by Ed McBain
It was a possibility.
It was more than a remote possibility.
Carella had been a detective/2nd for several years already before he’d met Kling—well, really met him; before that, he’d known him as a patrolman, but only to say hello to. When Kling got promoted into the squadroom (youngest man on the team back then) Carella took an immediate liking to him, and recognized at once that his boyish good looks and quiet manner could be a tremendous asset to anyone partnered with him. Nor was he thinking only of your garden-variety Mutt-and-Jeff situations, where any cop in the world would be happy to play the heavy to Kling’s apple-cheeked softie. It went beyond that. It involved something like a basic decency that civilians could sense, a decency that encouraged them to open up in his presence where they might not have to another cop.
It was easy to allow this precinct to burn you out. When you dealt with it day and night, it could get to you. All the ideals you’d come in with, the lofty notions about maintaining law and order, preserving society, all of it seemed to fade deeper and deeper into an innocent past as you came to grips with what it was really all about, when you realized it was a war you were fighting out there, the good guys versus the bad guys, and in a war you got tired, man, in a war you burned out.
So, yes, the police work had left its mark on Kling, too; only a man like Andy Parker could remain unfazed by police work, and the way he remained unfazed was by abdicating it. Parker was the worst cop in the precinct, perhaps the worst one in the entire city. Parker’s credo was a simple one: you can’t drown if you don’t go in the water. Maybe Parker had once been young and idealistic. If so, Carella hadn’t known him then. All he saw now was a man who never went in the water. The police work had touched Kling the way it had touched them all, but it wasn’t the police work that made Carella worry he would eat his gun one night, it was the women, the way Kling kept having such bad luck with women.
Carella had been with him that first time, in the bookshop on Culver Avenue, when Kling had knelt beside a dead girl wearing what appeared to be a red blouse, and had winced when he’d seen the two enormous bullet holes in the girl’s side, the blood pouring steadily from those wounds, staining her white blouse a bright red. Kling had reached down to lift from the dead girl’s face a book that had fallen from one of the shelves and lay tented over it, her broken string of pearls scattered on the floor like tiny luminescent islands in the sticky coagulation of her blood, his hand reaching out to lift the book, to reveal the girl’s face, and then he’d whispered, “Oh, my Jesus Christ!” and something in his voice caused Carella to run toward the back of the shop at once. And then he heard Kling’s cry, a single sharp anguished cry that pierced the dust-filled, cordite-stinking air of the shop.
“Claire!”
He was holding the dead girl in his arms when Carella reached him. His hands and his face were covered with Claire Townsend’s blood, his fiancee’s blood, and he kissed her lifeless eyes and her nose and her throat, and he kept murmuring over and over again, “Claire, Claire,” and Carella would remember that name and the sound of Kling’s voice as long as he lived.
And he would remember, too, the kind of cop Kling became— or almost became—after her murder. He thought they’d lose him then. He thought Kling would go the way of the Andy Parkers of the world, if indeed he remained a cop at all. Lieutenant Byrnes had wanted to transfer him out of the Eight-Seven. Byrnes was normally a patient and understanding man, who could appreciate the reasons for Kling’s behavior, but this in no way made Kling any nicer to have around the office. The way Byrnes figured it, psychology was certainly an important factor in police work because it helped you to recognize there were no longer any villains in the world, there were only disturbed people. It was a very nice tool to possess, psychology was, until a cheap thief kicked you in the groin one night. It then became somewhat difficult to imagine the thief as a put-upon soul who’d had a shabby childhood. In much the same way, though Byrnes completely understood the trauma that had been responsible for Kling’s behavior (God, how many years ago was this? Carella wondered), he nonetheless was finding it more and more difficult to accept Kling as anything but a cop who was going to hell with himself.
He had not gone to hell with himself.
Not that time nor the time afterward, either, when the girl he’d begun dating and eventually living with decided to dump him once and for all on a Christmas Eve, which was not a particularly good time to finally and irrevocably end a relationship, especially if later that night you were forced to shoot somebody dead, which was just what happened with Kling on that Christmas Eve, the man lunging across the room toward him, Kling squeezing the trigger once, and then again, aiming for the man’s trunk, both slugs catching him in the chest, one of them going directly through his heart and the other piercing his left lung. Kling had lowered the gun. He remained sitting on the floor in the corner of the room, and watched the man’s blood oozing into the sawdust, and wiped the sweat from his lip, and blinked and then began crying.
Long ago, Carella thought. All of it long ago.
Meeting Augusta Blair—or so all the guys in the squadroom had thought at the time—was perhaps the best thing that ever could have happened to Kling. He’d been investigating a burglary—victim came home from a ski trip to find the apartment a shambles—and there she was, auburn-haired and green-eyed, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in his life. Augusta Blair. Whose face and figure only adorned every fashion magazine in America. How could a detective/2nd earning only $24,600 a year even hope to ask a famous fashion model for a date? Nine months later, he told Carella he was thinking of marrying her.
“Yeah?” Carella said, surprised.
“Yeah,” Kling said, and nodded.
