Ice

by Ed McBain

  Well, there it is, Carella thought. Same old precinct. Hasn’t changed a bit since I first started working here, probably won’t change even after I’m dead and gone. Same rotten precinct.

  He was walking uptown from the subway kiosk on Grover Avenue, approaching the station house from the west. He normally drove to work, but the streets in Riverhead hadn’t yet been plowed when he’d awakened this morning, and he figured the subway would be faster. As it was, a switch had frozen shut somewhere on the track just before the train plunged underground at Lindblad Avenue, and he’d had to wait with another hundred shivering passengers until the trouble on the line was cleared. It was now almost 9:00 A.M. Carella was an hour and fifteen minutes late.

  It was bitterly cold. He could understand how a switch could freeze in this weather; his own switch felt shrunken and limp in his trousers, even though he was wearing long woolen underwear. Just before Christmas, his wife had suggested that what he needed was a willy-warmer. He had never heard it called a willy before. He asked her where she’d picked up the expression. She said her uncle had always called her cousin’s wee apparatus a willy. That figured. She had been Theodora Franklin before he’d married her, four-fifths Irish with (as she was fond of saying) a fifth of Scotch thrown in. So naturally her cousin owned a “wee apparatus” and naturally her uncle called it a “willy” and naturally she’d suggested just before Christmas that what a nice Italian boy like Carella could use in his stocking on Christmas morning was a nice mink willy-warmer. Carella told her he already had a willy-warmer, and it was better than mink. Teddy blushed.

  He climbed the steps leading to the front door of the station house. A pair of green globes flanked the wooden entrance doors, the numerals 87 painted on each in white. The doorknob on the one operable door was the original brass one that had been installed when the building was new, sometime shortly after the turn of the century. It was polished bright by constant hand-rubbings, like the toes of a bronze saint in St. Peter’s Cathedral. Carella grasped the knob, and twisted it, and opened the door, and stepped into the huge ground-floor muster room that was always colder than anyplace else in the building. This morning, compared with the glacier outside, it felt almost cozy.

  The high muster desk was on the right side of the cavernous room, looking almost like a judge’s altar of justice except for the waist-high brass railing before it and Sergeant Dave Murchison behind it, framed on one side by a sign that requested all visitors to stop and state their business, and on the other by an open ledger that held the records—in the process known as “booking”—of the various and sundry criminals who passed this way, day and night. Murchison wasn’t booking anyone at the moment. Murchison was drinking a cup of coffee. He held the mug in thick fingers, the steam rising in a cloud around his jowly face. Murchison was a man in his fifties, somewhat stout, bundled now in a worn blue cardigan sweater that made him look chubbier than he actually was and that, besides, was nonregulation. He looked up as Carella passed the desk.

  “Half a day today?” he asked.

  “Morning, Dave,” Carella said. “How’s it going?”

  “Quiet down here,” Murchison said, “but wait till you get upstairs.”

  “So what else is new?” Carella said, and sighed heavily, and walked for perhaps the ten-thousandth time past the inconspicuous and dirty white sign nailed to the wall, its black lettering announcing DETECTIVE DIVISION, its pointing, crudely drawn hand signaling any visitors to take the steps up to the second floor. The stairs leading up were metal, and narrow, and scrupulously clean. They went up for a total of sixteen risers, then turned back on themselves and continued on up for another sixteen risers, and there he was, automatically turning to the right in the dimly lighted corridor. He opened the first of the doors labeled with a LOCKERS sign, went directly to his own locker in the row second closest to the door, twisted the dial on the combination lock, opened the locker door, and hung up his coat and his muffler. He debated taking off the long johns. No, on a day like today, the squadroom would be cold.

  He went out of the locker room and started down the corridor, passing a wooden bench on his left and wondering for the thousandth time who had carved the initials C. J. in a heart on one arm of the bench, passing a backless bench on the right and set into a narrow alcove before the sealed doors of what had once been an elevator shaft, passing a door also on the right and marked MEN’S LAVATORY, and a door on his left over which a small sign read CLERICAL. The detective squadroom was at the end of the corridor.

