Текст книги "Ghosts"

Автор книги: Ed McBain

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 12 страниц)

“Honey, what is it?” he said.

You kissed another woman, she said.

“No, she kissed me.”

That’s the same thing.

“And besides, it wasn’t a kiss. It was…I don’t know what the hell it was.”

It was a kiss, that’s what the hell it was, Teddy said.

“Honey,” he said, “believe me, I…”

She shook her head.

“Honey, I love you. I wouldn’t kiss Jane Fonda if I found her wrapped under the Christmas tree tomorrow morning.” He smiled and then said, “And you know how I feel about Jane Fonda.”

Oh? Teddy said. And how do you feel about Jane Fonda?

“I think she’s…well, she’s a very attractive woman,” Carella said, and had the feeling he was plowing himself deeper than any of the snowdrifts outside. “The point I’m trying to make—”

I once dreamed Robert Redford was making love to me, Teddy said.

“How was it?” Carella asked.

Pretty good, as a matter of fact.

“Honey?” he said.

She watched his lips.

“I love you to death,” he said.

Then no more kisses, she said, and nodded. Or I’ll break your goddamn head.

6

The Mayor, when asked by reporters how he planned to get the streets clear before the heavy holiday traffic began, said with customary wit and style, “Boys, this is nothing but a simple snow job.” The members of the press did not find his remark amusing. Neither did the cops of the 87th.

Those who were unlucky enough to have caught the midnight to 8:00 A.M. shift on Christmas Day worked clear through to 10:00 in the morning, by which time the relieving detectives began arriving at the squadroom in dribs and drabs. There were eighteen detectives attached to the 87th Squad, and they divided among them the three shifts that constituted their working day, six men to each shift. The 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. shift (or—as it turned out—the 10:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.) was shared by Meyer Meyer, Hal Willis, Bob O’Brien, Lou Moscowitz, Artie Brown, and a transfer from the Two-One named Pee Wee Wizonski. Wizonski was six feet four inches tall, weighed 208 pounds in his underwear and socks, and suffered a great many slings and arrows about being Polish. There was not a day that went by without someone in the squadroom telling another Polish joke. On Christmas Day (which was Wizonski’s holiday), Lou Moscowitz (who was celebrating Hanukkah) told about Pope John Paul II’s first miracle: He changed wine into water. Wizonski did not think the joke was funny. Nobody, including the Mayor, was having much luck with his jokes today.

The fireworks started at about 10:30.

They started with a so-called “family dispute” on Mason and Sixth. Not too many years ago Mason Avenue had been known far and wide as la Vía de Putas—Whore Street. The hookers along that seedy stretch of Puerto Rican turf had since left it for greener pastures downtown, where they could turn a trick in a massage parlor for a quick forty to eighty dollars, depending on the services rendered. La Vía de Putas was now simply la Vía—the Street—a combination of pool parlors, porno bookshops, porn-flick theaters, greasy spoons, mom-and-pop grocery stores, a dozen or more bars, and a storefront church dedicated to saving the souls of those who frequented the area. Except for the church—which squatted in one-story religious hopefulness between the grimy buildings sandwiching it—the classy emporiums lining the Street were on the ground floors of tenements that housed people who were willing to settle for grubby surroundings in return for some of the cheapest rents to be found anywhere in the city. It was in one of these apartments that the family dispute took place.

The two patrolmen responding to the call were confronted with a distinctly unholidaylike scene. There were a pair of bodies in the living room, both of them wearing nightgowns, both of them the victims of a shooting. One of them, a woman, was sitting dead in a chair near the telephone, the receiver still clutched in her bloody hand. It was she, they later learned, who had placed the call to Emergency 911. The second victim was a sixteen-year-old girl, sprawled face downward on the patched linoleum, similarly dead. The woman who’d placed the call to 911 had said only, “Send the police, my husband is going crazy.” The patrolmen had expected a family dispute, but not one of such proportions. They had knocked on the apartment door, received no answer, tried the knob, and then entered somewhat casually—this was Christmas Day, this was Hanukkah. Now they both drew their pistols and fanned out into the room. A closed door was at one end of it. The first patrolman—a black cop named Jake Parsons—knocked on the door and was greeted with an immediate fusillade of shots that ripped huge chunks out of the wood paneling and would have done the same to his head if he hadn’t thrown himself flat to the floor in instant reflex. Both cops backed out of the apartment.

