The Heckler

by Ed McBain

  “Does your ferry carry trucks?” the deaf man asked.

  “Depends on how big.”

  “Well, I wasn’t thinking of a trailer truck,” the deaf man said, gently, his blue eyes twinkling.

  “Well, what kind of a truckwere you thinking of?”

  “An ice-cream truck.”

  “Ice-cream truck, huh? You mean like Good Humor? Like that?”

  “Yes. Not Good Humor, but a truck of that size. That’s exactly what I meant.”

  “We carry ’em.”

  “What was that? I’m sorry, I’m a little deaf.”

  “I said we carry ’em. Ice-cream trucks.”

  “Do I need a ticket in advance, or can I buy it on the ferry?”

  “You buy it on the ferry.”

  “Would you mind looking at this ferry schedule, please?” the deaf man said, and he shoved the schedule under the barred window. The ticket seller did not look up. His eyes shifted toward the schedule, but he continued counting, and he would not look up at the deaf man.

  “What about it?”

  “It says it’s effective April 13. That’s next Monday.”

  “That’s right. What about it? We still got some old schedules over there, if you want them.”

  “No, no, this is just what I want. But will these arrivals and departures be in effect for a while?”

  “Absolutely. Don’t put out a new schedule until June sometime. And even that’ll be the same, actually, except it makes people feel better when they see new dates on a timetable.”

  “Then these times will be in effect throughout April and May, is that right?”

  “June, too,” the ticket seller said. “AndJuly, for that matter.And August. Schedule don’t change again until we go off daylight-saving time. That’s in September sometime.”

  “I see, thank you. And I can buy a ticket for the truck after I have boarded the ferry with it, is that also correct?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Should I get here very far in advance, or can you usually accommodate all the vehicles that want passage?”

  “We got room for twenty-five cars. Seldom get more’n a dozen. Plenty of room aboard the old tub. Not many people want to go to Majesta. Sure, it’s nice and quiet there, but it ain’t exactly anybody’s idea of city life, if you know what I mean.”

  “Well, thank you very much,” the deaf man said. “What time does the next ferry leave?”

  The ticket seller did not stop counting, nor did he look up at the clock or down at his wrist watch. He simply said, “Eleven o’clock.”

  “Thank you,” the deaf man said. He walked away from the window, nodded pleasantly at a uniformed cop standing near the newspaper stand, and strode rapidly to where Rafe was sitting on the bench. He sat beside him unobtrusively.

  “I’ll be going over to Majesta,” he said. “You have some phone calls to make, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do,” Rafe said, nodding. The sight of the uniformed cop made him somewhat anxious. He did not like policemen. He had spent five years in prison because of policemen.

  “I just checked the schedule,” the deaf man told him. “We’ll plan on catching the 5:45P.M . boat on the evening of the caper. The one after that is at 6:05. That gives us a twenty-minute leeway, should anything go wrong.”

  “Do you think anything will go wrong?” Rafe asked. He was a tall thin man with a mild manner, a manner accentuated by the gold-rimmed eyeglasses and sandy-blond hair.

  “No,” the deaf man said confidently. “Nothing will go wrong.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I can be sure because I have studied the probabilities. And I can be sure because I know exactly what we are dealing with.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “An outmoded police force,” the deaf man said.

  “They weren’t so outmoded when they sent me to jail,” Rafe said quietly, glumly.

  “Examine the Police Department, if you will,” the deaf man said. “There are approximately thirty thousand cops in this sprawling metropolis. And this figure includes all of them, inspectors, deputy inspectors, detectives, patrolmen, veterinarians, policewomen, everything. The total police force numbers thirty thousand. That’s it.”

  “So?”

  “So there are approximately ten million people in this city. And it is the task of those thirty thousand policemen to see that those ten million people do not commit various criminal acts against each other. If we divide the number of potential lawbreakers by the number of policemen, we can say—roughly—that each cop is responsible for the conduct of about three hundred thirty-three people, am I right?”

  Rafe did some laborious long division. “Yes, that’s about right.”

