Ed McBain_87th Precinct 22

by Fuzz

  But assuming they did hit tonight, Carella thought as he watched Willis double-jump two of his kings, assuming they did hit, and assuming he and Willis behaved as expected, made the capture, and then called in for a squad car with chains, how would he get home to his wife and children after La Bresca and Calucci were booked and put away for the night? His own car had snow tires, but not chains, and he doubted if the best snow tires made would mean a damn on that glacier out there. A possibility, of course, was that Captain Frick would allow one of the RMPs to drive him home to Riverhead, but using city property for transporting city employees was a practice heavily frowned upon, especially in these days of strife when deaf people were running around killing city officials. “King me,” Willis said.

  Carella snorted and kinged him. He looked at his watch. It was seven-twenty. If La Bresca and Calucci hit as expected, there was little more than a half-hour to go.

  In Pete Calucci’s rented room on North Sixteenth, he and La Bresca armed themselves. John the Tailor was seventy years old, a slight stooped man with graying hair and failing eyes, but they were not taking any chances with him that night. Calucci’s gun was a Colt Government Model .45, weighing thirty-nine ounces and having a firing capacity of seven, plus one in the chamber. La Bresca was carrying a Walther P-38, which he had bought from a fence on Dream Street, with eight slugs in the magazine and another in the chamber. Both guns were automatics. The Walther was classified as a medium-power pistol whereas the Colt, of course, was a heavy gun with greater power. Each was quite capable of leaving John the Tailor enormously dead if he gave them any trouble. Neither man owned a holster. Calucci put his pistol into the right-hand pocket of his heavy overcoat. La Bresca tucked his into the waistband of his trousers.

  They had agreed between them that they would not use the guns unless John the Tailor began yelling. It was their plan to reach the shop by ten minutes to eight, surprise the old man, leave him bound and gagged in the back room, and then return to Calucci’s place. The shop was only five minutes away, but because of the heavy snow, and because neither man owned an automobile, they set out at seven twenty-five.

  They both looked very menacing, and they both felt quite powerful with their big guns. It was a shame nobody was around to see how menacing and powerful they looked and felt.

  In the warm snug comfort of the radio motor patrol car, Patrolman Richard Genero studied the bleak and windswept streets outside, listening to the clink of the chains on the rear wheel tires, hearing the two-way short wave radio spewing its incessant dialogue. The man driving the RMP was a hair bag named Phillips, who had been complaining constantly from the moment they’d begun their shifts at three forty-five P.M. It was now seven-thirty, and Phillips was still complaining, telling Genero he’d done a Dan O’Leary this whole past week, not a minute’s breather, man had to be crazy to become a cop, while to his right the radio continued its oblivious spiel, Car Twenty-one, Signal thirteen, This is Twenty-one, Wilco, Car Twenty-eight, signal …

  “This reminds me of Christmas,” Genero said. “Yeah, some Christmas,” Phillips said. “I worked on Christmas day, you know that?”

  “I meant, everything white.”

  “Yeah, everything white,” Phillips said. “Who needs it?”

  Genero folded his arms across his chest and tucked his gloved hands into his armpits. Phillips kept talking. The radio buzzed and crackled. The skid chains clinked like sleigh bells.

  Genero felt drowsy.

  Something was bothering the deaf man.

  No, it was not the heavy snow which had undoubtedly covered manhole number M3860, a hundred and twenty feet south of the southern curb of Harris, in the center of Faxon Drive, no, it was not that. He had prepared for the eventuality of inclement weather, and there were snow shovels in the trunk of the black sedan idling at the curb downstairs. The snow would merely entail some digging to get at the manhole, and he was allowing himself an extra hour for that task, no, it was not the snow, it was definitely not the snow.

  “What is it?” Buck whispered. He was wearing his rented police sergeant’s uniform, and he felt strange and nervous inside the blue garment.