On the radio in the car downstairs, they reported to Desk Sergeant Murchison that it looked like they had a double homicide here, not to mention somebody with a gun behind a locked door. Murchison called upstairs to the squadroom. Pee Wee Wizonski, who was catching, took his holster and pistol from the drawer of his desk, motioned to Hal Willis across the room, and was out through the gate in the railing even before Willis put on his coat. Murchison downstairs put a call through to Homicide and also to the Emergency Squad covering this section of the city. If there was a guy with a gun behind a locked door, this was a job for the volunteer Emergency cops, and not mere mortals. The Emergency cops were already there when Wizonski and Willis made the scene. Together the detectives from the Eight-Seven looked a lot like Mutt and Jeff or Laurel and Hardy. Wizonski was the biggest detective on the squad; Willis was the smallest, having just barely passed the Police Department’s five-foot-eight height requirement. The RMP patrolmen filled them in on what had happened upstairs, and they all went up to the fourth floor again. The Emergency cops, wearing bulletproof vests, went in first. Whoever was behind the locked door fired the moment he heard sounds in the apartment, so they abandoned all notions of kicking in the door. In the corridor outside, the assembled cops held a high-level conference.

The two Homicide men assigned to the case were named Phelps and Forbes. They looked a lot like Monoghan and Monroe, who were home just then, opening Christmas gifts. (The men of the Eight-Seven would later learn that Monoghan’s wife had presented him with a gold-plated revolver; Monroe’s wife had given him a video cassette home recorder upon which he could secretly play the porn tapes he picked up hither and yon in the city.) Phelps and Forbes were disgruntled about having to work on Christmas Day. Phelps was particularly annoyed because he hated Puerto Ricans, and was fond of repeating that if they’d all go back to that goddamn shitty island they’d come from, there’d be no more crime in this city. So here was a Puerto Rican family causing trouble on Christmas Day—assuming the bedbug behind the locked door was indeed Hispanic. “Hispanic” was the word the cops in this city used for anyone of even mildly Spanish descent, except for Phelps and many cops like him who still called them “spics.” Even the deputy mayor, who’d been born in Mayagüez, was a spic to Phelps.

“We go near that door,” Phelps said, “that spic in there’ll blow our fuckin’ heads off.”

“Think we can hit the window?” one of the Emergency cops asked.

“What floor is this?” the other one said.

“The fourth.”

“How many in the building?”

“Five.”

“Worth trying a rope from the roof, don’t you think?”

“You guys keep him busy outside the door,” the first Emergency cop said. “One of us’ll come in the window behind him.”

“When you hear us yell,” the second Emergency cop said, “kick in the door. We’ll get him both ways.”

The patrolmen who were first at the scene had meanwhile talked to a lady in an apartment down the hall who told them there were two daughters in the family—the sixteen-year-old they’d found dead on the floor and a ten-year-old named Consuela. They reported this to the cops working out their strategy in the hallway, and all of them agreed they had what was known as a “hostage situation” here, which made it a bit risky to come flying in the window like Batman. The two Emergency cops were in favor of trying it, anyway, without asking for help from the Hostage Unit. But Phelps and Forbes vetoed them and asked one of the patrolmen to go downstairs and call in for a hostage team. Nobody yet knew whether ten-year-old Consuela was indeed behind that locked door with whoever was shooting the gun or out taking a stroll in the snow instead.

