See Them Die (87th Precinct), page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Praise for Ed McBain & the 87th Precinct
“Raw and realistic…The bad guys are very bad, and the good guys are better.”—Detroit Free Press
“Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series…simply the best police procedurals being written in the United States.”—Washington Post
“The best crime writer in the business.”—Houston Post
“Ed McBain is a national treasure.”—Mystery News
“It’s hard to think of anyone better at what he does. In fact, it’s impossible.”—Robert B. Parker
“I never read Ed McBain without the awful thought that I still have a lot to learn. And when you think you’re catching up, he gets better.”
—Tony Hillerman
“McBain is the unquestioned king…light years ahead of anyone else in the field.”—San Diego Union-Tribune
“McBain tells great stories.”—Elmore Leonard
“Pure prose poetry…It is such writers as McBain who bring the great American urban mythology to life.”—The London Times
“The McBain stamp: sharp dialogue and crisp plotting.”—Miami Herald
“You’ll be engrossed by McBain’s fast, lean prose.”—Chicago Tribune
“McBain redefines the American police novel…he can stop you dead in your tracks with a line of dialogue.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“The wit, the pacing, his relish for the drama of human diversity [are] what you remember about McBain novels.”—Philadelphia Inquirer
“McBain is a top pro, at the top of his game.”—Los Angeles Daily News
See Them Die
AN 87TH PRECINCT NOVEL
ED McBAIN
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 1960 Ed McBain
Republished in 2011
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
eISBN: 9781477855362
This is for Rita and Bud
The city in these pages is imaginary.
The people, the places are all fictitious.
Only the police routine is based on established
investigatory technique.
July.
Heat.
In the city, they are synonymous, they are identical, they mean one and the same thing. In the 87th Precinct, they strut the streets with a vengeance, these twin bitches who wear their bleached blond hair and their bright-red lipstick slashes, who sway on glittering rhinestone slippers, who flaunt their saffron silk. Heat and July, they are identical twins who were born to make you suffer.
The air is tangible. You can reach out to touch it. It is sticky and clinging, you can wrap it around you like a viscous overcoat. The asphalt in the gutters has turned to gum, and your heels clutch at it when you try to navigate the streets. The pavements glow with a flat off-white brilliance, contrasting with the running black of the gutter, creating an alternating pattern of shade and light that is dizzying. The sun sits low on a still sky, a sky as pale as faded dungarees. There is only a hint of blue in this sky for it has been washed out by the intensity of the sun, and there is a shimmer over everything, the shimmer of heat ready to explode in rain.
The buildings bear the heat with the solemnity of Orthodox Jews in long, black frock coats. They have known this heat. Some of them have withstood it for close to a century, and so their suffering is a silent one; they face the heat with the intolerant blankness of stoics.
Scrawled onto the pavement in white chalk are the words: JESÚS VIENE. PREPÁRENSE POR NUESTRA REDENCION!
The buildings crowd the sidewalks and prepare neither for their redemption nor their perdition.
There is not much sky on this street.
There are places in the world where the sky is big, where it stretches from horizon to horizon like a gaudy blue tent, but such is not the case on this street. The sky here seems to have been wedged down over the uneven silhouette of the buildings, crammed into place because it would not fit properly, battered with a grimy fist until it tightly capped the street and contained the heat there.
The street is quiet.
It is only 8:40 in the morning, and it is Sunday.
There are unfluttering scraps of newspapers in the gutters; they share the gummy asphalt with empty tin cans and broken bottles and sticks ripped from orange crates. In the empty lot on one corner, there are the charred remains of bonfires, a torn and soiled crib mattress, the trailing white snakes of used condoms. The fire escapes are hung with the trivia of life: blankets, pillows, beer cases, potted plants, and here and there a guitar. A man sleeping on one of the fire escapes moves his arm, and it dangles down through the iron bars for a moment, swings idly, and then comes to a rest.
This is the only movement on the street.
The air is fetidly still. The heat is a self-contained, lifeless unit that does not stir and that discourages the motion of anything it embraces. It has baked itself into the brick fronts of the tenements, and the asphalt, and the pavements, and the sky. It has baked itself into these things and onto these things like orange enamel on copper.
Somewhere in the distance, the church bells toll, for this is Sunday morning, but even the bells ring out on the air with a harsh flatness, a metallic unevenness that must force its way through layers and layers of heat. Beneath that, like a rushing counterpoint, the elevated train roars past two blocks south, and then the train sound dies, and the bell sound dissipates in the sticky silence of the air, and the street is still once more.
Two people will die on this street today.
The boy’s name was Zip.
