Give the Boys a Great Big Hand

2

In the detective squadroom of the 87th Precinct, the boys were swapping reminiscences about their patrolman days.

Now you may quarrel with the use of the word “boys” to describe a group of men who ranged in age from twenty-eight to forty-two, who shaved daily, who went to bed with various and assorted mature and immature women, who swore like pirates, and who dealt with some of the dirtiest humans since Neanderthal. The word “boys,” perhaps, connotes a simplicity, an innocence that would not be entirely accurate.

There was, however, a spirit of boyish innocence in the squadroom on that dreary, rainy March day. It was difficult to believe that these men who stood in a fraternal knot around Andy Parker’s desk, grinning, listening in attentiveness, were men who dealt daily with crime and criminals. The squadroom, in effect, could have been a high-school locker room. The chatter could have been that of a high-school football team on the day of the season’s last game. The men stood drinking coffee from cardboard containers, completely at ease in the grubby shopworn comfort of the squadroom. Andy Parker, like a belligerent fullback remembering a difficult time in the game against Central High, kept his team huddled about him, leaned back in his swivel chair, and shook his head dolefully.

“I had a pipperoo one time, believe me,” he said. “I stopped her coming off the River Highway. Right near Pier Seventeen, do you know the spot?”

The boys nodded.

“Well, she crashed the light at the bottom of the ramp, and then made a U-turn under the highway. I blew the whistle, and she jammed on the brakes, and I strolled over to the car and said, ‘Lady, you must be the Mayor’s daughter to be driving like that.’”

“Was she?” Steve Carella asked. Sitting on the edge of the desk, a lean muscular man with eyes that slanted peculiarly downward to present an Oriental appearance, he held his coffee container in big hands and studied Parker intently. He did not particularly care for the man or his methods of police investigation, but he had to admit he told a story with gusto.

“No, no. Mayor’s daughter, my eye. What she was — well, let me tell the story, will you?”

Parker scratched his heavy beard. He had shaved that morning, but five o’clock shadow came at an earlier hour for him, so that he always looked somewhat unkempt, a big shaggy man with dark hair, dark eyes, dark beard. In fact, were it not for the shield Parker carried pinned to his wallet, he could easily have passed for many of the thieves who found their way into the 87th. He was so much the Hollywood stereotype of the gangster that he’d often been stopped by overzealous patrolmen seeking suspicious characters. On those occasions, he immediately identified himself as a detective and then proceeded to bawl out the ambitious rookie, which pastime — though he never admitted it to himself — gave him a great deal of pleasure. In truth, it was possible that Andy Parker purposely roamed around in other precincts hoping to be stopped by an unsuspecting patrolman upon whom he could then pull his rank.

“She was sitting in the front seat with a two-piece costume on,” Parker said, “a two-piece costume and these long black net stockings. What the costume was, it was these little black panties covered with sequins, and this tiny little bra that tried to cover the biggest set of bubs I ever seen on any woman in my entire life I swear to God. I did a double take, and I leaned into the car and said, ‘You just passed a stop light, lady, and you made a U-turn over a double white line. And for all I know, we got a good case against you for indecent exposure. Now how about that?’”

“What did she say?” Cotton Hawes asked. He alone of the detectives surrounding Parker’s desk was not drinking coffee. Hawes was a tea drinker, a habit he’d picked up as a growing boy. His father had been a Protestant minister, and having members of the congregation in for tea had been a daily routine. The boy Hawes, for reasons best known to his father, had been included in the daily congregational tea-drinking visits. The tea, hefty, hot, and hearty, had not stunted his growth at all. The man Hawes stood six feet two inches in his stocking feet, a redheaded giant who weighed in at 190 pounds.

“She looked at me with these big blue eyes set in a face made for a doll,” Parker said, “and she batted her eyelashes at me and said, ‘I’m in a hurry. If you’re going to give me the goddamn ticket, give it to me!’”

“Wow!” Hawes said.

“So I asked her what the hurry was, and she said she had to be on stage in five minutes flat.”

“What kind of stage? One of the burly houses?”

