Til Death

by Ed McBain

  “Was the man killed?”

  Tommy hesitated. “Yeah,” he said at last.

  “And his buddy threatened you?”

  “He said he was gonna kill me one day.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “He got shipped back home. Frostbite or something. I don’t know. He lives in California.”

  “Have you ever heard from him since?”

  “No.”

  “Was he the kind of a person who’d do a thing like this? Send a spider?”

  “I didn’t know him very well. From what I did know, he seemed like the kind of guy who ate spiders for breakfast.”

  Carella almost choked on his coffee. He put down his cup and said, “Tommy, I’m going to give you some advice. Angela is a very sensitive girl. I guess it runs in the Carella family. Unless you want to wind up getting a divorce real soon, I wouldn’t discuss hairy or crawly or…”

  “I’m sorry, Steve,” Tommy said.

  “Okay. What was this guy’s name? The one who threatened you?”

  “Sokolin. Marty Sokolin.”

  “Have any pictures of him?”

  “No. What would I be doing with his picture?”

  “Were you in the same company?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have one of these company group pictures where everybody’s grinning and wishing he was out of the Army?”

  “No.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “He was a very big, beefy guy with a broken nose. He looked like a wrestler. Black hair, very dark eyes. A small scar near his right eye. He was always smoking cigars.”

  “Think he had a police record?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, we’ll check on it.” Carella was pensive for a moment. “It doesn’t seem like, though, that he’s the guy. I mean, what the hell, how would he know you were getting married today?” He shrugged. “Hell, this may just be a gag, anyway. Somebody with a warped sense of humor.”

  “Maybe,” Tommy said, but he didn’t seem convinced.

  “Where’s your phone?” Carella asked.

  “In the bedroom.”

  Carella started out of the kitchen. He paused. “Tommy, would you mind a few extra guests at your wedding?” he asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “Well, if this isn’t a gag—and it probably is—but if it isn’t, we don’t want anything happening to the groom, do we?” He grinned. “And the nice thing about having a cop for a brother-in-law is that he can get bodyguards whenever he needs them. Even on a Sunday.”

  There is no such day as Sunday in the police department. Sunday is exactly the same as Monday and Tuesday and all those other days. If you happen to have the duty on Sunday, that’s it. You don’t go to the commissioner or the chaplain or the mayor. You go to the squadroom. If Christmas happens to fall on one of your duty days, that’s extremely unfortunate, too, unless you can arrange a switch with a cop who isn’t celebrating Christmas. Life is just one merry round in the police department.

  On Sunday morning, June 22, Detective/2nd Grade Meyer Meyer was catching in the squadroom of the 87th Precinct. It was not a bad day to be in charge of the six-man detective team that had begun its shift at 8:00 A.M. and that would work through until 6:00 P.M. that evening. There was a mild breeze on the air, and the sky was a cloudless blue, and sunlight was pouring through the meshed grill screening over the squadroom’s windows. The squadroom, shoddy with time and use, was quite comfortable on a day such as this. There were days when the city’s temperature soared into the nineties, and on those days the squadroom of the 87th Precinct resembled nothing so much as a big iron coffin. But not today. Today, a man could sit without his trousers crawling up his behind. Today, a man could type up reports or answer phones or dig in the files without danger of melting into a small unidentifiable puddle on the squadroom floor.

  Meyer Meyer was quite content. Puffing on his pipe, he studied the Wanted circulars on his desk and thought about how nice it was to be alive in June.

  Bob O’Brien, six feet and one inch tall in his bare feet, weighing in at 210 pounds, stomped across the room and collapsed into the chair beside Meyer’s desk. Meyer felt an immediate sense of doom, because if ever there was a jinxed cop it was O’Brien. Since the time he’d been forced to kill a neighborhood butcher years ago—a man he’d known since he was a boy—O’Brien seemed to find himself constantly in the kind of scrapes wherein gunplay was absolutely necessary. He had not wanted to kill Eddie the butcher. But Eddie’d been a little out of his head and had come raving out of his shop swinging a meat cleaver at an innocent woman. O’Brien tried to stop him, but it was no use. Eddie knocked him to the pavement and then raised the meat cleaver and O’Brien, acting reflexively, drew his service revolver and fired. He killed Eddie with a single shot. And that night he went home and wept like a baby. He had killed six men since that time. In each of the shootings, he had not wanted to draw his gun—but circumstances so combined to force him into the act of legal murder. And whenever he was forced to kill, he still wept. Not openly. He wept inside, where it hurts most.