He was seventeen years old and he erupted from the mouth of the tenement like a hand-grenade explosion. He came onto the stoop lightly, and then almost danced down the steps. He looked up at the waking man on the fire escape, waved nonchalantly, and then glanced up the street. He was tall and thin, good-looking in a craggy way, with a light complexion and black hair that he wore in a high crown off his forehead. He was wearing tight black slacks and high-topped combat boots and a bright silk purple jacket with his name embroidered in yellow on the left breast.
He looked at his watch.
It was 8:45, and he noted the time and then nodded, as if he had correctly estimated the exact duration of each of his movements up to this moment, as if he and the universe were meshing gears correctly. He looked up the street again. There was an air of restless urgency about him, the air a business magnate wears when he is expecting to close a deal for the purchase of a new company. The attitude was curious on a seventeen-year-old. And yet, he looked at his watch again, a person captured by the intricacies of time, the mind of a fifty-year-old banker seemingly ensnared in the body of an adolescent.
He lighted a cigarette, took several puffs on it, and then stamped it out under one booted foot. He looked at his watch again, stepped into the center of the street, and then started for the luncheonette on the corner. A huge sign traveled the corner of the building over the luncheonette like the marching electric letters on the Times Building in New York. These letters, however, were painted in red on a white field and they did not announce world-shattering events. They simply stated: LUÍS LUNCHEONETTE. The luncheonette occupied a space in the corner of the building. When the doors were rolled back, the luncheonette became an extension of the sidewalk, open on both sides, the avenue and the street. The doors were closed now. The corrugated iron presented the impregnable look of a fortress. The boy went to the door on the street side, tried it, found it locked, and kicked it in anger.
“What are you doing there?” a voice said. “Get away from there!”
The man who came up the street had spoken with a slight Spanish accent, a gentle accent that seemed molded exactly to his appearance. He was a stoop-shouldered man wearing a small black mustache, a man who seemed older than his fifty-odd years, who moved with an economy that somehow seemed tortured.
“Don’t tell me you’re finally gonna open this dump!” Zip said.
Luís Amandez walked to the huge iron door and said, “What were you doing? Trying to break in here, hah? That what you were trying to do?”
He reached into his pocket for the key to the padlock, inserted it, took off the lock, and prepared to roll the door back into its overhead tracks.
“Don’t flatter the dump,” Zip said. “Come on, come on, get the lead out. Open the goddamn doors.”
“This is my place, and I’ll open them as slow or as fast as I want to. You snotnoses…”
Zip gr inned suddenly. “Come on, man,” he said, and there was infectious warmth in his voice now. “You got to move! You want to get any place, you got to move.”
Luís rolled back the first of the doors. “I wish you would move,” he said. “To California.”
“Dig the old bird,” Zip said. “He’s got humor.” And he walked into the luncheonette and directly to the wall phone near the jukebox. Luís went around to the avenue side and took the padlock off the door there, rolling the door back, allowing the sunshine to rip through the corner store like cross fire. Zip had taken the phone from its hook, reached into his pocket for a coin, and discovered that the smallest change he had was a quarter. He slammed the receiver onto the hook and went to meet Luís as he entered the shop.
“Listen, break a quarter for me,” he said.
“What for?” Luís asked. “For the jukebox?”
“What’s all the time ‘What for’? Don’t I buy enough in this crumby joint? I ask you for change, don’t give me a Dragnet routine.”
“It’s too early to play the juke,” Luís said calmly, going behind the counter and taking a white apron from a hook. “There are still people sleeping.”
“In the first place, I don’t care who’s sleeping. It’s time they were up hustling. In the second place, I ain’t gonna play the juke, I’m gonna make a phone call. And in the third and last place, you don’t change this two bits for me, and one day you’re liable to come in and find all your coffeepots busted.”
“You threaten me?” Luís said. “I am a friend of the police. I tell them…”
“Come on, come on,” Zip said, and again the warm grin flashed on his face. “You can sue me later. Right now, give me the change, huh? Come on.”
Luís shook his head, picked up the quarter, and reached into his pocket. He made the change, and Zip picked it up and started for the telephone. He began dialing. Luís, since money matters had been brought to mind, walked to the cash register, reached into his pocket, and put in his day’s starting money, laying the bills into the register drawer. He was about to break open a roll of dimes when Zip yelled, “Hey! Hey, Cooch! Over here!”
Luís turned. The second boy was also from the neighborhood, also wearing one of the purple silk jackets, but he was younger than Zip. Luís studied him from the distance of age, and wondered if he too had sported such a ridiculously thin and boyish-looking mustache when he was sixteen. He decided that he had not. The boy was short and squat, with thick powerful hands. His complexion was dark. He spotted Zip from the middle of the street and shouted, “Hey, Zipboy!” and then broke into a trot for the luncheonette. Luís sighed and cracked the roll of dimes on the edge of the cash drawer.
