Ed McBain_87th Precinct 48

by Nocturne

  “Mr. Himmel?”

  “Yes?”

  “Police,” Carella said. “Could you come to the door, please?”

  Still standing to the side of it. Hawes on the other side of the jamb, facing him. Cold in the hallway here. Not a sound from inside the apartment. Not a sound anywhere in the building. They waited.

  “Mr. Himmel?”

  No answer.

  “Mr. Himmel? Please come to the door, sir.” They waited. “Or we’ll have to go downtown for a warrant.” Still no answer. “Mr. Himmel?”

  They heard footsteps approaching the door.

  They braced themselves.

  Lock clicking open.

  The door opened a crack. A night chain stopped it. The same voice said, “Yes?”

  “Mr. Himmel?”

  “Yes?”

  “May we come in, sir?”

  “Why?”

  “We’d like to ask you some questions, sir.”

  “What about?”

  “Well, if you’d let us in, sir …”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Himmel said, and slammed the door in their faces. The lock snapped shut. They waited. In a moment, they heard the unmistakable sound of a window going up.

  Carella took a calculated risk.

  He kicked in the door.

  He would worry later about convincing a judge that a reliable witness had seen a paroled gambling offender accepting money from a suspected murderer in an underground club that served booze illegally after hours. He would worry later about convincing a judge that slamming a door shut on two police officers merely here to ask questions, and then locking that door, and then opening a window were acts that constituted flight, than which there was no better index of guilt, tell that to O.J.

  Meanwhile, the wood splintered, and the lock sprang, and the chain snapped, and they were inside a studio apartment, looking at a wide-eyed girl in bed clutching a blanket to her, the window open on the wall beyond, the curtains billowing on a harsh cold wind. They rushed across the room. Carella poked his head into the night.

  “Stop! Police!” he yelled down the fire escape.

  Nobody was stopping.

  He could hear footfalls clanging on the iron rungs of the ladder below.

  “I didn’t do anything,” the girl said.

  They were already out the door again.

  12

  In the movies, one cop goes out the window and onto the fire escape and comes thundering down the ladders after the fleeing perp, passing windows where ladies in nightgowns are all aghast, while the other cop runs down the steps inside the building, and dashes around into the backyard so they have the perp sandwiched between them, All right, Louie, drop da gat!

  In real life, cops know it’s faster and safer, especially if the perp is armed, to come down the inside steps while he’s outside descending to street level on narrow, often slippery metal ladders, especially when the temperature outside is three above zero. Carella and Hawes were a beat behind Bernie the Banker Himmel. They rounded the rear corner of the building just as he was climbing a snowcapped wooden fence separating the backyards.

  This was a beautiful night for a little jog through the city. The clouds had passed, the sky above was a black canopy studded with stars and hung with an almost full moon that washed the terrain with an eerie glow. All was silent except for the sound of their footsteps crunching on crusted snow, their labored breaths puffing from chapped lips. They followed Himmel over the fence, right hands cold against the walnut stocks of their pistols, left hands gloved, coats flapping loose, mufflers flying behind them as if they were World War I fighter pilots. Himmel was small and Himmel was fast, and both Carella and Hawes were large and out of shape, and they were having a tough time keeping up with him.

  In the movies, detectives are always lifting weights down at the old headquarters gym, or shooting at targets on the old firing range. In real life, detectives aren’t often in on the big action scenes. They hardly ever chase thieves. They rarely, if ever, fire weapons at fleeing suspects. In real life, detectives usually come in after the fact. The burglary, the armed robbery, the arson, the murder has already been committed. It is their job to piece together past events and apprehend the person or persons who committed a crime or crimes. Sometimes, yes, a suspect will attempt flight, but even then there are strict guidelines limiting the use of force, deadly or otherwise. The LAPD has these guidelines, too; tell it to Rodney King.