  “I don’t know,” Ahmad answered. “Look at the way he’s pacing.”

  The deaf man was indeed pacing. Wearing electrician’s coveralls, he walked back and forth past the desk in one corner of the room, not quite muttering, but certainly wagging his head like an old man contemplating the sorry state of the world. Buck, perhaps emboldened by the bravery citation on his chest, finally approached him and said, “What’s bothering you?”

  “The 87th,” the deaf man replied at once.

  “What?”

  “The 87th, the 87th,” he repeated impatiently. “What difference will it make if we kill the mayor? Don’t you see?”

  “No.”

  “They get away clean,” the deaf man said. “We kill JMV, and who suffers, will you tell me that?”

  “Who?” Buck asked.

  “Not the 87th, that’s for sure.”

  “Look,” Buck said gently, “we’d better get started. We’ve got to dig down to that manhole, we’ve got to …”

  “So JMV dies, so what?” the deaf man asked. “Is money everything in life? Where’s the pleasure?”

  Buck looked at him.

  “Where’s the pleasure?” the deaf man repeated. “If JMV—” He suddenly stopped, his eyes widening. “JMV,” he said again, his voice a whisper. “JMV!” he shouted excitedly, and went to the desk, and opened the middle drawer, and pulled out the Isola telephone directory. Quickly, he flipped to the rear section of the book.

  “What’s he doing?” Ahmad whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Buck whispered back.

  “Look at this!” the deaf man shouted. “There must be hundreds of them, thousands of them!”

  “Thousands of what?” Buck asked.

  The deaf man did not reply. Hunched over the directory, he kept turning pages, studying them, turning more pages. “Here we are,” he mumbled, “no, that’s no good … let’s see … here’s another one … no, no … just a second … ahhh, good … no, that’s all the way downtown … let’s see, let’s see … here … no …” mumbling to himself as he continued to turn pages, and finally shouting “Culver Avenue, that’s it, that’ll do it!” He picked up a pencil, hastily scribbled onto the desk pad, tore the page loose, and stuffed it into the pocket of his coveralls. “Let’s go!” he said.

  “You ready?” Buck asked.

  “I’m ready,” the deaf man said, and picked up the volt-ohm meter. “We promised to get JMV, didn’t we?” he asked.

  “We sure did.”

  “Okay,” he said, grinning. “We’re going to get two JMV’s—and one of them’s in the 87th Precinct!” Exuberantly, he led them out of the apartment.

  The two young men had been prowling the streets since dinnertime. They had eaten in a delicatessen off Ainsley and then had stopped to buy a half-gallon of gasoline in the service station on the corner of Ainsley and Fifth. The taller of the two young men, the one carrying the open can of gasoline, was cold. He kept telling the shorter one how cold he was. The shorter one said everybody was cold on a night like this, what the hell did he expect on a night like this?

  The taller one said he wanted to go home. He said they wouldn’t find nobody out on a night like this, anyway, so what was the use walking around like this in the cold? His feet were freezing, he said. His hands were cold too. Why don’t you carry this fuckin’ gas a while? he said.

  The shorter one told him to shut up.

  The shorter one said this was a perfect night for what they had to do because they could probably find maybe two guys curled up together in the same hallway, didn’t that make sense?

  The taller one said he wished he was curled up in a hallway someplace.

  They stood on the street comer arguing for a few minutes, each of them yelling in turn, and finally the taller one agreed to give it another ten minutes, but that was all
. The shorter one said Let’s try it for another half-hour, we bound to hit pay dirt, and the taller one said No, ten minutes and that’s it, and the shorter one said You fuckin’ idiot, I’m telling you this is a good night for it, and the taller one saw what was in his eyes, and became afraid again and said Okay, okay, but only a half-hour, I mean it, Jimmy, I’m really cold, really.

  You look like you’re about to start crying, Jimmy said.

  I’m cold, the other one said, that’s all.

