McBain's Ladies: The Women of the 87th Precinct

Eileen Burke

The girl’s legs were crossed.

She sat opposite Willis and Byrnes in the lieutenant’s office on the second floor of the 87th Precinct. They were good legs. The skirt reached to just a shade below her knees, and Willis could not help noticing they were good legs. Sleek and clean, full-calved, tapering to slender ankles, enhanced by the high-heeled black patent pumps.

The girl was a redhead, and that was good. Red hair is obvious hair. The girl had a pretty face, with a small Irish nose and green eyes. She listened to the men in serious silence, and you could feel intelligence on her face and in her eyes. Occasionally she sucked in a deep breath, and when she did, the severe cut of her suit did nothing to hide the sloping curve of her breast.

The girl earned $5,555 a year. The girl had a .38 in her purse.

The girl was a Detective 2nd/Grade, and her name was Eileen Burke, as Irish as her nose.

“You don’t have to take this one if you don’t want it, Miss Burke,” Byrnes said.

“It sounds interesting,” Eileen answered.

“Hal — Willis’ll be following close behind all the way, you understand. But that’s no guarantee he can get to you in time should anything happen. ‘

“I understand that, sir,” Eileen said.

“And Clifford isn’t such a gentleman,” Willis said. “He’s beaten, and he’s killed. Or at least we think so. It might not be such a picnic.”

“We don’t think he’s armed, but he used something on his last job, and it wasn’t his fist. So you see, Miss Burke…”

“What we’re trying to tell you,” Willis said, “is that you needn’t feel any compulsion to accept this assignment. We would understand completely were you to refuse it.”

“Are you trying to talk me into this or out of it?” Eileen asked.

“We’re simply asking you to make your own decision. We’re sending you out as a sitting duck, and we feel—”

“I won’t be such a sitting duck with a gun in my bag.”

“Still, we felt we should present the facts to you before—”

“Will we be the only pair?” Eileen asked Willis.

“To start, yes. We’re not sure how this’ll work. I can’t follow too close or Clifford’ll panic. And I can’t lag too far behind or I’ll be worthless.”

“Do you think he’ll bite?”

“We don’t know. He’s been hitting in the precinct and getting away with it, so chances are he won’t change his m.o. — unless this killing has scared him. And from what the victims have given us, he seems to hit without any plan. He just waits for a victim and then pounces.”

“I see.”

“So we figured an attractive girl walking the streets late at night, apparently alone, might smoke him out.”

“I see.” Ellen let the compliment pass. There were about four million attractive girls in the city, and she knew she was no prettier than most. “Has there been any sex motive?” she asked.

Willis glanced at Byrnes. “Not that we can figure. He hasn’t molested any of his victims.”

“I was only trying to figure what I should wear,” Eileen said.

“Well, no hat,” Willis said. “That’s for sure. We want him to spot that red hair a mile away.”

“All right,” Eileen said.

“Something bright, so I won’t lose you — but nothing too flashy,” Willis said. “We don’t want the Vice Squad picking you up.”

Eileen smiled. “Sweater and skirt?” she asked.

“Whatever you’ll be most comfortable in.”

“I’ve got a white sweater,” she said. “That should be clearly visible to both you and Clifford.”

“Yes,” Willis said.

“Heels or flats?”

“Entirely up to you. You may have to — well, he may give you a rough time. If heels will hamper you, wear flats.”

“He can hear heels better,” Eileen said.

“It’s up to you.”

“I’ll wear heels.”

“All right.”

“Will anyone else be in on this? I mean, will you have a walkie-talkie or anything?”

“No,” Willis said, “it’d be too obvious. There’ll be just the two of us.”

“And Clifford, we hope.”

“Yes,” Willis said.

Eileen Burke sighed. “When do we start?”

“Tonight?” Willis asked.

“I was going to get my hair done,” Eileen said, smiling, “but I suppose that can wait.” The smile broadened. “It isn’t every girl who can be sure at least one man is following her.”

“Can you meet me here?”

“What time?” Eileen asked.

“When the shift changes. Eleven forty-five?”

“I’ll be here,” she said. She uncrossed her legs and rose. “Lieutenant,” she said, and Byrnes took her hand.

“Be careful, won’t you?” Byrnes said.

“Yes, sir. Thank you.” She turned to Willis. “I’ll see you later.”

“I’ll be waiting for you.”

“Good-bye, now,” she said, and she left the office.

When she was gone, Willis asked, “What do you think?”

“I think she’ll be okay,” Byrnes said. “She’s got a record of fourteen subway-masher arrests.”

“Mashers aren’t muggers,” Willis said.

Byrnes nodded reflectively. “I think she’ll be okay.”

Willis smiled. “I think so, too,” he said.

