Transgressions

by Ed McBain

James and Fanny Hope had enjoyed eight years in that house on Ellis Street, before a stroke carried him off in 1876. They had let his white kinfolk take him back to New York for burying. Better to have him far away, Fanny Hope had said, than separated from us by a cemetery wall here in Augusta.

  Fanny raised her brood of eight alone, and they did her credit. She had lived three years into the twentieth century, long enough to see her offspring graduate from colleges and go on to fine careers. Little blue-eyed John Hope was the best of them, folks said. He had attended Brown University up north, and now he was president of a college in Atlanta. So was little Tommy Wilson, the white preacher’s son, who now went by his middle name of Woodrow, and was a “throne” at Princeton College up north. You never could tell about a child, how it would turn out.

  Though he never told anyone, Grandison had hoped that Dr. George’s son Madison might be the outstanding one of Fanny’s children, but he had been content to work at low wage jobs in Augusta and to care for his aging mother. He and Dr. George had that in common—neither of the sons had surpassed them.

  Funny to think that he had outlived the beautiful Fanny Hope. In his mind she is still a poised and gentle young girl, and sometimes he regrets that he did not go to her burying in Cedar Grove. The dead rested in peace there now, for the state had legalized the procuring of cadavers by the medical schools some twenty years back, but around that time, rumors had surfaced in the community about grave robbing. Where had the doctors got the bodies all those years for their dissecting classes? Cedar Grove, of course. There was talk of a riot. Augusta had an undertaker now for people of color. The elegant Mr. Dent, with his fancy black oak hearse with the glass panels, and the plumed horses to draw it along in style. Had John or Julia Dent started those rumors to persuade people to be embalmed so the doctors wouldn’t get you? There had been sharp looks and angry mutterings at the time, for everyone knew who had been porter at the medical college for all these years, but he was an old man by then, a wiry pillar of dignity in his white suit, and so they let him alone, but he did not go to buryings any more.

  The night air is cool, and he takes a deep breath, savoring the smell of flowers borne on the wind. He hears no voices in the wind, and dreams no dreams of dead folks reproaching him for what he has done. In a little while, a few months or years at most, for he is nearly ninety, he too will be laid to rest in Cedar Grove among the empty grave sites, secret monuments to his work. He is done with this world, with its new machines and the new gulf between the races. Sometimes he wonders if there are two heavens, so that Fanny Hope will be forever separated from her husbands by some celestial fence, but he rather hopes that there is no hereafter at all. It would be simpler so. And in all his dissecting he has never found a soul.

  He smiles on the dark street, remembering a young minister who had once tried to persuade him to attend a funeral. “Come now, Mr. Harris,” the earnest preacher had said. “There is nothing to fear in a cemetery. Surely those bodies are simply the discarded husks of our departed spirits. Surely the dead are no longer there.”

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Allen, Lane. “Grandison Harris, Sr.: Slave, Resurrectionist and Judge.” Athens, GA: Bulletin of the Georgia Academy of Science, 34:192-199.

  Ball, James M. The Body Snatchers. New York: Dorset Press, 1989.

  Blakely, Robert L., and Judith M. Harrington. Bones in the Basement: Post Mortem Racism in Nineteenth Century Medical Training. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1997.

  Burr, Virginia Ingraham, ed. The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1848-1889. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1990.

  Cashin, Edward J. Old Springfield: Race and Religion in Augusta, Georgia. Augusta, GA: The Springfield Village Park Assoc. 1995.

  Corley, Florence Fleming. Confederate City: Augusta, Georgia 1860-1865. Columbia, SC: The USC Press; Rpt. Spartanburg, SC: The Reprint Company, 1995.

  Davis, Robert S. Georgia Black Book: Morbid Macabre and Disgusting Records of Genealogical Value. Greenville, SC: Southern Historical Press, 1982.

  Fido, Martin. Body Snatchers: A History of the Resurrectionists. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988.

  Fisher, John Michael. Fisher & Watkins Funeral Home, Danville, VA. Personal Interview, March 2003.

  Kirby, Bill. The Place We Call Home: A Collection of Articles About Local History from the Augusta Chronicle. Augusta, GA: The Augusta Chronicle, 1995.

