Эд Макбейн - Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here

He was looking at a somewhat soiled Snow White, but this was the ’70s, and nobody expected to find virgins in sewers anymore.

Still grinning, Brown replaced the grating, brushed himself off again, and headed back for the squadroom.

In the city for which Brown worked, the Identification Section and the police laboratory operated on weekends with only a skeleton force, which was often only slightly better than operating with no force at all. Most cases got put over till Monday, unless they were terribly urgent. The shooting of a police detective was considered terribly urgent, and so the Snow White mask Brown dispatched to the lab downtown on High Street was given top priority. Detective-Lieutenant Sam Grossman, who ran the lab, was of course not working on a Sunday. The task of examining the mask for latent fingerprints (or indeed any clue as to its wearer’s identity) fell to Detective 3rd/Grade Marshall Davies, who, like Genero, was a comparatively new detective and therefore prone to catching weekend duty at the lab. He promised Brown he would get back to him as soon as possible, mindful of the fact that a detective had been shot and that there might be all kinds of pressure from upstairs, and then set to work.

In the squadroom, Brown replaced the telephone on its cradle and looked up as a patrolman approached the slatted-rail divider with a prisoner in tow. At his desk, Carl Kapek was eating an early lunch, preparatory to heading for the bar in which the Marine had encountered the girl with the bewitching behind, bars in this city being closed on Sundays until twelve, at which time it was presumably acceptable for churchgoers to begin getting drunk. The clock on the squadroom wall read fifteen minutes to noon. The squadroom was somewhat more crowded than it might have been at this hour on a Sunday because Levine, Di Maeo, and Meriwether, the three detectives who had been called in when they were supposed to be on vacation, were sitting at one of the desks waiting to see the lieutenant, who at the moment was talking to Captain Frick, commander of the precinct, about the grocery store shooting and the necessity to get some more men on it. The three detectives were naturally grumbling. Di Maeo said that next time he was going to Puerto Rico on his vacation because then the lieutenant could shove it up his ass if he wanted him to come back. Cooperman was on vacation, too, wasn’t he? But he was in the Virgin Islands, and the loot sure as hell didn’t call him down there and drag him in, did he? Besides, Levine pointed out, Andy Parker was a lousy cop, and who the hell cared if he got shot or even killed? Meriwether, who was a mild-mannered hair-bag in his early sixties, and a detective/first to boot, said, “Now, now, fellows, it’s all part of the game, all part of the game,” and Di Maeo belched.

The patrolman walked over to Brown’s desk, told his prisoner to sit down, took Brown aside, and whispered something to him. Brown nodded and came back to the desk. The prisoner was handcuffed, sitting with his hands in his lap. He was a pudgy little man with green eyes and a pencil-line mustache. Brown estimated his age at forty or thereabouts. He was wearing a brown overcoat, a brown suit and shoes, white shirt with a button-down collar, gold-and-brown striped silk tie. Brown asked the patrolman to advise the man of his rights, a job the patrolman accepted with some trepidation, while he called the hospital to ask about Parker’s condition. They told him that Parker was doing fine. Brown accepted the report without noticeable enthusiasm. He hung up the phone, heard the prisoner tell the patrolman he had nothing to hide and would answer any questions they wanted to ask, swiveled his chair around to face the man, and said, “What’s your name?”

The man would not look Brown in the eye. Instead, he kept staring past his left ear to the grilled windows and the sky outside.

“Perry Lyons,” he said. His voice was very low. Brown could barely hear him.

“What were you doing in the park just now, Lyons?” Brown said.

“Nothing,” Lyons answered.

“Speak up!” Brown snapped. There was a noticeable edge to his voice. The patrolman, too, was staring down at Lyons in what could only be described as an extremely hostile way, his brow twisted into a frown, his eyes hard and mean, his lips tightly compressed, his arms folded across his chest.

“I wasn’t doing nothing,” Lyons answered.

“Patrolman Brogan here seems to think otherwise.”

Lyons shrugged.

“What about it, Lyons?”

“There’s no law against talking to somebody.”

“Who were you talking to, Lyons?”

“A kid.”

“What’d you say to him?”

“Just it was a nice day, that’s all.”

“That’s not what the kid told Patrolman Brogan.”

“Well, kids, you know kids,” Lyons said.

“How old was the kid, Joe?” Brown asked.

“About nine,” Brogan answered.

“You always talk to nine-year-old kids in the park?” Brown asked.

“Sometimes.”

“How often?”

“There’s no law against talking to kids. I like kids.”

“I’ll bet you do,” Brown said. “Tell him what the boy told you, Brogan.”

Brogan hesitated a moment and then said, “The boy said you asked him to blow you, Lyons.”

“No,” Lyons said. “No, I never said anything like that. You’re mistaken.”

“I’m not mistaken,” Brogan said.

“Well then, the kid’s mistaken. He never heard anything like that from me, nossir.”

“You ever been arrested before?” Brown asked.

Lyons did not answer.

“Come on,” Brown said impatiently, “we can check it in a minute.”

“Well, yes,” Lyons said. “I have been arrested before.”

“How many times?”

“Twice.”

“What for?”

“Well...” Lyons said, and shrugged.

“What for, Lyons?”

“Well, it was, uh, I got in trouble with somebody a while back.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“With some kid.”

“What was the charge, Lyons?”

Lyons hesitated again.

“What was the charge?” Brown repeated.

“Carnal abuse.”

“You’re a child molester, huh, Lyons?”

“No, no, it was a bum rap.”

“Were you convicted?”

“Yes, but that don’t mean a thing, you guys know that. The kid was lying. He wanted to get even with me, he wanted to get me in trouble, so he told all kinds of lies about me. Hell, what would I want to fool around with a kid like that for? I had a girlfriend and everything, this waitress, you know? A real pretty girl, what would I want to fool around with a little kid for?”

“You tell me.”

“It was a bum rap, that’s all. These things happen, that’s all. You guys know that.”

“And the second arrest?”

“Well, that...”

“Yeah?”

“Well, you see what happened, after I got paroled, you know, I went back to live in this motel I used to live in before I got put away, you know?”

“Where’d you serve your time?”

“Castleview”

“Go ahead.”

“So I had this same room, you know? That I had before they locked me up. And it turned out the kid who got me in trouble before, he was living there with his mother.”

“Just by coincidence, huh?”

“Well, no, not by coincidence. I mean, I can’t claim it was coincidence. His mother ran the place, you see. I mean, she and her father owned it together. So it wasn’t coincidence, you know. But I didn’t think the kid was going to cause me no more trouble, you see what I mean? I done my time, he already got even with me, so I didn’t expect no more trouble from him. Only thing is he come around to my cabin one day, and he made me do things to him. He said he’d tell his mother I was bothering him again if I didn’t do these things to him. I mean, I was on parole, you know what I mean? If the kid had went to his mother, they’d have packed me off again in a minute.”