The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories

by Otto Penzler

  “So I’m typing these reports—only uniform in a room full of bulls, only spic in a room full of harps—when they bring in the drunk.”

  Frank paused to order another shot, and Marty brought one for me too. I was hungry and really needed to step outside for some air, but I wanted to hear Frank’s story. I did want to know how he thought we were similar, and I hoped he would talk about the photo. He turned his face to the ceiling and opened his mouth like a child catching rain, and he poured the booze smoothly down his throat.

  “You gotta remember,” he continued, “Crown Heights was still mostly white back then, white civilians, white skells. The drunk is just another mick with a skinful. But what an obnoxious cocksucker. And loud.

  “Man who brought him in is another uniform, almost new as me. He throws him in the cage and takes the desk next to mine to type his report. Only this guy can’t type, you can see he’s gonna be there all day. Takes him ten minutes to get the paper straight in the damn machine. And all this time the goddamn drunk is yelling at the top of his lungs down the length of the squad room. You can see the bulls are gettin’ annoyed. Everybody tells him to shut up, but he keeps on, mostly just abusing the poor fuck that brought him in, who’s still struggling with the report, his fingers all smudged with ink from the ribbons.

  “On and on he goes: ‘Your mother blows sailors . . . Your wife fucks dogs . . . You’re all queers, every one of you.’ Like that. But I mean, really, it don’t end, it’s like he never gets tired.

  “So the guy who locked him up gets him outa the cage and walks him across the room. Over in the corner they got one of these steam pipes, just a vertical pipe, no radiator or nothing. Hot as a motherfucker. So he cuffs the drunk’s hands around the pipe, so now the drunk’s gotta stand like this”—Frank formed a huge circle with his arms, as if he were hugging an invisible fat woman—“or else he gets burned. And just bein’ that close to the heat, I mean, it’s fuckin’ awful. So the uniform walks away, figuring that’ll shut the scumbag up, but it gets worse.

  “Now, the bulls are all pissed at the uniform for not beatin’ the drunk senseless before he brought him in, like any guy with a year on the street would know to do. The poor fuck is still typing the paperwork at about a word an hour, and the asshole is still at it, ‘Your daughter fucks niggers. When I get out I’ll look your wife up—again.’ Then he looks straight at the uniform, and the uniform looks up. Their eyes lock for a minute. And the drunk says this: ‘What’s it feel like to know that every man in this room thinks you’re an asshole?’ Then the drunk is quiet and he smiles.”

  Marty returned then, and though I felt I was barely hanging on, I didn’t dare speak to refuse the drink. Frank sat silently while Marty poured, and when he was done Frank stared at him until he walked away.

  “After that,” he continued in a low voice, “it was like slow motion. Like everything was happening underwater. The uniform stands up, takes his gun out, and points it at the drunk. The drunk never stops smiling. And then the uniform pulls the trigger, shoots him right in the face. The drunk’s head like explodes, and he spins around the steam pipe—all the way—once, before he drops.

  “For a second everything stops. It’s just the echo and the smoke and blood on the wall and back window. Then, time speeds up again. The sergeant of detectives, a little leprechaun from the other side—must’ve bribed his way past the height requirement—jumps over his desk and grabs up a billy club. He lands next to the uniform, who’s still holding the gun straight out, and he clubs him five or six times on the forearm, hard and fast, whap-whap-whap. The gun drops with the first hit but the leprechaun don’t stop till the bone breaks. We all hear it snap.

  “The uniform pulls his arm in and howls, and the sergeant throws the billy club down and screams at him: ‘The next time . . . the next time, it’ll be your head that he breaks before you were able to shoot him. Now get him off the pipe before there’s burns on his body.’ And he storms out of the room.”

  Frank drank the shot in front of him and finished his beer. I didn’t move. He looked at me and smiled. “The whole squad room,” he said, “jumped into action. Some guys uncuffed the drunk; I helped the uniform out. Got him to a hospital. Coupla guys got rags and a pail and started cleaning up.

