Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here!

by Ed McBain

  The patrolman walked over to Brown’s desk, told his prisoner to sit down, took Brown aside, and whispered something to him. Brown nodded and came back to the desk. The prisoner was handcuffed, sitting with his hands in his lap. He was a pudgy little man with green eyes and a pencil-line mustache. Brown estimated his age at forty or thereabouts. He was wearing a brown overcoat, a brown suit and shoes, white shirt with a button-down collar, gold-and-brown striped silk tie. Brown asked the patrolman to advise the man of his rights, a job the patrolman accepted with some trepidation, while he called the hospital to ask about Parker’s condition. They told him that Parker was doing fine. Brown accepted the report without noticeable enthusiasm. He hung up the phone, heard the prisoner tell the patrolman he had nothing to hide and would answer any questions they wanted to ask, swiveled his chair around to face the man, and said, “What’s your name?”

  The man would not look Brown in the eye. Instead, he kept staring past his left ear to the grilled windows and the sky outside.

  “Perry Lyons,” he said. His voice was very low. Brown could barely hear him.

  “What were you doing in the park just now, Lyons?” Brown said.

  “Nothing,” Lyons answered.

  “Speak up!” Brown snapped. There was a noticeable edge to his voice. The patrolman, too, was staring down at Lyons in what could only be described as an extremely hostile way, his brow twisted into a frown, his eyes hard and mean, his lips tightly compressed, his arms folded across his chest.

  “I wasn’t doing nothing,” Lyons answered.

  “Patrolman Brogan here seems to think otherwise.”

  Lyons shrugged.

  “What about it, Lyons?”

  “There’s no law against talking to somebody.”

  “Who were you talking to, Lyons?”

  “A kid.”

  “What’d you say to him?”

  “Just it was a nice day, that’s all.”

  “That’s not what the kid told Patrolman Brogan.”

  “Well, kids, you know kids,” Lyons said.

  “How old was the kid, Joe?” Brown asked.

  “About nine,” Brogan answered.

  “You always talk to nine-year-old kids in the park?” Brown asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “How often?”

  “There’s no law against talking to kids. I like kids.”

  “I’ll bet you do,” Brown said. “Tell him what the boy told you, Brogan.”

  Brogan hesitated a moment and then said, “The boy said you asked him to blow you, Lyons.”

  “No,” Lyons said. “No, I never said anything like that. You’re mistaken.”

  “I’m not mistaken,” Brogan said.

  “Well then, the kid’s mistaken. He never heard anything like that from me, nossir.”

  “You ever been arrested before?” Brown asked.

  Lyons did not answer.

  “Come on,” Brown said impatiently, “we can check it in a minute.”

  “Well, yes,” Lyons said. “I have been arrested before.”

  “How many times?”

  “Twice.”

  “What for?”

  “Well…” Lyons said, and shrugged.

  “What for, Lyons?”

  “Well, it was, uh, I got in trouble with somebody a while back.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “With some kid.”

  “What was the charge, Lyons?”

  Lyons hesitated again.

  “What was the charge?” Brown repeated.

  “Carnal abuse.”

  “You’re a child molester, huh, Lyons?”

  “No, no, it was a bum rap.”

  “Were you convicted?”

  “Yes, but that don’t mean a thing, you guys know that. The kid was lying. He wanted to get even with me, he wanted to get me in trouble, so he told all kinds of lies about me. Hell, what would I want to fool around with a kid like that for? I had a girlfriend and everything, this waitress, you know? A real pretty girl, what would I want to fool around with a little kid for?”

  “You tell me.”

  “It was a bum rap, that’s all. These things happen, that’s all. You guys know that.”

  “And the second arrest?”

  “Well, that…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, you see what happened, after I got paroled, you know, I went back to live in this motel I used to live in before I got put away, you know?”

  “Where’d you serve your time?”

  “Castleview”

  “Go ahead.”

  “So I had this same room, you know? That I had before they locked me up. And it turned out the kid who got me in trouble before, he was living there with his mother.”

  “Just by coincidence, huh?”

  “Well, no, not by coincidence. I mean, I can’t claim it was coincidence. His mother ran the place, you see. I mean, she and her father owned it together. So it wasn’t coincidence, you know. But I didn’t think the kid was going to cause me no more trouble, you see what I mean? I done my time, he already got even with me, so I didn’t expect no more trouble from him. Only thing is he come around to my cabin one day, and he made me do things to him. He said he’d tell his mother I was bothering him again if I didn’t do these things to him. I mean, I was on parole, you know what I mean? If the kid had went to his mother, they’d have packed me off again in a minute.”

  “So what did you do, Lyons?”

  “Argh, the fuckin’ little bastard started yelling. They…they busted me again.”

  “Same charge?”

