Ed McBain_87th Precinct 22

by Fuzz

  “Who is this?” Kling asked, and motioned across the room for Hawes to pick up the extension.

  “I was quite serious about what I promised,” the man said. “Parks Commissioner Cowper will be shot to death sometime tomorrow night unless I receive five thousand dollars by noon. This is how I want it. Have you got a pencil?”

  “Mister, why’d you pick on us?” Kling asked.

  “For sentimental reasons,” the man said, and Kling could have sworn he was smiling on the other end of the line. “Pencil ready?”

  “Where do you expect us to get five thousand dollars?”

  “Entirely your problem,” the man said. “My problem is killing Cowper if you fail to deliver. Do you want this information?”

  “Go ahead,” Kling said, and glanced across the room to where Hawes sat hunched over the other phone. Hawes nodded.

  “I want the money in singles, need I mention they must be unmarked?”

  “Mister, do you know what extortion is?” Kling asked suddenly.

  “I know what it is,” the man said. “Don’t try keeping me on the line. I plan to hang up long before you can effect a trace.”

  “Do you know the penalty for extortion?” Kling asked, and the man hung up.

  “Son of a bitch,” Kling said.

  “He’ll call back. We’ll be ready next time,” Hawes said. “We can’t trace it through automatic equipment, anyway.”

  “We can try.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said ‘sentimental reasons.’”

  “That’s what I thought he said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Search me,” Hawes said, and went back to his desk, where he had spread a paper towel over the dropcloth, and where he had been drinking tea from a cardboard container and eating a cheese Danish before the telephone call interrupted him.

  He was a huge man, six feet two inches tall and weighing two hundred pounds, some ten pounds more than was comfortable for him. He had blue eyes and a square jaw with a cleft chin. His hair was red, except for a streak over his left temple where he had once been knifed and where the hair had curiously grown in white after the wound healed. He had a straight unbroken nose, and a good mouth with a wide lower lip. Sipping his tea, munching his Danish, he looked like a burly Captain Ahab who had somehow been trapped in a civil service job. A gun butt protruded from the holster under his coat as he leaned over the paper towel and allowed the Danish crumbs to fall onto it. The gun was a big one, as befitted the size of the man, a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum, weighing 44½ ounces, and capable of putting a hole the size of a baseball in your head if you happened to cross the path of Cotton Hawes on a night when the moon was full. He was biting into the Danish when the telephone rang again.

  “87th Squad, Kling here.”

  “The penalty for extortion,” the man said, “is imprisonment not exceeding fifteen years. Any other questions?”

  “Listen …” Kling started.

  “You listen,” the man said. “I want five thousand dollars in unmarked singles. I want them put into a metal lunch pail, and I want the pail taken to the third bench on the Clinton Street footpath into Grover Park. More later,” he said, and hung up.

  “We’re going to play Fits and Starts, I see,” Kling said to Hawes.

  “Yeah. Shall we call Pete?”

  “Let’s wait till we have the whole picture,” Kling said, and sighed and tried to get back to typing up his report. The phone did not ring again until eleven-twenty. When he lifted the receiver, he recognized the man’s voice at once.

  “To repeat,” the man said, “I want the lunch pail taken to the third bench on the Clinton Street footpath into Grover Park. If the bench is watched, if your man is not alone, the pail will not be picked up, and the commissioner will be killed.”

  “You want five grand left on a park bench?” Kling asked.

  “You’ve got it,” the man said, and hung up.

  “You think that’s all of it?” Kling asked Hawes.

  “I don’t know,” Hawes said. He looked up at the wall clock. “Let’s give him till midnight. If we don’t get another call by then, we’ll ring Pete.”

  “Okay,” Kling said.