  He saw first the familiar slatted wooden rail divider. Beyond that, he saw desks and telephones, and a bulletin board with various photographs and notices on it, and a hanging light globe, and beyond that more desks and the grilled windows that opened on the front of the building. He couldn’t see very much that went on beyond the railing on his right because two huge metal filing cabinets blocked the desks on that side of the room. But the sounds coming from beyond the cabinets told him the place was a zoo this morning.

  Detective Richard Genero’s portable radio, sitting on the corner of his desk in miniaturized Japanese splendor, blasted a rock tune into the already dissonant din. Genero’s little symphony meant that the lieutenant wasn’t in yet. Without a by-your-leave, Carella went directly to Genero’s desk, and turned off the radio. It helped, but not much. The sounds in this squadroom were as much a part of his working day as were the look and the feel of it. He sometimes felt he was more at home in this scarred and flaking, resonating apple green room than he was in his own living room.

  Everyone on the squad thought Carella looked short when he wore a turtleneck. He was not short. He was close to six feet tall, with the wide shoulders, narrow hips, and sinewy movements of a natural athlete—which he was not. His eyes, brown and slanted slightly downward, gave his face a somewhat Oriental look that prompted the squadroom wags to claim he was distantly related to Takashi Fujiwara, the only Japanese-American detective on the squad. Tack told them it was true; he and Carella were, in fact, cousins—a blatant lie. But Tack was very young, and he admired Carella a great deal, and was really fonder of him than he was of his no-good real cousins. Carella knew how to say “Good morning” in Japanese. Whenever Tack came into the squadroom—morning, noon, or night—Carella said, “Oh-hi-oh.” Tack answered, “Hello, cousin.”

  Carella was wearing a turtleneck shirt under his sports jacket that Saturday morning. The first thing Meyer Meyer said to him was, “Those things make you look short.”

  “They keep me warm,” Carella said.

  “Is it better to be warm or tall?” Meyer asked philosophically, and went back to his typing.

  He did not, even under normal circumstances, enjoy typing. Today, because of the very pregnant lady across the room who was shouting Spanish obscenities at the world in general and at Detective Cotton Hawes and an appreciative chorus of early-morning drunks in particular, Meyer found it even more difficult to concentrate on the keyboard in front of him. Patiently, doggedly, he kept typing, while across the room the pregnant lady was loudly questioning Cotton Hawes’s legitimacy.

  Meyer’s patience was an acquired skill, nurtured over the years until it had reached a finely honed edge of perfection. He had certainly not been born patient. He had, however, been born with all the attributes that would later make a life of patience an absolute necessity if he were to survive. Meyer’s father had been a very comical man. At the bris, the classic circumcision ceremony, Meyer’s father made his announcement. The announcement concerned the name of his new offspring. The boy was to be called Meyer Meyer. The old man thought this was exceedingly humorous. The moile didn’t think it was so humorous. When he heard the announcement, his hand almost slipped. In that moment, he almost deprived Meyer of something more than a normal name. Fortunately, Meyer Meyer emerged unscathed.

  But being an Orthodox Jew in a predominantly gentile neighborhood can be trying even if your name isn’t Meyer Meyer. As with all things, something had to give. Meyer Meyer had
begun losing his hair when he was still rather young. He was now completely bald, a burly man with china blue eyes, slightly taller than Carella—even when Carella wasn’t wearing a turtleneck. He was smoking a cigar as he typed, and wishing he could have a cigarette. He had begun smoking cigars on Father’s Day last year when his daughter presented him with an expensive box in an attempt to break his cigarette habit. He still sneaked a cigarette every now and then, but he was determined to quit entirely and irrevocably. On a day like today, with the squadroom erupting so early in the morning, he found his patience a bit strained, his determination somewhat undermined.

  Across the room, the pregnant lady—in a mixture of streetwise English and hooker’s Spanish—yelled, “So how comes, pendego, you kippin me here when I couldn’t make even a blind man happy in my condition?”