  Here in this city, tonight or any other night, gunplay was the very last thing Carella or Hawes wanted. The second least desirable thing was brute force. Besides, the way this little chase was developing, Bernie the Banker would be out of gun range at any moment. All three of them had now emerged from the barren backyards onto deserted—well, almost deserted—city streets, Himmel running ahead through narrow paths shoveled on icy sidewalks, banks of snow on either side of him, fast outdistancing Carella and Hawes who followed him and each other through the same narrow sidewalk burrows, knowing for damn sure they were going to lose him.

  And then, three things happened in rapid succession.

  Himmel rounded the corner and disappeared from sight.

  A dog began barking.

  And a snowplow went barreling up the street.

  “This is what I’d like to know,” Priscilla said.

  Georgie yawned.

  Tony yawned, too.

  “If this tall blond guy delivered the key to the locker …”

  “Well, he did,” Georgie said. “We know he did.”

  “Then he had to know my grandmother, right?”

  “Well … sure.”

  “I mean, she had to have given him the envelope with the key in it, am I right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So why are we wasting time looking for this bookie, is what I’d like to know? When all we have to do is go to my grandmother’s building and see if anyone there knows the blond guy.”

  “Good idea,” Georgie said. “Let’s do it in the morning when everybody’s awake.”

  “It is morning,” Priscilla said.

  “Priss, please. We go knocking on doors at this hour …”

  “You’re right,” she said.

  Which astonished him.

  Bernie Himmel was astonished to see a large black dog standing there like some fuckin apparition on the narrow path cleared through the snow. He stopped dead in his tracks. Ahead of him was the animal, snarling and barking and baring his teeth and blocking Himmel’s escape route through the snow. Behind him, somewhere up the street, he could hear the roaring clang of a snowplow rushing through the night. He did what any sensible man would have done in the face of threatening fangs dripping saliva and slime. He leaped over the snowbank on his left, into the street, just as the plow came thundering by.

  Where earlier there had been an evil growling monster guarding the icy gates of hell, now there was an avalanche of snow and ice and salt and sand pouring down onto Himmel’s shoulders and head, knocking him off his feet and throwing him back against old snow already heaped at the curb, virtually burying him. He flailed with his arms, kicked with his legs, came sputtering up out of a filthy gray mountain of shmutz, and found himself blinking up into a pair of revolvers.

  Fuckin Cujo, he thought.

  The questioning took place in the second-floor interrogation room at five-thirty that Monday morning. They explained to Himmel that they weren’t charging him with anything, that in fact they weren’t interested in him at all …

  “Then why am I here?” he asked reasonably.

  He had been this route before, though not in this particular venue, which looked like any other shitty police precinct in this city, or even some he had known in Chicago, Illinois, or Houston, Texas.

  “Just some questions we want to ask you,” Hawes said.

  “Then read me my rights and get me an attorney.”

  “Why?” Carellla asked. “Did you do something?”

  “You had my address, chances
are you already been to the computer. So you know my record. So you want to ask me some questions. So I’ll be back upstate tomorrow morning for breaking parole. I want a lawyer.”

  “This has nothing to do with breaking parole.”

  “Then why are you even mentioning it?”

  “You’re the one who mentioned it.”

  “Cause I’m six steps ahead of you.”

  “This has to do with a person you were talking to in The Juice Bar on Friday night …”

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “… and again on Sunday morning.”

  “I still want a lawyer.”

  “Give us a break here, Bernie.”

  “Why? You gonna give me a break?”

  “We told you. We’re not interested in you.”

  “I’ll say it again. If you’re not interested in me, why am I here?”

  “This tall blond man you were talking to,” Hawes said.

  “What about him? If I was talking to him.”

  Progress, Carella thought.

  “We traced a murder weapon to him,” he said.

  “Oh, I see. Now it’s a murder. You’d better get me a lawyer right this minute.”

  “All we want is his name.”

  “I don’t know his name.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Nothing. We met in a club, exchanged a few words …”

  “Exchanged some cash, too, didn’t you?”

  The room went silent.

  So did Himmel.

