by Ed McBain
"Yeah," the sailor said, nodding, "where he said I could get anything I want. Now how about that?"
"He was right," Zip answered.
"So here I am," the sailor said. He paused. "Where is it?"
"Right down the street there."
"Thank you," the sailor said, nodding. "Thank you ver' much." He started off down the street again.
"Don't mention it," Zip said, smiling. He stared after the sailor for a few moments, and then went into the luncheonette. "Give me a cup of coffee, Luis," he said.
The sailor went down the street, studying each doorway as he had before. He stopped suddenly, looked at the lettering on the plate-glass window of a bar, and muttered, "La Gallina, I'll be damned. Feller was right." He walked directly to the front door, not expecting it to be locked, trying to open it, and then discovering that it was locked, immensely annoyed that the knob had resisted his hand. He backed away from the door and yelled, "Hey! Hey, wake up! Wake up, goddamnit! I'm here!"
"What the hell is that?" Luis said.
"Sailor out there," Zip said, grinning.
Luis came from behind the counter. Up the street, the sailor-was still shouting at the top of his lungs.
"You!" Luis said. "Quiet, quiet."
The sailor turned. "You talking to me, mate?"
"Si, I'm talking to you, mate. Stop the racket. This is Sunday morning. People like to sleep, you know? You wake them up."
"Well, hell, thass what I'm trying to do, you know."
"Why you trying to wake them up for?"
'"Cause I wanna go to bed."
"That makes sense, all right," Luis said, nodding patiently. "Are you drunk?"
"Me?" the sailor said. "Me?"
"Yes."
"Hell, no."
"You look perhaps a little drunk."
The sailor walked to where Luis was standing, put his hands on his hips and said, "Well, maybe I am perhaps a li'l drunk. So ain't you never been perhaps a li'l drunk?"
"I have been a little drunk," Luis said, "and I have been a lot drunk. Come. I'll make you a cup of coffee."
"Whuffor?"
"What for?" Luis shrugged and walked into the luncheonette. The sailor followed him. "Because I like sailors," Luis said. "I used to be a sailor myself once."
"Did you find it, pal?" Zip interrupted.
"Yeah. It's closed."
"I coulda told you that."
"So why dinn you?"
"You didn't ask."
"Oh, you're one of those guys," the sailor said.
"Which guys?" Zip asked, and he stiffened suddenly on the counter stool, as if expecting an attack.
"The guys you got to ask."
"Yeah," Zip answered. "I'm one of those guys. So what?"
Rapidly, perhaps because he sensed Zip's sudden belligerence, perhaps because he simply wanted to switch the conversation back to himself, Luis said, "Yes, I was in the Navy from 1923 to 1927. Yes, sir."
"Was you on a ship?" the sailor asked. If he had detected any challenge in Zip's voice, he was studiously ignoring it. Either that, or he was too drunk to have noticed.
"A man who has not been on a ship is not a sailor." He looked over at the bubbling Silexes. "The coffee is almost ready."
"What kind of a ship?"
"A garbage scow," Zip said quickly, and he grinned.
"Never mind this smart one. I was on a mine sweep."
"What was your rate?" the sailor asked suspiciously.
"You never heard of Rear Admiral Luis Amandez?" Zip asked, mock surprise spreading over his uneven features.
"I was a steward's mate," Luis answered with dignity. "And you shut up, you little snotnose."
"Wha'd he say your name was? Louise?"
"Yeah, that's right," Zip answered, chuckling. "This here is Aunt Louise."
"Louise? Yeah?"
"No, Luis. Luis."
"No, Louise," Zip insisted.
"Are you a Mexican, Louise?" the sailor asked.
"No." Luis shook his head. "Puerto Rican."
"Well, that's the same thing, ain't it?"
"Well" Luis thought for a moment, and then shrugged resignedly. "Si, the same thing."
"What part of Mehico you from?" the sailor asked obliviously.
"The part down in the Caribbean," Luis said dryly.
"The annex," Zip put in. "South. You know?"
