Ed Mcbain - Fuzz

The girl was waiting in a Buick.

The car was black, Meyer made the year and make at once, but he could not read the license plate because the car was too far away, parked at the curb some two blocks up the street. The engine was running. The exhaust threw gray plumes of carbon monoxide into the gray and empty street. La Bresca stopped at the car, and Meyer ducked into the closest doorway, the windowed alcove of a pawnshop. Surrounded by saxophones and typewriters, cameras and tennis rackets, fishing rods and loving cups, Meyer looked diagonally through the joined and angled windows of the shop and squinted his eyes in an attempt to read the license plate of the Buick. He could not make out the numbers. The girl had blond hair, it fell loose to the base of her neck, she leaned over on the front seat to open the door for La Bresca.

La Bresca got into the car and slammed the door behind him.

Meyer came out of the doorway just as the big black Buick gunned away from the curb.

He still could not read the license plate.

Nobody likes to work on Saturday.

There’s something obscene about it, it goes against the human grain. Saturday is the day before the day of rest, a good time to stomp on all those pressures that have been building Monday to Friday. Given a nice blustery rotten March day with the promise of snow in the air and the city standing expectantly monolithic, stoic, and solemn, given such a peach of a Saturday, how nice to be able to start a cannel coal fire in the fireplace of your three-room apartment and smoke yourself out of the joint. Or, lacking a fireplace, what better way to utilize Saturday than by pouring yourself a stiff hooker of bourbon and curling up with a blonde or a book, spending your time with War and Peace or Whore and Piece , didn’t Shakespeare invent some of his best puns on Saturday, drunk with a wench in his first best bed?

Saturday is a quiet day. It can drive you to distraction with its prospects of leisure time, it can force you to pick at the coverlet wondering what to do with all your sudden freedom, it can send you wandering through the rooms in search of occupation while moodily contemplating the knowledge that the loneliest night of the week is fast approaching.

Nobody likes to work on Saturday because nobody else is working on Saturday.

Except cops.

Grind, grind, grind, work, work, work, driven by a sense of public-mindedness and dedication to humanity, law enforcement officers are forever at the ready, alert of mind, swift of body, noble of purpose.

Andy Parker was asleep in the swivel chair behind his desk.

“Where is everybody?” one of the painters said.

“What?” Parker said. “Huh?” Parker said, and sat bolt upright, and glared at the painter and then washed his huge hand over his face and said, “What the hell’s the matter with you, scaring a man that way?”

“We’re leaving,” the first painter said.

“We’re finished,” the second painter said.

“We already got all our gear loaded on the truck, and we wanted to say good-by to everybody.”

“So where is everybody?”

“There’s a meeting in the lieutenant’s office,” Parker said.

“We’ll just pop in and say good-by,” the first painter said.

“I wouldn’t advise that,” Parker said.

“Why not?”

“They’re discussing homicide. It’s not wise to pop in on people when they’re discussing homicide.”

“Not even to say good-by?”

“You can say good-by to me ,” Parker said.

“It wouldn’t be the same thing,” the first painter said.

“So then hang around and say good-by when they come out. They should be finished before twelve. In fact, they got to be finished before twelve.”

“Yeah, but we’re finished now ,” the second painter said.

“Can’t you find a few things you missed?” Parker suggested. “Like, for example, you didn’t paint the typewriters, or the bottle on the water cooler, or our guns. How come you missed our guns? You got green all over everything else in the goddamn place.”

“You should be grateful,” the first painter said. “Some people won’t work on Saturday at all , even at time and a half.”

So both painters left in high dudgeon, and Parker went back to sleep in the swivel chair behind his desk.

“I don’t know what kind of a squad I’m running here,” Lieutenant Byrnes said, “when two experienced detectives can blow a surveillance, one by getting made first crack out of the box, and the other by losing his man; that’s a pretty good batting average for two experienced detectives.”

“I was told the suspect didn’t have a car,” Meyer said. “I was told he had taken a train the night before.”

“That’s right, he did,” Kling said.

“I had no way of knowing a woman would be waiting for him in a car,” Meyer said.

“So you lost him,” Byrnes said, “which might have been all right if

the man had gone home last night. But O’Brien was stationed outside the La Bresca house in Riverhead, and the man never showed, which means we don’t know where he is today, now do we? We don’t know where a prime suspect is on the day the deputy mayor is supposed to get killed.”

“No, sir,” Meyer said, “we don’t know where La Bresca is.”

“Because you lost him.”

“I guess so, sir.”

“Well, how would you revise that statement, Meyer?”

“I wouldn’t, sir. I lost him.”

“Yes, very good, I’ll put you in for a commendation.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t get flip, Meyer.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“This isn’t a goddamn joke here, I don’t want Scanlon to wind up with two holes in his head the way Cowper did.”

“No, sir, neither do I.”

“Okay, then learn for Christ’s sake how to tail a person, will you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now what about this other man you say La Bresca spent time with in conversation, what was his name?”

“Calucci, sir. Peter Calucci.”

“Did you check him out?”

“Yes, sir, last night before I went home. Here’s the stuff we got from the B.C.I.”

Meyer placed a manila envelope on Byrnes’ desk, and then stepped back to join the other detectives ranged in a military line before the desk. None of the men was smiling. The lieutenant was in a lousy mood, and somebody was supposed to come up with fifty thousand dollars before noon, and the possibility existed that the deputy mayor would soon be dispatched to that big City Hall in the sky, so nobody was smiling. The lieutenant reached into the envelope and pulled out a photocopy of a fingerprint card, glanced at it cursorily, and then pulled out a photocopy of Calucci’s police record.

Byrnes read the sheet, and then said, “When did he get out?”

“He was a bad apple. He applied for parole after serving a third of the sentence, was denied, and applied every year after that. He finally made it in seven.”

Byrnes looked at the sheet again.

IDENTIFICATION BUREAU

NAME Peter Vincent Calucci

IDENTIFICATION JACKET NUMBER P 421904

ALIAS “Calooch” “Cooch” “Kook”

COLOR White

RESIDENCE 336 South 91st Street, Isola

DATE OF BIRTH October 2, 1938 AGE 22

BIRTHPLACE Isola

HEIGHT 5’9” WEIGHT 156 HAIR Brown EYES Brown

COMPLEXION Swarthy OCCUPATION Construction worker

SCARS AND TATTOOS Appendectomy scar, no tattoos.

ARRESTED BY: Patrolman Henry Butler

DETECTIVE DIVISION NUMBER: 63-R1-1605-1960

DATE OF ARREST 3/14/60 PLACE 812 North 65 St., Isola

CHARGE Robbery

BRIEF DETAILS OF CRIME Calucci entered gasoline station