  “Well, not the same ‘cause the kid was older now. You know, like there’s carnal abuse with a kid ten years old or younger, and then there’s carnal abuse with a kid over ten and less than sixteen. He was eight years old the first time and eleven the next time. It was a bum rap both times. Who the hell needs that kind of stuff, you think I need it? Anyway, this was a long time ago. I already served both sentences. You think I’d be crazy enough to risk a third fall?”

  “You could’ve been put away for life the second time,” Brown said.

  “Don’t you think I know it? So why would I take another chance?” He looked up at Brogan. “That kid must’ve heard me wrong, Officer. I didn’t say nothing like that to him. Honest. I really didn’t.”

  “We’re booking you for endangering the morals of a child, as defined in Section 483-a of the Penal Law,” Brown said. “You’re allowed three telephone—”

  “Hey, hey, look,” Lyons said, “give me a break, will you? I didn’t mean no harm to the kid, I swear it. We were just sitting there talking, I swear to God. I never said nothing like that to him, would I say something like that to a little kid? Jesus, what do you take me for? Hey, come on, give me a break, will you? Come on, Officer, give me a break.”

  “I’d advise you to get a lawyer,” Brown said. “You want to take him down, Brogan?”

  “Hey, come on,” Lyons said.

  Brown watched as the patrolman led Lyons out of the squadroom. He stared at the retreating figure, and thought, The guy’s sick. Why the hell are we sending him away again, instead of helping him? And then he thought, I have a seven-year-old daughter—and then he stopped thinking because everything seemed suddenly too complex, and the telephone on his desk was ringing.

  He lifted the receiver.

  It was Steve Carella reporting that he was on his way to the squadroom.

  Jose Vicente Huerta was in a bad way. Both of his legs had been broken by the four assailants who’d attacked him, and his face was swathed in bandages that covered the multiple wounds that had spilled his blood all over the front stoop of the building. He resembled a not-so-invisible Invisible Man, his brown eyes burning fiercely through the holes left in the bandages.

  His mouth, pink against the white, showed through another hole below the eyeholes, and looked like a gaping wound itself. He was conscious now, but the doctors advised Delgado that their patient was heavily se
dated and might drift in and out of sleep as he talked. Delgado figured he would take his chances.

  He sat in a chair by the side of Huerta’s bed. Huerta, both legs in traction, his hands lying on the covers, palms up, his head turned into the pillow in Delgado’s direction, the brown eyes burning fiercely, the wound of the mouth open and pathetically vulnerable, listened as Delgado identified himself, and then nodded when asked if he felt able to answer some questions.

  “First,” Delgado said, “do you know who the men were?”

  “No,” Huerta answered.

  “You didn’t recognize any of them?”

  “No.”

  “Were they young men?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You saw them as they attacked you, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, how old would you say they were?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Were they neighborhood men?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mr. Huerta, any information you can give us—”

  “I don’t know who they were,” Huerta said.

  “They hurt you very badly. Surely—”

  The bandaged head turned away from Delgado, into the pillow.

  “Mr. Huerta?”

  Huerta did not answer.

  “Mr. Huerta?”

  Again, he did not answer. As had been promised by the doctors, he seemed to have drifted off into sleep. Delgado sighed and stood up. Since he was at Buenavista Hospital, anyway, and just so his visit shouldn’t be a total loss, he decided to stop in on Andy Parker to see how he was doing. Parker was doing about as well as Huerta. He, too, was asleep. The intern on the floor informed Delgado that Parker was out of danger.

  Delgado seemed as thrilled by the information as Brown had earlier been.

  The trouble with being a detective in any given neighborhood is that almost everybody in the neighborhood knows you’re a detective. Since detection is supposed to be undercover secret stuff at least some of the time, snooping around becomes a little difficult when 90 percent of the people you encounter know you’re a snoop. The bartender at Bar Seventeen (which was the name of the bar in which the Marine had first encountered the girl who later kicked him in the head, such bar being thus imaginatively named since it was located on Seventeenth Street) knew that Carl Kapek was a bull, and Kapek knew that the bartender knew, and since they both knew, neither of them made any pretense of playing at cops and robbers. The bartender set up beers for Kapek, who was not supposed to drink on duty, and Kapek accepted them without offering payment, and everybody had a nice little understanding going. Kapek did not even attempt to ask the bartender about the kicking girl and her boyfriend. Nor did the bartender try to find out why Kapek was there. If he was there, he was there for a reason, and the bartender knew it, and Kapek knew he knew it, and so the two men kept a respectful distance, coming into contact only when the bartender refilled Kapek’s glass from time to time. It was a cool symbiosis. The bartender merely hoped that Kapek was not there investigating some minor violation that would inevitably cost him money. He was already paying off two guys from the fire department, not to mention the police sergeant on the beat; one more guy with his hand out, and it would be cheaper to take care of the goddamn violations instead. Kapek, for his part, merely hoped that the bartender would not indicate to too many of his early-afternoon patrons that the big blond guy sitting at the bar was a police detective. It was difficult enough these days to earn a living.