"And whereabouts in Puerto Rico?"
"A town called Cabo Rojo, do you know it?"
"I only know Tia Juana," the sailor said, "and I ain't even been there. Closest I ever got was San Diego."
"Here," Luis said, pouring a cup of coffee. "Drink this."
"Where's mine?" Zip asked.
"I have only two hands." He finished pouring the sailor's coffee, and then poured a cup for Zip.
"What brung you all the way here from Puerto Rico?" the sailor asked.
"Work," Luis said. "A man has to work, you know."
"Where you from, sailor?" Zip asked.
"Fletcher," the sailor said. "That's in Colorado."
"I never heard of it."
"It's there, all right."
The three fell silent.
Zip and the sailor sipped at their coffee. Luis got to work behind the counter. There seemed to be nothing more to say to each other. The three, after all, had very little in common. One had inquired about the whereabouts of a bar-quasi-whorehouse. The other had told him where it was. The third had served them both coffee. One was in his early fifties, the other was perhaps twenty-two, and the third was seventeen. One was born in Puerto Rico, the other in Fletcher, Colorado, and the third was a native of the city. Thus divided by time and space and natural inclination, there was nothing each could say to the other at the moment, and so they fell silent.
And yet, within the silence, their thoughts ran in strangely similar patterns so that, if the thoughts had been voiced, each would have instantly understood or thought he'd understood the other.
Luis had begun thinking about why he'd come to the mainland, about why he'd left the place of his birth. He had told the sailor he had come here to work, and yet he knew it was something more than that. It was not to work, it was to begin. He had lived on the island with a wife and three children, and the island despite his love for it had meant primarily one thing, and that thing was hunger. Constant hunger. Hunger that lingered through the cane-cutting season because you could not spend all of your earnings while the season was in swing; you had to save some for the empty days ahead. There was not much to hold and not much to save. You fished in the off season, and sometimes your haul was good but most of the time you were hungry. And being hungry, even knowing that everyone else around you was hungry, being hungry somehow reduced you to being nothing. There were things he would always love about the island, the innate pride and decency and hospitality of the people, the respect humans automatically showed to other humans, a respect bred of sunshine and lush tropical foliage where cruelty seemed blatantly out of place. The island seemed to draw people closer together, strengthening their bonds as humans. And yet, contradicting this was the dire economic need, so that on the one hand Luis had felt like a very important person with many friends and much love, and on the other he had felt like a hungry animal.
And so he'd left the island. He'd left the island in search of a beginning. He had worked hard for the luncheonette. It was still owned mostly by the bank, but he knew now that he would never go hungry again. And if he had lost something else, something quite dear to him, he had another sort of satisfaction, and this satisfaction was in his stomach and his bowels where perhaps a man feels it most.
The sailor sipped at his coffee and thought of Fletcher, Colorado.
He did not often think of Fletcher because he found he got sad whenever he did. He had been born in Fletcher, and he learned early the meaning of the words "small town". When a place is called a small town, it has nothing whatever to do with the size of the town. A giant metropolis can be a small town
, and some very large cities are small towns in every sense of the word. Fletcher, Colorado, was just like every other small town in the United States of America. There was a schoolhouse, and a church, and a row of stores. There were DRIVE CHILDREN SLOW signs, and SPEED LIMIT STRICTLY enforced signs, and there were the teenage kids hanging out in the corner drugstore, and the Boy Scout cookouts, and the Little League, and the choir practice, and the Saturday Evening Post route, and in the spring the forsythias lined the highway with bright yellow and there was the bursting pink of cherry blossoms, and in the fall he would go hunting for deer with his father and his older brother, and the woods would shriek with color. In the winter, there was deep snow and skiing. The mountains surrounded the town. You could always see the mountains. Everybody in town knew everybody else in town. He met Corrine at a church picnic when he was six years old. By the time they were eleven, everybody in town had decided that one day they would get married. When he got a swimming medal in his freshman year at high school, he gave it to Corrine. He went everywhere with Corrine and did everything with Corrine, and it became plain to him after a while that Corrine was perfectly happy to have been born and raised in a town like Fletcher, and that she would be happy to get married there, and breed kids there, and eventually to die there. And suddenly, he wondered if this was what he himself wanted.
