Ed McBain: The Big Bad City

"Oh. No. I'm sorry. I don't.”

Well, Carella could have spent the next week and a half zeroing in on the orders that still wore wedding bands with the initials IHS engraved inside, or he could have spent the next month and a half calling every convent in the directory none of which had listed phone numbers, he noticed, another plus but there was an easier way.

A surefire American way.

He went directly to the media.

"Suppose you get on a bus, and the driver is Dustin Hoffman? I mean, there's the guy sitting behind the wheel, and he looks just like Dustin Hoffman and everything, but you know he isn't Dustin Hoffman because there aren't any cameras around, they're not shooting a movie or anything on the bus. This is just a normal bus and a normal bus driver who happens to look just like Dustin Hoffman. Do you understand me ?”

"Uh-huh," Carella said.

"That's the way I felt when I saw that police sketch of Mary on the front page of the newspaper. I thought "That isn't Mary, it can't be Mary." Same as I would think "That isn't Dustin Hoffman, it's just a bus driver." Is it Mary?”

"You'll have to tell us," Carella said.

"I mean, I just saw her yesterday, and everything." They were in the Chevy sedan Carella and Brown drove whenever their preferred car was in for service, as it was today. The gift's name they thought of her as a girl because she was still in her early twenties was Helen Daniels, and she was sitting on the back seat, smoking. She was a nurse, but she was smoking. She had told them on the phone that the woman on the front page of that morning's tabloid was Sister Mary Vincent. It was now close to noon on a steamy Saturday, the twenty-se cont a day of u;u, "", .... were driving her to the morgue.

"When yesterday. Brown asked.

"At the hospital.”

Which answered where yesterday, but not when. They waited.

"We worked the same shift. Seven in the morning to three in the afternoon.”

"Was she a nurse?”

"An LPN. St. Margaret's is one of the hospitals run by hr order. She worked with the terminally ill. Cancer patients mostly.”

"What's an LPN?" Brown asked.

"A licensed practical nurse. But she was better than any RN I know, believe me.”

"Was that the last time you saw her? Yesterday at three? When the shift ...”

"Yes. Well, not three. We went for coffee together after the shift broke.”

"Then what?”

"I went to the subway.”

“Where'd she go?”

“I don't know.”

"Didn't say where she was going?”

"I guessed she was going home. It was already four, four-thirty.”

"How long have you known her?" Carella asked. "Be six months in September. That's when she started working at St. Margaret's.”

“How'd she get along there?”

“Fine.”

"Good worker?”

Oh, yes.”

"Got along with the other nuns?”

“Yes.”

“Nurses?”

"Yes, of course.”

“Doctors?”

“Yes.”

"While you were having coffee ... ," Brown said. "Where was this, by the way?”

"Deli across the street from the hospital.”

“See anybody watching her?”

“Paying unusual attention to her?”

“No, I can't think of anyone.”

"I really don't thinkf ll Wso. "Y U out of the deli?”

"When you left each other, was she walking, or did she catch a cab, or what?”

“She was walking.”

“In which direction?”

“She turned the corner and headed cross town.”

“Toward the park?”

“Yes. Toward the park.”

Helen Daniels was a nurse, and so she did not display any squeamishness at being inside a morgue. This was not the hospital for which she worked, but it was nonetheless familiar territory. She followed the detectives into the stainless-steel chamber with its stainless-steel dissecting tables and stainless-steel drawers, and watched while the attendant on duty rolled out the drawer with the unidentified corpse on it, and she looked down at the face and said, "Yes, that's Mary Vincent,"" and went outside to vomit.

First thing you had to understand about this city was that it was big.

It was difficult to explain to someone who came from Overall Patches, Indiana, that you could take his entire town and tuck it into one tiny corner of the smallest of the city's five separate sectors and still have room left over for the entire bustling municipalities of Two Trees, Wyoming, and Sleepy Sheep, South Dakota.

This city was dangerous, too. That was the next thing you had to know about it. Never mind the reassuring bulletins from the Mayor's office.

Ask the Mayor to take an unescorted two A.M. stroll through any of the city's barren moonscapes, and then interview him in his hospital bed the next morning to ask him about lower crime rates and improved police patrols. Or just watch the first ten minutes of the eleven o'clock news every night and you'll learn in the wink of an eye exactly what the people of this city were capable of doing to other people in this city. It was on last night's eleven o'clock news that the story of the unidentified dead nun had first been broadcast to a populace accustomed to news of dead people turning up in Dumpsters or abandoned bathtubs.

Bad things happened in this city every hour of the day or night, and they happened all over the city.

So if you came here thinking, Gee, there's going to be a neat little murder takes place in a town house and some blue-haired lady will solve it in her spare time when she isn't tending her rose garden, then you came to the wrong city at the wrong time of the year. In this city, you had to pay attention. In this city, things were happening all the time, all over the place, and you didn't have to be a detective to smell evil in the wind.

he had come home from work yesterday evening to find that her apartment had been "robbed," as she'd put it when she phoned the police. The two responding uniformed cops informed her that the correct expression was "burglarized," as if that made a damn bit of difference, and then asked her a lot of dumb questions about "access”

and "vulnerability," which she supposed meant Who has a key to the front door and Which window opens onto a fire escape? And now only a day late and a dollar short here were two plainclothes detectives asking the same dumb questions. Her best friend, Sylvia, whose apartment had been broken into last year around this time, told her that there wasn't a single recorded instance in this city of the cops ever catching who did it or ever recovering the stolen goods, it was all a waste of time and taxpayers' money. But here they were at twenty minutes to one on the day after the burglary, when she had a hundred Saturday afternoon errands to run.

"We're sorry to bother you," the bald one was saying. She was sure he'd introduced himself as Meyer Meyer, but that couldn't be a person's name, could it? He was a tall, burly man wearing pale blue trousers and a lightweight sports jacket, the collar of his shirt open and worn outside the jacket collar, the way teenagers in America used to wear it in the forties and the way Russian gangsters wore it today, from pictures she had seen in Life magazine.

"What time did you get home from work last night?" the blond one asked. He was very good-looking, if you cared for apple pie and chocolate milk midwestern shit-kicking looks, an inch or so taller than his partner, just as wlae n me snouiaers, oom t them in their mid-to-late thirties, she supposed, which made them both too young for her, not that she was interested. Annie Kearnes was forty-two years old, almost to the day, since her birthday had been last Tuesday, August eighteenth, a Leo as she was proud of telling first dates. Annie went on a lot of first dates. She wondered if either of these two boring gentlemen was married, though police work seemed an extraordinarily dangerous occupation.