  “Now, obviously, one cop—even assuming he is armed with the most modern weapons—couldn’t possibly control three hundred thirty-three people should they, for example, decide to commit three hundred thirty-three crimes in three hundred thirty-three places at the same time. It would be physically impossible for one cop to prevent all of those crimes because he couldn’t possibly be in two places at the same time, one of the basic laws of physics. But, of course, there are a vast number of policemen who, in combination, can be brought into action against a multitude of simultaneous criminal explosions. But even these men, in combination, could not cope with, if you will, ten million people committing ten million crimes simultaneously. Despite the permutations.”

  “I don’t understand you,” Rafe said.

  “Permutations,” the deaf man said. “The number of possible ways—well, let’s take a deck of cards. You’ll be more at ease with cards than with policemen. There are fifty-two cards in the deck. If we want to know how many possible ways there are of arranging those fifty-two cards, we start with the simple permutation, written this way.” He took a slip of paper from his pocket and quickly jotted: 52p52.

  “I still don’t understand,” Rafe said.

  “That’s simply the mathematical way of writing the permutations of 52. We callall the arrangements we can make by selecting all the numbers of a group ‘simple permutations.’ The equation becomes…” And he wrote: 52p52=52!

  “That tells us how many possible ways there are of arranging a deck of 52 cards.”

  “What’s the exclamation point for?” Rafe asked.

  “It’s not an exclamation point. There are no interjections in mathematics. It simply indicates that the number must be multiplied by every whole number below it until we get to 1. For example, the number four followed by that symbol simply means 4 times 3 times 2 times 1.”

  “So how many wayscan you arrange a deck of cards?”

  “52! ways—or 52 times 51 times 50 times 49 times—well, all the way down until you reach the figure 1. It would take all day to multiply it out. But at the risk of making you nervous again, let’s get back to something of more concern to us, policemen. And, specifically, the detectives of the Eighty-seventh Squad. There are normally sixteen men on the squad. But when we pull our job, two will be on vacation and two will be in Washington taking an FBI course.”

  “That leaves twelve,” Rafe said.

  “Right. Let’s try to figure how many possible combinations those twelve men can arrange themselves into, shall we? The equation would be this.” He wrote: 12p12=12!

  “Which means,” he went on, “12 times 11 times 10, and so on. Let’s see what that comes to.” Quickly, he began multiplying figures on his sheet of paper. “Well, here you are,” he said. “All the possible combinations for twelve men, 12 times 11 times 10 down through 1, is 479,001,600. It sounds staggering, doesn’t it?”

  “It sure does. Evenone cop sounds staggering to me,” Rafe said.

  “Of course, detectives usually work in pairs, and not in teams of twelve or eight or six or what have you. And this would automatically limit the number of possible combinations. Besides, we need not concern ourselves with the permutations of those twelve men. We need only to abstract a theory about law
enforcement and crime prevention. It seems to me, Rafe, that the police operate on their own limited theory of probability. Obviously, with their inadequate force of thirty thousand, they cannot possibly hope to be everywhere at once. This is a damned big city and a great many people in it are practicing criminals. So the police operate against percentages. They figure in this fashion, more or less: A certain number of criminals must escape detectionfor the moment because we can’t possibly hope to be where they are when a crime is being committed or because we can’t successfully investigate every crime even after it’s been committed; however,in the long run, we will one day catch a previously undetected criminal because we will be in the right place at the right time or because the situation for a successful investigation will present itself.‘In the long run’ —those are the key words in probability.”

  “I think I’d better go make my phone calls,” Rafe said. “Besides, your ferry’s coming in.”

  “Just a moment, Rafe.‘In the long run.’ Remember those words. If you flipped a penny five times in succession, the first five flips might come up tails. If you stopped flipping right there, you might come to the conclusion that a penny will come up tails one hundred per cent of the times it is flipped. Deviation, remember? The difference between observation and reality. Actually, the longer you kept flipping that penny, the closer you would come to the truth. Which is, of course, that it will turn up heads fifty per cent of the time and tails the remaining fifty per cent. So the cops are playing the long run. They’ve got this rather cute, quaint, antiquated, friendly, bumbling law enforcement machine andin the long run, through a combination of choice and chance, they will make their arrests and maintain order—primarily because the percentages are on their side. Most citizens, you see, are law-abiding. But tell me something, Rafe.”