  The cops of the 87th Squad were not a superstitious bunch, but they nonetheless shied away from answering a complaint with Bob O’Brien along. With O’Brien along, there was bound to be shooting. They did not know why. It certainly wasn’t Bob’s fault He was always the last person on the scene to draw a gun, and he never did so until it became absolutely necessary. But with O’Brien along, there would undoubtedly be shooting and the cops of the 87th were normal-type human beings who did not long to become involved in gun duels. They knew that if O’Brien went out to break up a marble game being played by six-year-old tots, one of those tots would miraculously draw a submachine gun and begin blasting away. That was Bob O’Brien. A hard-luck cop.

  And that, of course, was pure police exaggeration because O’Brien had been a cop for ten years, four of them with the 87th, and he’d only shot seven men in all that time. Still, that was a pretty good average.

  “How’s it going, Meyer?” he asked.

  “Oh, very nicely,” Meyer said. “Very nicely, thank you.”

  “I’ve been wondering.”

  “What about?”

  “Miscolo.”

  Miscolo was the patrolman in charge of the Clerical Office just down the corridor. Meyer very rarely wondered about him. In fact, he very rarely even thought about him.

  “What’s the matter with Miscolo?” he asked now.

  “His coffee,” O’Brien said.

  “Something wrong with his coffee?”

  “He used to make a good cup of coffee,” O’Brien said wistfully. “I can remember times, especially during the winter, when I’d come in here off a plant or something and there was a cup of Miscolo’s coffee waiting for me and I’m telling you, Meyer, it made a man feel like a prince, a regular prince. It had rich body, and aroma, and flavor.”

  “You’re wasting your time with police work,” Meyer said. “I’m serious, Bob. You should become a television announcer. You can sell coffee the way—”

  “Come on, I’m trying to be serious.”

  “Excuse me. So what’s wrong with his coffee now?”

  “I don’t know. It just isn’t the same any more. You know when it changed?”

  “When?”

  “When he got shot. Remember when that nutty dame was up here with a bottle of TNT and she shot Miscolo? Remember that time?”

  “I remember,” Meyer said. He remembered very well. He still had scars as mementos of the pistol whipping he’d received from Virginia Dodge on that day last October. “Yes, I remember.”

  “Well, right after Miscolo got out of the hospital, the first day he was on the job again, the coffee began to stink. Now what do you suppose causes something like that, Meyer?”

  “Gee, I don’t know, Bob.”

  “Because, to me, it’s a phenomenon, I mean it. A man gets shot, and suddenly he can’t make good coffee any more. Now, to
me, that’s one of the eight wonders of the world.”

  “Why don’t you ask Miscolo?”

  “Now how can I do that, Meyer? He takes pride in the cup of coffee he makes. Can I ask him how come his coffee is suddenly no good? How can I do that, Meyer?”

  “I guess you can’t.”

  “And I can’t go out to buy coffee or he’ll be offended. What should I do, Meyer?”

  “Gee, Bob, I don’t know. It seems to me you’ve got a problem. Why don’t you try some occupational therapy?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why don’t you call up some of the witnesses to that holdup we had the other day and see if you can’t get something more out of them?”

  “You think I’m goofing, you mean?”

  “Did I say that, Bob?”

  “I’m not goofing, Meyer,” O’Brien said. “I’ve just got a thirst for some coffee, and the thought of drinking Miscolo’s is making me sick.”

  “Have a glass of water instead.”

  “At nine-thirty in the morning?” O’Brien looked shocked. “Do you think we can call the desk and ask Murchison to sneak in some coffee from outside?”