  He began typing again. He typed hunched over the machine, using a six-finger system that was uniquely his own, typing rapidly and with a great many mistakes, overscoring or erasing as the whim struck him, detesting the paperwork that went into police work, wondering why anyone would want a metal pail left on a park bench where any passing stranger might pick it up, cursing the decrepit machine provided by the city, and then wondering how anyone could have the unmitigated gall to demand five thousand dollars not to commit a murder. He frowned as he worked, and because he was the youngest detective on the squad, with a face comparatively unravaged by the pressures of his chosen profession, the only wrinkle in evidence was the one caused by the frown, a deep cutting ridge across his smooth forehead. He was a blond man, six feet tall, with hazel eyes and an open countenance. He wore a yellow sleeveless pullover, and his brown sports jacket was draped over the back of his chair. The Colt .38 Detective’s Special he usually wore clipped to his belt was in its holster in the top drawer of his desk.

  He took seven calls in the next half-hour, but none of them were from the man who had threatened to kill Cowper. He was finishing his report, a routine listing of the persons interrogated in a mugging on Ainsley Avenue, when the telephone rang again. He reached for the receiver automatically. Automatically, Hawes lifted the extension.

  “Last call tonight,” the man said. “I want the money before noon tomorrow. There are more than one of us, so don’t attempt to arrest the man who picks it up or the commissioner will be killed. If the lunch pail is empty, or if it contains paper scraps or phony bills or marked bills, or if for any reason or by any circumstance the money is not on that bench before noon tomorrow, the plan to kill the commissioner will go into effect. If you have any questions, ask them now.”

  “You don’t really expect us to hand you five thousand dollars on a silver platter, do you?”

  “No, in a lunch pail,” the man said, and again Kling had the impression he was smiling.

  “I’ll have to discuss this with the lieutenant,” Kling said.

  “Yes, and he’ll doubtless have to discuss it with the parks commissioner,” the man said.

  “Is there any way we can reach you?” Kling asked, taking a wild gamble, thinking the man might hastily and automatically reveal his home number or his address.

  “You’ll have to speak louder,” the man said. “I’m a little hard of hearing.”

  “I said is there any way …”

  And the man hung up.

  The bitch city can intimidate you sometimes by her size alone, but when she works in tandem with the weather she can make you wish you were dead. Cotton Hawes wished he was dead on that Tuesday, March 5. The temperature as recorded at the Grover Park Lake at seven A.M. that morning was twelve degrees above zero, and by nine A.M.—when he started onto the Clinton Street footpath—it had risen only two degrees to stand at a frigid fourteen above. A strong harsh wind was blowing off the River Harb to the north, racing untrammeled through the narrow north-south corridor leading directly to the path. His red hair whipped fitfully about his hatless head, the tails of his overcoat were flat against the backs of his legs. He was wearing gloves and carrying a black lunch pail in his left hand. The third button of his overcoat, waist high, was open, and the butt of his Magnum rested just behind the gaping flap, ready for a quick right-handed, spring-assisted draw.

  The lunch pail was empty.

  They had awakened Lieutenant Byrnes at five minutes to twelve the night before, and advised him of their subsequent conversations with the man they now referred to as The Screwball. The lieutenant had mumbled a series of grunts into the telephone and then said, “I’ll be right down,” and then asked what time it was. They told him it was almost midnight. He grunted again, and hung up. When he got
to the squadroom they filled him in more completely, and it was decided to call the parks commissioner to apprise him of the threat against his life and to discuss any possible action with him. The parks commissioner looked at his bedside clock the moment the phone rang and immediately informed Lieutenant Byrnes that it was half past midnight, wasn’t this something that could wait until morning?

  Byrnes cleared his throat and said, “Well, someone says he’s going to shoot you.”

  The parks commissioner cleared his throat and said, “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

  The situation was ridiculous.

  The parks commissioner had never heard of a more ridiculous situation, why this man had to be an absolute maniac to assume anyone would pay him five thousand dollars on the strength of a few phone calls. Byrnes agreed that the situation was ridiculous, but that nonetheless a great many crimes in this city were committed daily by misguided or unprincipled people, some of whom were doubtless screwballs, but sanity was not a prerequisite for the successful perpetration of a criminal act.

  The situation was unthinkable.