  Lee, Joseph M. III. Images of America: Augusta and Summerville. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2000.

  Spalding, Phinizy. The History of the Medical College of Georgia. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1997.

  Torrence, Ridgely. The Story of John Hope. New York: Macmillan, 1948.

  United States Census Records: Richmond County, GA: 1850; 1860; 1870; 1880; 1990.

  ED MCBAIN

  Ed McBain was born in 1956, when Evan Hunter was thirty years old. I am both of these people. What happened was that Pocket Books, Inc., had published the paperback edition of The Blackboard Jungle (by Evan Hunter) and wanted to know if I had any ideas for a mystery series. I came up with the notion of the 87th Precinct, and they gave me a contract for three paperback books, “to see how it goes.” I was advised to put a pseudonym on the new series because “If it becomes known that Evan Hunter is writing mystery novels, it could be damaging to your career as a serious novelist,” quote, unquote. When I finished the first book, Cop Hater, I still didn’t have a new name. I went out into the kitchen, where my wife was feeding my twin sons, and I said, “How’s Ed McBain?” She thought for a moment, and then said, “Good.”

  Fiddlers, which will be published this year, is the fifty-sixth title in the 87th Precinct series; frankly, I can’t see that the Evan Hunter career has suffered at all. Between them, Hunter and McBain have written more than a hundred novels. McBain has never written a screenplay, but Hunter has written several, including The Birds for Alfred Hitchcock. The most recent Hunter novel was The Moment She Was Gone. The most recent McBain was Alice in Jeopardy, the first in a new mystery series.

  But only once have they ever actually written anything together: Hunter wrote the first half of Candyland and McBain wrote the second half.

  They still speak to each other.

  MERELY HATE

  Ed McBain

  A blue Star of David had been spray-painted on the windshield of the dead driver’s taxi.

  “This is pretty unusual,” Monoghan said.

  “The blue star?” Monroe asked.

  “Well, that, too,” Monoghan agreed.

  The two homicide detectives flanked Carella like a pair of book-ends. They were each wearing black suits, white shirts, and black ties, and they looked somewhat like morticians, which was not a far cry from their actual calling. In this city, detectives from Homicide Division were overseers of death, expected to serve in an advisory and supervisory capacity. The actual murder investigation was handled by the precinct that caught the squeal—in this case, the Eight-Seven.

  “But I was referring to a cabbie getting killed,” Monoghan explained. “Since they started using them plastic partitions . . . what, four, five years ago? . . . yellow-cab homicides have gone down to practically zip.”

  Except for tonight, Carella thought.

  Tall and slender, standing in an easy slouch, Steve Carella looked like an athlete, which he wasn’t. The blue star bothered him. It bothered his partner, too. Meyer was hoping the blue star wasn’t the start of something. In this city—in this world—things started too fast and took too long to end.

  “Trip sheet looks routine,” Monroe said, looking at the clipboard he’d recovered from the cab, glancing over the times and locations handwritten on the sheet. “Came on at midnight, last fare was dropped off at one-forty. When did you guys catch the squeal?”

  Car four, in the Eight-Seven’s Adam Sector, had discovered the cab parked at the curb on Ainsley Avenue at two-thirty in the morning. The driver was slumped over the wheel, a bullet hol
e at the base of his skull. Blood was running down the back of his neck, into his collar. Blue paint was running down his windshield. The uniforms had phoned the detective squadroom some five minutes later.

  “We got to the scene at a quarter to three,” Carella said.

  “Here’s the ME, looks like,” Monoghan said.

  Carl Blaney was getting out of a black sedan marked with the seal of the Medical Examiner’s Office. Blaney was the only person Carella knew who had violet eyes. Then again, he didn’t know Liz Taylor.

  “What’s this I see?” he asked, indicating the clipboard in Monroe’s hand. “You been compromising the crime scene?”

  “Told you,” Monoghan said knowingly.

  “It was in plain sight,” Monroe explained.

