Ed McBain: Give the Boys a Great Big Hand

“She looked at me with these big blue eyes set in a face made for a doll,” Parker said, “and she batted her eyelashes at me and said, ‘I’m in a hurry. If you’re going to give me the goddamn ticket, give it to me!’”

“Wow!” Hawes said.

“So I asked her what the hurry was, and she said she had to be on stage in five minutes flat.”

“What kind of stage? One of the burly houses?”

“No, no, she was a dancer in a musical comedy. A big hit, too. And it was just about eight-thirty, and she was breaking her neck to catch the curtain. So I pulled out my fountain pen and my pad, and she said, ‘Or would you prefer two tickets to the biggest hit in town?’ and she started digging into her purse, those bubs about to spill out of that tiny little bra and stop traffic away the hell up to the Aquarium.”

“So how was the show?” Carella asked.

“I didn’t take the tickets.”

“Why not?”

“Because this way I had a private show of my own. It took me twenty minutes to write that ticket, and all that time she was squirming and wiggling on the front seat with those gorgeous pineapples ready to pop. Man, what an experience!”

“You’re not only mean,” Carella said, “you’re also horny.”

“That I am,” Parker admitted proudly.

“I caught a guy once on Freeman Lewis Boulevard,” Carella said. “He was doing eighty miles an hour. I had to put on the siren before he’d stop. I got out of the squad car and was walking over to his car when the door popped open, and he leaped out and started running toward me.”

“A hood?” Hawes asked.

“No, but that’s just what I thought. I figured I’d stumbled on a guy who was running from the law. I expected him to pull a gun any minute.”

“What did he do?”

“He came up to me hopping up and down, first one leg, then the other. He said he knew he was speeding, but he’d just had an acute attack of diarrhea, and he had to find a gas station with a men’s room in a hurry.”

Parker burst out laughing. “Oh, brother, that takes it,” he said.

“Did you let him go?” Hawes asked.

“Hell, no. I just wrote the ticket in a hurry, that’s all.”

“I’ll tell you one I let go,” Hawes said. “This was when I was a patrolman with the 30th. The guy was clipping along like a madman, and when I stopped him he just looked at me and said, ‘You going to give me a ticket?’ So I looked right back at him and said, ‘Damn right, I’m going to give you a ticket.’ He stared at me for a long time, just nodding his head. Then he said, ‘That’s it, then. You give me a ticket, and I’ll kill myself.’”

“What the hell did he mean?”

“That’s just what I said. I said, ‘What do you mean, mister?’ But he just kept staring at me, and he didn’t say another word, just kept staring and nodding his head, over and over again, as if this ticket was the last straw, do you know what I mean? I had the feeling that this had just been one of those days where everything in the world had gone wrong for him, and I knew — I just knew as sure as I was standing there — that if I slapped a summons on him, he would actually go home and turn on the gas or jump out the window or slit his throat. I just knew it. I could just sense it about the guy.”

“So you let him go. The Good Samaritan.”

“Yeah, yeah, Samaritan,” Hawes said. “You should have seen that guy’s eyes. You’d have known he wasn’t kidding.”

“I had a woman once,” Kling, the youngest of the detectives started, and Patrolman Dick Genero burst into the squadron carrying the small, blue overnight bag. One look at his eyes, and anyone would have known he wasn’t kidding. He carried the bag in his right hand, far away from his body, as if afraid to be contaminated by it. He pushed his way through the gate in the slatted railing that separated the squadroom from the corridor outside, went directly to Parker’s desk, and plunked the bag down in the middle of it with a finality that indicated he had done his duty and was now glad to be rid of it.

“What have you got, Dick?” Hawes asked.

Genero could not speak. His face was white, his eyes were wide. He swallowed several times, but no words came from his mouth. He kept shaking his head and pointing at the bag. Hawes stared at the bag in puzzlement, and then began to unzip it. Genero turned away. He seemed ready to vomit momentarily.

Hawes looked into the bag and said, “Oh, Jesus, where’d you get this?”

“What is it?” Kling asked.

“Oh, Jesus,” Hawes said. “What a goddamn thing. Get it out of here. Jesus, get it out of the squadroom. I’ll call the morgue.” The rugged planes of his face were twisted in pain. He could not look into the bag again. “I’ll call the morgue,” he said again. “Jesus, get it out of here. Take it downstairs. Get it out of here.”

Carella picked up the bag and started out of the room.

He did not look into it. He did not have to.

He had been a cop for a long time now, and he knew instantly from the expression on Hawes’s face that the bag must contain a segment of a human body.

Now that’s pretty damn disgusting.

But let’s get something straight. Death is pretty damn disgusting, and there are no two ways about it. If you are one of those people who like motion pictures where a man fires a gun and a small spurt of dust explodes on the victim’s chest — just a small spurt of dust, no blood — then police work is not the line for you. Similarly, if you are one of those people who believe that corpses look “just like they’re sleeping,” it is fortunate you are not a cop. If you are a cop, you know that death is seldom pretty, that it is in fact the ugliest and most frightening event that can over take a human being.

If you are a cop, you have seen death at its ugliest because you have seen it as the result of violent upheaval. You have, more than likely, puked more than once at the things you have seen. You have, more than likely, trembled with fear, because death has a terrifying way of reminding the strongest human that his flesh can bleed and his bones can break. If you are a cop, you will never get used to the sight of a corpse or a part of a corpse — no matter how long you deal with them, no matter how strong you are, no matter how tough you become.

There is nothing reassuring about the sight of a man who has been worked over with a hatchet. The skull, a formidable piece of bone, assuming the characteristics of a melon, the parallel wounds, the criss-crossing wounds, the bleeding ugly wounds covering the head and the face and the neck, the windpipe exposed and raw, throbbing with color so bright, but throbbing only with color because life is gone, life has fled beneath the battering rigidity of an impersonal hatchet blade; there is nothing reassuring.

There is nothing beautiful about the post-mortem decomposition of a body, man or woman, child or adult, the gas formation, the discoloration of head and trunk tissues, the separation of epidermis, the staining of veins, the protrusion of tongue, decomposed liquefied fat soaking through the skin resulting in large yellow-stained areas; there is nothing beautiful.

There is nothing tender about bullet wounds, the smeared and lacerated flesh of contact wounds, the subcutaneous explosion of gases, the tissues seared and blackened by flame and smoke, the embedded powder grains, the gaping holes in the flesh; there is nothing tender.

If you are a cop, you learn that death is ugly, and frightening, and disgusting. If you are a cop, you learn to deal with what is ugly, frightening, and disgusting or you quit the force.

The object in the overnight bag was a human hand, ugly, frightening, and disgusting.