  The telephone on Meyer’s desk rang. He snatched it from the cradle and said, “87th Squad, Detective Meyer.”

  “Meyer, this is Steve.”

  “Hi, boy. Lonely for the place, huh? Can’t resist calling in even on your day off.”

  “It’s your twinkling blue eyes I miss,” Carella said.

  “Yeah, everybody’s charmed by my eyes. I thought your sister was getting married today.”

  “She is.”

  “So what can I do for you? Need a few bucks for a wedding present?”

  “No. Meyer, would you take a look at the new schedule and see who’s on my team this week? I want to know who else is off today.”

  “You need a fourth for bridge? Hold on a second.” He opened his top desk drawer and pulled out a clipboard to which a mimeographed sheet was attached. He studied the grid, his index finger running down the page:

  “Oh, I pity these poor bastards,” Meyer said into the phone. “Having to work with a schnook like—”

  “Come on, come on, who are they?” Carella asked.

  “Kling and Hawes.”

  “Have you got their home numbers handy?”

  “Is there anything else you’d like, sir? Shoes shined? Pants pressed? Loan of my wife for the weekend?”

  “Now that isn’t a bad idea,” Carella said, grinning.

  “Hold on. You got a pencil to take this down?”

  “Sarah’s number?”

  “Leave Sarah out of this.”

  “You were the one who brought her up.”

  “Listen, horny, you want these numbers or not? We’re trying to run a tight little squad here.”

  “Shoot,” Carella said, and Meyer gave him the numbers. “Thank you. Now there are a few more things I’d like you to do for me. First, will you see what you can get on a guy named Marty Sokolin. You may draw a blank because he’s a resident of California and we haven’t got time to check with the FBI. But give our own IB a buzz and see if he’s turned up here in the past few years. Most important, try to find out if he’s here now.”

  “I thought this was your day off,” Meyer said wearily.

  “A conscientious cop never has a day off,” Carella said conscientiously. “The last thing is this. Can you send a patrolman over to my house to pick up a note? I’d like the lab to look it over, and I’d like a report on it as soon as possible.”

  “You think we’re running a private messenger service here?”

  “Come on, Meyer, loosen the reins. I should be home in a half-hour or so. Try to get back to me on Sokolin before noon, will you?”

  “I’ll try,” Meyer said. “What else do you do for diversion on your day off? Pistol practice?”

  “Goodbye, Meyer,” Carella said. “I’ve got to call Bert and Cotton.”

  Cotton Hawes was dead asleep when the telephone rang in his bachelor apartment. He heard it only vaguely and then as a distant tinkle. During World War II, he’d been the only man aboard his PT boat who’d earned the distinction of having slept through the bleatings of the alarm announcing General Quarters. He’d almost lost his Chief Torpedoman’s rating because of the incident. But the captain of the vessel was a lieutenant, JG, who’d been trained as a radar technician for the Navy’s Communications Division and who didn’t know torpedoes from toenails. He recognized, with some injury to his ego, that the man who really commanded the boat, the man who established rapport with the crew, the man who knew navigation and ballistics, was really Cotton Hawes and not himself. The JG (anachronistically called “The Old Man” by the crew, even though he was only twenty-five years old) had been a disc jockey in his home town, Schenectady, New York. He wanted only to return safely to—in order of their importance— his beloved records, his beloved MG convertible, and his beloved Annabelle Tyler whom he’d been dating since high school. He did not appreciate Naval chains of command or Naval reprimands or Naval operations. He knew he had a job to do and he knew he could not do it without Cotton Hawes’s complete co-operation. Perhaps the Admiral would have been delighted were Hawes demoted to Torpedoman First Class. The JG didn’t much give a damn about the Admiral.

  “You’ll have to watch that stuff,” he said to Hawes. “We can’t have you sleeping through another kamikaze attack.”

  “No, sir,” Hawes said. “I’m sorry, sir. I’m a heavy sleeper.”

