Ed McBain_87th Precinct 48

by Nocturne

  “You ever notice that most of the cases we work together, it’s wintertime?” Danny asked.

  “Seems that way.”

  “I wonder why,” Danny said. “Maybe it’s cause I hate winter. Don’t you hate winter?”

  “It’s not my favorite season,” Carella said.

  He was behind the wheel of the police sedan, driving Danny and Hawes to an all-night deli on the Stem. The snow had stopped and they were in a hurry to get going on this damn thing, but Danny was something of a prima donna who didn’t like to be treated like some cheap snitch who transferred information in back alleys or police cars. Hawes was sitting in back. Danny didn’t ask Hawes what his favorite season was because he didn’t particularly like the man. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was the white streak in his hair. Made him look like the fuckin bride of Frankenstein. Or maybe it was the faint trace of Boston dialect that made him sound like one of the fuckin Kennedys. Whatever, he directed most of his conversation to Carella.

  There were maybe three, four other people in the diner when they walked in, but Danny looked the place over like a spy about to trade atomic secrets. Satisfied he would not be seen talking to cops, he chose a booth at the back, and sat facing the door. Gray and grizzled, and looking stouter than he actually was because of the layers of clothing he was wearing, Danny picked up his coffee cup in both hands and sipped at it as if a Saint Bernard had carried it through a blizzard. His leg hurt. He told Carella it hurt whenever it snowed. Or rained. Or even when the sun was shining, for that matter. Fuckin leg hurt all the time.

  Carella told him what they were looking for.

  “Well, there ain’t no cockfights on Sunday nights,” Danny said.

  He hadn’t been to bed yet, either; to him, it was still Sunday night.

  “You get them on Saturday nights, different parts of the city,” he said, “mostly your Spanish neighborhoods, but you don’t get them on Sunday nights.”

  “How about Friday nights?”

  “Sometimes, when there’s heat on, you know, they change the night and the location. But usually, it’s Saturday night.”

  “We’re looking at Friday.”

  “This past Friday?”

  “Yes.”

  “There might’ve been one, I’ll have to make some calls.”

  “Good, make them.”

  “You mean now? It’s two in the morning!”

  “We’re working a homicide,” Carella said.

  “What are those, the magic words?” Danny said. “Let me finish my coffee. I hate to wake people up, the middle of the night.”

  Carella shrugged as if to say you want to do business or you want to lead a life of indulgence and indolence?

  Danny took his time finishing the coffee. Then he slid out of the booth and limped over to the pay phone on the wall near the men’s room. They watched him as he dialed.

  “He doesn’t like me,” Hawes said.

  “Naw, he likes you,” Carella said.

  “I’m telling you he doesn’t.”

  “He came to the hospital when I got shot,” Carella said.

  “Maybe I ought to get shot, huh?”

  “Bite your tongue.”

  They sipped at their coffees. Two Sanitation Department men came in and took stools at the bar. Outside the deli, their orange snowplows sat at the curb. The night was starless. Everything was black outside, except for the orange plows. Danny had reached his party. He was leaning in close to the mouthpiece, talking, nodding, even gesticulating. He limped back to the table some five minutes later.

  “It’ll cost you,” he said.

  “How much?” Hawes asked.

  “Two bills for me, three for the guy you’ll be talking to.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Guy who had a bird fighting in Riverhead on Friday night. There was also supposed to be a fight in Bethtown, but it got canceled. Big Asian community there, this ain’t only a Spanish thing, you know.”

  “Where in Riverhead?” Hawes asked.

  “The bread, please,” Danny said, and rolled his thumb against his forefinger.

  Hawes looked at Carella. Carella nodded. Hawes took out his wallet and pulled two hundred-dollar bills from it. Danny accepted the money.

  “Gracias,” he said. “I’ll take you up there, introduce you to Luis. Actually, I’m surprised you don’t know about this already.”

  “How come?” Carella asked.