Oh, he loved Corrine, it wasn't that. He supposed he loved her. She had very straight red hair that she wore loose around her shoulders, and she had very bright blue eyes and a nose that tilted slightly at the tip, she looked exactly like those pictures of small-town American girls he had seen on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post when he used to deliver the magazine. And he liked to neck with her. He liked to touch her, too, whenever she let him, which wasn't often, and he never could figure out when she wanted him to and when she didn't want him to; he supposed he loved her because he respected her wishes in the matter.
And then, one day, all of a sudden, he decided he was going to join the Navy. When his parents asked him why, when Gorrine asked him why, when his friends asked him why, he told them he would be drafted soon anyway, and he might just as well go into the Navy where a fellow didn't have to go on hikes or sleep in the mud. That was what he told all these people. But he knew why he was really joining the Navy. He was joining the Navy to get out of Fletcher. He was joining the Navy because Fletcher was slowly and surely suffocating him, and he could feel those mountains moving in closer and closer every day, and he knew that one day he would no longer be able to breathe, that one day he would be crushed by everything in this small town. When he left, he told himself he would never return. And so it made him sad to think about Fletcher.
Zip, drinking his coffee, studying his reflection in the mirror behind the counter, did not feel sad at all. Zip felt pretty damn good. Zip felt, at last, that things were beginning to click. They had never clicked for him in that ratty neighborhood downtown. There'd been nothing there for him but getting kicked by the older kids. Fat Ass Charlie, they used to call him. Fat Ass Charlie, and bam! a well-placed kick right in the middle of that fat ass. The nickname had persisted even when he began thinning into adolescence. And then they'd moved.
And suddenly, he wasn't fat-assed any more, and he wasn't even Charlie any more. He began calling himself Zip, and he began feeling that there was opportunity in this new neighborhood, the opportunity to be the person he wanted to be, and not the person everybody else thought he should be. He'd met Cooch, and Cooch had shown him the ropes and suggested that they join the biggest club in the neighborhood, the Royal Guardians.
But Zip had ideas of his own. Why become a schnook running around the fringes of the higher-ups when you could have a club of your own? And so he suggested the Latin Purples, and he planned to start it small, six, seven guys to begin with so far there were only four. And Cooch's sister-in-law had sewn the purple jackets for them, and he wore his jacket with a great deal of pride now because the jacket meant something to him, the jacket meant that he was on his way.
If you'd asked him where he was going, he couldn't have told you.
But he knew he was on his way, and he knew that today would be the clincher, today would be the day he realized himself fully as a person.
And so the three of them sat with their separate thoughts, thoughts which were strangely similar, and when the sailor finally spoke, both Luis and Zip knew instantly what he meant.
The sailor said, "You can lose yourself in Fletcher. You can get just plumb lost." He shook his head. "That's why I left. I wanted to know who I was."
"And have you found out?" Luis asked.
"Give him time," Zip said. "You think a guy can make a rep in one day?"
"I'll find out, Louise," the sailor said.
"How? With the girls from La Gallina?"
"Huh?"
"Sailor, take my advice," Luis said. "Go back to your ship. This neighborhood is not always a nice place."
"Leave him alone," Zip said. "He wants a girl, I'll help him find one." He winked at the sailor, and then he grinned broadly.
"Don't let Sunday morning fool you," Luis said. "Last night, there was drinking and guitars. And this morning, everyone sleeps. But sometimes ... sailor, take my advice. Go back to your ship..."
"I think I'll hang around for a while."
"Then be careful, eh? You are a stranger here. Choose your company." He looked at Zip meaningfully. "There are good and bad, entiende? You understand? Take care."
The sailor swung around on his stool. He leaned his elbows on the counter top and drunkenly looked out over the sun-washed street.
"It looks nice and peaceful to me," he murmured.