  “I’m assigning a seaman to wake you whenever General Quarters is sounded. That should take care of it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Hawes said. “Thank you, sir.”

  “How the hell did you manage to snore through that ungodly din, Cotton? We almost had two direct hits on our bow!”

  “Mike, I can’t help it,” Hawes said. “I’m a heavy sleeper.”

  “Well, somebody’ll wake you from now on,” the JG said. “Let’s come through this damn thing alive, huh, Cotton?”

  They came through the damn thing alive. Cotton Hawes never heard from the JG after they were separated at Lido Beach. He assumed he’d gone back to jockeying discs in Schenectady, New York. And whereas the seaman had temporarily foiled the further attempts of Japanese pilots to sink the boat, the victory over Morpheus was at best a shallow one. Cotton Hawes was still a heavy sleeper. He attributed this to the fact that he was a big man, six feet two inches tall and weighing 190 pounds. Big men, he maintained, needed a lot of sleep.

  The telephone continued to tinkle somewhere in the far distance. There was movement on the bed, the creaking of springs, the rustle of the sheet being thrown back. Hawes stirred slightly. The distant tinkle was somewhat louder now. And then, added to the tinkle, came a voice fuzzy with sleep.

  “Hello?” the voice said. “Who? I’m sorry, Mr. Carella, he’s asleep. Can you call back a little later? Me? I’m Christine Maxwell.” The voice paused. “No, I don’t think I ought to wake him right now. Can he call you when he…” Christine paused again. Cotton sat up in bed. She stood naked at the telephone, the black receiver to her ear, her blonde hair pushed back to tumble over the black plastic in a riot of contrast. Delightedly, he watched her, her slender fingers curled about the telephone, the curving sweep of her arm, the long length of her body. Her brow was knotted in a frown now. Her blue eyes were puzzled.

  “Well,” she said, “why didn’t you say you were from the squad to begin with? Just a moment, I’ll see if—”

  “I’m up,” Hawes said from the bed.

  “Just a second,” Christine said to the telephone. “He’s coming now.” She cradled the mouthpiece. “It’s a Steve Carella. He says he’s from the 87th Squad.”

  “He is,” Hawes said, walking to the phone.

  “Does that mean you’ll have to go in today?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You promised you’d spend the day—”

  “I haven’t even talked to him yet, honey.” Gently, Hawes took the p
hone from her hand. “Hello, Steve,” he said. He yawned.

  “Did I get you out of bed?”

  “Yes.”

  “You busy today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Feel like doing me a favor?”

  “No.”

  “Thanks a million.”

  “I’m sorry, Steve, I’ve got a date. I’m supposed to go on a boat ride up the Harb.”

  “Can’t you break it? I need help.”

  “If I break the date, the lady’ll break my head.” Christine, listening to the conversation, nodded emphatically.

  “Come on. Big strong guy like you. You can take the girl with you.”

  “Take her where?”

  “To my sister’s wedding.”

  “I don’t like weddings,” Hawes said. “They make me nervous.”

  “Somebody’s threatened my future brother-in-law. Or at least it looks that way. I’d like a few people I can trust in the crowd. Just in case anything happens. What do you say?”

  “Well…” Hawes started. Christine shook her head. “No, Steve. I’m sorry.”

  “Look, Cotton, when’s the last time I asked you for a favor?”

  “Well…” Hawes started, and again Christine shook her head. “I can’t, Steve.”

  “There’ll be free booze,” Carella said.

  “No.”

  “Take the girl with you.”

  “No.”

  “Cotton, I’m asking a favor.”

  “Just a second,” Hawes said, and he covered the mouthpiece.

  “No,” Christine said immediately.

  “You’re invited,” Hawes said. “To a wedding. What do you say?”

  “I want to go on the boat ride. I haven’t been on a boat ride since I was eighteen.”

  “We’ll go next Sunday, okay?”

  “You’re not off next Sunday.”

  “Well, the first Sunday I am off, okay?”

  “No.”

  “Christine?”

  “No.”

  “Honey?”

  “Oh, damnit.”

  “All right?”