Ed McBain - See Them Die

A long wooden plaque, painted white and then overlaid with the black letters detective division, pointed to a flight of narrow iron-runged steps which led upstairs to the bull pen. The flight of steps, gathering heat only from a small window where the steps turned back upon themselves before continuing to the second floor, was perhaps the coolest spot in the station house. Beyond the steps, a long corridor led to the detective squadroom where a battery of electric fans fought valiantly to produce some semblance of a breeze. The grilled windows at the far end of the squadroom admitted bright, golden sunlight which spread across the wooden floor like licking flames. The men in the squadroom sat in shirt sleeves at sun-drenched desks.

If there was one nice thing about being a detective, it was the fact that a gray flannel suit, a button-down shirt, and a neat black tie were not requisites of the job. Detective Steve Carella was perhaps the only detective in the squadroom on that Sunday morning in July who looked as if he might be an advertising executive. But then, Carella always looked as if he were dressed for the pages of Esquire. Even wearing a leather jacket and dungarees, he managed to exude the scent of careful grooming. He was a tall man whose sinewy body gave only the slightest hint of the power he possessed. Unpadded, slender with a rawboned simplicity, he seemed built to flatter whatever clothes were heaped onto his frame. This morning he was wearing a blue seersucker suit, the jacket of which was draped over the back of his chair. He had worn a bow tie to work, but had untied it the moment he entered the squadroom so that it hung loosely about his neck now, his shirt unbuttoned, his head bent over the report he was studying.

The other cops presented a slightly less sartorial appearance. Andy Parker, a cop who would have looked like a bum even when dressed for his own funeral, was wearing a pair of tan nylon slacks and a sports shirt which had surely been designed in honor of Hawaii's having achieved statehood. Hula girls swayed their hips all over Parker's shirt. Surfboarders flitted over his huge barrel chest. The colors on the shirt exploded like Roman candles. Parker, who looked unshaven even though he had shaved closely before reporting to the squadroom, pounded at a typewriter with both huge hands, using his fingers like fists. The typewriter seemed to resist each successive assault wave, a machine refusing to succumb to brute force. Parker continued to smash into it as if he were engaged in mortal combat, cursing each time the keys locked, slamming the carriage over whenever he reached the end of a line of the D.D. report, the bell clanging savagely in protest.

"No arrest," he muttered savagely, "but I got to type up a damn report, anyway."

"Be glad you're alive," Carella said, not looking up from the sheet in his hands.

"It'll take more than a punk like Pepe Miranda to put the blocks to me, pal," Parker said. He continued smashing at the typewriter.

"You're lucky," Carella said. "He was feeling charitable. He had your gun, and he had everybody else's gun, and you're just damn lucky he didn't decide to kill you all."

"He was chicken," Parker said, looking up. "If that was me in his place, I'd have blasted every cop in sight, and then shot a few passers-by just for the hell of it. But Miranda was chicken. He knows the jig's up, so he figured he wouldn't add anything else to what we already got on him."

"Maybe he liked your face," Carella said. "Maybe he figured you were too sweet to shoot."

"Yeah," Parker said, and he ripped the D.D. report from the machine. He did not like Carella. He could still remember the time in March when he and Carella had mixed it up a little in the squadroom. The fight had ended abruptly because Frankie Hernandez had reminded them both that the lieutenant was in the building. But Parker didn't like unfinished business. And maybe Carella had forgotten all about the incident — though he doubted it — but Parker had not, and would not until the thing was resolved finally, one way or another. Thinking back to that March day, he thought it odd that the same men had been present in the squadroom, the three of them, and that Carella had taken offense at a chance remark made to Hernandez. Why the hell were people always so touchy? He dropped the report on his desk and walked to the water cooler.

Frankie Hernandez, the third man who'd been there on that March day, the third man in the squadroom on this day in July, was standing at one of the filing cabinets, the drawer open. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt and dark-blue trousers. A .38 police special protruded from the holster strapped to his chest. He was a wide-shouldered man with a tan complexion and straight, black hair. His eyes were brown, the eyes of man who expected to be offended and who, as a result, was constantly prepared for the eventuality. It was not easy to be a Puerto Rican cop in a neighborhood with such a large Puerto Rican population — especially if you happened to have been born and raised in the streets of the precinct. Whatever battles Hernandez fought with his neighbors, the police, and himself were reflected in his eyes. He was not a happy man. No man dedicated to a single cause ever is.

"What do you think of your pal there?" Parker asked from the cooler.

"What pal?" Hernandez asked "Miranda."

"He's no pal of mine," Hernandez answered.

"I thought we had him cold yesterday," Parker said, filling a paper cup and drinking from it. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. "Five of us walked into that apartment, and the son of a bitch pulls a gun from someplace up his sleeve and cold-cocks us. The rotten punk. He made us look like amateurs. You see the paper today? 'Miranda Foils Cops.' A punk getting headlines."

"He's still no pal of mine," Hernandez said.

"Yeah," Parker answered. He seemed ready to say more, but he let the matter drop. "Who was that woman up here?" he asked.

"Her name's Gomez," Hernandez answered.

"What'd she want?"

"Her son's in some kind of trouble. She wants me to talk to him."

"What the hell does she think you are? A priest?"

Hernandez shrugged.

"You gonna go?" Parker asked.

"As soon as I finish what I'm working on."

"Maybe you are a priest."

"Maybe," Hernandez replied.

Parker walked to the coat rack in one corner of the room and took a dark-blue Panama from one of the pegs. "I'm going outside," he said, "see if I can't hear something."

"About what?" Carella asked.

"About that punk Miranda. He didn't vanish into thin air, that's for sure. So where would you go if you was him?"

"To Russia," Carella replied.

"Yeah. Well, I think he came back here. Right here someplace. He sure as hell wouldn't try to find another pad in Riverhead, not after we almost collared him there. So where? Home. Home to the 87th. And if he's somewhere around here, you can bet your ass everybody in the streets knows just where. So Andy Parker goes on the earie." He stopped at his desk, opened the top drawer, took out his service revolver and holster, and clipped the holster into his right hip pocket. "Don't work too hard," he said, as he went through the gate in the railing. "Not that I think you need the advice."

His footsteps echoed down the long corridor. Hernandez watched him as he turned to go down the flight of iron-runged steps. When he looked back into the squadroom, he saw that Carella had been watching the other man, too.

A glance passed between them. Neither said a word. Silently, they got back to work.

Azucena — Gomez had been one of those fortunate people who are born beautiful and who remain beautiful no matter what tricks life decides to play on them. Her name, translated from the Spanish, meant White Lily, and she seemed to have been appropriately named because her skin was white and smooth, and her face, her body, seemed to combine all the delicate beauty and regality of that flower. The oval of her face was dominated by brown eyes which slanted to lend an exotic flair to otherwise serene features. Her nose was straight and slender, her mouth was a mouth which looked as if it could cry. She had managed, without the benefit of dieting, to maintain a body which had evoked many a street-corner whistle in her native Puerto Rico. She was forty-two years old, and she had known what it was to be a woman, still knew, and she knew the happiness and sorrow of motherhood. She was not a tall woman, perhaps the one flaw which robbed her of true beauty, but she seemed exceptionally tall as she stood by the bed and looked down at her son.