  “This the vie?” Blaney asked, striding over to the cab and looking in through the open window on the driver’s side. It was a mild night at the beginning of May. Spectators who’d gathered on the sidewalk beyond the yellow CRIME SCENE tapes were in their shirt sleeves. The detectives in sport jackets and ties, Blaney and the homicide dicks in suits and ties, all looked particularly formal, as if they’d come to the wrong street party.

  “MCU been here yet?” Blaney asked.

  “We’re waiting,” Carella said.

  Blaney was referring to the Mobile Crime Unit, which was called the CSI in some cities. Before they sanctified the scene, not even the ME was supposed to touch anything. Monroe felt this was another personal jab, just because he’d lifted the goddamn clipboard from the front seat. But he’d never liked Blaney, so fuck him.

  “Why don’t we tarry over a cup of coffee?” Blaney suggested, and without waiting for company, started walking toward an all-night diner across the street. This was a black neighborhood, and this stretch of turf was largely retail, with all of the shops closed at three-fifteen in the morning. The diner was the only place ablaze with illumination, although lights had come on in many of the tenements above the shuttered shops.

  The sidewalk crowd parted to let Blaney through, as if he were a visiting dignitary come to restore order in Baghdad. Carella and Meyer ambled along after him. Monoghan and Monroe lingered near the taxi, where three or four blues stood around scratching their asses. Casually, Monroe tossed the clipboard through the open window and onto the front seat on the passenger side.

  There were maybe half a dozen patrons in the diner when Blaney and the two detectives walked in. A man and a woman sitting in one of the booths were both black. The girl was wearing a purple silk dress and strappy high-heeled sandals. The man was wearing a beige linen suit with wide lapels. Carella and Meyer each figured them for a hooker and her pimp, which was profiling because for all they knew, the pair could have been a gainfully employed, happily married couple coming home from a late party. Everyone sitting on stools at the counter was black, too. So was the man behind it. They all knew this was the Law here, and the Law frequently spelled trouble in the hood, so they all fell silent when the three men took stools at the counter and ordered coffee.

  “So how’s the world treating you these days?” Blaney asked the detectives.

  “Fine,” Carella said briefly. He had come on at midnight, and it had already been a long night.

  The counterman brought their coffees.

  Bald and burly and blue-eyed, Meyer picked up his coffee cup, smiled across the counter, and asked, “How you doing?”

  “Okay,” the counterman said warily.

  “When did you come to work tonight?”

  “Midnight.”

  “Me, too,” Meyer said. “Were you here an hour or so ago?”

  “I was here, yessir.”

  “Did you see anything going down across the street?”

  “Nossir.”

  “Hear a shot?”

  “Nossir.”

  “See anyone approaching the cab there?”

  “Nossir.”

  “Or getting out of the cab?”

  “I was busy in here,” the man said.

  “What’s your name?” Meyer asked.

  “Whut’s my name got to do with who got aced outside?”

  “Nothing,” Meyer said. “I have to ask.”

  “Deaven Brown,” the counterman said.

  “We’ve got a detective named Arthur Brown up the Eight-Seven,” Meyer said, still smiling pleasantly.

  “That right?” Brown said indifferently.

  “Here’s Mobile,” Carella said, and all three men hastily downed their coffees and went outside again.

  The chief tech was a Detective/First named Carlie . . .

  “For Charles,” he explained.

  . . . Epworth. He didn’t ask if anyone had touched anything, and Monroe didn’t volunteer the information either. The MCU team went over the vehicle and the pavement surrounding it, dusting for prints, vacuuming for fibers and hair. On the cab’s dashboard, there was a little black holder with three miniature American flags stuck in it like an open fan. In a plastic holder on the partition facing the back seat, there was the driver’s pink hack license. The name to the right of the photograph was Khalid Aslam. It was almost four A.M. when Epworth said it would be okay to examine the corpse.

  Blaney was thorough and swift.

  Pending a more thorough examination at the morgue, he proclaimed cause of death to be a gunshot wound to the head—

  Big surprise, Monroe thought, but did not say.

  —and told the assembled detectives that they would have his written report by the end of the day. Epworth promised likewise, and one of the MCU team drove the taxi off to the police garage where it would be sealed as evidence. An ambulance carried off the stiff. The blues took down the CRIME SCENE tapes, and told everybody to go home, nothing to see here anymore, folks.