  “The place got busted Friday night. That’s the only reason he’s willing to talk to you.”

  Ramon Moreno was the doorman who’d been on duty outside the hotel on Sunday morning, when the tall blond man delivered the envelope. They had telephoned him at the Club Durango, down in the Quarter, and he was just packing up to go home when they got there at a quarter past two. Ramon was a musician. He worked days at the hotel to pay the bills, but his love was the B-flat tenor saxophone, and he played whatever gig came his way whenever. He told Priscilla—who he knew was a fellow musician—that he’d played the Durango three nights running so far, and he was hoping it would turn into a steady gig. The club was Mexican, and they played all the old standby stuff like “El Jarabe de la Botella” and “La Chachalaca” and the ever-popular and corny “Cielito Lindo,” but occasionally they got a hip crowd in and could cut loose on some real jazz with a Hispanic tint. When he wasn’t playing the Durango, he did weddings and anniversary parties and birthday parties …

  “A girl’s fifteenth birthday is a big thing in the Spanish culture …”

  … and whatever else might come along. He even played a bar mitzvah a couple of weeks ago.

  All of which is very fucking interesting, Georgie thought.

  The way he got to be a tenor player was very strange, Ramon said. He used to play the alto, an instrument better suited to his size in that he was only five feet six inches tall. At the time, he was playing in a band with a four-piece sax section, and one of the guys playing tenor was this big tall guy, six-three, six-four, which was appropriate because the tenor is a fairly large instrument, not as big as your baritone sax, but a good-sized horn, you understand? Then one day, during rehearsal, they switched instruments just for fun, and discovered they were better suited to the horns they’d borrowed, the short guy, Ramon himself, blowing this tenor sax almost bigger than he is, and the tall guy, Julius, playing the smaller alto, which looked almost like a toy saxophone in his hands.

  All of which is even more interesting, Georgie thought.

  “About yesterday morning,” Priscilla said, cutting to the chase.

  “Yeah,” Ramon said, sounding a bit offended. “What did you want to know?”

  “Tall blond man wearing a dark blue coat and a red scarf. Walked in around eleven, walked out a few minutes later. Did you see him?”

  “Not when he walked in,” Ramon said.

  He still sounded miffed, Georgie thought. Probably wondering why his dumb story about a tall guy playing a small sax and a short guy playing a big sax wasn’t quite wowing the crowds here in the big bad city. Hell with you, Georgie thought. Just don’t tell her anything’ll lead her to the blond guy.

  “But you did see him,” Patricia said.

  “Yeah, when he came out. Cause he asked me to get him a cab.”

  “What’d he sound like?”

  “Sound like?”

  “His accent.”

  “Oh. Yeah. That’s right.”

  “Was it a Spanish accent?”

  “No. Definitely not.”

  “He didn’t speak Spanish to you, did he?”

  “No. It was English. But with an accent. Like you say.”

  “Russian?”

  “Italian, maybe. I’m not sure.”

  “Did you get him a cab?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you know where he was going?”

  “As it happens, yes,” Ramon said.

  They waited breathlessly.

  Master of suspense, Georgie thought.

  “The doormen at th
e Powell are trained to ask our guests their destinations, and to relay this information to the cabdriver,” Ramon said, as if reciting from the hotel’s brochure. “Many of our guests are foreigners,” he said. “They will have an address scribbled on a piece of paper, and will have no idea where that address might be. Japanese people, for example. Arabs. Germans. We try to help them out. As a courtesy,” he said. “These people who can barely speak English.”

  But the blond guy did speak English, Georgie thought.

  “So where was he going?” Priscilla asked impatiently.

  Georgie hoped he wouldn’t remember.

  “I remember because I played there once,” Ramon said.

  “Where?” Priscilla insisted.

  “A place called The Juice Bar,” Ramon said. “It’s an after-hours club on Harris Avenue. In Riverhead. Near the Alhambra Theater.”

