Ed McBain - Another Part of the City

Reardon picked up the extension phone.

“Hello?” he said. “Oh, Martin, good, glad you got back to me.”

“What apartment was this?” Ruiz asked the old lady.

“Apartment fourteen,” she said.

“And you say this was around midnight.”

“Midnight exactly,” the lady said.

“Well, what I want to know is does she have the right to send my kid to Jersey,” Reardon said into the phone. He listened. “Her parents there,” he said, and listened again. “Sixty-five, something like that. Her father used to work for the phone company, he’s retired now.” He listened again.

“Has this happened before?” Ruiz asked.

“All the time,” the lady said.

“What?” Ruiz said.

“What?” Reardon said. “Well, how the hell do I know if we can show they’re unfit?”

“What do you mean by all the time?” Ruiz asked.

“Every night,” the lady said.

“Every night?”

“At midnight. I think he’s in love with me.”

“Uh-huh,” Reardon said into the phone. “Uh-huh. All right, how about this afternoon sometime? No, I can’t right now, Martin. How about lunch? Well, when are you free? Okay, two o’clock, I’ll see you then, fine,” he said, and hung up.

“Do you know who this man is?” Ruiz said.

“Yes. He’s John Travolta,” the lady said.

Ruiz looked at her.

“He’s in love with me,” she said.

“Who was that?” Hoffman asked Reardon.

“My lawyer,” Reardon said. “The fucking asshole.” He glanced quickly to where the old lady was now telling Ruiz about Travolta jumping off the screen one time to kiss her.

“What’s the problem now?” Hoffman asked.

“I’m trying to see my daughter, that’s the problem.”

“Calm down,” Hoffman said. “I’m not the one who sent her to Jersey.”

“Yeah,” Reardon said, but he was still steaming.

Hoffman picked up the report from where Farmer had dropped it on the desk. “There’s something missing from this,” he said.

“There’s a lot missing from it,” Reardon said.

“Calm down, willya?”

“There’s a goddamn family been busted up for no reason at all,” Reardon said.

“Whose family are you talking about, Bry?” Hoffman asked. “The D’Annunzios... or yours?”

Reardon stared at him.

Ruiz said, “I’ll call Mr. Travolta personally and tell him to stop bothering you.”

“No, don’t tell him to stop bothering me,” the lady said. “Just tell him to stop doing it so late at night.”

“I’m sorry,” Reardon said.

“Just don’t let it get to you, okay?” Hoffman said.

“What about the report?”

“Remember the people we were questioning on the street?”

“Yeah?”

“Where was Sadie?”

“Who?”

“Sadie. The shopping bag lady. She’s usually in that doorway across from the restaurant, isn’t she? That’s where she lives. Bry. That doorway is her home .”

“Maybe she went south for the holidays,” Reardon said. “Found herself a warmer doorway on Chambers Street.”

“I think we ought to look for her,” Hoffman said.

“Tell him to bother me around nine, nine-thirty,” the old lady said as she left the squadroom.

New York City’s Bowery was a desperate place at any time of the year, but today, with soot-stained snow piled against the gutters and a harsh wind blowing, it seemed more forbidding than usual. The drunks appeared paralyzed. Normally, they would be out in the middle of the street, offering to wipe the windshields of cars stopped for traffic lights, hoping to pick up a quarter here, a nickel there. Or they would be on the sidewalks, making their pitch to whatever pedestrian happened to pass, people here to shop the various wholesale supply houses that lined either side of the avenue. Below Delancey, you had your stores selling lighting fixtures and a handful of stores selling glassware and cutlery. Above Delancey, the restaurant supply stores took over in earnest — kitchen equipment, cash registers, china, plumbing, pizza ovens — and in the midst of all this, an advance scout probing enemy terrain, was a lone Chinese chicken market. The drunks, the homeless of this city, sat huddled in doorways, staring glassy-eyed into the cold, all of them candidates for freezing to death. The thermometer outside one of the banks on Canal Street had read twelve degrees when Reardon and Hoffman drove past it. It felt colder than that now that they were out of the car.

“It’s the wind-chill factor,” Hoffman said.

They played the canvass by the book, the way Farmer would have liked it.

“Lady in her sixties. Her name’s Sadie. The shopping bag lady. Sadie. You seen her around?”

“What’s her last name?” a drunk asked. He was sitting in a doorway near the Bowery Mission. He had tied newspapers around his trouser legs. He had wet his pants, and the urine had soaked through the newspapers.

“We don’t know her last name. She’s Sadie. She’s around all the time. Everybody knows Sadie.”

“Don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” the drunk said.

They continued along the Bowery.

“Cold,” Reardon said.

Hoffman nodded. His eyes were tearing.

Another doorway. This one near Grand Street.

Another drunk.

“Sally, did you say?”

“Forget it.”

And yet another.

And another.

The wind howling through the Bowery with a vengeance.

Nearing the northernmost boundary of the precinct now, the Salvation Army-Booth House between Rivington and Stanton. A man there told them he’d seen Sadie on Monday.

“Monday when?” Hoffman asked.

“The afternoon sometime.”

“She didn’t come in Monday night, did she? After seven o’clock?”

“Not while I was here,” the man said. “Why? What’d she do?”

Doubling back on the other side of the avenue now, a hotel near the corner of Broome Street, the room clerk telling them she’d taken a room there on Monday night.

“Is she still here?” Reardon asked.

“No, she only had cash enough for the one night.”

“When did she leave?” Hoffman asked.

“Early yesterday morning.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

“Yeah, Paris, France,” the clerk said drily. “There’s lots of garbage cans in Paris, France.”

It was warmer in the car, even though the heater wasn’t functioning properly. They cruised the streets, looking. Plenty of shopping bag ladies, but none of them Sadie. Plenty of men lying in doorways. Plenty of people passing by them hurriedly. The wind lashed the snow piled against the curbs, sent eddies into the air so that it seemed it was snowing again.

“Lost souls,” Hoffman said. “Every fucking one of ’em. Some of these guys, they’re probably doctors, lawyers, maybe, lost themselves in a fuckin’ bottle.”

“You want to break for lunch?” Reardon asked.

“Let’s hit a few more places,” Hoffman said.

“You bucking for Commissioner?”

“Fat chance. In this city, unless you’re Irish or black, you haven’t got a prayer above Captain.”

“You mean I might make Commissioner?” Reardon said, grinning.

“Sure, go talk to your rabbi.”

The men fell silent. The heater rattled and clanged.

“Fuckin’ jungle out there.” Hoffman said.

They continued riding in silence.

“You talk about promotions,” Hoffman said, “that robbery bust ain’t helping me, either.”

“What do you mean?”

“That missing cash.”

“Come on,” Reardon said.

“They think I bagged that fuckin’ loot,” Hoffman said.

“Nobody thinks that.”