Ed Mcbain - Fuzz

“Nobody was here, if that’s what you mean.”

“You get any phone calls during the night?”

“No.”

“Just your word then, right?”

“And mine, “ Concetta said.

“Listen, I don’t know what you guys want from me,” La Bresca said, “But I’m telling you the truth, I mean it. What’s going on, anyway?”

“Did you happen to catch the news on television?”

“No, I musta fell asleep before the news went on. Why? What happened?”

“I go in his room and turn off the light at ten-thirty,” Concetta said.

“I wish you guys would believe me,” La Bresca said.

“Whatever it is you’ve got in mind, I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”

“I believe you,” Willis said. “How about you, Artie?”

“I believe him, too,” Brown said.

“But we have to ask questions,” Willis said, “you understand?”

“Sure, I understand,” La Bresca said, “but I mean, it’s the middle of the night, you know? I gotta get up tomorrow morning.”

“Why don’t you tell us about the man with the hearing aid again,” Willis suggested gently.

They spent at least another fifteen minutes questioning La Bresca and at the end of that time decided they’d either have to pull him in and charge him with something, or else forget him for the time being. The man who’d called the squadroom had said, “There are more than one of us,” and this information had been passed from Kling to the other detectives on the squad, and it was only this nagging knowledge that kept them there questioning La Bresca long after they should have stopped. A cop can usually tell whether he’s onto real meat or not, and La Bresca did not seem like a thief. Willis had told the lieutenant just that only this afternoon, and his opinion hadn’t changed in the intervening hours. But if there was a gang involved in the commissioner’s murder, wasn’t it possible that La Bresca was one of them? A lowly cog in the organization, perhaps, the gopher, the slob who was sent to pick up things, the expendable man who ran the risk of being caught by the police if anything went wrong? In which case, La Bresca was lying.

Well, if he was lying, he did it like an expert, staring out of his baby blues and melting both those hardhearted cops with tales of the new job he was anxious to start tomorrow morning, which is why he’d gone to bed so early and all, got to get a full eight hours’ sleep, growing mind in a growing body, red-blooded second-generation American, and all that crap. Which raised yet another possibility. If he was lying — and so far they hadn’t been able to trip him up, hadn’t been able to budge him from his description of the mystery man he’d met outside Meridian, hadn’t been able to find a single discrepancy between the story he’d told that afternoon and the one he was telling now — but if he was lying, then wasn’t it possible the caller and La Bresca were one and the same person? Not a gang at all, that being a figment of his own imagination, a tiny falsehood designed to lead the police into believing this was a well-organized group instead of a single ambitious hood trying to make a killing. And if La Bresca and the caller were one and the same, then La Bresca and the man who’d murdered the commissioner were also one and the same. In which case, it would be proper to take the little liar home and book him for murder. Sure, and then try to find something that would stick, anything that would stick, they’d be laughed out of court right at the preliminary hearing.

Some nights you can’t make a nickel.

So after fifteen minutes of some very fancy footwork designed to befuddle and unsettle La Bresca, with Brown utilizing his very special logically persistent method of questioning while Willis sniped and jabbed around the edges, they knew nothing more than they had known that afternoon. The only difference was that now the commissioner was dead. So they thanked Mrs. La Bresca for the use of the hall, and they shook hands with her son and apologized for having pulled him out of bed, and they wished him luck at his new job, and then they both said good night again and went out of the house and heard Mrs. La Bresca locking the kitchen door behind them, and went down the rickety wooden steps, and down the potholed driveway, and across the street to where they had parked the police sedan.

Then Willis started the car, and turned on the heater, and both men talked earnestly and softly for several moments and decided to ask the lieutenant for permission to bug La Bresca’s phone in the morning.

Then they went home.

It was cold and dark in the alley where Steve Carella lay on his side huddled in a tattered overcoat. The late February snow had been shoveled and banked against one brick alley wall, soiled now with the city’s grime, a thin layer of soot crusted onto its surface. Carella was wearing two pairs of thermal underwear and a quilted vest. In addition, a hand warmer was tucked into one pocket of the vest, providing a good steady heat inside the threadbare overcoat. But he was cold.

The banked snow opposite him only made him colder. He did not like snow. Oh yes, he could remember owning his own sled as a boy, and he could remember belly-whopping with joyous abandon, but the memory seemed like a totally fabricated one in view of his present very real aversion to snow. Snow was cold and wet. If you were a private citizen, you had to shovel it, and if you were a Department of Sanitation worker, you had to truck it over to the River Dix to get rid of it. Snow was a pain in the ass.

This entire stakeout was a pain in the ass.

But it was also very amusing.

It was the amusing part of it that kept Carella lying in a cold dark alley on a night that wasn’t fit for man or beast. (Of course, he had also been ordered to lie in a cold dark alley by the lieutenant for whom he worked, nice fellow name of Peter Byrnes, he should come lie in a cold dark alley some night.) The amusing part of this particular stakeout was that Carella wasn’t planted in a bank hoping to prevent a multimillion dollar robbery, nor was he planted in a candy store someplace, hoping to crack an international ring of narcotics peddlers, nor was he even hidden in the bathroom of a spinster lady’s apartment, hoping to catch a mad rapist. He was lying in a cold dark alley, and the amusing part was that two vagrants had been set on fire. That wasn’t so amusing, the part about being set on fire. That was pretty serious. The amusing part was that the victims had been vagrants. Ever since Carella could remember, the police had been waging an unremitting war against this city’s vagrants, arresting them, jailing them, releasing them, arresting them again, on and on ad infinitum. So now the police had been presented with two benefactors who were generously attempting to rid the streets of any and all bums by setting them aflame, and what did the police do? The police promptly dispatched a valuable man to a cold dark alley to lie on his side facing a dirty snowbank while hoping to catch the very fellows who were in charge of incinerating bums. It did not make sense. It was amusing.

A lot of things about police work were amusing.

It was certainly funnier to be lying here freezing than to be at home in bed with a warm and loving woman; oh God, that was so amusing it made Carella want to weep. He thought of Teddy alone in bed, black hair spilling all over the pillow, half-smile on her mouth, nylon gown pulled back over curving hip, God, I could freeze to death right here in this goddamn alley, he thought, and my own wife won’t learn about it till morning. My own passionate wife! She’ll read about it in the papers! She’ll see my name on page four! She’ll —