Ed McBain - Ten Plus One

“Would you like to order now, Mr. Mulligan?” the waiter asked.

“I’ll look over the menu,” Mulligan said. The waiter brought the card, and Mulligan picked up his glass of scotch, took a sip of it, and began reading. The menu rarely changed. He almost knew it by heart.

He was wondering whether he should have the crabmeat au gratin when suddenly the plate-glass window alongside the table shattered.

Mulligan didn’t have time to react to the falling glass because it had been shattered by a bullet, and the next thing the bullet shattered was the bone just below his right temple.

If there had been a scale of importance for homicide, ranging from zero for the least important to ten for the most important, Blanche Lettiger would have clocked in at zero, Sal Palumbo would have registered a resounding two, and both Anthony Forrest and Randolph Norden would have fallen somewhere between the three and four mark.

Andrew Mulligan fell snoot-first into his glass of Dewar’s on the rocks and promptly sent the murder meter soaring to seven-point-eight. There were two leading afternoon newspapers in the city, one big, one small, you paid your money and you took your choice. They both stank. The big one always printed its headline-above-the-headline in red type. The tabloid-sized one always printed its headline-above-the-headline in blue type, because it was a very liberal newspaper and didn’t want people to think it was too liberal, in fact didn’t want even the slightest association with the color red. The big newspaper’s headline that afternoon read SNIPER SLAYS D.A. The headline-above-the-headline was printed in red and it said: MULLIGAN’S TRIUMPHS, p. 5. The tabloid-sized newspaper’s headline that afternoon read MULLIGAN MURDERED, and across the top of the page, in blue, THE FIGHTING D.A., A Study by Agnes Lovely, p. 33. Agnes Lovely’s study had been composed in fifteen minutes by backtracking through the paper’s morgue shortly before press time. The news story, on the other hand, read more like a study, because it was a policy of the blue-headline tabloid to make every item of news sound like a piece of fiction in a popular magazine. If President Kennedy sent a new tax bill to Congress, the blue-headline tabloid started the story something like this: These ancient halls were still with contemplation today. There was a paper to be considered, a decision to be made. The paper had come down to them from above, a document that could change the lives of everyone in the nation, a document that …and so on. Somewhere toward the end of the news story, the reporter usually revealed what the hell he was talking about. Up to that time, he was writing for atmosphere and suspense.

There were many people in the city who felt that the rifle death of an assistant district attorney contained enough atmosphere and suspense all by itself. These people foolishly felt that all a newspaper was supposed to do in a news story was tell the facts, ma’am. But the blue-headline newspaper, you see, was really running a disguised school for fiction writers, someone having told the city editor that Ernest Hemingway had once been a newspaper correspondent. The city editor also felt that most of the people in the city were illiterate. He would have liked to fill his newspaper with a lot of photographs beneath which would be short, sharp captions, but a morning newspaper in the city had been using that format for a good many years now, and the city editor of the blue-headline tabloid didn’t want to seem like a copycat. So instead, he decided that illiterate people would rather not have their news straight from the shoulder, but would instead prefer reading each story as if it were a chapter of a long novel about life.

The tall man was drinking scotch. He sat by the restaurant window watching the rush of humanity outside, thinking private thoughts of a crusader who has foolishly and momentarily taken off all his armor. He could have been a Columbus in other times, he could have been an Essex at the side of Elizabeth. He was, instead, a tall and impressive man drinking his scotch. He was soon to be a dead man.

This was the way the reporter on the blue-headline newspaper started his story. But in addition to a city editor who had the notion that everyone was an illiterate except maybe himself, the paper also had a typesetter who thought that people enjoyed working out cryptograms while reading their newspapers. When you were dealing with illiterates, it wasn’t necessary to give the facts in the first place, and in the second place it was always necessary to garble every line of type so that the story became even more mystifying and, in many cases, practically unintelligible.

The story on page 3 of that afternoon’s edition read like this:

Thet allman was drinking scotch. He sat by the restaurant window watching the Russian humanity outside, thinking private thoughts of sex at the side of Elizabeth. He was, a crusader who has foolishly and momentarily taken off his arm. Or he could have been a Columbus in other times, he could have been an Es DRINKING HIS SCOTCH. He was soon to be a dead man.

instead, a tall and impressive man.

It really didn’t matter what the blue-headline tabloid said, because the assistant district attorney named Andrew Mulligan was inconsiderately turning a little blue on a slab in the morgue, and the district attorney himself, a man named Carter Cole, turned a very deep shade of blue mixed with red and bordering on purple when he found out that a man from his office had been inconveniently knocked off in the middle of a trial while drinking a glass of scotch.

The DA himself picked up a telephone and put in a call to the Police Commissioner, wanting to know what the hell was happening in this city when a respected and much-needed assistant district attorney couldn’t even go to a restaurant without having his brains blown out while drinking a glass of scotch. The Police Commissioner told him that he was doing everything in his power to get at the facts, after which he hung up and called the Chief of Detectives.

He asked the Chief of Detectives what the hell was happening in this city when a respected and much-needed assistant district attorney couldn’t even go into a restaurant without having his brains blown out while drinking a glass of scotch. The Chief of Detectives told him that he was doing everything in his power to get at the facts, after which he hung up and called Detective Lieutenant Peter Byrnes of the 87th Squad.

Detective Lieutenant Peter Byrnes informed the Chief of Detectives that he had called him only this morning in an attempt to solicit some assistance on this case, which was getting a little out of hand, what with people dying like flies, and what with respected and much-needed assistant district attorneys getting their brains blown out and all. The Chief of Detectives told Lieutenant Byrnes that he would certainly see to it that Capello, or whatever his name was, got all the help he needed on this case, because, and here his voice lowered, and he actually said, “Just between you and me, Pete, the DA himself was a little burned up over the situation.”

Andrew Mulligan, meanwhile, was being sliced up nicely and neatly, and being searched for a stray bullet, which, when it was found, turned out to be a Remington .308, of all things. Being dead, he still had no idea that Carella and Meyer of the 87th Squad were working on a case involving someone who was putting bullets through people’s heads, nor had he any idea how much his own death had helped the investigating cops.

By midnight that night, Carella had been assigned teams of detectives from every section of the city to assist in running down the sniper. He had, in effect, a small army to work with.

Now all the army had to do was find the enemy.