  At two-thirty that morning, Luis Villada was waiting outside the Alhambra Theater when Danny Gimp arrived with the two detectives. Danny introduced them all around, told them he was sure they had no further use for his services, hailed a cab and headed downtown without so much as a backward glance. Hawes was ever more certain that the man simply didn’t like him.

  Luis looked the two detectives over.

  He was not afraid of telling them anything they wanted to know about Friday night because every cop in the city already knew what had gone down. Or at least every cop in Emergency Service and every cop in the Four-Eight Precinct and every cop on the Riverhead Task Force, not to mention twenty agents from the ASPCA, which not very many Japanese, German, or Arabian tourists knew stood for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. As if cockfighting was being cruel to animals. Besides, they couldn’t charge him with anything more than they already had. As a spectator, he’d been arrested for one misdemeanor count of cruelty to animals and another misdemeanor count for participating in animal fights.

  “They kept us in the theater overnight,” he said, “writing tickets.”

  Not a trace of an accent. Carella figured him for another third-generation Puerto Rican.

  “They let us go after they gave us dates for court appearances,” he said. “I have to go downtown on February twenty-eighth.”

  He looked the cops dead in the eye.

  “Danny says you have something for me,” he said.

  Hawes handed him an envelope.

  Luis didn’t bother to open it or to count what was inside it. Hey, if you couldn’t trust cops, who could you trust? Ho ho ho. He pocketed the envelope and began walking them down a long dark alley smelling of piss, toward the back wall of the theater, where he said there was a door the police had broken down Friday night and couldn’t padlock afterward. The door was in splinters, small wonder. Nailed to the lintel was a printed crime scene notice, which should have detained anyone from seeking entry, door or no door. But Luis believed that printed notices from the police were to be ignored, and so he stepped over the surviving bottom panel of the door and into a blackness deeper than the one outside. The detectives followed him in. Hawes turned on a penlight.

  “Mejor,” Luis said.

  Hawes flashed the light around.

  They moved deeper into the theater.

  Luis began talking.

  He seemed to think he’d been given a four-million-dollar publishing advance to cover a major sporting event, rather than a mere three hundred bucks for information about whatever he’d seen and heard this past Friday night. Like an eyewitness about to describe a major disaster like an earthquake, an avalanche, or a plane crash, he began setting the scene by describing the excitement of the night, the sheer joy of being there on this special occasion. Taking a penlight Carella offered him, he led them through the abandoned movie theater that had served as the arena. Where once there had been upholstered seats, there were now bleachers surrounding a carpeted ring. Dried blood stained the carpet.

  “The walls are on rollers,” Luis explained. “If the police come, the promoters slide them back to make it look like a prizefight is going on. They have two guys in boxing trunks and gloves in the back office. The lookout sounds the alarm, the walls move out, the boxers are in the ring hitting each other, everything’s nice and legal. Cockfighting shouldn’t be against the law, anyway. It’s legal in some states, you know. Louisiana, Oklahoma, I forget the other two. It’s legal in four states altogether. So why should it be against the law here? Farmers in the South get to see cockfights, but here in a sophisticated city like this one, it’s against the law. Shit, man! I go to a cockfight to enjoy myself, and all of a sudden I’m charged with two misdemeanors, I can go to jail for a year on each. What for? What crime did I commit? This was a social gathering here.”

  The social gathering, as he tells it to them, began at nine o’clock on Friday night, when the spectators, some two hundred and fifty of them, began gathering at this theater on Harris Avenue in the Harrisville section of Riverhead, both avenue and neighborhood named for a long-ago councilman named Albert J. Harris. The fight was supposed to take place on Saturday night, at another venue, but someone leaked it to the police and so the date and the place were changed—although, as it turned out, someone leaked this to the police as well.

  This is an important event tonight because it’s the first big fight of the season, which begins in January and runs through July. Roosters don’t molt during these months. When they’re molting, blood flows into their quills, causing them to become vulnerable and incapable of fighting …

  “Did you see that movie The Birds?” Luis asked. “There was a line in it where the girl says that birds get a hangdog expression when they’re molting. That was a very funny line Hitchcock wrote. Because how can birds get hangdog expressions?”