They were in an unmarked police car, heading for the next state. It was bitterly cold outside. The windows, except for the windshield, were entirely covered with rime. Carella busied himself with the heater.
“What do you think?” Kling asked.
“Well, I don’t know. Do you think she’ll say yes?”
“Oh, yeah, I think she’ll say yes.”
“Well then, ask her.”
“Well,” Kling said, and fell silent.
They had come through the tollbooth. Behind them, Isola thrust its jagged peaks and minarets into a leaden sky. Ahead, the terrain consisted of rolling, smoke-colored hills through which the road snaked its lazy way. As it turned out, Kling’s doubts had largely to do with whether or not the relationship he then enjoyed with Augusta would somehow change once they were married. He finally got around to asking Carella why he himself had got married. Carella thought it over for a long while. Then he said, “Because I couldn’t bear the thought of any other man ever touching Teddy.”
And in the long run, that was what had ended the marriage between Kling and Augusta, wasn’t it? Another man touching her? Not so long ago, that. No. Only last August. This was now February, and Kling had found his wife in bed with another man only last August, and had almost killed that man, but had hurled his gun away before he’d fired it. The divorce had been simple and clean. Augusta needed no alimony and wanted none from him; she had always earned more than three times what he did, anyway. They had split their possessions equally down the middle. It was Kling who’d moved out of the apartment they’d once shared. It was Kling who’d found a new apartment downtown, almost at the opposite end of the city, almost as though he wanted to put as much geographical distance between them as was humanly possible. It was Kling who’d carted all his possessions downtown with him, his clothes, his share of the records and books—and his guns. He owned two guns. They were both .38 caliber Police Specials. He preferred carrying the one with the burn mark on the walnut stock, and kept the other one only as a spare. It was the guns that bothered Carella.
He had never seen Kling this despondent, not even after the senseless murder of Claire Townsend in that bookshop. He had talked Byrnes into offering Kling two weeks’ vacation immediately af
ter the divorce was final, even though Kling wasn’t up for another vacation till the summertime. Kling had refused the offer. He had invited Kling to several dinner parties at the Riverhead house. Kling had turned down the invitations. He had tried to work out his schedule so that he and Kling were partnered more often than any other two men on the squad, so that he could talk to Kling, help him through this bad time the way he had helped him through all the other bad times. But Kling had learned of the maneuver and had asked that he be put on “floater” status, filling in for whoever was off sick or in court or on vacation or whatever. Carella now believed that Kling was deliberately trying to avoid him, and only because he was a painful reminder of what had happened; he had, after all, been the first person to whom Kling had confided his suspicions.
Tomorrow was Valentine’s Day—well, today, actually; the bedside clock read 1:30 in the morning. Holidays, even minor-league ones, were a bad time for anyone who’d lost a partner through death or divorce. Carella felt there was a fifty-fifty chance the lieutenant would give him the extra man he and Meyer desperately needed. So, all right, if the lieutenant did say okay, then why not zero in on Kling, tell the lieutenant Kling was the only man who could properly help them track down all those 114 names on the company list, and then question a third of those people, and eliminate the ones who couldn’t possibly have killed either Sally Anderson or Paco Lopez—damn it, where was the connection?
He fell asleep thinking that even if the lieutenant did assign Kling as a triple, the job would take them forever. He did not know that at that very moment the case was about to take a turn that would bring Kling into it, anyway, and would furthermore obviate the urgent need for questioning all those 114 people.
The man was wearing under his overcoat a plaid jacket, gray flannel slacks, and a vest. He was also wearing a .32 caliber pistol in a holster on the left-hand side of his body. The overcoat button closest to his waist was unbuttoned so that he could reach in for a clean, right-handed draw if ever the need arose. He had never had to use the pistol since he’d got the carry permit for it, six years ago.
He should not have worked so late tonight.
When he’d closed his shop downtown, and then rolled down the metal grille and fastened the padlock in place, bolting the protective grille to the sidewalk, there had not been another soul anywhere on the street. He had walked quickly and nervously to the all-night garage where he normally parked his car, grateful for the gun at his waist. In the empty hours of the morning, the midtown area of this city turned into something resembling a moonscape. He had driven steadily uptown, stopping at each red light, nervously anticipating a sudden attack from any of the denizens who were abroad. When finally he entered the Grover Park transverse road, he felt a bit more secure; he would only have to stop at two traffic lights inside the park itself (if, in fact, they were red when he approached them) and a possible third one when he came out of the park farther uptown on Grover Avenue. He caught the first of the lights and waited impatiently for it to change. The next one was green. The one at the end of the exit ramp was also green; he made his right turn onto Grover Avenue, drove uptown for several blocks, past the police station with its green globes flanking the front doorstep, the numerals 87 on each globe, and continued driving for another three blocks uptown before he made a left turn and headed north for Silvermine Road. He parked the car in the garage under his building, the way he always did, locking it and then heading for the elevator at the far end of the garage. It occurred to him, each and every time he parked the car under the building, that the security guard at the front door upstairs wasn’t of very much use down here. But the distance from his assigned parking space to the red door of the elevator was perhaps fifty feet, if that, and rarely did he get home later than 7:00 P.M., when there were a great many other tenants coming and going.
