Ed McBain - Hail to the Chief

Hail to the Chief

Ed McBain

This edition published 1975 by Pan Books Ltd. ISBN 0-330-24491-4

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter One

They found the bodies in an open ditch on the northernmost extreme of the 87th Precinct. The telephone company had torn up the street early the morning before, to get at the underground cables. The repairmen finished the job by nightfall, when the temperature dropped below freezing. They had covered the ditch with temporary wooden planking, and had erected blinking barriers around the excavation, to keep motorists away from the long, narrow, covered trench in the earth. Someone had ripped up the planking and dropped the six bodies into the ditch. Two radio-car cops, on routine patrol near the boat basin, spotted the ripped-up sections of planking and flashed their torches into the excavation. The date was January the sixth. The time was three in the morning. By three-ten, Detectives Steve Carella and Bertram Kling were on the scene.

The bottom of the ditch was a maze of electrical and telephone cables. Water had seeped into the ditch, combining with the freshly spaded earth to form a quagmire which had frozen over at nightfall, so that the cables now seemed embedded in brown plastic. The six bodies were lying in angular confusion on top of the mud-colored ice. There was another color staining the ice. The color was blood. The bodies were naked. Their nakedness made the night seem even colder than it was. Carella, wearing a fleece-lined leather jacket, brown woolen gloves, and earmuffs, looked down into the ditch. Kling was fanning the beam of his flashlight over the bodies. Ten feet from where they were standing, two radio motor patrol cars blinked their revolving red lights into the night. Now that the detectives were here, the patrolmen had gone back into the cars to keep warm.

There were three men, two young girls, and a baby in the ditch. The baby was clutched in the arms of one of the girls. Carella did not turn away until he saw the baby. Up to that moment, this was another homicide, grislier than most, but you don't turn away from any of them unless you're going to turn away from all of them. The sight of the dead baby caused a short, sharp stab of pain somewhere behind his eyes. He said 'Jesus' as he turned away from the ditch, and behind him he heard Kling catch his breath, and knew that he had seen the baby, too. Kling turned off the flashlight. They moved farther away from the ditch, as though proximity to it might in some way be contaminating. Their vapored breaths feathered out onto the air. In the distance they heard a police siren. For several moments neither of the cops said anything. Kling, gloveless and hatless, his blond hair blowing in the wind, put the flashlight under his arm, and immediately thrust both hands into the pockets of his car coat. His shoulders hunched, his chin ducked into his collar, he said, very softly, 'It reminds me of the bookshop,' and for a moment Carella did not know what he meant. And then, of course, he recalled a day in October, thirteen years ago, when he and Kling had stepped into a bookshop on Culver Avenue and found four dead bodies on the floor. One of the victims had been Kling's girl friend, Claire Townsend.

Physically, Kling had not changed very much in those thirteen years - oh, perhaps around the eyes a little, a weariness around the eyes. But he still looked quite young, the blond hair and hazel eyes combining with a clean-shaven, well-scrubbed sort of face that never seemed to age. Carella looked into that face now, studying the eyes, trying to fathom whether Kling's memory of the bookshop was as vivid as his own, or whether he had learned to deal with that long-ago pain by blocking it out, pretending it had never happened. Jesus, that day. Jesus, when he had called the lieutenant and told him to get over there right away because Kling's girl had been killed - Jesus, the way he had stammered on the telephone, almost unable to get the words past his lips.

Both men looked up at the sound of the approaching siren. An unmarked car pulled to the curb, its tailpipe throwing a blue-gray ghost into the air. The two detectives who stepped out of the car were dressed almost identically, each wearing black overcoat and gray fedora, black leather gloves, blue woolen muffler. Both of the men were sturdily built, with wide shoulders and beefy chests and thighs, craggy faces and eyes that had seen it all, seen it all: Monoghan and Monroe from Homicide, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of criminal investigation.

'Well, well, you guys never sleep, do you?' Monoghan said.

'They're always awake,' Monroe said.

'Always got a body or two for us in the middle of the night, don't you?' Monoghan said.

'Few more than that this time,' Carella said.

'Yeah?' Monroe said.

'Where are they?' Monoghan asked.

'Over in the ditch there,' Kling said.

They watched as the two Homicide detectives walked over toward the ditch. In the city for which these men worked, the appearance of Homicide cops at the scene of a murder was mandatory, even though the subsequent investigation was handled by the precinct detectives catching the squeal. Carella and Kling looked upon the cops from Homicide as a nuisance. In rare instances, and presumably because they were 'specialists,' they would sometimes come up with an idea that helped expedite the solution of a case. More often than that, however - rather like eye, ear, nose, and throat men advising a general practitioner that his patient was deaf, dumb, blind, and suffering besides from sinus trouble and laryngitis - they merely stated the obvious, confused the issues, and demanded reports in triplicate for their own department. Homicide cops, in short, were pains in the ass to detectives actually in the field trying to solve murder cases. Monoghan and Monroe were supreme pains in the ass.

'Look at this, willya?' Monoghan said, throwing the beam of his flashlight into the ditch.

'Must be at least six of them down there,' Monroe said.

'Half a dozen, anyway,' Monoghan said.

'What's that?' Monroe said. 'A baby?'

'An infant,' Monoghan said.

'Now I seen everything,' Monroe said.

'I seen one worse than this,' Monoghan said.

'Worse than a baby in a ditch in the middle of January on a night you could freeze your balls off?'

'Much worse,' Monoghan said. 'This was back in the fifties, I was still working out of the Eight-Three, that's one hell of a precinct, I can tell you.'

'Oh, don't I know it,' Monroe said. 'That's the precinct where Ralphie Donatello got shot in the back with an African blowgun.'

'A poison dart,' Monoghan said.

'Yeah,' Monroe said.

'That was during my time,' Monoghan said. 'I used to know Ralphie. He was a damn good cop. Can you imagine? A poison dart?'

'Truth is stranger than fiction,' Monroe said, and shook his head.

'Anyway, this case I was on, there were fourteen old ladies buried in the basement. Fourteen of them. Made Bluebeard look like a kid who didn't even shave yet. Fourteen of them.'

'How old?'

'Old. Seventy, eighty, like that. Guy stabbed them all and put them in the basement. The way we found the bodies was a plumber came in to work on some pipes. That was worse than this. Much worse.'

'Yeah, but these are all young kids,' Monroe said, leaning over the edge of the ditch for a better look.

'Not so young. The guy with the beard looks twenty-four, twenty-five.'

'Yeah, but the others look like teenagers.'

'The girls especially.'

'Fourteen or fifteen, huh?'