  “What?” Rafe asked.

  “What happens when someone comes along and screws up the percentages? What happens when the police are forced to cope with something the likes of which they’ve never encountered before? What happens when they’re pushed into dealing with theshort run?”

  “I don’t know,” Rafe said. “What happens?”

  “We’ll walk off with two and a half million bucks,” the deaf man said. “That’s what.”

  THE REAL ESTATE AGENTin Majesta was quite taken with his caller. The man was tall and good-looking, with pleasant blue eyes and a manner reminiscent of the Old South. At the same time, the man knew what he wanted and he wasted no time in stating his needs.

  “A small house with a garage,” the deaf man said. “It needn’t be close to the ferry, and I shall only need it for a few weeks. The garage must be large enough to hold two cars; a sedan and a small truck.”

  “I see, sir,” the agent said. “And the house? How large a house need it be?”

  “It should accommodate four adults,” the deaf man said. He grinned pleasantly. “My colleagues and I are working on a screenplay which will be shot in the city streets this summer. We want two weeks of uninterrupted work, no telephones, no visitors. That’s why we thought of Majesta.”

  “I see,” the agent said. “You’re a screen writer then, is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I knew you weresomething right off the bat. I could tell.”

  “Well, thank you,” the deaf man said.

  “Sure. And I think I’ve got just the house for you.” He paused. “What movie company do you work for?”

  “An independent outfit,” the deaf man said quickly.

  “You write anything else besides movie scripts?”

  “Oh yes, a great many things.”

  “Would I know your name?” the agent asked.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Well, what is it? I’ll need it for our records, anyway.”

  “Thomas Wolfe,” the deaf man said.

  “Oh, sure,” the agent said, smiling. “Sure. I think I even read a few of your books. Sure.”

  SITTING IN THE PHONE BOOTH,Rafe put a small tick mark alongside the tenth number on his list. There were fifteen numbers after that one, and all of the exchanges were for locations on the south side of the city, or—to be more precise—on the south side of the territory under the command of the Eighty-seventh Precinct. David Raskin’s phone number was among those on the list. So was James Lombardo’s. Dave Raskin ran a dress loft. Jim Lombardo ran a haberdashery. The two men had nothing at all in common. Unless one wished to comment on the fact that Dave’s loft was over a bank and Jim’s hat store was next door to a jewelry concern. Otherwise, there was no similarity.

  Of the twenty-five numbers on the list, six belonged to clothing stores, eight belonged to restaurants, one belonged to Raskin, one belonged to Lombardo, three belonged to candy shops, two belonged to leather goods stores, one belonged to a travel agency, two belonged to shoe stores, and the last belonged to a tie shop.

  Very innocent-looking concerns.

  But Dave Raskin’s loft was over a bank. And Jim Lombardo’s hat shop was next door to a jewelry concern. Thirteen more of the stores on that list were next door to banks. Six were next door to rather fancy jewelry shops. One was next door to a firm which made money loans. Another was next door to a firm which sold silverware. The twenty-fourth store on the list was a Chinese restaurant which was located on the second floor of a building which housed a quaint little shop on the ground floor; the shop had close to five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Oriental jade in the window. And the twenty-fifth store was next door to a company which dealt in foreign exchange and which kept huge sums of cold cash in its safe.

  Rafe dialed the eleventh number on his list and waited for the phone to be picked up on the other end. When the voice came on, he asked, “Mr. Carmichael?”

  “Yes?” the man said.

  “Get out of that store, Mr. Carmichael!” Rafe shouted. “Get out before the thirtieth, or I’ll kill you!”

  8.

  “CAR TWENTY-THREE, car twenty-three, signal thirteen, signal thirteen.”