  Well, come on, Jimmy said, we’ll find somebody and make a nice fire, huh? A nice warm fire.

  The two young men grinned at each other.

  Then they turned the corner and walked up the street toward Culver Avenue as Car Seventeen, bearing Phillips and Genero clinked by on its chained tires sounding like sleigh bells.

  It was difficult to tell who was more surprised, the cops or the robbers.

  The police commissioner had told His Honor the Mayor JMV that “a lot of police work dovetails past and present and future,” but it was fairly safe to assume he had nothing too terribly philosophical in mind. That is, he probably wasn’t speculating on the difference between illusion and reality, or the overlap of the dream state and the workaday world. That is, he probably wasn’t explaining time continua or warps, or parallel universes, or coexisting systems. He was merely trying to say that there are a lot of accidents involved in police work, and that too many cases would never get solved if it weren’t for those very accidents. He was trying to tell His Honor the Mayor JMV that sometimes cops get lucky.

  Carella and Willis got very lucky on that night of March fifteenth at exactly ten minutes to eight.

  They were watching the front of the shop because Dominick Di Fillippi (who had never ratted on anybody in his life) had told them the plan was to go into the shop at ten minutes to eight, just before John the Tailor drew the blinds on the plate glass window fronting the street. La Bresca was to perform that task instead, Di Fillippi had further said, and then he was to lock the front door while Calucci forced John the Tailor at gun point into the back room. In Di Fillippi’s ardent recital, there had been a lot of emphasis real or imagined, on the front of the shop. So everyone had merely assumed (as who wouldn’t?) that La Bresca and Calucci would come in through the front door, open the door, ting-a-ling would go the bell, shove their guns into John the Tailor’s face, and then go about their dirty business. It is doubtful that the police even knew there was a back door to the shop.

  La Bresca and Calucci knew there was a back door.

  They kicked that door in at precisely seven-fifty, right on schedule, kicked it in noisily and effectively, not caring whether or not they scared John the Tailor out of ten years’ growth, knowing he would rush to the back of the shop to see what the hell was happening, knowing he would run directly into two very large pistols.

  The first thing they saw was two guys playing checkers.

  The first thing La Bresca said was, “Fuzz!”

  He knew the short guy was fuzz because he had been questioned by him often enough. He didn’t know who the other guy was, but he reasoned that if you saw one mouse you probably had fifty, and if you saw one cop you probably had a thousand, so the place was probably crawling with cops, they had stepped into a very sweet little trap here—and that was when the curtain shot back and the front door of the shop burst open.

  It was also when all the overlapping confusion started, the past, present, and future jazz getting all mixed up so that it seemed for a tense ten seconds as if seven movies were being projected simultaneously on the same tiny screen. Even later, much later, Carella couldn’t quite put all the pieces together; everything happened too fast and too luckily, and he and Willis had very little to do with any of it.

  The first obvious fact that crackled up Carella’s spine and into his head was that he and Willis had been caught cold. Even as he rose from his chair, knocking it over backwards, even as he shouted, “Hal, behind you!” and reached for his revolver, he knew they’d been caught cold, they were staring into the open muzzles of two high caliber guns and they would be shot dead on the spot. He heard one of the men shout, “Fuzz!” and then he saw both guns come up level at the same time, and too many last thoughts crowded into his head in the tick of a second. Willis whirled, knocking checkerboard and checkers to the floor, drawing his gun, and suddenly John the Tailor threw back the curtain separating the rear of the shop from the front, and the front door of the shop burst open in the same instant.

  John the Tailor later said he had run back to see what the noise was, throwing the curtain between the two rooms, and then whirling to see what Carella only later saw, three men standing in the front doorway of his shop, all of them holding pistols.