  Her condition was imminent. Perhaps that was why the four drunks in the detention cage in the corner of the room found her so comical. Or perhaps it was because she was wearing nothing but a half-slip under her black cloth coat. The coat was unbuttoned, and the pregnant lady’s belly ballooned over the elastic waistband of the peach-colored slip. Above that, her naked breasts, swollen with the threat of parturition, bobbed indignantly and rather perkily in time to her words, which the drunks found hilarious.

  “Tell me, hijo de la gran puta,” she said grandly to Hawes, grinning at the detention cage, pleased with her receptive audience and playing to the house, “would you pay for somebody looks like me?” and here she grabbed both frisky breasts and squeezed them in her hands, the nipples popping between her index and middle fingers. “Would you? Hah?”

  “Yes!” one of the drunks in the cage shouted.

  “The arresting officer says you propositioned him,” Hawes said wearily.

  “So where is this arresting officer, hah?” the woman asked.

  “Yeah, where is he?” one of the drunks in the cage shouted.

  “Down the hall,” Hawes said.

  The arresting officer was Genero. Genero was a horse’s ass. Nobody in his right mind would have arrested a pregnant hooker. Nobody in his right mind would have filled the detention cage with drunks at 9:00 on a Saturday morning. There would be stale vomit in the cage tonight, when the citizenry began howling and the cage was really needed. Genero had first brought in the drunks, one at a time, and then he had brought in the pregnant hooker. Genero was on a crusade. Genero was a one-man Moral Majority. Which, perhaps, the real Moral Majority was as well.

  “Sit down and shut up,” Hawes said to the hooker.

  “No, keep standin’,” one of the drunks in the cage yelled.

  “Turn this way, honey!” another one yelled. “Let’s see ‘em one more time!”

  “Muy linda, verdad?” the hooker said, and showed her breasts to the drunks again.

  Hawes shook his head. In a squadroom where fairness was an unspoken credo, it rankled that Genero had dragged in a pregnant hooker. He could be forgiven the cageful of drunks—maybe—but a pregnant hooker? Even Hawes’s father would have looked the other way, and Jeremiah Hawes had been an extremely religious person, a man who’d felt that Cotton Mather was the greatest of the Puritan priests, a man who’d named his own son in honor of the colonial God-seeker who’d hunted witches with the worst of them. Hawes’s father had chalked off the Salem witch trials as the personal petty revenges of a town feeding on its own ingrown fears, thereby exonerating Cotton Mather and the role the priest had played in bringing the delusion to its fever pitch. Would his father, if he were still alive, have similarly excused Genero for his zeal? Hawes doubted it.

  The woman came back to his desk.

  “So what you say?” she said.

  “About what?”

  “You let me walk, okay?”

  “I can’t,” Hawes said.

  “I got somethin’ in the oven juss now,” the woman said, and spread her hands wide on her belly. “But I pay you back later, okay? When this is all finish, okay?” She winked at him. “Come on, let me walk,” she said. “You very cute, you know? We have a nice time together later, okay?”

  “Cute?” one of the drunks in the cage yelled, insulted. “Jesus, lady!”

  “He’s very cute, this little muchacho,” the woman said, and chucked Hawes under the chin as though he were a cuddly little ten-year-old dumpling. He was, in fact, six feet two inches tall, and he weighed an even 200 pounds now that he wasn’t watching his diet too closely, and he had somewhat unnervingly clear blue eyes and flaming red hair with a white streak over the left temple—the result of a peculiar accident while he was still working as a detective/3rd out of the 30th Precinct downtown. He had responded to a 1021, a Burglary Past, and the victim had been a hysterical woman who came screaming out of her apartment to greet him, and the super of the building had come running up with a knife when he spotted Hawes, mistaking Hawes for the burglar, who was already eighteen blocks away, and lunging at him with the knife and putting a big gash on his head. The doctors shaved the hair to get at the cut, and when it grew back, it grew in white—which had been the exact color of Hawes’s terror.