"Can you see through the walls, sailor?" Luis asked. "Do you know what goes on under the skin of the buildings?"
3
The skin of the building which housed the uniformed cops and detectives of the 87th Precinct was not lovely, nor engaged, nor had it been washed in more than half a century. It presented a characterless gray to the park across the street, a gray which seemed contradictory to the bright sunshine that filled the air. The gray stones were rough and uneven, covered with the soot and grime of the city, relieved only by the hanging green globes which announced in white numerals to the world at large that this was Precinct 87.
The low, flat steps of the front stoop led to a pair of glass-fronted doors which were open now to permit the entrance of whatever scant breeze rustled across Grover Park. The breeze, unfortunately, did not get very much further than the entrance doors. It certainly did not pass into the muster room where Sergeant Dave Murchison sat behind his high desk pulling at his undershorts and cursing the heat. A rotating electric fan sat on top of the switchboard to the left of the desk. The switchboard, at the moment, wasn't blinking with calls from the violated citizenry, thank God. Murchison wiped sweat from his brow, tugged at his undershorts, and wondered if it was any cooler upstairs.
A long wooden plaque, painted white and then overlaid with the black letters detective division, pointed to a flight of narrow iron-runged steps which led upstairs to the bull pen. The flight of steps, gathering heat only from a small window where the steps turned back upon themselves before continuing to the second floor, was perhaps the coolest spot in the station house. Beyond the steps, a long corridor led to the detective squadroom where a battery of electric fans fought valiantly to produce some semblance of a breeze. The grilled windows at the far end of the squadroom admitted bright, golden sunlight which spread across the wooden floor like licking flames. The men in the squadroom sat in shirt sleeves at sun-drenched desks.
If there was one nice thing about being a detective, it was the fact that a gray flannel suit, a button-down shirt, and a neat black tie were not requisites of the job. Detective Steve Carella was perhaps the only detective in the squadroom on that Sunday morning in July who looked as if he might be an advertising executive. But then, Carella always looked as if he were dressed for the pages of Esquire. Even wearing a leather jack
et and dungarees, he managed to exude the scent of careful grooming. He was a tall man whose sinewy body gave only the slightest hint of the power he possessed. Unpadded, slender with a rawboned simplicity, he seemed built to flatter whatever clothes were heaped onto his frame. This morning he was wearing a blue seersucker suit, the jacket of which was draped over the back of his chair. He had worn a bow tie to work, but had untied it the moment he entered the squadroom so that it hung loosely about his neck now, his shirt unbuttoned, his head bent over the report he was studying.
The other cops presented a slightly less sartorial appearance. Andy Parker, a cop who would have looked like a bum even when dressed for his own funeral, was wearing a pair of tan nylon slacks and a sports shirt which had surely been designed in honor of Hawaii's having achieved statehood. Hula girls swayed their hips all over Parker's shirt. Surfboarders flitted over his huge barrel chest. The colors on the shirt exploded like Roman candles. Parker, who looked unshaven even though he had shaved closely before reporting to the squadroom, pounded at a typewriter with both huge hands, using his fingers like fists. The typewriter seemed to resist each successive assault wave, a machine refusing to succumb to brute force. Parker continued to smash into it as if he were engaged in mortal combat, cursing each time the keys locked, slamming the carriage over whenever he reached the end of a line of the D.D. report, the bell clanging savagely in protest.
"No arrest," he muttered savagely, "but I got to type up a damn report, anyway."
"Be glad you're alive," Carella said, not looking up from the sheet in his hands.
"It'll take more than a punk like Pepe Miranda to put the blocks to me, pal," Parker said. He continued smashing at the typewriter.
"You're lucky," Carella said. "He was feeling charitable. He had your gun, and he had everybody else's gun, and you're just damn lucky he didn't decide to kill you all."
"He was chicken," Parker said, looking up. "If that was me in his place, I'd have blasted every cop in sight, and then shot a few passers-by just for the hell of it. But Miranda was chicken. He knows the jig's up, so he figured he wouldn't add anything else to what we already got on him."
