Ed McBain: Eight Black Horses

EIGHT BLACK

HORSES

[An 87 thPrecinct Novel]

Ed McBain

Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

* * * *

The lady was extraordinarily naked.

That is to say, she looked extraordinarily naked because she was so very white. There are, after all, no degrees of nakedness. You are either clothed or you are unclothed. The lady was very definitely unclothed, but all the detectives gathered around her agreed that she looked more naked than any naked person they had ever seen in their collective lives.

‘It’s because she’s so white,’ Monoghan said.

‘Looks like an albino,’ Monroe said.

Monoghan and Monroe were Homicide detectives. They had been called in the moment it was ascertained that the lady lying on the withering leaves off the park path was indeed dead. It did not require much detection to determine that she was dead. The foot patrolman had known she was dead the moment he saw the bullet hole at the base of her skull. When he’d got on the walkie-talkie to the desk sergeant at the Eight-Seven, he had, in fact, said, ‘Sarge, I got a female stiff here in the park.’ Carella and Brown knew the lady was dead, too. That was why they’d called back to the station house to ask Sergeant Murchison to inform Homicide.

None of the men were wearing overcoats.

After the recent rain the October weather had turned mild enough to permit shorts and sandals, which many of the curious onlookers behind the Crime Scene signs and barricades were, in fact, wearing. In contrast, Monoghan and Monroe were both wearing black suits, white shirts, blue lies, and gray fedoras. They looked like chunky undertakers waiting outside a funeral home to greet mourners.

Arthur Brown was wearing a tan tropical-weight suit. Steve Carella was wearing blue slacks and a darker blue sports shirt rolled up at the cuffs. They could have been two ordinary citizens, a pair of married men—which they were—who had strolled into the park on a lovely Tuesday morning to get away from the wife and kids and discuss football scores.

The gathering crowd knew Brown was a cop, though, because he looked mean. Scowling, he stared down at the body on the leaves. The temperature when he’d awakened this morning was sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit—or twenty degrees Celsius, as the damn forecasters insisted on translating and so he’d put on the lightweight tan suit. The suit made him look very brown, which in fact he was. He did not like to think of himself as a black man, which—in today’s nomenclature—he also was. He did not know any black men who were really black. Black was an absence of color, wasn’t it? He had always thought of himself as ‘colored,’ in fact, until it became almost mandatory for a black man to start thinking of himself as black. If you didn’t think of yourself as black, you were betraying the race. Black power. Bullshit, What Brown had was brown power, all six feet four inches and two hundred and twenty pounds of him. The crowd figured he was a cop because anybody so mean-looking, if he was standing with a bunch of cops and he wasn’t wearing handcuffs, had to be a cop himself. Also there was a little plastic ID card clipped to the pocket of his suit.

The crowd, what with the World Series still fresh in their minds, thought Carella looked like a baseball player. They deducted this because of his athletic stance and his long slender body. They also thought he looked a little Chinese; that was because his brown eyes slanted slightly downward—or was that Japanese? They doubted there were very many Caucasian Chinese baseball players in America, though, so they figured he had to be a cop, too. A clue to this was the plastic ID card pinned to his shirt pocket, just like the one the mean-looking black guy was wearing. Both men were wearing holstered pistols on their hips, another clue to their identity, though in this city—like in the olden days of the Wild West—you sometimes got cheap street thieves running around with guns right in the open.

Carella and Brown liked being partnered together.

They felt it was effective against the bad guys.

The bad guys took one look at Carella, and they figured this one is the pushover, it’s the bad-ass nigger you gotta watch out for. Whenever they were partnered together, Carella and Brown played Mutt and Jeff to the hilt. Carella played Mr. Clean—‘Golly, Artie, it don’t look to me like this nice young man here even knows what marijuana is !’ Brown played Big Bad Leroy, born in a ghetto garbage can, shooting dope since he was six years old, done time at Castleview upstate, seen the light afterward and became a cop by way of penance for his formerly evil life. Mean, though, still as mean as a hooker’s snatch. ‘You lyin’ little punk, I’m gonna kill you right here on the spot, save the slate a ‘lectric bill. Get your hands off me, Steve, I’m gonna throw this man off the roof!’ Mean, oh man, real bad-ass. Big Bad Leroy. It worked nicely.

The sky overhead was as blue as a newborn baby’s eyes.

The leaves in the trees lining the path were yellow and brown and red and orange.

The leaves under the dead lady were yellow and red.

The red was caused by the wound at the base of her skull.

‘This city,’ Monroe said, ‘you can carry a dead person in a park, she’s got a bullet hole in her head and she’s starkers, nobody bats an eyelash.’

Carella was looking down at the lifeless white body on the blood-stained leaves. They always look all angles, he thought. The thought was short lived, accompanied by a brief flicker of pain in his eyes. In solitude, on too many occasions, he had sat and wondered why the geometry of death left only angles.

‘Let’s roll her over,’ Monoghan said. ‘See she’s wearing some ID pinned to her chest.’

He knew they could not roll her over until the medical examiner got there. He just enjoyed hassling the detectives from the Eight-Seven. That was one of life’s little joys. The bulls on this squad up here, they took things too serious. In Monoghan’s universe a stiff was a stiff, period. Dressed, naked, stabbed, shot, strangled, incinerated, poleaxed, whatever, it was still only a corpse, and a corpse meant paperwork. In this city, though, the appearance of Homicide cops at the scene of a crime was mandatory. The case officially belonged to the detectives who caught the squeal, but the Homicide Division—like a nagging backseat driver—constantly watched over their shoulders, demanding progress reports at every turn in the road.

‘What do you say?’ Monoghan asked, not sure Carella had heard him. ‘We roll her over, see what she looks like from the front.’

Carella didn’t bother answering him. His eyes were scanning the leaves for any sign of a bullet or a spent cartridge case.

‘How old you think she is?’ Monroe asked. ‘Judging from her ass.’

‘That’s a twenty-seven-year-old ass,’ Monoghan said.

‘She’s got a beauty mark on her right cheek,’ Monroe said.

‘Good firm ass, she’s got there,’ Monoghan said.

‘I had a case once,’ Monroe said, ‘this guy died from a broken bottle shoved up his ass.’

‘Yeah, I remember that one,’ Monoghan said.

‘Hemorrhaged to death,’ Monroe said.

‘His boyfriend done it, right?’

‘Yeah, his boyfriend.’

Both men looked at the woman’s buttocks.

‘Twenty-seven years old, I’ll give you two to one,’ Monoghan said.

‘The legs look twenty-seven, too,’ Monroe said.