  This was what La Bresca and Calucci must have seen as well, looking through the now open curtain directly to the front door. And whereas they must have instantly known they had caught the back-room cops cold, they now recognized the threat of the three other cops standing in the front door, all of them with pistols in their fists and kill looks on their faces. The three men weren’t cops, but La Bresca and Calucci didn’t know that. The sergeant standing in the doorway shouted, “Fuzz!” meaning he thought La Bresca and Calucci were fuzz, but La Bresca and Calucci merely thought he was announcing his own arrival. So they began shooting. The three men in the door, facing what they too thought was a police trap, opened fire at the same time. John the Tailor threw himself to the floor. Carella and Willis, recognizing a good healthy crossfire when they saw one, tried to flatten themselves against the wall. In the flattening process, Willis slipped on one of the fallen checkers and went tumbling to the floor, bullets spraying over his head.

  Carella’s gun was in his hand now. He leveled it at the front door because he had taken a good look at one of the men standing there firing into the back room, and whereas the man was not wearing his hearing aid, he was tall and blond and Carella recognized him at once. He aimed carefully and deliberately. The gun bucked in his hand when he pulled off the shot. He saw the deaf man clutch for his shoulder and then half-stumble, half-turn toward the open doorway. Someone screamed behind Carella, and he turned to see La Bresca falling over the pressing machine, spilling blood onto the white padding, and then four more shots exploded in the tiny shop and someone grunted, and there were more shots, Willis was up and firing, and then there was only smoke, heavy smoke that hung on the air in layers, the terrible nostril-burning stink of cordite, and the sound of John the Tailor on the floor, praying softly in Italian.

  “Outside!” Carella shouted, and leaped the counter dividing the shop, slipping in a pool of blood near the sewing machine, but regaining his footing and running coatless into the snow.

  There was no one in sight.

  The cold was numbing.

  It hit his naked gun hand immediately, seemed to wed flesh to steel.

  A trail of blood ran from the shop door across the white snow stretching endlessly into the city. Carella began following it.

  The deaf man ran as fast as he could, but the pain in his shoulder was intolerable.

  He could not understand what had happened.

  Was it possible they had figured it out? But no, they couldn’t have. And yet, they’d been there, waiting. How could they have known? How could they possibly have known when he himself hadn’t known until fifteen minutes ago?

  There had been at least twenty-five pages of “V” listings in the Isola directory, with about 500 names to a page, for a combined total of some 12,500 names. He had not counted the number of first names beginning with the letter “J,” but there seemed to be at least twenty or thirty on every page, and he had actually gone through eleven names with the initials “JMV,” the same initials as His Honor the Mayor James Martin Vale, before coming to the one on Culver Avenue.

  How could they have known? How could they have pinpointed the tailor shop of John Mario Vicenzo, the final twist of the knife, a JMV located within the very confines of the 87th? It’s impossi
ble, he thought. I left nothing to chance, it should have worked, I should have got them both, there were no wild cards in the deck, it should have worked.

  There were still some wild cards in the deck.

  “Look,” Jimmy said.

  The taller boy, the one carrying the gasoline can, lifted his head, squinted against the wind, and then ducked it immediately as a fiercer gust attacked his face. He had seen a tall blond man staggering off the pavement and into the center of the snowbound street.

  “Drunk as a pig,” Jimmy said beside him. “Let’s get him, Baby.”

  The one called Baby nodded bleakly. Swiftly, they ran toward the corner. The wind was stronger there, it struck them with gale force as they turned onto the wide avenue. The vag was nowhere in sight.

  “We lost him,” Baby said. His teeth were chattering, and he wanted to go home.

  “He’s got to be in one of these hallways,” Jimmy said. “Come on, Baby, it’s fire time.”

  From where Genero sat in the RMP car, he could see the empty windswept avenue through a frost-free spot on the windshield, snow devils ascending with each fresh gust of wind, hanging signs clanging and flapping, an eerie graveyard sound rasping at the windows of the automobile. The avenue was deserted, the snow locked the street from sidewalk to sidewalk, lights burned behind apartment windows like warming fires in a primeval night.