  Meyer and Carella still had four hours to go before their shift ended.

  ______

  “Khalid Aslam, Khalid Aslam,” the man behind the computer said. “Must be a Muslim, don’t you think?”

  The offices of the License Bureau at the Taxi and Limousine Commission occupied two large rooms on the eighth floor of the old brick building on Emory Street all the way downtown. At five in the morning, there were only two people on duty, one of them a woman at another computer across the room. Lacking population, the place seemed cavernous.

  “Most of the drivers nowadays are Muslims,” the man said. His name was Lou Foderman, and he seemed to be close to retirement age, somewhere in his mid-sixties, Meyer guessed.

  “Khalid Aslam, Khalid Aslam,” he said again, still searching. “The names these people have. You know how many licensed yellow-cab drivers we have in this city?” he asked, not turning from the computer screen. “Forty-two thousand,” he said, nodding. “Khalid Aslam, where are you hiding, Khalid Aslam? Ninety percent of them are immigrants, seventy percent from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. You want to bet Mr. Aslam here is from one of those countries? How much you wanna bet?”

  Carella looked up at the wall clock.

  It was five minutes past five.

  “Back when I was driving a cab,” Foderman said, “this was during the time of the Roman Empire, most of your cabbies were Jewish or Irish or Italian. We still got a couple of Jewish drivers around, but they’re mostly from Israel or Russia. Irish and Italian, forget about it. You get in a cab nowadays, the driver’s talking Farsi to some other guy on his cell phone, you think they’re planning a terrorist attack. I wouldn’t be surprised Mr. Aslam was talking on the phone to one of his pals, and the passenger shot him because he couldn’t take it anymore, you said he was shot, correct?”

  “He was shot, yes,” Meyer said.

  He looked up at the clock, too.

  “Because he was babbling on the phone, I’ll bet,” Foderman said. “These camel jockeys think a taxi is a private phone booth, never mind the passenger. You ask them to please stop talking on the phone, they get insulted. We get more complaints here about drivers talking on the phone than anything else. Well, maybe playing the radio. They
play their radios with all this string music from the Middle East, sitars, whatever they call them. Passengers are trying to have a decent conversation, the driver’s either playing the radio or talking on the phone. You tell him please lower the radio, he gives you a look could kill you on the spot. Some of them even wear turbans and carry little daggers in their boots, Sikhs, they call themselves. ‘All Singhs are Sikhs,’” Forderman quoted, “ ‘but not all Sikhs are Singhs,’ that’s an expression they have. Singhs is a family name. Or the other way around, I forget which. Maybe it’s ‘All Sikhs are Singhs,’ who knows? Khalid Aslam, here he is. What do you want to know about him?”

  Like more than thousands of other Muslim cab drivers in this city, Khalid Aslam was born in Bangladesh. Twelve years ago, he came to America with his wife and one child. According to his updated computer file, he now had three children and lived with his family at 3712 Locust Avenue in Majesta, a neighborhood that once—like the city’s cab drivers—was almost exclusively Jewish, but which now was predominately Muslim.

  Eastern Daylight Savings Time had gone into effect three weeks ago. This morning, the sun came up at six minutes to six. There was already heavy early-morning rush-hour traffic on the Majesta Bridge. Meyer was driving. Carella was riding shotgun.

  “You detect a little bit of anti-Arab sentiment there?” Meyer asked.

  “From Foderman, you mean?”

  “Yeah. It bothers me to hear another Jew talk that way.”

  “Well, it bothers me, too,” Carella said.

  “Yeah, but you’re not Jewish.”

  Someone behind them honked a horn.

  “What’s with him?” Meyer asked.

  Carella turned to look.

  “Truck in a hurry,” he said.

  “I have to tell you,” Meyer said, “that blue star on the windshield bothers me. Aslam being Muslim. A bullet in the back of his head, and a Star of David on the windshield, that bothers me.”

  The truck driver honked again.

  Meyer rolled down the window and threw him a finger. The truck driver honked again, a prolonged angry blast this time.