  The way he decided to earn his living on this particular bright October Sunday—bright outside, dim and cheerless inside—was to engage a drunk in conversation. Kapek had been in the bar for close to an hour now, studying the patrons, trying to decide which of them were regulars, which of them came here infrequently, which of them recognized him from around the streets, which of them had not the faintest inkling that he was fuzz. He did all of this in what he hoped was a surreptitious manner, going to the phone booth once to pretend he was making a call, going to the men’s room once, going to the jukebox three or four times, casing everyone in the place on his various excursions, and then settling down on a stool within listening distance of the bartender and a man in a dark-blue suit. Kapek opened the Sunday tabloid he had carried with him into the bar, and turned to the sports section. He pretended to be pondering yesterday’s racing results, working figures with a pencil in the margin of the newspaper, while simultaneously listening intently to everything the man in the blue suit said. When the bartender walked off to serve someone at the other end of the bar, Kapek made his move.

  “Damn horse never delivers when he’s supposed to,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?” the man in the blue suit said, turning on his stool. He was already very intoxicated, having presumably begun his serious drinking at home before the bar could legally open its doors. He looked at Kapek now with the benign expression of someone anxious to be friendly with anyone at all, even if he happened to be a cop. He did not seem to know that Kapek was a cop, nor was Kapek anxious to let him in on the secret.

  “You follow the ponies?” Kapek asked.

  “I permit myself a tiny wager every so often,” the man in the blue suit said. He had bleary blue eyes and a veined nose. His white shirt looked un-ironed, his solid blue tie was haphazardly knotted, his suit rumpled. He kept his right hand firmly clutched around a water tumbler full of whiskey on the bar top in front of him.

  “This nag’s the goddamn favorite nine times out of ten,” Kapek said, “but he never wins when he’s supposed to. I think the jocks got it all fixed between them.”

  The bartender was ambling back. Kapek shot him a warning glance: Stay out of this, pal. You work your side of the street, I’ll work mine. The bartender hesitated in mid-stride, then turned on his heel and walked over to his other customer.

  “My name’s Carl Kapek,” Kapek said, and closed his newspaper, encouraging further conversation. “I’ve been playing the horses for twelve years now, I made only one decent killing in all that time.”

  “How much?” the man in the blue suit asked.

  “Four hundred dollars on a long shot. Had two dollars on his nose. It was beautiful, beautiful,” Kapek said, and grinned and shook his head remembering the beauty of this event that had never taken place. The most he had ever won in his life was a chemistry set at a church bazaar.

  “How long ago was that?” the man in the blue suit asked.

  “Six years ago,” Kapek said, and laughed.

  “That’s a long time between drinks,” the man said, and laughed with him.

  “I don’t think I got your name,” Kapek said, and extended his hand.

  “Leonard Sutherland,” the man said. “My friends all call me Lennie.”

  “How do you do, Lennie?” Kapek said, and they shook hands.

  “What do your friends all call you?” Lennie asked.

  “Carl.”

  “Nice meeting you, Carl,” Lennie said.

  “A pleasure,” Kapek answered.

  “My game’s poker,” Lennie said. “Playing the horses, you’ll pardon me, is for suckers. Poker’s a game of skill.”

  “No question,” Kapek agreed.

  “Do you actually prefer beer?” Lennie asked suddenly.

  “What?”

  “I notice you have been drinking beer exclusively. If you would permit me, Carl, I’d consider it an honor to buy you something stronger.”

  “Little early in the day for me,” Kapek said, and smiled apologetically.

  “Never too early for a little rammer,” Lennie said, and smiled.

  “Well, I was out drinking late last night,” Kapek said, and shrugged.

  “I am out drinking late every night,” Lennie said, “but it’s still never too early for a little rammer.” To emphasize his theory, he lifted the water glass and swallowed half the whiskey in it. “Mmm, boy,” he said, and coughed.

  “You usually do your drinking here?” Kapek asked.
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br />   “Hm?” Lennie asked. His eyes were watering. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and dabbed at them. He coughed again.

  “In this place?”

  “Oh, I drift around, drift around,” Lennie said, and made a fluttering little motion with the fingers of one hand.

  “Reason I ask,” Kapek said, “is I was in here last night, and I didn’t happen to see you.”

  “Oh, I was here, all right,” Lennie said, which Kapek already knew because this was what he had overheard in the conversation between Lennie and the bartender, a passing reference to a minor event that had taken place in Bar Seventeen the night before, the bartender having had to throw out a twenty-year-old who was noisily expressing his views on lowering the age to vote.

  “Were you here when they threw out that young kid?” Kapek asked.

  “Oh, indeed,” Lennie said.

  “Didn’t see you,” Kapek said.

  “Oh yes, here indeed,” Lennie said.