A genuine hostage situation normally brought a lot of muck-a-mucks to the scene, even if the scene happened to be in a Puerto Rican section of town. By 11:00 that morning, when the two Hostage Unit cops arrived, there were four sergeants, a lieutenant, and a captain standing in the crowded hallway with all the others. The captain was in charge of the operation now, and he laid his plans like someone about to storm the Kremlin, telling the Emergency cops he did indeed want a man on a rope from the roof coming down to the window while the Hostage cops talked to the guy through the door. He wanted bulletproof vests on everybody, including the man coming down on the rope. He wanted Wizonski and Willis in vests as backups behind the Hostage cops at the door. The Emergency cop who planned to make the descent from the roof told him the vest weighed a ton and a half, and he’d have trouble enough on the rope with this wind, never mind wearing a vest that might send him plummeting to the street four stories below. The captain insisted on the vest. They all were ready to take up their positions when the door opened and a thin guy wearing only undershorts threw an empty Colt .45 automatic out into the living room and came out with his hands up over his head. He was weeping. His ten-year-old daughter, Consuela, was on the bed behind him. He had smothered her with a pillow. The captain seemed disappointed that he would not now have the opportunity to put his brilliant plan into action.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Meyer Meyer and Bob O’Brien caught a somewhat more elevated squeal. Ordinarily Meyer did not enjoy working with O’Brien. This had nothing to do with O’Brien’s personality, skill, or courage. It had to do only with O’Brien’s peculiar penchant for getting into situations where it became necessary for him to shoot somebody. O’Brien did not enjoy shooting people. In fact, he went to enormous lengths to avoid having to draw his pistol. But people eager to get shot seemed naturally to gravitate toward him. As a result, because cops don’t like to get shot any more than civilians do, and because working with O’Brien increased the possibility that there would be an exchange of unwanted gunfire, most of the cops on the 87th tried to arrange it so that they were not too often partnered with him. O’Brien, perhaps wrongly, had been dubbed a hard-luck cop. He himself believed that if anywhere in this city there was a man or a woman with a weapon, that weapon would somehow be used against him, and he would have to defend himself. He once told this to the girl he was engaged to marry; she broke the engagement the following week, small wonder.

Today, though—being Christmas and Hanukkah both—Meyer felt the possibilities for violence in the company of O’Brien were perhaps tilted eighty-twenty in their favor. The odds soared to ninety-ten when they caught the Smoke Rise squeal. Smoke Rise was the most elegant community within the boundaries of the Eight-Seven, almost a township unto itself, with houses ranging in the $200,000 to $300,000 class, most of them commanding splendid views of the River Harb. Moreover, the squeal was a 10-21—a “Burglary Past”—which meant the thief had done his song and dance and then got off the stage to a less than tumultuous applause. There was no danger of anyone shooting at O’Brien—or of O’Brien shooting back—because the man was nowhere on the premises when they arrived.

Many of the streets in Smoke Rise were named regally—Victoria Circle, Elizabeth Lane, Albert Way, Henry Drive—giving the community a royal tone it neither needed nor desired. The builder, however, taking no chances that his area might be confused with some of the seedier sections on this side of town, had named the streets himself when subdividing the tract. When he ran out of Normandys, Plantaganets, Lancasters, Yorks, Tudors, Oranges, and Hanovers, he switched over to Windsors. And when he ran out of royalty, he hit upon names like Westminster and Salisbury and Winchester (which he abandoned because it sounded too much like a rifle) and Stonehenge. The entire place had an absolutely British tone to it. Many of the houses even looked as if they’d have been right at home on some moor in Cornwall.

The burglary had taken place on Coronation Drive, just around the corner from Buckingham Way. The house was a multigabled, multiturreted stone and leaded-glass wonder that rose on the bank of the river like the queen’s summer palace. The man who lived inside the house had earned his fortune as a junk dealer when it was still possible to amass great deals of cash without having to give 70 percent of it to Uncle. He still spoke with a distinct Calm’s Point accent, his “deses” and “doses” falling like blasphemies in the vaulted living room with its cathedral ceiling. His family—a wife and two sons—were dressed in their holiday finery. They had left the house at a quarter to 11:00, to deliver some Christmas gifts up the street, and had arrived home at 12:30 to find the place ransacked. They had called the police at once.

“What’d he take, Mr. Feinberg?” Meyer asked.