At two o’clock on the morning of Thursday, September 21, Eileen walked the streets of Isola in a white sweater and a tight skirt.

She was a tired cop.

She had been walking the streets of Isola since eleven forty-five the previous Saturday night. This was her fifth night of walking. She wore high-heeled pumps, and they had definitely not been designed for hikes. During the course of her early morning promenades, she had been approached seven times by sailors, four times by soldiers, and twenty-two times by civilians in various styles of male attire. The approaches had ranged from polite remarks such as, “Nice night, ain’t it?” to more direct opening gambits like, “Walking all alone, honey?” to downright unmistakable business inquiries like, “How much, babe?”

All of these, Eileen had taken in stride.

They had, to be truthful, broken the monotony of her otherwise lonely and silent excursions. She had never once caught sight of Willis behind her, though she knew with certainty that he was there. She wondered now if he was as bored as she, and she concluded that he was possibly not. He did, after all, have the compensating sight of a backside which she jiggled jauntily for the benefit of any unseen, observant mugger.

Where are you, Clifford? she mentally asked.

Have we scared you off? Did the sight of the twisted and bloody young kid whose head you split open turn your stomach, Clifford? Have you decided to give up this business, or are you waiting until the heats off?

Come on Clifford.

See the pretty wiggle? The bait is yours, Clifford. And the only hook is the .38 in my purse.

Come on, Clifford!

From where Willis jogged doggedly along behind Eileen, he could make out only the white sweater and occasionally a sudden burst of bright red when the lights caught at her hair.

He was a tired cop.

It had been a long time since he’d walked a beat, and this was worse than walking any beat in the city. When you had a beat, you also had bars and restaurants and sometimes tailor shops or candy stores. And in those places you could pick up, respectively, a quick beer, cup of coffee, snatch of idle conversation, or warmth from a hissing radiator.

This girl Eileen liked walking. He had followed behind her for four nights now, and this was the fifth, and she hadn’t once stopped walking. This was an admirable attitude, to be sure, a devotion to duty which was not to be scoffed aside.

But good Christ, man, did she have a motor?

What propelled those legs of hers? (Good legs, Willis. Admit it.)

And why so fast? Did she think Clifford was a cross-country track star? He had spoken to her about her speed after their first night of breakneck pacing. She had smiled easily, fluffed her hair like a virgin at a freshman tea, and said, “I always walk fast.”

That, he thought now, had been the understatement of the year.

What she meant, of course, was “I always run slow.”

He did not envy Clifford. Whoever he was, wherever he was, he would need a motorcycle to catch this redhead with the paperback-rover bazooms.

Well, he thought, she’s making the game worth the candle.

Wherever you are, Clifford, Miss Burke’s going to give you a run for your money.

He had first heard the tapping of her heels.

The impatient beaks of woodpeckers riveting at the stout mahogany heart of his city. Fluttering taps, light-footed, strong legs and quick feet.

He had then see the white sweater, a beacon in the distance, coming nearer and nearer, losing its two-dimensionality as it grew closer, expanding until it had the three-sidedness of a work of sculpture, then taking on reality, becoming woolen fiber covering firm high breasts.

He had seen the red hair then, long, lapped by the nervous fingers of the wind, enveloping her head like a blazing funeral pyre. He had stood in the alleyway across the street and watched her as she pranced by, cursing his station, wishing he had posted himself on the other side of the street instead. She carried a black patent-leather sling bag over her shoulder, the strap loose, the bag knocking against her left hipbone as she walked. The bag looked heavy.

He knew that looks could be deceiving, that many women carried all sorts of junk in their purses, but he smelled money in this one. She was either a whore drumming up trade or a society bitch out for a late evening stroll — it was sometimes difficult to tell them apart. Whichever she was, the purse promised money, and money was what he needed pretty badly right now.

The newspapers shrieking about Jeannie Paige, Jesus!

They had driven him clear off the streets. But how long can a murder remain hot? And doesn’t a man have to eat?

He watched the redhead swing past, and then he ducked into the alleyway, quickly calculating a route which would intersect her apparent course.

There are three lampposts on each block, Eileen thought.

It takes approximately one and one-half minutes to cover the distance between lampposts. Four and a half minutes a block. That’s plain arithmetic.

Nor is that exceptionally fast. If Willis thinks that’s fast, he should meet my brother. My brother is the type of person who rushes through everything — breakfast, dinner…

Hold it now!

She was reaching for the .38 in her purse when the strap left her shoulder. She felt the secure weight of the purse leaving her hipbone, and then the bag was gone. And just as she planted her feet to throw the intruder over her shoulder, he spun her around and slammed her against the wall of the building.