  The parks commissioner had never heard of a more unthinkable situation, he couldn’t even understand why they were bothering him with what were obviously the rantings of some kind of lunatic. Why didn’t they simply forget the entire matter?

  “Well,” Byrnes said, “I hate to behave like a television cop, sir, I would really rather forget the entire thing, as you suggest, but the possibility exists that there is a plan to murder you, and in all good conscience I cannot ignore that possibility, not without discussing it first with you.”

  “Well, you’ve discussed it with me,” the parks commissioner said, “and I say forget it.”

  “Sir,” Byrnes said, “we would like to try to apprehend the man who picks up the lunch pail, and we would also like to supply you with police protection tomorrow night. Had you planned on leaving the house tomorrow night?”

  The parks commissioner said that Byrnes could do whatever he thought fit in the matter of apprehending the man who picked up the lunch pail, but that he did indeed plan on going out tomorrow night, was in fact invited by the mayor to attend a performance of Beethoven’s Eroica given by the Philharmonic at the city’s recently opened music and theater complex near Remington Circle, and he did not want or need police protection.

  Byrnes said, “Well, sir, let’s see what results we have with the lunch pail, we’ll get back to you.”

  “Yes, get back to me,” the parks commissioner said, “but not in the middle of the night again, okay?” and hung up.

  At five A.M. on Tuesday morning while it was still dark, Detectives Hal Willis and Arthur Brown drank two fortifying cups of coffee in the silence of the squadroom, donned foul-weather gear requisitioned from an Emergency Squad truck, clipped on their holsters, and went out onto the arctic tundra to begin a lonely surveillance of the third bench on the Clinton Street footpath into Grover Park. Since most of the park’s paths meandered from north to south and naturally had entrances on either end, they thought at first there might be some confusion concerning the Clinton Street footpath. But a look at the map on the precinct wall showed that there was only one entrance to this particular path, which began on Grover Avenue, adjacent to the park, and then wound through the park to end at the band shell near the lake. Willis and Brown planted themselves on a shelf of rock overlooking the suspect third bench, shielded from the path by a stand of naked elms. It was very cold. They did not expect action, of course, until Hawes dropped the lunch pail where specified, but they could hardly take up posts after the event, and so it had been Byrnes’ brilliant idea to send them out before anyone watching the bench might observe them. They did windmill exercises with their arms, they stamped their feet they continuously pressed the palms of their hands against portions of their faces that seemed to be going, the telltale whiteness of frostbite appearing suddenly and frighteningly in the bleak early morning hours. Neither of the two men had ever been so cold in his life.

  Cotton Hawes was almost, but not quite, as cold when he entered the park at nine A.M. that morning He passed two people on his way to the bench. One of them was an old man in a black overcoat, walking swiftly toward the subway kiosk on Grover Avenue. The other was a girl wearing a mink coat over a long pink nylon nightgown that flapped dizzily about her ankles, walking a white poodle wearing a red wool vest. She smiled at Hawes as he went by with his lunch pail.

  The third bench was deserted.

  Hawes took a quick look around and then glanced up and out of the park to the row of apartment buildings on Grover Avenue. A thousand windows reflected the early morning sun. Behind any one of those windows, there might have been a man with a pair of binoculars and a clear unobstructed view of the bench. He put the lunch pail on one end of the bench, moved it to the other end, shrugged, and relocated it in the exact center of the bench. He took another look around, feeling really pretty stupid, and then walked out of the park and back to the office. Detective Bert Kling was sitting at his desk, monitoring the walkie-talkie operated by Hal Willis in the park.

  “How you doing down there?” Kling asked.

  “We’re freezing our asses off,” Willis replied.

  “Any action yet?”

  “You think anybody’s crazy enough to be out in this weather?” Willis said.

  “Cheer up,” Kling said, “I hear the boss is sending you both to Jamaica when this is over.”

  “Fat Chance Department,” Willis said. “Hold it!”

  There was silence in the squadroom. Hawes and Kling waited. At last, Willis’ voice erupted from the speaker on Kling’s box.