“No, no, she was a dancer in a musical comedy. A big hit, too. And it was just about eight-thirty, and she was breaking her neck to catch the curtain. So I pulled out my fountain pen and my pad, and she said, ‘Or would you prefer two tickets to the biggest hit in town?’ and she started digging into her purse, those bubs about to spill out of that tiny little bra and stop traffic away the hell up to the Aquarium.”

“So how was the show?” Carella asked.

“I didn’t take the tickets.”

“Why not?”

“Because this way I had a private show of my own. It took me twenty minutes to write that ticket, and all that time she was squirming and wiggling on the front seat with those gorgeous pineapples ready to pop. Man, what an experience!”

“You’re not only mean,” Carella said, “you’re also horny.”

“That I am,” Parker admitted proudly.

“I caught a guy once on Freeman Lewis Boulevard,” Carella said. “He was doing eighty miles an hour. I had to put on the siren before he’d stop. I got out of the squad car and was walking over to his car when the door popped open, and he leaped out and started running toward me.”

“A hood?” Hawes asked.

“No, but that’s just what I thought. I figured I’d stumbled on a guy who was running from the law. I expected him to pull a gun any minute.”

“What did he do?”

“He came up to me hopping up and down, first one leg, then the other. He said he knew he was speeding, but he’d just had an acute attack of diarrhea, and he had to find a gas station with a men’s room in a hurry.”

Parker burst out laughing. “Oh, brother, that takes it,” he said.

“Did you let him go?” Hawes asked.

“Hell, no. I just wrote the ticket in a hurry, that’s all.”

“I’ll tell you one I let go,” Hawes said. “This was when I was a patrolman with the 30th. The guy was clipping along like a madman, and when I stopped him he just looked at me and said, ‘You going to give me a ticket?’ So I looked right back at him and said, ‘Damn right, I’m going to give you a ticket.’ He stared at me for a long time, just nodding his head. Then he said, ‘That’s it, then. You give me a ticket, and I’ll kill myself.’”

“What the hell did he mean?”

“That’s just what I said. I said, ‘What do you mean, mister?’ But he just kept staring at me, and he didn’t say another word, just kept staring and nodding his head, over and over again, as if this ticket was the last straw, do you know what I mean? I had the feeling that this had just been one of those days where everything in the world had gone wrong for him, and I knew — I just knew as sure as I was standing there — that if I slapped a summons on him, he would actually go home and turn on the gas or jump out the window or slit his throat. I just knew it. I could just sense it about the guy.”

“So you let him go. The Good Samaritan.”

“Yeah, yeah, Samaritan,” Hawes said. “You should have seen that guy’s eyes. You’d have known he wasn’t kidding.”

“I had a woman once,” Kling, the youngest of the detectives started, and Patrolman Dick Genero burst into the squadron carrying the small, blue overnight bag. One look at his eyes, and anyone would have known he wasn’t kidding. He carried the bag in his right hand, far away from his body, as if afraid to be contaminated by it. He pushed his way through the gate in the slatted railing that separated the squadroom from the corridor outside, went directly to Parker’s desk, and plunked the bag down in the middle of it with a finality that indicated he had done his duty and was now glad to be rid of it.

“What have you got, Dick?” Hawes asked.

Genero could not speak. His face was white, his eyes were wide. He swallowed several times, but no words came from his mouth. He kept shaking his head and pointing at the bag. Hawes stared at the bag in puzzlement, and then began to unzip it. Genero turned away. He seemed ready to vomit momentarily.

Hawes looked into the bag and said, “Oh, Jesus, where’d you get this?”

“What is it?” Kling asked.

“Oh, Jesus,” Hawes said. “What a goddamn thing. Get it out of here. Jesus, get it out of the squadroom. I’ll call the morgue.” The rugged planes of his face were twisted in pain. He could not look into the bag again. “I’ll call the morgue,” he said again. “Jesus, get it out of here. Take it downstairs. Get it out of here.”

Carella picked up the bag and started out of the room.

He did not look into it. He did not have to.

He had been a cop for a long time now, and he knew instantly from the expression on Hawes’s face that the bag must contain a segment of a human body.