  The streak in his hair had accounted for a great many different reactions from a great many different women—but none of them had ever thought he was “cute.” Looking at the pregnant hooker’s naked breasts and appraising eyes, he began to think that maybe he was cute, after all. He also began to think that it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to let her walk and to take her up later on her fine proposition. She was a good-looking woman in her mid-thirties, he guessed, who carried her coming infant like a barrage balloon, but who had a good slender body otherwise, with long strong legs and very nice breasts indeed, swollen to bursting now and being flaunted with deliberate coercive intent as she sashayed past Hawes’s desk, back and forth, back and forth, black coat open, belly and breasts billowing like the mainsail and jibsail of an oceangoing schooner. The drunks began to applaud.

  If he did let her walk, of course, Genero would bring departmental charges or do something else stupid. Hawes was pondering the inequity of having to work with someone like Genero when Hal Willis pushed through the slatted rail divider, dragging behind him two people handcuffed to each other. Hawes couldn’t tell whether the people were boys or girls because they were both wearing designer jeans and woolen ski masks. The drunks in the cage cheered again, this time in greeting to the masked couple. Willis took a bow, spotted the pregnant hooker with the open coat, said, “Close your coat, lady, you’ll freeze those sweet little darlings to death,” and then said, “Come in, gentlemen,” to the two people in the designer jeans and the ski masks. “Hello, Steve,” he said to Carella, “it’s starting early today, isn’t it? Who’s that in the cage? The Mormon Tabernacle Choir?”

  The drunks found this almost as amusing as they found the pregnant hooker. The drunks were having the time of their lives. First a topless floor show, and now a stand-up comic with two guys in funny costumes. The drunks never wanted to leave this place.

  “What’ve you got?” Carella asked.

  “Two masked bandits,” Willis said, and turned to them. “Sit down, boys,” he said. “You won’t believe this,” he said to Carella, and then he turned to where Meyer was typing, and said, “You won’t believe this, Meyer.”

  “What won’t I believe?” Meyer asked, and his words seemed to command the immediate respect of everyone in the squadroom, as though—like a superb ringmaster—he had cracked a whip to call attention to the morning’s star performers, diminutive Hal Willis and the two masked men. The pregnant hooker turned to look at them, and even closed her coat so that her own star performers would not detract from the action in the main ring. The drunks put their faces close to the meshed steel of the detention cage as if they were Death Row inmates in a B-movie, watching a fellow prisoner walk that Long Last Mile. Hawes looked, Carella looked, Meyer looked, everybody looked.

  Willis, never one to shun the limelight, upstaged the two masked and manacled bandits, and said, “I was heading in to
work, you know? Snow tires in the trunk ‘cause I planned to have them put on at the garage on Ainsley and Third, okay? So I stop there, and I tell the mechanic to put on the tires for me—don’t ask why I waited till February, okay? The Farmer’s Almanac said it was gonna be a harsh winter. So he starts jackin’ up the car, and I take the key to the men’s room, and I go out to take a leak—excuse me, lady.”

  “De nada,” the pregnant hooker said.

  “And when I come back, these two guys are standin’ there with cannons in their hands and yelling at the mechanic, who already crapped his pants, to open the safe. The mechanic is babbling he hasn’t got the combination, and these two heroes here are yelling that he’d better find the combination fast or they’ll blow his goddamn brains out, excuse me, lady. That’s when I come out of the can zipping up my fly.”

  “What happened?” one of the drunks asked breathlessly and with sincere interest. This was really turning into a marvelous morning! First the topless dancer, then the stand-up comic, who was now becoming a very fine dramatic actor with a good sense of timing and a wonderful supporting cast of actors in masks as in the Japanese traditional No theater.

  “Do I need an attempted armed robbery at nine in the morning?” Willis asked the cageful of drunks. “Do I need an armed robbery at any time of day?” he asked the pregnant hooker. “I stop in a garage to get my tires changed and to take a leak, and I run into these two punks.”

  “So what’d you do?” the drunk insisted. The suspense was unbearable, and all this talk about taking a leak was making him want to pee, too.

  “I almost ran out of there,” Willis said. “What would you have done?” he asked Hawes. “You’re zipping up your fly and suddenly there are two punks with .45s in their hands?”

  “I’d have run,” Hawes said, and nodded solemnly.

  “Of course,” Willis said. “Any cop in his right mind would’ve run.”