Эд Макбейн - Ice

“Remember?” he said.

“Memory like a judge,” she said.

“We’ll leave you two to work out your strategy,” Meyer said. “Come on, Steve, let’s use the interrogation room.”

“When do we start?” Eileen asked, and lit another cigarette.

“Tonight?” Willis said.

In the interrogation room down the hall, Meyer and Carella studied the single sheet of paper that had been in the envelope Levine sent them:

“He types neat,” Meyer said.

“Not much here though,” Carella said.

“This must’ve been before he got that call from Dorfsman, huh?”

“Got fast action with his BOLO,” Carella said.

“Let’s see what we’ve got on the other one,” Meyer said.

In the Clerical Office, Alf Miscolo was brewing the city’s worst coffee. Its strong aroma assailed their nostrils the moment they stepped into the room.

“Halloween has come and gone,” Meyer said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Miscolo said.

“You can stop throwing newts and frogs in your coffeepot.”

“Ha-ha,” Miscolo said. “You don’t like it, don’t drink it.” He sniffed the air. “This is a new Colombian blend,” he said, and rolled his eyes appreciatively.

“Your coffee smells just like Meyer’s cigars,” Carella said.

“I give him all my old butts,” Meyer said, and then realized his cigars were being attacked. “What do you mean?” he said. “What’s the matter with my cigars?”

“Did you come in here to waste my time, or what?” Miscolo said.

“We need the file on Paco Lopez,” Carella said.

“That was only a few days ago, wasn’t it?”

“The homicide on Culver,” Carella said, nodding. “Tuesday night.”

“It ain’t filed yet,” Miscolo said.

“So where is it?”

“Here on my desk someplace,” Miscolo said, and gestured toward the wilderness of unfiled reports covering its top.

“Can you dig it out?” Carella said.

Miscolo did not answer. He sat in the swivel chair behind the desk and began sorting out the reports. “My wife gave me that coffee for Valentine’s Day,” he said, sulking.

“She must love you a lot,” Meyer said.

“What’d your wife give you?”

“Valentine’s Day isn’t till tomorrow.”

“Maybe she’ll give you some terrific cigars,” Carella said. “Like the ones you’re already smoking.”

“Here’s a Gofredo Lopez, is that who you’re looking for?”

“Paco,” Carella said.

“There’s nothing wrong with my cigars,” Meyer said.

“You know how many Lopezes we got up here in the Eight-Seven?” Miscolo said. “Lopez up here is just like Smith or Jones in the real world.”

“Only one Lopez got shot last Tuesday,” Carella said.

“I sometimes wish all of them would,” Miscolo said.

“Give them a sip of your coffee instead,” Meyer said. “Do ’em in as sure as a sawed-off shotgun.”

“Ha-ha,” Miscolo said. “Paco, where the hell’s Paco?”

“When are you going to get around to filing all this stuff?” Meyer said.

“When I get around to it,” Miscolo said. “If all our upstanding citizens out there would stop shooting each other, and robbing each other, and stabbing each other—”

“You’d be out of a job,” Carella said.

“Shove the job,” Miscolo said. “I’ve had the job up to here. Three more years, I’ll be out of it. Three more years, I’ll be living in Miami.”

“No crime at all down there in Miami,” Meyer said.

“Nothing that’ll bother me,” Miscolo said. “I’ll be out on my boat fishing.”

“Don’t forget to take your coffeepot with you,” Meyer said.

“Here it is,” Miscolo said. “Paco Lopez. Bring it back when you’re finished with it.”

“So you can file it next Friday,” Meyer said.

“Ha-ha,” Miscolo said.

In the late-morning stillness of the squadroom, they looked over the sheaf of papers on Paco Lopez. The shooting had taken place last Tuesday night, a bit more than seventy-three hours before Sally Anderson was killed with the same gun half a city away. The girl’s body had been found at 12:30 A.M. on the morning of the thirteenth; Paco Lopez had been killed at 11:00 P.M. on the night of the ninth. The dead girl had been twenty-five years old, a white female, gainfully employed. Lopez had been nineteen, a Hispanic male, with one previous arrest for possession of narcotics with intent to sell; he had gotten off with a suspended sentence because he’d been only fifteen at the time. When they’d gone through his pockets on Tuesday night, they’d found six grams of cocaine and a rubber-banded roll of $100 bills totaling $1,100. Sally Anderson’s wallet had contained $23. There seemed very little connection between the two victims. But the same gun had been used in both slayings.

The supplementary reports on Lopez confirmed that he’d continued dealing drugs after his initial bust; his street name was El Snorto. No such word existed in the Spanish language, but the Hispanic residents in the 87th Precinct were not without their own wry sense of humor. The people Carella and Meyer had interrogated and interviewed all seemed to agree that Paco Lopez was a mean son of a bitch who’d deserved killing. Many of them suggested alternate means of death slower and more painful than the two .38 caliber bullets that had been fired into his chest at close range. One of his previous girlfriends unbuttoned her blouse for the detectives and showed them the cigarette burns Lopez had left as souvenirs on both her breasts. Even Lopez’s mother seemed to agree (although she’d crossed herself when she admitted this) that the world would be much better off without the likes of her son around.

A round-up of known gram dealers had brought up the information that Lopez was truly a small-time operator, something slightly higher than a mule in the hierarchy of cocaine “redistribution” — as one of the dealers euphemistically called it. Lopez had enjoyed a small following of users whom he’d supplied on a modest basis, but if he pulled down ten, twelve bills a week, that was a lot. Listening to this, Meyer and Carella, who each and separately pulled down only twenty bills a month, wondered if perhaps they were not in the wrong profession. All of these more successful dealers agreed that Lopez hadn’t even been worth killing. He was a threat to nobody, operating as he was on the fringes of gram-dealer society. They all figured some angry cokie had iced him. Maybe Lopez got fancy, started cutting his stuff too fine in an attempt to get more mileage out of the dust, and maybe an irate user had put the blocks to him. As simple as that. But how did a cocaine murder tie in with Sally Anderson?

“You know what I wish?” Carella said.

“What?”

“I wish we hadn’t inherited this one.”

But they had.

The superintendent of Sally Anderson’s building on North Campbell Street was not happy to see them. He had been awakened at close to 1:00 in the morning and interrogated by two other detectives, and he had not been able to fall asleep again till almost 2:30, and then he’d had to get up at 6:00 to put out the garbage cans before the Sanitation Department trucks arrived, and then he’d had to shovel the sidewalk in front of the building clear of snow, and now it was ten minutes to 12:00, and he was hungry, and he wanted his lunch, and he didn’t want to be talking to two more detectives when he hadn’t even seen what happened and hardly knew the girl from a hole in the wall.