  “Now, think about that,” Frank said, leaning in toward me and lowering his voice yet again. “I’m the only spic there. The only other uniform. There had to be ten bulls. But the sergeant, he didn’t have to tell anybody what the plan was, or to keep their mouth shut, or any fucking thing. And there was no moment where anybody worried about me seeing it, being a spic. We all knew that coulda been any one of us. That’s the most on-the-inside I ever felt. Department now, it’s a fucking joke. Affirmative action, cultural-diversity training. And what’ve you got? Nobody trusts anybody. Guys afraid to trust their own partners.” He was whispering, and starting to slur his words.

  I began to feel nauseated. It’s a joke, I thought. A cop’s made-up war story. “Frank, did the guy die?”

  “Who?”

  “The drunk. The man that got shot.”

  Frank looked confused, and a bit annoyed. “Of course he died.”

  “Did he die right away?”

  “How the fuck should I know? They dragged him outa the room in like a minute.”

  “To a hospital?”

  “Was a better world’s all I’m saying. A better world. And you always gotta stay on the inside, don’t drift, Danny. If you drift, nobody’ll stick up for you.”

  Jesus, did he have a brogue? He certainly had picked up that lilt to his voice that my father’s generation possessed. That half-accent that the children of immigrants acquire in a ghetto. I had to get out of there. A few more minutes and I feared I’d start sounding like one of these tura-lura-lura motherfuckers myself.

  I stood, probably too quickly, and took hold of the bar to steady myself. “What about the picture, Frank?”

  He handed it to me. “Martin is right,” he said slowly, “let it lie. Why do you care who she was?”

  “Who she was? I asked who she is. Is she dead, Frank? Is that what Marty meant by letting the dead rest?”

  “Martin . . . Marty meant . . .”

  “I’m right here, Francis,” Marty said, “and I can speak for myself.” He turned to me. “Francis has overindulged in a few jars,” he said. “He’ll nap in the back booth for a while and be right as rain for the ride home.”

  “Is that the way it happened, Frank? Exactly that way?”

  Frank was smiling at his drink, looking dreamily at his better world. “Who owns memory?” he said.

  “Goodnight, Daniel,” Marty said. “It was good of you to stop in.”

  I didn’t respond, just turned and slowly walked out. One or two guys gestured at me as I left, the rest seemed not to notice or care.

  I removed the picture from my pocket again when I was outside, an action that had taken on a ritualistic feel, like making the sign of the cross. I did not look at it this time, but began tearing it in strips, lengthwise. Then I walked, and bent down at street comers, depositing each strip in a separate sewer along Fourth Avenue.

  He’d told me that he’d broken his arm in a car accident, pursuing two black kids who had robbed a jewelry store.

  As I released the strips of paper through the sewer gratings, I thought of the hand in the subway tunnel, and my father’s assertion that there were many body parts undoubtedly littering the less frequently traveled parts of the city. Arms, legs, heads, torsos; and perhaps all these bits of photo would find their way into disembodied hands. A dozen or more hands, each gripping a strip of photograph down in the wet slime under the street. Regaining a history, a past, that they lost when they were dismembered, making a connection that I never would.

  LOU MANFREDO

  Case Closed

  FROM Brooklyn Noir

  The fear enveloped her, and yet despite it, or perhaps because of it, she found herself oddly detached, being from body, as she ran
frantically from the stifling grip of the subway station out into the rainy, darkened street.

  Her physiology now took full control, independent of her conscious thought, and her pupils dilated and gathered in the dim light to scan the streets, the storefronts, the randomly parked automobiles. Like a laser, her vision locked onto him, indiscernible in the distance. Her brain computed: one hundred yards away. Her legs received the computation and turned her body toward him, propelling her faster. How odd, she thought through the terror, as she watched herself from above. It was almost the flight of an inanimate object. So unlike that of a terrified young woman.

  When her scream came at last, it struck her deeply and primordially, and she ran even faster with the sound of it. A microsecond later the scream reached his ears and she saw his head snap around toward her. The silver object at the crest of his hat glistened in the misty streetlight, and she felt her heart leap wildly in her chest.