  Carella shook his head in wonder.

  “Anyway, there was only one other event after the holidays, and then came this one on Friday night, which was supposed to be the next night, but the promoters sold a lot of tickets in advance, and it was just a matter of letting people know the date had been changed and instead of the athletic club on Dover Plains, it was now the Alhambra here on Harris. The tickets cost …”

  … twenty dollars each, which is practically giving the seats away. The promoters don’t expect to make a lot of money on the gate. What’s twenty times two-fifty? Five K? So what’s that? Where they make the real money is selling food and alcohol. And, of course, the betting. Thousands of dollars are wagered on each of the fights. During a typical three-hour night, there can be anywhere from twenty to thirty matches, depending on the ferocity and duration of each contest. The average match will run fifteen minutes, but some will end in five and others—the more popular ones with the crowd—can last as long as half an hour or even forty minutes, the birds literally tearing themselves apart in frenzy.

  There is a huge indoor parking garage across the street from the Alhambra, and it is here that the paying customers park their cars, hidden from the eyes of prying police officers—though on this Friday night, informers have already been paid, and a massive raid is in preparation even before the first of the cars arrives. Inside, there is joviality and conviviality, an atmosphere reminiscent of the old days on the island, where cockfighting is still a gentleman’s sport. Luis can remember attending his first fight when he was seven years old. His father was a breeder of fighting birds, and he recalls feeding them special diets of raw meat and eggs supplemented with vitamins to fortify their stamina and strength. Now, here in this city, the owners of fighting birds sometimes pay three, four hundred dollars a month to hide their roosters on clandestine farms in neighboring states. These are expensive birds. Some of them are worth five, ten thousand dollars.

  “It’s a gentleman’s sport,” he says again.

  Drinking rum at the bar, eating cuchifritos, speaking their native tongue, the customers—mostly men, but here and there one will see a pretty, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman dressed elegantly for the occasion—relax in an ambiance of total acceptance and fond recall. Ther
e could easily be tropical breezes blowing through this converted theater, the swish of palm fronds outside, the rush of the sea against a white sand beach. For a moment, there is respite for these transplanted people who more often than not are made to feel foreign in this city.

  The fights are furious and deadly.

  This is a blood sport in every sense.

  The roosters are crossbred with pheasants to fortify their most aggressive traits. Nurtured on steroids that increase muscle tissue, dosed with angel dust to numb pain, they are equipped with fighting spurs and then are moved into the carpeted cockpit to kill or be killed. In India, where the sport enjoys wide popularity, the birds fight “bare-heeled,” using only their own claws to shred and destroy. In Puerto Rico, the trainers attach to the birds’ heels a long plastic apparatus that resembles a darning needle. Here in this city, the chosen device is called a slasher. It is a piece of steel honed to razor-sharp precision. These spurs are fastened to both claws. They are twin weapons of mutilation and destruction.

  Luis himself can’t bear to watch the final moments of a fight, when the roosters, doped up with PCP, rip and tear at each other with their metal talons, blood and feathers flying, the crowd screaming for a kill. More often than not, both birds are killed.

  “It’s a sad thing,” Luis says. “No one likes to see animals hurt. This is a gentleman’s sport.”

  The police who raided the theater at eleven twenty-seven p.m. last Friday apparently disagreed with his premise. Captain Arthur Forsythe, Jr., who led the team of E.S. officers who spearheaded the operation, later told the press that the forced combat of these birds was nothing less than barbaric, a criminal act that had to be abolished if this city were ever to call itself civilized. His men had taken out the two lookouts posted at the entrance, handcuffing them and putting them down on the sidewalk before they could sound an alarm. They then went in wearing bulletproof vests and carrying machine guns, followed by teams from the Four-Eight, the Task Force, and the ASPCA.