“What the hell kept you?” Zip asked. “I was just calling your house.”
“Oh, man, don’t ask,” Cooch said. He spoke, as did Zip, without a trace of an accent. Both were total products of the city and the neighborhood, as far removed from Puerto Rico as was Mongolia. Studying them, Luís felt suddenly old, suddenly foreign. He shrugged, went to his stove, and began putting up his pots of coffee.
“My people are the eeriest, you know that, man?” Cooch said. He had large brown eyes, and he used his face expressively when he spoke, like a television comic going through a famous routine. “I think my old man must be on the Chamber of Commerce, I swear to God.”
“What’s your old man got to do with your being late? I said a quarter to nine, so here it is…”
“He gets a letter from Puerto Rico,” Cooch went on blithely, “and right away he flips. ‘Come stay with us,’ he writes. ‘Come live with us. Bring all your kids, and your grandma, and your police dog. We’ll take care of you.’” Cooch slapped his forehead dramatically. “So all our goddamn barefoot cousins come flop with us. And every time another one shows up at the airport, my old man throws a party.”
“Listen, what’s this got to…”
“He threw a party last night. Out came the goddamn guitars. We had enough strings there to start a symphony. You shoulda seen my old man. He has a couple of drinks, right away his hands head for my old lady. Like homing pigeons. Two drinks, and his hands are on her ass.”
“Look, Cooch, who cares where your old man’s…”
“Judging from last night,” Cooch said reflectively, “I should have another brother soon.”
“All right, now how come you’re late?”
“I been trying to tell you. The jump didn’t break up until four A.M. I could hardly crawl outa bed this morning. I still can’t see too straight.” He paused. “Where’s Papá? Ain’ he here yet?”
“That’s what I’m wondering. You all think we’re playing games here.”
“Who, me?” Cooch said, offended. “Me? I think that?”
“Okay, maybe not you,” Zip said, relenting. “The other guys.”
“Me?” Cooch persisted, astonished and hurt. “Me? Who was it first showed you around the scene when you moved up here?”
“Okay, I said not you, didn’t I?”
“Where’d you come from? Some crumby slum near the Calm’s Point Bridge? What the hell did you know about this neighborhood? Who showed you around, huh?”
“You did, you did,” Zip said patiently.
“Yeah. So right away you hop on me. A few minutes late, and you…”
“Ten minutes late,” Zip corrected.
“All right, ten minutes, I didn’t know you had a stopwatch. Man, I don’t understand you sometimes, Zip. Saying I think we’re playing games here. Man, if ever a guy…”
“I said not you! For Pete’s sake, I said not you! I’m talking about the other studs.” He paused. “Did you stop by for Sixto?”
“Yeah. That’s another reason I’m late. You give me all these stops to…”
“So where is he?”
“He had to help his old lady.”
“Doing what?”
“With the baby. Listen, you think it’s kicks having a baby in the house? I never seen a kid could wet her pants like Sixto’s sister. Every time you turn around, that kid is pissing.”
“He was changing her pants?” Zip asked, astonished.
“He was powdering her behind the last time I seen him.”
“I’m gonna powder his behind when he gets here!” Zip said angrily. “See, that’s just what I mean. He thinks we’re fooling around here. Then you wonder why we ain’t making a name for ourselves. It’s because nobody on this club’s for real, that’s why. Everybody expects me to do everything.”
“We got a name, Zip,” Cooch said gently.
“We got balls! You guys still think this is a goddamn basketball team at the Boys’ Club. When you gonna grow up? You want to walk the streets in this neighborhood, or you want to hide every time there’s a backfire?”
“I don’t hide from nothing!”
“You think anybody on the Royal Guardians is scared of anything?” Zip asked.
“No, but the Royal Guardians got two hundred and fifty members.”
“So how you think they got them members? By being late when there’s a wash job scheduled?”
“Hey!” Cooch said suddenly.
“What’s the matter?”
“Shhhh.”
A woman was coming up the street, her ample breasts bobbing with the haste of her steps. Her black hair was pulled into a bun at the back of her neck. She looked neither to the right nor to the left. She walked with a purposefulness, almost a blindness, passing the boys who stood in the open street side of the luncheonette, turning the corner, and moving out of sight.
“You see who that was?” Cooch whispered.
“That lady?”
“Yeah.” Cooch nodded. “Alfie’s mother.”
“What?” He walked to the corner and stared up the avenue. But the woman was already gone.