“Everything,” Feinberg said. “He musta backed a truck in the driveway. The stereo’s gone, and the TV, and my wife’s furs and jewelry, and all my cameras from the upstairs closet. Not to mention all the presents that were under the tree. Son of a bitch took everything.”

In one corner of the living room was a mammoth Christmas tree that must have taken a crew of four to erect and decorate. Meyer did not find the tree strange in a Jewish home. He had struggled with the concept of celebrating Christmas together with the Gentiles ever since his own children were born and had finally succumbed when they were respectively nine, eight, and six. His first compromise had been a wooden orange crate decorated with crepe paper to resemble a chimney. From there he had progressed to a small live spruce complete with a burlapped ball of earth, which he told the children was a Hanukkah bush. He had strained his back planting the damn tree in the backyard after Christmas and the very next year had bought a chopped-down pine from the charitable organization selling them in the empty lot on the corner. He did not feel any less Jewish for having a decorated Christmas tree in his home. As with many Gentiles, the holiday for him was one of spirit rather than religion. If anything on earth could bring people together for the briefest tick of time, Meyer was all for it.

Some of his Jewish friends told him he was a closet goy. He told them he was also a closet Jew. It was Meyer’s belief that Israel was not the homeland, but a foreign country. He was dedicated to the concept that Israel must survive and, in fact, endure—but there was never any question in his mind that he was first an American, next a Jew, and never an Israeli. He knew that Israel had accepted within its besieged boundaries homeless Jews from all over the world—but he never forgot that America was accepting homeless Jews long before Israel was even a dream. So yes, he had given money to plant trees in Israel. And yes, he hated with all the passion in his soul the acts of terrorism against that tiny nation. And yes, he longed to see those biblical places he knew of only from the days of his youth, when he was going to heder six days a week and was, in fact, the most brilliant Hebrew student in the class. He was pleased that Christmas and Hanukkah fell on the same day this year. He suspected in his heart of hearts, anyway, that all religious holidays had been agrarian holidays centuries ago; it was no accident that Easter and Passover came so close together each year and sometimes—as with this celebration—fell on exactly the same day. Lou Moscowitz, who was a detective/2nd on the squad, told Meyer he was no longer a real Jew. Meyer Meyer was a real Jew with every fiber of his being. He was just his own kind of real Jew.

The burglar had indeed done a lovely number in the Feinberg house. As the detectives went through it, itemizing the stolen goods, they discovered that many more items had been taken than Feinberg had originally surmised. The premise that the burglar had backed a truck into the driveway now seemed entirely plausible. He had even stolen the boys’ bicycles from the garage and had taken the younger boy’s prize collection of Queen albums. The loss of the albums seemed to distress the kid more than the loss of his new movie camera, a Christmas gift he had left under the tree after opening it. The family’s original outrage at the theft was giving way to a numbed sense of loss that had nothing whatever to do with the value of the goods. Someone had been inside this house. An unwelcome intruder had entered and pillaged, and the most valuable thing he’d stolen was the family’s sense of inviolate privacy. Since the detectives lacked any real knowledge of whether the burglar had been armed with either explosives or a deadly weapon, the crime seemed to be third-degree burglary: “Knowingly entering or remaining unlawfully in a building with intent to commit a crime therein.” But the criminal law language was hardly adequate to define the crime that had been committed against the Feinbergs. They would none of them forget this day as long as they lived. For years to come they would tell about the man who had come into their house on Christmas Day, the same day as Hanukkah that year—and of what had happened to the two detectives ten minutes after they left the scene of the crime.

Meyer and O’Brien’s attention might not have been captured by the moving van had this not been Christmas Day. The van was parked on a side street some fifteen blocks from the Feinberg house and indeed well outside the stone walls that circumscribed the Smoke Rise development. The left rear tire of the van, the one away from the snowbanked curb, was flat. A man wearing a brown leather jacket and a blue woolen watch cap was changing the tire. A tire iron and a lug wrench were on the partially scraped pavement beside him. When they saw the van, neither Meyer nor O’Brien said a word to each other about a moving company working on Christmas Day. They had no need to. Meyer, who was driving, pulled the unmarked sedan into the curb behind the van. Both men got out of the car, one from each side of it. The pavement was still slippery with patches of hardened snow the plows had missed. Their breaths feathered from their mouths as they approached the man lifting the spare tire into place.

