Ed McBain: Lullaby

Three huge black men and a small Puerto Rican.

The streetlamp was still on over their heads. They struggled silently in the morngloam, natural light mingling with artificial, the three black men wielding baseball bats, the little Puerto Rican trying to defend himself with nothing but his hands. Blood spattered up onto the brick wall behind him. This was in earnest.

Kling yanked up the hand brake and came out of the car at a run, hand going for his gun, rules and regs racing through his mind, felony in progress, substantial reason to unholster the piece. 'Police officer,' he shouted, 'freeze!'

Nobody froze.

A bat came spinning out of the half-light, moving like a helicopter blade, horizontal on the air, twirling straight for his head. He threw himself flat to the pavement, a mistake. As he rolled over and brought the gun into firing position, one of the black men kicked him in the head. In the dizziness, he thought Hold on. In the dizziness, he thought Shoot. Blurred figures. Someone screaming. Shoot, he thought. And fired. One of them fell to the pavement. Someone else kicked him again. He fired again. Knew he was okay by the book, piece as a defensive weapon, tasted blood in his mouth, not a means of apprehension, lip bleeding, how the hell, almost choked on something, a tooth, Jesus, and fired again, blindly this time, angrily, and scrambled to his feet as one of the men swung a baseball bat for his head.

He took a step to the side, the thick end of the bat coming within an inch of his nose, and then he squeezed the trigger again, going for the money, catching the batter too high, five inches above the heart, spinning him around with a slug in the shoulder that sent him staggering back toward the blood-spattered brick wall of the building where the third black man was busily beating the shit out of the little Puerto Rican, swinging the bat at him again and again, long-ball practice here on the corner of Concord and Dow.

'Put it down!' Kling shouted, but his words this morning were having very little positive effect, because all the man seemed intent on doing was finishing off the little Puerto Rican who was already so bloody he looked like a sodden bundle of rags lying on the sidewalk. 'You dumb fuck!' Kling shouted. 'Put it down!'

The man turned.

Saw the gun. Saw the big blond guy with the gun. Saw the look in his eyes, knew the man and the gun were both on the thin edge of explosion. He dropped the bat.

'Hey, cool it, man,' he said.

'Cool shit!' Kling said, and threw him against the wall, and tossed him, and then handcuffed his hands behind his back.

He knelt to where the little Puerto Rican was lying on the sidewalk, bleeding from a dozen wounds.

'I'll get an ambulance,' he said.

'Gracias por nada,' the Puerto Rican said.

Which in Spanish meant, 'Thanks for nothing.'

* * * *

2

A reconstructed timetable can only be verified by the one person who cannot possibly verify it: the corpse.

It appeared, however, that Annie Flynn had left her home on North Sykes, seven and a half blocks from the Hodding apartment, at eight o'clock and had taken a Grover Avenue bus (she'd told this to the Hoddings) down to Twelfth Street, arriving there at eight-fifteen. The Hoddings had left for their party at eight-thirty sharp, taking a cab to their friends' apartment only four blocks downtown on Grover; Mrs Hodding said she hadn't wanted to walk even such a short distance because of the high heels and the long gown.

From eight-thirty p.m. until approximately twenty minutes past midnight neither the Hoddings nor the Flynns had talked to Annie. As was usual on New Year's Eve, all circuits were busy after midnight and it took Annie's father a while to get through to her. Both he and his wife wished her a happy new year and then chatted with her for five minutes or so. Hodding was trying to reach his home at about that same time. Kept getting a busy signal. It was around twelve-thirty when finally he got through. He ascertained that the baby was okay, wished Annie a happy new year, and then hung up. It was certain, then, that she was still alive at twelve-thirty in the morning. She was not alive at two thirty, when the Hoddings came back to the apartment. There was no way of knowing whether Annie Flynn - as was often the case with sitters - had made or received any other calls on the night of her murder. The telephone company did not keep records of local calls. Period.

It was now ten minutes past eight.

Meyer and Carella had been relieved officially at a quarter to, but this was a homicide and the first twenty-four hours were the most important. So once again they put on their overcoats, and their mufflers, and their gloves, and they went back to the Hodding building, this time to knock on doors. This was the tedious part. No cop liked this part. No cop liked getting shot at, either, but given the choice many cops would have preferred a good old-fashioned chase to the sort of legwork that required asking the same questions over and over again.

With only one exception, each and every resident of 967 Grover Avenue wanted to know whether it was necessary to be asking these questions so early in the morning. Didn't they know this was New Year's Day? Didn't they realize that a lot of people had been up late the night before? What was so important that it couldn't wait till later in the day? With only one exception, everyone in the building was shocked to learn that the Hodding baby and her sitter had been murdered last night. This was such a good neighborhood, they could understand if something like this had happened farther uptown, but here? With a doorman and everything? With only one exception, everyone the detectives interviewed had neither heard nor seen anything strange or unusual between the hours of twelve-thirty and two-thirty last night. Many of them hadn't even been home during those hours. Many of them had gone to sleep shortly after midnight. The one exception-

'You're a little late, aren't you?' the man said at once.

'What do you mean?' Meyer said.

'The big show was last night,' his wife said. 'We had the whole damn police department here.'

'Well, two uniformed cops and a detective,' the man said.

As opposed to all the other tenants in pajamas and robes, the Ungers - for such was the name on their doorbell - were fully dressed and ready to take their morning walk in the park, despite what had happened last night. What had happened last night . . .

'We were robbed last night is what happened,' the wife said.

Her name was Shirley Unger. She was a good-looking brunette in her late twenties, wearing a gray sweatshirt with a University of Michigan seal on it, gray sweat pants to match, red Reeboks. Hair springing from her head like a tangle of weeds. Red sweatband on her forehead. Luminous brown eyes. A Carly Simon mouth. She knew she was gorgeous. She played to the cops like a stripper on a runway.

'We got home at about one-thirty,' she said. 'The robber was just going out the window. In the TV room. Actually a second bedroom.'

She rolled her eyes when she said the word 'bedroom,' as though there'd been something licentious about a burglar going out the window. She seemed to be enjoying the thrill of all this criminal activity, although - like most honest citizens - she confused burglary with robbery. To your honest citizen, somebody stole something from you, it was robbery. Any cheap thief on the street knew the difference between burglary and robbery. Any garden-variety crook could reel off the penal-code numbers for each crime, the maximum prison terms. Just like a cop. In this business, you needed a scorecard to tell which player was which.

'We called the police right away,' Unger said.

'They were here in three minutes flat,' Shirley said. 'Two cops in uniform and a detective. A little short guy with curly hair.'