There was no one else in the garage at a quarter to 2:00 in the morning.
The pillars supporting the roof stood like bulky sentinels spaced some ten feet apart from each other, four of them marking off the distance between him and the elevator. The garage was brightly lighted. His heels clicked on the cement floor as he moved toward the elevator. His footfalls echoed. He was passing the third pillar when a man with a gun in his hand stepped out from behind it, directly into his path.
He reached immediately into his coat for his own gun.
His hand closed on the stock.
He was starting to pull the gun free of its holster when the man standing in his path fired. The man fired directly into his face. He felt only the fierce sharp pain of the first bullet. His body was already jerking backward with the force of the impact when the second bullet entered his head. He did not feel this bullet. He did not feel anything anymore. His hand was still inside his coat, the fingers wrapped around the butt of the pistol, when he collapsed to the cold cement floor of the garage.
It was beginning to snow again. Lightly. Fat fluffy flakes drifting down lazily from the sky. Arthur Brown was driving. Bert Kling sat beside him on the front seat of the five-year-old unmarked sedan. Eileen Burke was sitting in the back. She had still been in the squadroom when the homicide squeal came in, and she’d asked Kling if he’d mind dropping her off at the subway on his way to the scene. Kling had merely grunted. Kling was a charmer, Eileen thought.
Brown was a huge man who looked even more enormous in his bulky overcoat. The coat was gray and it had a fake black fur collar. He was wearing black leather gloves that matched the black collar. Brown was supposed to be what people nowadays called a “black” man, but Brown knew that his complexion did not match the color of either the black collar or the black gloves. Whenever he looked at himself in the mirror, he saw someone with a chocolate-colored skin looking back at him, but he did not think of himself as a “chocolate” man. Neither did he think of himself as a Negro anymore; somehow, if a black man thought of himself as a Negro, he was thinking obsequiously. Negro had become a derogatory term, God alone knew when or how. Brown’s father used to call himself “a person of color,” which Brown thought was a very hoity-toity expression even when it was still okay for black men to call themselves Negroes. (Brown noticed that Ebony magazine capitalized the word Black, and he often wondered why.) He guessed he still thought of himself as colored, and he sincerely hoped there was nothing wrong with that. Nowadays, a nigger didn’t know what he was supposed to think.
Brown was the kind of black man white men crossed the street to avoid. If you were white, and you saw Brown approaching on the same side of the street, you automatically assumed he was going to mug you, or cut you with a razor, or do something else terrible to you. That was partially due to the fact that Brown was six feet four inches tall and weighed 220 pounds. It was also partially (mostly) due to the fact that Brown was black, or colored, or whatever you chose to call him, but he certainly was not white. A white man approaching Brown might not have crossed the street if Brown had also been a white man; unfortunately, Brown never had the opportunity to conduct such an experiment. The fact remained that when Brown was casually walking down the street minding his own business, white people crossed over to the other side. Sometimes even white cops crossed over to the other side. Nobody wanted trouble with someone who looked the way Brown looked. Even black people sometimes crossed the street when Brown approached, but only because he looked so bad-ass.
Brown knew he was, in fact, very handsome.
Whenever Brown looked in the mirror, he saw a very handsome chocolate-colored man looking back at him out of soulful brown eyes. Brown liked himself a lot. Brown was very comfortable with himself. Brown was glad he was a cop because he knew that the real reason white people crossed the street when they saw him was because they thought all black people were thieves or murderers. He frequently regretted the day he was promoted into the Detective Division because then he could no longer wear his identifying blue uniform, the contradiction to his identifying brown skin. Brown especially liked to bust people of his own race. He especially li
ked it when some black dude said, “Come on, brother, give me a break.” That man was no more Brown’s brother than Brown was brother to a hippopotamus. In Brown’s world, there were the good guys and the bad guys, white or black, it made no difference. Brown was one of the good guys. All those guys breaking the law out there were the bad guys. Tonight, one of the bad guys had left somebody dead and bleeding on the floor of a garage under a building on fancy Silvermine Road, and Kling had caught the squeal, and Brown was his partner, and they were two good guys riding out into the gently falling snow, with another good guy (who happened to be a girl) sitting on the back seat—which reminded him; he had to drop her off at the subway station.
“The one on Culver and Fourth okay?” he asked her.
“That’ll be fine, Artie,” Eileen said.
Kling was hunkered down inside his coat, looking out at the falling snow. The car heater rattled and clunked, something wrong with the fan. The car was the worst one the squad owned. Brown wondered how come whenever it was his turn to check out a car, he got this one. Worst car in the entire city, maybe. Ripe tomato accelerator, rattled like a $2 whore, something wrong with the exhaust, the damn car always smelled of carbon monoxide, they were probably poisoning themselves on the way to the homicide.
“Willis says you nabbed the guy who was running around pulling down bloomers, huh?” Brown said.