“Need any help?” Meyer asked.

“No, I’m fine,” the man said. He was in his late twenties, Meyer guessed, a white man with a rather pale complexion that seemed almost chalky against the darkness of his eyes and the black mustache under his nose. The lettering on the side of the truck read CULBERTSON MOVING AND TRUCKING COMPANY. The license plate was a commercial plate from the next state.

“Got you working on Christmas Day, huh?” O’Brien said casually.

“Yeah, you know how it is,” the man said.

“Must be an important load,” Meyer said. “Sent you to pick it up on Christmas.”

“Listen, what’s it to you?” the man said. “I got a flat here, I’m trying to change it, why don’t you just fuck off, huh?”

“Police officers,” O’Brien said, and was reaching into his pocket for his shield when the pistol appeared in the man’s hand. The move took them both by surprise. Not many crib burglars—as house and apartment burglars were called—carried weapons. The man committing a burglary at night, especially in a residence where there was a human being at the time, ran the risk of the heaviest burglary rap and might well be armed, even if the gun charge would lengthen his stay in prison. If they’d expected any show of violence—and they truly hadn’t—it might have come by way of a sudden grab for the tire iron on the pavement. But the man reached under his jacket, instead, and the gun appeared in his hand, a .38-caliber pistol pulled from the waistband of his trousers and aimed directly at Meyer now.

The gun went off before Meyer could react and draw his own pistol. The man fired twice, both shots taking Meyer in the leg and knocking him to the pavement. O’Brien’s gun was in his hand at once. He had no time to think that it was happening to him again. He thought only, My partner is down, and then he saw the man turning the gun toward him, and he fired instantly, catching him in the shoulder, and then fired again as the man toppled over, the second bullet taking him in the chest. The gun still in his right hand, O’Brien knelt over the wounded man, grabbed for the handcuffs at his belt in a clumsy left-handed pull, and then rolled him over with no concern for the wounds pouring blood and cuffed his hands behind his back. Out of breath, he turned to Meyer, who lay on the street with one leg buckled under him.

“How you doing?” he asked.

“Hurts,” Meyer said.

O’Brien went into the car and pulled the radio mike from the dashboard. “This is Eight-Seven-Four,” he said, “on Holmsby and North. Police officer down. I need an ambulance.”

“Who’s this?” the dispatcher said.

“Detective O’Brien.”

As if the dispatcher hadn’t already guessed.

The nearest hospital to Smoke Rise was Mercy General on North and Platte. There, as a holy crucifix of nuns fluttered about him in the emergency room, an intern slit Meyer’s left trouser leg on both sides, looked at the two holes in his leg—one in the thigh, the other just below the kneecap—and phoned upstairs for immediate use of an operating room. The burglar who’d shot Meyer was afforded the same meticulous care—all God’s creatures, large and small. By 1:00 that Christmas afternoon, both were doing fine in separate rooms on the sixth floor. A patrolman was posted outside the burglar’s room, but that was the only difference.

The burglar’s name was Michael Addison. In the van he’d stolen from the Culbertson parking lot in the next state, the police found not only the loot from the Feinberg job but also the flotsam and jetsam of several other burglaries he’d committed that day. Addison refused to admit anything. He said he was a sick man, and he wanted a lawyer. He said he was going to sue O’Brien personally and the city corporately for having shot an innocent person trying to change a tire. O’Brien, leaning over his bed, whispered to him that if his partner came out of this a cripple, Addison had better move to China.

Back at the squadroom, Arthur Brown—who was an English literature freak—mentioned to Miscolo in the Clerical Office that the guy had been named absolutely perfectly for a burglar.

“What do you mean?” Miscolo said.

“Addison and Steal,” Brown said, and grinned.

“I don’t get it,” Miscolo said.

“Steal,” Brown said. “S-T-E-A-L.”

“I still don’t get it,” Miscolo said. “You want some coffee?”

This was before a team of six men stole an entire city street.