  “This is twenty-three.”

  “Signal thirteen, seven three five Gramercy Street, repeat seven three five Gramercy Street, complainant Sergei Rosnakoff, stink bomb in incinerator, signal thirteen. Car thirty-six, car thirty-six, signal eleven, signal—”

  “This is thirty-six. Go ahead.”

  “This is twenty-three, what was that address again?”

  “Hold it, thirty-six. I gave it to you twice, twenty-three. What the—”

  “This is thirty-six, thirty-six, over.”

  “That’s seven three five Gramercy. You got that, twenty-three?”

  “Seven three five Gramercy, Roger.”

  “Car thirty-six, car thirty-six, come in car…”

  IF DELIVERY URGENT BUT PICKUP & HOLD CONTACT RIVERHEAD PCT (*(*(* 98TH PCT 98TH XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX

  INFORMATION REQUEST HQ COMMAND GENERAL REQUEST ALL PCTS ALL PCTS ALL PCTS XXXXXXXXX PRECINCTS GEN REQUEST INFORMATION XXXXXXX MAN’S UNIFORM GREY BRASS BUTTONS TOBACCO POUCH FOUND REMAINS BURNT CHARRED BETHTOWN APT BLDG INCINERATOR XXX SUSPECT POSS POWDER BURNS ON CLOTH XXXXX INFO OR ASSIST UNSOLVED SHOOTING CASES CONTACT HQ XXX HQ COMMAND DET LT DOUGHETY DOUGHERTY DOUGHERTY XXXXXXXX

  X XXXXXX XXXXX XXX APRIL 13 GENERAL ALARM ALL PCTS BE ON LOCKOUT WOMAN BLONDE AGE 24 5 FEET 4 INCHES 110 LBS EXTREMELY ATTRACTIVE LAST SEEN WEARING BLUE S

  POLICE DEPARTMENT

  Police Headquarters Command

  89 High Street, Isola

  BY MESSENGER

  TO: BY MESSENGER

  Detective Stephen Louis Carella

  87th Detective Squad

  87th Precinct

  711 Grover Avenue

  Isola

  Enclosed herewith is laboratory report received on the charred scraps of uniform garment taken from Bethtown incinerator, and forwarded as per your request received at 3:07 P.M. this afternoon.

  Please note that report is preliminary and incomplete concerning matchbook discovered in pocket of uniform coat, but la
boratory tests should be complete by tomorrow Tuesday April 14 and suggest you contact Lieutenant Samuel Grossman at that time should you desire further information in your case.

  Sincerely,

  Det/Lt. Albert N. Dougherty

  Headquarters Command

  AD/rl

  cc: Lt. Samuel Grossman

  9.

  LIEUTENANT SAM GROSSMAN was one of those rare and vanishing individuals who take extreme pride in their work. As one of these, he was not the type of man who would wait for someone to call for information once that information was available. He had worked all day Monday on the matchbook remains which had been found with the charred uniform material in the incinerator. He was in receipt of a carbon copy of Dougherty’s letter, and so he knew that Steve Carella was interested in the case. But even if the interested party hadn’t been someone Grossman knew and liked, even if it had been an obscure patrolman pounding a beat on Majesta, Grossman’s attitude would have remained the same. He was now in possession of information which could prove extremely valuable to the man investigating the case. He’d be damned if he was going to wait for that man to call him.

  Nor had Grossman come into possession of this possibly valuable information through a stroke of luck, or even through the performance of a few simple laboratory tests. There are, you know, some laboratory tests which are extremely simple and which require no patience or perseverance. The reconstruction of burnt paper, unfortunately, does not fall into this category.

  To begin with, the matchbook found with the material was contained by what the lab assumed to be the breast pocket of the jacket. The presence of the matchbook would not have been suspected at all had not one of Grossman’s capable assistants noticed the glint of metal among the commingled ashes. Upon study, the metal turned out to be a tiny staple of the kind that holds matches to an outside cover. And once the presence of the remains of a matchbook had been determined, the real work lay just around the corner.