  Oh my God, she thought, a police officer. Thank you, dear God, a police officer!

  As he stepped from the curb and started toward her, she swooned, and her being suddenly came slamming back into her body from above. Her knees weakened and she faltered, stumbled, and as consciousness left her, she fell heavily down and slid into the grit and slime of the wet, cracked asphalt.

  Mike McQueen sat behind the wheel of the dark gray Chevrolet Impala and listened to the hum of the motor idling. The intermittent slap-slap of the wipers and the soft sound of the rain falling on the sheet-metal body were the only other sounds. The Motorola two-way on the seat beside him was silent. The smell of stale cigarettes permeated the car’s interior. It was a slow September night, and he shivered against the dampness.

  The green digital on the dash told him it was almost 1:00 AM. He glanced across the seat and through the passenger window. He saw his partner, Joe Rizzo, pocketing his change and about to leave the all-night grocer. He held a brown bag in his left hand. McQueen was a six-year veteran of the New York City Police Department, but on this night he felt like a first-day rookie. Six years as a uniformed officer first assigned to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, then, most recently, its Upper East Side. Sitting in the car, in the heart of the Italian-American ghetto that was Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood, he felt like an out-of-towner in a very alien environment.

  He had been a detective, third grade, for all of three days, and this night was to be his first field exposure, a midnight-to-eight tour with a fourteen-year detective first grade, the coffee-buying Rizzo.

  Six long years of a fine, solid career, active in felony arrests, not even one civilian complaint, medals, commendations, and a file full of glowing letters from grateful citizens, and it had gotten for him only a choice assignment to the East Side Precinct. And then one night, he swings his radio car to the curb to pee in an all-night diner, hears a commotion, takes a look down an alleyway, and just like that, third grade detective, the gold shield handed to him personally by the mayor himself just three weeks later.

  If you’ve got to fall ass-backwards into an arrest, fall into the one where the lovely young college roommate of the lovely young daughter of the mayor of New York City is about to get raped by a nocturnal predator. Careerwise, it doesn’t get any better than that.

  McQueen was smiling at the memory when Rizzo dropped heavily into the passenger seat and slammed the door.

  “Damn it,” Rizzo said, shifting his large body in the seat. “Can they put some fucking springs in these seats, already?”

  He fished a container of coffee from the bag and passed it to McQueen. They sat in silence as the B train roared by on the overhead elevated tracks running above this length of Eighty-sixth Street. McQueen watched the sparks fly from the third rail contacts and then sparkle and twirl in the rainy night air before flickering and dying away. Through the parallel slots of the overhead tracks, he watched the twin red taillights of the last car vanish into the distance. The noise of the steel-on-steel wheels and a thousand rattling steel parts and I-beams reverberated in the train’s wake. It made the deserted, rain-washed streets seem even more dismal. McQueen found himself missing Manhattan.

  The grocery had been the scene of a robbery the week before, and Rizzo wanted to ask the night man a few questions. McQueen wasn’t quite sure if it was the coffee or the questions that had come as an afterthought. Although he had only known Rizzo for two days, he suspected the older man to be a somewhat less than enthusiastic investigator.

  “Let’s head on back to the house,” Rizzo said, referring to the 62nd Precinct station house, as he sipped his coffee and fished in his outer coat pocket for the Chesterfields he seemed to live on. “I’ll write up this here interview I just did and show you where to file it.”

  McQueen eased the car out from the curb. Rizzo had insisted he drive, to get the lay of the neighborhood, and McQueen knew it made sense. But he felt disoriented and foolish: He wasn’t even sure which way the precinct was.

  Rizzo seemed to sense McQueen’s discomfort. “Make a U-turn,” he said, lighting the Chesterfield. “Head back up Eighty-sixth and make a left on Seventeenth Avenue.” He drew on the cigarette and looked sideways at McQueen. He smiled before he spoke again. “What’s the matter, kid? Missing the bright lights across the river already?”

  McQueen shrugged. “I guess. I just need time, that’s all.”

