Ed Mcbain: Cop Hater

The body lay outside an abandoned, boarded-up theatre. The theatre had started as a first-run movie house, many years back when the neighborhood had still been fashionable. As the neighborhood began rotting, the theatre began showing second-run films, and then old movies, and finally foreign language films. There was a door to the left of the movie house, and the door had once been boarded, too, but the planks had been ripped loose and the staircase inside was littered with cigarette butts, empty pint whiskey bottles, and contraceptives. The marquee above the theatre stretched to the sidewalk, punched with jagged holes, the victim of thrown rocks, tin cans, hunks of pipe, and general debris.

Across the street from the theatre was an empty lot. The lot had once owned an apartment house, and the house had been a good one with high rents. It had not been unusual, in the old days, to see an occasional mink coat drifting from the marbled doorway of that apartment house. But the crawling tendrils of the slum had reached out for the brick, clutching it with tenacious fingers, pulling it into the ever-widening circle it called its own. The old building had succumbed, becoming a part of the slum, so that people rarely remembered it had once been a proud and elegant dwelling. And then it had been condemned, and the building had been razed to the ground, and now the lot was clear and open, except for the scattered brick rubble that still clung to the ground in some places. A City housing project, it was rumored, was going up in the lot. In the meantime, the kids used the lot for various purposes. Most of the purposes were concerned with bodily functions, and so a stench hung on the air over the lot, and the stench was particularly strong on a hot Summer night, and it drifted over toward the theatre, captured beneath the canopy of the overhanging marquee, smothering the sidewalk with its smell of life, mingling with the smell of death on the pavement

One of the Homicide cops moved away from the body and began scouring the sidewalk. The second cop stood with his hands in his back pockets. The assistant m.e. went through the ritual of ascertaining the death of a man who was certainly dead. The first cop came back.

"You see these?" he asked.

"What've you got?"

"Couple of ejected cartridge cases."

"Mm?"

"Remington slugs. .45 calibre."

"Put 'em in an envelope and tag 'em. You about finished, Doc?"

"In a minute."

The flash bulbs kept popping. The photographer worked like the press agent for a hit musical. He circled the star of the show, and he snapped his pictures from different angles, and all the while his face showed no expression, and the sweat streamed down his back, sticking his shirt to his flesh. The assistant m.e. ran his hand across his forehead.

"What the hell's keeping the boys from the 87th?" the first cop asked.

"Big poker game going, probably. We're better off without them." He turned to the assistant m.e. "What do you say, Doc?"

"I'm through." He rose wearily.

"What've you got?"

"Just what it looks like. He was shot twice in the back of the head. Death was probably instantaneous."

"Want to give us a time?"

"On a gunshot wound? Don't kid me."

"I thought you guys worked miracles."

"We do. But not during the Summer."

"Can't you even guess?"

"Sure, guessing's free. No rigor mortis yet, so I'd say he was killed maybe a half-hour ago. With this heat, though . . . hell, he might maintain normal body warmth for hours. You won't get us to go out on a limb with this one. Not even after the autopsy is ..."

"All right, all right. Mind if we find out who he is?"

"Just don't mess it up for the Lab boys. I'm taking off." The assistant m.e. glanced at his watch. "For the benefit of the timekeeper, it's 12:19."

"Short day today," the first Homicide cop said. He jotted the time down on the time table he'd kept since his arrival at the scene.

The second cop was kneeling near the body. He looked up suddenly. "He's heeled," he said.

"Yeah?"

The assistant m.e. walked away, mopping his brow.

"Looks like a .38," the second cop said. He examined the holstered gun more closely. "Yeah. Detective's Special. Want to tag this?"

"Sure." The first cop heard a car brake to a stop across the street. The front doors opened, and two men stepped out and headed for the knot around the body. "Here's the 87th now."

"Just in time for tea," the second cop said drily. "Who'd they send?"

"Looks like Carella and Bush." The first cop took a packet of rubber-banded tags from his right hand jacket pocket. He slipped one of the tags free from the rubber band, and then returned the rest to his pocket. The tag was a three-by-five rectangle of an oatmeal color. A hole was punched in one end of the tag, and a thin wire was threaded through the hole and twisted to form two loose ends. The tag read POLICE DEPARTMENT, and beneath that in bolder type: EVIDENCE.

Carella and Bush, from the 87th Precinct, walked over leisurely. The Homicide cop glanced at them cursorily, turned to the Where found space on the tag, and began filling it out. Carella wore a blue suit, his grey tie neatly clasped to his white shirt. Bush was wearing an orange sports shirt and khaki trousers.

"If it ain't Speedy Gonzales and Whirlaway," the second Homicide cop said. "You guys certainly move fast, all right. What do you do on a bomb scare?"

"We leave it to the Bomb Squad," Carella said drily. "What do you do?"

"You're very comical," the Homicide cop said.

"We got hung up."

"I can see that."

"I was catching alone when the squeal came in," Carella said. "Bush was out with Foster on a bar knifing. Reardon didn't show." Carella paused. "Ain't that right, Bush?" Bush nodded.

"If you're catching, what the hell are you doing here?" the first Homicide cop said.

Carella grinned. He was a big man, but not a heavy one. He gave an impression of great power, but the power was not a meaty one. It was, instead, a fine-honed muscular power. He wore his brown hair short. His eyes were brown, with a peculiar downward slant that gave him a clean-shaved Oriental appearance. He had wide shoulders and narrow hips, and he managed to look well-dressed and elegant even when he was dressed in a leather jacket for a waterfront plant. He had thick wrists and big hands, and he spread the hands wide now and said, "Me answer the phone when there's a homicide in progress?" His grin widened. "I left Foster to catch. Hell, he's practically a rookie."

"How's the graft these days?" the second Homicide cop asked.

"Up yours," Carella answered drily.

"Some guys get all the luck. You sure as hell don't get anything from a stiff."

"Except tsores," the first cop said.

"Talk English," Bush said genially. He was a soft-spoken man, and his quiet voice came as a surprise because he was all of six-feet-four inches and weighed at least two-twenty, bone dry. His hair was wild and unkempt, as if a wise Providence had fashioned his unruly thatch after his surname. His hair was also red, and it clashed violently against the orange sports shirt he wore. His arms hung from the sleeves of the shirt, muscular and thick. A jagged knife scar ran the length of his right arm.

The photographer walked over to where the detectives were chatting.

"What the hell are you doing?" he asked angrily.

"We're trying to find out who he is," the second cop said. "Why? What's the matter?"

"I didn't say I was finished with him yet"

"Well, ain't you?"

"Yeah, but you should've asked."

"For Christ's sake, who are you working for? Conover?"

"You Homicide dicks give me a pain in the ..."

"Go home and emulsify some negatives or something, will you?"

The photographer glanced at his watch. He grunted and withheld the time purposely, so that the first cop had to glance at his own watch before jotting down the time on his time table. He subtracted a few minutes, and indicated a t.o.a. for Carella and Bush, too.