Ed McBain - Ten Plus One

“Listen,” she said.

He looked up.

“Listen,” she said, and the tears suddenly began rolling down her face uncontrollably, “she’s not a very strong woman. Please…when you tell her…please do it gently? Please? When you tell her my father is dead? Please?”

Carella nodded and began dialing the number.

Clara Forrest was thirty-nine years old, a slender woman with a network of tiny wrinkles around her eyes and her mouth. She accompanied Carella into the mortuary silently, her face fixed in that curiously tight, almost angry expression people assume when they are told death has arrived. While the attendant pulled out the drawer on its oiled rollers, she stood by silently and then looked silently into the face of her husband, and nodded only once. She had accepted the knowledge the moment Carella revealed it on the telephone. This now, this looking into the face of the man she had married when she was nineteen, the man she had loved since she was seventeen, the man for whom she had borne three children, the man she had seen through bad times and good, this now, this looking into the dead and sightless face of a man who was now a corpse on an oiled drawer in a mortuary, this was only routine. The heartache had started the moment Carella spoke the words to her, and the rest was only routine.

“Is that your husband, Mrs. Forrest?” Carella asked.

“Yes.”

“And his name is Anthony Forrest?”

“Yes.” Clara shook her head. “Can we get out of here, please?”

They walked out of the big, echoing room and stood outside in the hospital corridor.

“Will they do an autopsy?” she asked.

“Yes, Mrs. Forrest.”

“I wish they wouldn’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you think it was painful for him?”

“He probably died instantly, Mrs. Forrest.”

“Thank God for that.”

There was a long silence.

“We have clocks,” Clara said. “Oh, maybe two dozen of them. I knew this would happen.”

“What do you mean?”

“He always wound the clocks. Some of them are very complicated. The older ones. And some of the tricky foreign ones. He used to wind them every week, on Saturday, all the clocks.” She paused and smiled tiredly. “I was always so afraid this would happen. You see, he…I never learned how to wind them.”

“I don’t understand,” Carella said.

“Now…now that Tony’s gone,” she said dully, “who’ll wind the clocks?”

And then she began weeping.

The police department is a vast organization, and a detective is only an organization man. He goes to his office each day, and he conducts his business. And, as with any other business, there are company rules and company procedures, and papers to be typed and dictated, and phone calls to be made, and people to be interviewed and visited, and facts to be researched, and other branches of the organization to contact, and specialists to be consulted. And, as with any other business, it is impossible in police work to devote one’s full energies to a single pressing matter. There are always calls about something else, there are always unrelated people to see, there are conflicting vacation schedules and shortages of personnel, and overlapping and backslipping, and plain weariness.

Being a detective is something like being an account executive.

There is only one substantial difference, and once the mental adjustment is made, the difference becomes negligible.

An account executive, despite the cutthroat notoriety of his profession, rarely has to look death in the face, and certainly does not have to look it in the face daily.

A detective sees death in all its various forms at least five times a week, and usually more often. He sees it in the street in its elemental form, the slow disintegration of boys and girls, men and women, exposed to the rotting decay of the slums, dying bit by bit, having the life sucked out of them by the relentless city. He sees it more viciously in the junkies, a death that exists only by its negation of life, the slow suffocation of all will, the gradual extinction of any drive save the drive toward heroin. He sees it in convicted thieves, the burglars, the muggers, the con men, the pimps, a death imposed by law, the gradual death of confinement behind bars. He sees it in the whores who have witnessed the death of honor, and daily multiply the death of love, who bleed away their own lives fifty times a day beneath the relentless stabbings of countless conjugations. He sees it in the homosexuals, who have watched their manhood die, and who live a desperate dying life in the shadow of the law. He sees it in the juvenile street gangs, who live in fear of death and who propagate fear by inflicting death to banish fear.

And he sees it at its worst, as the result of violent emotions bursting into the mind and erupting from the hands. He sees gunshot wounds and stab wounds and hatchet wounds and ice-pick wounds and mutilations and eviscerations. And each time, each time he looks at another human body that has been killed and nullified, he is yanked out of his own body, loses his own humanity to become an observer, a visitor from somewhere far in space studying a curious race of insect people who rip each other apart, who tear each other limb from limb and drink each other’s blood; he stands appalled, a civilized human who momentarily renounces his citizenship, unable to believe such cruelty can exist in men who have almost reached the stars. And then he blinks his eyes shut, and he opens them again, and there is only a case lying on the pavement, and he is only an organization man, and there are facts to be dug for and information to be had, before this one can be filed away with all the rest.

The ballistics report informed Carella that the bullet dug from the wooden runner of the doors behind Forrest and the discharged shell found on the rooftop of the building across the way were separate parts of a .308-caliber Remington cartridge. The report also stated that the .308 had a full metal case, with a copper-jacketed bullet that had six lands and grooves, a soft point, a right twist, and weighed 191.6 grains. It was suggested that Forrest’s murderer must have used a telescopic sight, the distance from the roof to the sidewalk where Forrest was standing being something over 150 yards.

Carella studied the report, and then behaved like a man who had not been in this business for a long, long time. He ignored the nagging premonition that had begun the moment he looked down at the dead man, in the hope that if he ignored it, it would go away, thereby making the case easier to cope with. He had caught the squeal, and so the case was officially his. The men of the 87th rarely worked with a fixed partner, rather sharing the caseload in a haphazard but effective manner, delegating duty to whoever had time or energy to spare. It was only April, but Meyer Meyer was just returning from his vacation to replace Bert Kling, who was leaving on his. The early vacations were the lieutenant’s idea; gang violence and crime in general seemed to enjoy an upswing during the summer months, and he wanted his full squad on duty during July and August. Cotton Hawes and Hal Willis were desperately trying to crack a series of warehouse robberies, Andy Parker was working on a jewelry holdup, and Arthur Brown was working with the Narcotics Squad in an attempt to flush out a known pusher hiding in the precinct. There were sixteen detectives on the squad, and Carella had worked with them all at one time or another, but he enjoyed working with Meyer Meyer and was happy when the lieutenant assigned him to the case.

Meyer, oddly, fell immediately into the pattern Carella had set. He, too, blatantly ignored something that was staring them both in the face. He seemed inordinately glad to discover that they knew who the victim was, where his family lived, and what kind of bullet had killed him. They had often begun cases without the faintest idea of the victim’s name or address, without a single clue to his family or friends.