  “But we’re willing to forget that,” Carella said.

  “Then whatever I say is hypothetical,” Himmel said.

  “Let’s hear it first.”

  “First let’s understand it’s hypothetical.”

  “Okay, it’s hypothetical,” Carella said.

  “Then let’s say the man is a big gambler. Bets on any event happening.”

  “Like?”

  “Boxing, baseball, football, hockey, basketball, a man for all seasons. My guess is he bets the nags, too, but at one of the off-track parlors.”

  “Okay, he’s a gambler.”

  “No, you weren’t listening. He’s a big gambler. And he’s usually in over his head. Wins occasionally, but most of the time he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Fuckin greaseball can’t tell the difference between baseball and football, how would he know how to bet? I give him the odds, he picks whatever sounds …”

  “What do you mean, greaseball?” Hawes asked.

  “He’s Italian.”

  “From Italy, you mean?” Carella said.

  “Of course from Italy. Where would Italians come from, Russia?”

  “You mean he’s really Italian,” Carella said.

  “Yeah, really really Italian,” Himmel said. “What’s with you?”

  “Never mind.”

  “You’re surprised he’s Italian, is that it? Cause he’s blond?”

  “No, I’m not surprised.”

  “He also has blue eyes, does that surprise you, too?”

  “Nothing ever surprises me,” Carella said wearily.

  “You expect a wop to have black curly hair and brown eyes, you expect him to be a short fat guy. This guy’s six-two, he weighs at least a buck ninety. Handsome as can be. Dumb fuck doesn’t even know what the Super Bowl is, he bets a fortune on Pittsburgh, loses his shirt.”

  “When was this?”

  “Two Sundays ago. Hypothetically.”

  “So, hypothetically, what was he doing in The Juice Bar this past Friday night?”

  “Hypothetically, he was telling his bookie, in broken English, that he didn’t have the twenty large to pay him.”

  “Is that what he bet on the Steelers?”

  “Twenty big ones. Gave him a fourteen-and-a-half-point spread. Cowboys took it by sixteen.”

  “So what happened last Friday night?”

  “The bookie told him to come up with the bread by Sunday morning or he was going to be swimming with the goddamn fishes.”

  “How’d he react to that?”

  “Said he had to make a phone call.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yeah, from the phone right there on the wall.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Around one-fifteen in the morning. A few hours after the cops raided the Alhambra up the street from the club. Where they hold the cockfights.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “One of the owners came in. His bird had just got chewed up, he was practically weeping at the table. He told me he had a gun, he was thinking of shooting himself.”

  “His name wouldn’t be Jose Santiago, would it?”

  This city was full of mind readers.

  “Yeah,” Himmel said. “How’d you know that?”

  “Lucky guess,” Hawes said. “What time did he come in?”

  “Santiago? Eleven-thirty, twelve o’clock. Right after the bust went down. I was sitting there waiting for Larry.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The guy owed the twenty.”

  “I thought you didn’t know his name.”

  “That was before everything got hypothetical.”

  “Larry what?”

  “It’s Lorenzo, but everybody calls him Larry.”

  “Lorenzo what?”

  “I can’t even pronounce it.”

  “Try.”

  “I’m telling you I can’t. I wrote it down first time he placed a bet, it’s one of those fuckin wop tongue twisters.”

  Carella sighed.

  “Where’d you write it down?”

  “On the slip.”

  “The betting slip?”

  “No, a lady’s pink slip, lace-trimmed.”

  The detectives looked at him. He knew he was being a smart-ass. He grinned. Nobody grinned back. He shrugged.

  “Yes, the betting slip,” he said. “Long since gone.”

  “Never wrote the name down again?”

  “Never. Couldn’t have if I wanted to. It was a mile long. Besides, I had his phone number. A man don’t pay his marker, I give him a call, I say, Joey, you owe me a little something, am I right? It usually scares them.”

  “Did it scare Lorenzo?”

  “He came up here to see me one o’clock in the morning, didn’t he?”