  “Just a kid,” Willis said. “Stopped at the bench, looked over the lunch pail, and then left it right where it was.” “Stay with it,” Kling said.

  “We have to stay with it,” Brown’s voice cut in. “We’re frozen solid to this goddamn rock.”

  There were people in the park now.

  They ventured into the bitch city tentatively, warned by radio and television forecasters, further cautioned by the visual evidence of thermometers outside apartment windows, and the sound of the wind whipping beneath the eaves of old buildings, and the touch of the frigid blast that attacked any exploratory hand thrust outdoors for just an instant before a window slammed quickly shut again. They dressed with no regard to the dictates of fashion, the men wearing ear muffs and bulky mufflers, the women bundled into layers of sweaters and fur-lined boots, wearing woolen scarves to protect their heads and ears, rushing at a quick trot through the park, barely glancing at the bench or the black lunch pail sitting in the center of it. In a city notorious for its indifference, the citizens were more obviously withdrawn now, hurrying past each other without so much as eyes meeting, insulating themselves, becoming tight private cocoons that defied the cold. Speech might have made them more vulnerable, opening the mouth might have released the heat they had been storing up inside, commiseration would never help to diminish the wind that tried to cut them down in the streets, the saber-slash wind that blew in off the river and sent newspapers wildly soaring into the air, fedoras wheeling into the gutter. Speech was a precious commodity that cold March day.

  In the park, Willis and Brown silently watched the bench.

  The painters were in a garrulous mood.

  “What have you got going, a stakeout?” the first painter asked.

  “Is that what the walkie-talkie’s for?” the second painter asked.

  “Is there gonna be a bank holdup?”

  “Is that why you’re listening to that thing?”

  “Shut up,” Kling said encouragingly.

  The painters were on their ladders, slopping apple green paint over everything in sight.

  “We painted the D.A.’s office once,” the first painter said.

  “They were questioning this kid who stabbed his mother forty-seven times.”

  “Forty-seven times.”

  “In the belly, the head, the breasts, everyplace.”r />
  “With an icepick.”

  “He was guilty as sin.”

  “He said he did it to save her from the Martians.”

  “A regular bedbug.”

  “Forty-seven times.”

  “How could that save her from the Martians?” the second painter said.

  “Maybe Martians don’t like ladies with icepick holes in them,” the first painter said, and burst out laughing. The second painter guffawed with him Together, they perched on their ladders, helpless with laughter, limply holding brushes that dripped paint on the newspapers spread on the squadroom floor.

  The man entered the park at ten A.M.

  He was perhaps twenty-seven years old, with a narrow cold-pinched face, his lips drawn tight against the wind, his eyes watering. He wore a beige car coat, the collar pulled up against the back of his neck, buttoned tight around a green wool muffler at his throat His hands were in the slash pockets of the coat. He wore brown corduroy trousers, the wale cut diagonally, and brown high-topped workman’s shoes. He came onto the Clinton Street footpath swiftly without looking either to the right or the left, walked immediately and directly to the third bench on the path, picked up the lunch pail, tucked it under his arm, put his naked hand back into his coat pocket, wheeled abruptly, and was starting out of the park again, when a voice behind him said, “Hold it right there Mac.”

  He turned to see a tall burly Negro wearing what looked like a blue astronaut’s suit. The Negro was holding a big pistol in his right hand. His left hand held a wallet which fell open to reveal a gold and blue shield.

  “Police officer,” the Negro said. “We want to talk to you.”

  2

  Miranda-Escobedo sounds like a Mexican bullfighter. It is not.

  It is the police shorthand for two separate Supreme Court decisions. These decisions, together, lay down the ground rules for the interrogation of suspects and cops find them a supreme pain in the ass. There is not one working cop in the United States who thinks Miranda-Escobedo is a good idea. They are all fine Americans, these cops, and are all very concerned with the rights of the individual in a free society, but they do not like Miranda-Escobedo because they feel it makes their job more difficult. Their job is crime prevention.