  He drove slowly through the light rain. Once off Eighty-sixth Street’s commercial strip, they entered a residential area comprised of detached and semidetached older, brick homes. Mostly two stories, the occasional three-story. Some had small, neat gardens or lawns in front. Many had ornate, well-kept statues, some illuminated by flood lamps, of the Virgin Mary or Saint Anthony or Joseph. McQueen scanned the home fronts as he drove. The occasional window shone dimly with night lights glowing from within. They looked peaceful and warm, and he imagined the families inside, tucked into their beds, alarm clocks set and ready for the coming workday. Everyone safe, everything secure, everyone happy and well.

  And that’s how it always seemed. But six years had taught him what was more likely going on in some of those houses. The drunken husbands coming home and beating their wives; the junkie sons and daughters, the sickly, lonely old, the forsaken parent found dead in an apartment after the stench of decomposition had reached a neighbor and someone had dialed 911.

  The memories of an ex-patrol officer. As the radio crackled to life on the seat beside him and he listened with half an ear, he wondered what the memories of an ex-detective would someday be.

  He heard Rizzo sigh. “All right, Mike. That call is ours. Straight up this way, turn left on Bay Eighth Street. Straight down to the Belt Parkway. Take the parkway east a few exits and get off at Ocean Parkway. Coney Island Hospital is a block up from the Belt. Looks like it might be a long night.”

  When they entered the hospital, it took them some minutes to sort through the half-dozen patrol officers milling around the emergency room. McQueen found the right cop, a tall, skinny kid of about twenty-three. He glanced down at the man’s nametag. “How you doing, Marino? I’m McQueen, Mike McQueen. Me and Rizzo are catching tonight. What d’ya got?”

  The man pulled a thick leather note binder from his rear pocket. He flipped through it and found his entry, turned it to face McQueen, and held out a Bic pen.

  “Can you scratch it for me, detective? No sergeant here yet.”

  McQueen took the book and pen and scribbled the date, time, and CIHOSP E/R across the bottom of the page, then put his initials and shield number. He handed the book back to Marino.

  “What d’ya got?” he asked again.

  Marino cleared his throat. “I’m not the guy from the scene. That was Willis. He was off at midnight, so he turned it to us and went home. I just got some notes here. Female Caucasian, Amy Taylor, twenty-six, single, lives at 1860 Sixty-first Street. Coming off the subway at Sixty-second Street about eleven o’clock, twenty-three hundred, the station’s got no clerk on duty after nine. She goes into one of them
—what d’ya call it?—one-way exit-door turnstile things, the ones that’ll only let you out, not in. Some guy jumps out of nowhere and grabs her.”

  At that point, Rizzo walked up. “Hey, Mike, you OK with this for a while? My niece is a nurse here, I’m gonna go say hello, OK?”

  Mike glanced at his partner. “Yeah, sure, OK, Joe, go ahead.”

  McQueen turned back to Marino. “Go on.”

  Marino dropped his eyes back to his notes, “So this guy pins her in the revolving door and shoves a knife in her face. Tells her he’s gonna cut her bad if she don’t help him.”

  “Help him with what?”

  Marino shrugged, “Who the fuck knows? Guy’s got the knife in one hand and his johnson in the other. He’s trying to whack off on her. Never says another word to her, just presses the knife against her throat. Anyway, somehow he drops the weapon and she gets loose, starts to run away. The guy goes after her. She comes out of the station screaming, Willis is on a foot post doing a four-to-midnight, sees her running and screaming, and goes over her way. She takes a fall, faints or something, bangs up her head and swells up her knee and breaks two fingers. They got her upstairs in a room, for observation on account of the head wound.”

  McQueen thought for a moment. “Did Willis see the guy?”

  “No, never saw him.”

  “Any description from the girl?”

  “I don’t know, I never even seen her. When I got here she was upstairs.”

  “OK, stick around till your sergeant shows up and cuts you loose.”

  “Can’t you, Detective?”

  “Can’t I what?”

  “Cut me loose?”

  McQueen frowned and pushed a hand through his hair. “I don’t know. I think I can. Do me a favor, though, wait for the sarge, OK?”