The call came in at ten minutes to 5:00. By then there had been the expected number of actual suicides or suicide attempts—in fact, a bit more than anyone could remember for previous Christmases. By then Lieutenant Byrnes had personally driven out to Meyer’s house to break the news to Sarah. Sarah was relieved to learn her husband had only been shot in the leg; the moment she saw Byrnes on her doorstep she’d assumed the worst of her fears had been realized. Byrnes drove her to the hospital after his brief visit, and she spent the rest of the afternoon with Meyer, who complained that when a man got shot, his wife should bring him a nize bowl tschicken soup. Along about then, as she was holding Meyer’s hand between both her own and telling him how glad she was that he was still alive, a truck pulled into Gedney Avenue, and six men got out of it to begin tearing up the cobblestone street.

Gedney was one of the few areas in the city that still boasted cobblestone streets—or at least until that Christmas Day it did. The cobblestones, some said, went back to when the Dutch still governed the city. Others maintained that the Dutch wouldn’t have known a cobblestone from a tulip, and it was the British who’d first paved Gedney. The name of the avenue was British, wasn’t it? So it had to be the British. Whoever had paved it, the six men who jumped out of the truck were now unpaving it. The plows had been through Gedney twice already, and the street was relatively clear of snow. The men set to work with great vigor—odd for civil service employees at any time, but especially peculiar on Christmas Day—using picks and crowbars, prying loose the precious cobblestones, lifting them into the truck, stacking them row on row there, working with the precision of a demolition squad. All up and down the street, people peered from their windows, watching the men at work, marveling at their dedicated industry. It took the men two hours to unpave the entire block from corner to corner. At the end of that time they piled back into the truck and drove off. No one noticed the license plate of the truck.

But one man was somewhat impressed by the fact that the Department of Public Works—for such it had seemed—was out there doing its bit for this much-maligned city even on Christmas Day. He called the mayor’s office to congratulate whoever was manning the phones and got through to someone on the mayor’s newly installed Citizens’ Hotline, to whom he poured out his effusive praise. The lady who’d answered the phone suspiciously called the Department of Public Works immediately afterward, got no answer there, and called the superintendent of the department at home. The superintendent told her there had been no work orders issued to tear up the cobblestones on Gedney Avenue. He suggested that she call the police.

So at 5:00 that evening, as the streetlamps came on and the shadows lengthened, Detectives Arthur Brown and Lou Moscowitz stood at one end of the block and looked at the same soil Indians must have trod in their moccasins centuries ago, when Columbus came to this hemisphere to start the whole she-bang. Shorn of its cobblestones from end to end, Gedney looked virginal and rustic. Brown and Moscowitz were grinning from ear to ear; even cops appreciated a daring rip-off every now and then.

Carella, at home, felt guilty as hell. Not because someone had carted off a block of cobblestones but because Meyer had been shot twice in the leg. Had Carella switched holidays with him, then maybe Meyer wouldn’t have got shot. Maybe Carella would have got shot instead. Thinking about this, he felt a little less guilty. He’d been shot enough times, thanks—once just a few days before Christmas, in fact. But Carella was of Italian descent, and the Italians and Jews in this city shared guilt the way they shared matriarchal families. Carella had a cousin who, if he accidentally drove through a red traffic light, would stop in atonement at the green light on the next corner.

So on Christmas night, at 8:00, Carella arrived at Mercy Hospital to tell Meyer how guilty he was feeling about not having got shot in Meyer’s place. Meyer was feeling guilty himself. It was Meyer’s contention that if he hadn’t been stupid enough to have got himself shot, then Bob O’Brien wouldn’t have been forced into the position of once again having to draw his gun and fire it. Meyer was worried about what this might do to O’Brien’s own feelings of guilt, even though O’Brien was Irish and consequently less prone.

Carella had brought a pint of whiskey with him. He took it out of his coat pocket, poured a pair of generous shots into two sterile hospital glasses, and together the men drank to the undeniable fact that Meyer was still alive albeit a bit punctured. Carella poured a second pair of drinks, and the men drank to another day dawning tomorrow.