  “And made his phone call fifteen minutes later, is that right?”

  “Yeah. We didn’t have much to talk about after I mentioned him swimming with his little fishies.”

  “You didn’t happen to overhear his end of the phone conversation, did you?”

  “Yeah, but it was all in Italian.”

  “You think he called an Italian-speaking person, is that it?”

  “I don’t know who he called. I know he was talking Italian.”

  “What happened next?”

  “He came back to the table, said he’d have the money by Sunday. Then he asked did I perhaps know where he could buy a gun.”

  “So you recommended Santiago,” Carella said.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Himmel said, looking surprised.

  “You didn’t witness the gun changing hands, did you?” Hawes asked.

  “No. But hypothetically, Larry bought it.”

  “What time did he leave here?”

  “One-thirty or so.”

  “One more thing,” Carella said.

  “His phone number, right?” Himmel said.

  Still six steps ahead of them.

  At six-oh-four that Monday morning, the desk sergeant at the Eight-Eight called Ollie Weeks at home to tell him something had come up that might relate to the triple homicide he was investigating. He didn’t know whether he should be waking Ollie up or not …

  “Yeah, well you did,” Ollie said.

  … but some guy named Curly Joe Simms had called to say he was having a cup of coffee in the Silver Chief Diner on Ainsley, and a waitress named Sally told him a detective named Oliver Weeks was in there asking about three kids pissing in the gutter, and C
urly Joe had seen these three kids with a person named Richie Cooper, who was a good friend now deceased. So if this detective wanted to talk to him …

  “What’s his number?” Ollie asked.

  The phone company told Hawes that the call from the wall phone of The Juice Bar at 1:17 a.m. on January nineteenth had been made to a telephone listed to a subscriber named Svetlana Helder at 1217 Lincoln Street in Isola.

  This was puzzling.

  Why had Larry Whoever called a woman who was murdered the very next night with a gun he’d purchased not five minutes after he’d got off the phone with her?

  Meanwhile, Carella was dialing the number Bernie the Banker had given them. This was now a quarter past six in the morning. A woman’s sleepy voice said, “Pronto.”

  “Signora?” he said.

  “Sì?”

  “Voglio parlare con Lorenzo, per piacere.”

  “Non c’è.”

  In the next five minutes, in tattered Italian and shattered English, the woman—whose name was Carmela Buongiorno and who said she was the landlady of a rooming house on Trent Street, not five blocks from where Svetlana had been shot—told Carella that Lorenzo Schiavinato had been living there since October the twenty-fourth, but had moved out this past Sunday. She did not know where he was now. He seemed to be a nice man, was something the matter?

  “Che succese?” she asked.

  What happened?

  “Niente, signora, niente,” Carella said.

  Nothing, signora, nothing.

  But something had indeed happened.

  Murder had happened.

  And Lorenzo Schiavinato had purchased the murder weapon the night before someone used it on Svetlana Dyalovich.

  They now had his full name.

  They ran it through the computer.

  There was niente, signora.

  Niente.

  Ollie figured Curly Joe Simms would turn out to be a bald guy and he wasn’t disappointed. He made a note to mention to Meyer Meyer, up at the Eight-Seven, that he would start calling himself Curly Meyer. Curly Joe was wearing yellow earmuffs and a brown woolen coat buttoned over a green muffler. His eyes kept watering and he kept blowing his nose as he explained to Ollie that he was a night person, which meant that he only slept during the daytime. He was beginning to get a little drowsy right now, in fact, but he felt it was important to do his civic duty, wasn’t it? Ollie was a little drowsy, too, but only because he’d just got up half an hour ago. At six forty-two in the morning, there weren’t too many places open near the 88th Precinct station house. They met in the coffee shop of the Harley Hotel on Ninety-second and Jackson. The Harley was a hotbed dive catering to hookers and their clientele. A steady stream of girls walked in and out of the coffee shop while Ollie and Curly Joe talked.