“I’m not playing around,” he said in a low, menacing voice, and she realized instantly that he wasn’t. The collision with the wall of the building had knocked the breath out of her. She watched his face, dimly lighted in the alleyway. He was not wearing sunglasses, but she could not determine the color of his eyes. He was wearing a hat, too, and she cursed the hat because it hid his hair.

His fist lashed out suddenly, exploding just beneath her left eye. She had heard about purple and yellow globes of light which followed a punch in the eye, but she had never experienced them until this moment. She tried to move away from the wall, momentarily blinded, but he shoved her back viciously.

“That’s just a warning,” he said. “Don’t scream when I’m gone, you understand?”

“I understand,” she said levelly. Willis, where are you? her mind shrieked. For God’s sake, where are you?

She had to detain this man. She had to hold him until Willis showed. Come on, Willis.

“Who are you?” she asked.

His hand went out again, and her head rocked from his strong slap.

“Shut up!” he warned. “I’m taking off now.”

If this was Clifford, she had a chance. If this was Clifford, she would have to move in a few seconds, and she tensed herself for the move, knowing only that she had to hold the man until Willis arrived.

There!

He was going into it now.

“Clifford thanks you, madam,” he said, and his arm swept across his waist, and he went into a low bow, and Eileen clasped both hands together, raised them high over head, and swung them at the back of his neck as if she were wielding a hammer.

The blow caught him completely by surprise. He began to pitch forward, and she brought up her knee, catching him under the jaw. His arms opened wide. He dropped the purse and staggered backward, and when he lifted his head again, Eileen was standing with a spike-heeled shoe in one hand. She didn’t wait for his attack. With one foot shoeless, she hobbled forward and swung out at his head.

He backed away, missing her swing, and then he bellowed like a wounded bear, and cut loose with a roundhouse blow that caught her just below her bosom. She felt the sharp knifing pain, and then he was hitting her again, hitting her cruelly and viciously now. She dropped the shoe, and she caught at his clothes, one hand going to his face, living to rip, trying to claw, forgetting all her police knowledge in that one desperate lunge for self-survival, using a woman’s weapons — nails.

She missed his face, and she stumbled forward, catching at his jacket again, clawing at the breast pocket. He pulled away, and she felt the material tear, and then she was holding the torn shield of his pocket patch in her hands, and he hit her again, full on the jaw, and she fell back against the wall and heard Willis’s running footsteps.

The mugger stooped down for the fallen purse, seizing it by the shoulder straps as Willis burst into the alley, a gun in his fist.

Clifford came erect, swinging the bag as he stood. The bag caught Willis on the side of the head, and he staggered sideward, the gun going off in his hand. He shook his head, saw the mugger taking flight, shot without aiming, shot again, missing both times. Clifford turned the corner, and Willis took off after him, rounding the same bend.

The mugger was nowhere in sight.

He went back to where Eileen sat propped against the wall of the building. Her knees were up, and her skirt was pulled back, and she sat in a very unladylike position, cradling her head. Her left eye was beginning to throb painfully. When she lifted her head, Willis winced.

“He clipped you,” he said.

“Where the hell were you?” Eileen answered.

The Mugger, 1956

The black lunch pail containing approximately fifty thousand scraps of newspaper was placed in the center of the third bench on the Clinton Street footpath into Grover Park by Detective Cotton Hawes, who was wearing thermal underwear and two sweaters and a business suit and an overcoat and ear muffs. Hawes was an expert skier, and he had skied on days when the temperature at the base was four below zero and the temperature at the summit was thirty below, had skied on days when his feet went and his hands went and he boomed the mountain non-stop not for fun or sport but just to get near the fire in the base lodge before he shattered into a hundred brittle pieces. But he had never been this cold before. It was bad enough to be working on Saturday, but it was indecent to be working when the weather threatened to gelatinize a man’s blood.

Among the other people who were braving the unseasonable winds and temperatures that Saturday were:

1) A pretzel salesman at the entrance to the Clinton Street footpath.

2) Two nuns saying their beads on the second bench into the park.

3) A passionate couple necking in a sleeping bag on the grass behind the third bench.

4) A blind man sitting on the fourth bench, patting his seeing eye German shepherd and scattering bread crumbs to the pigeons.

The pretzel salesman was a detective named Stanley Faulk, recruited from the 88th across the park, a man of fifty-eight who wore a gray handlebar mustache as his trademark. The mustache made it quite simple to identify him when he was working in his own territory, thereby diminishing his value on plants. But it also served to strike terror into the hearts of hoods near and wide, in much the same way that the green-and-white color combination of a radio motor patrol car is supposed to frighten criminals and serve as a deterrent. Faulk wasn’t too happy about being called into service for the 87th on a day like this one, but he was bundled up warmly in several sweaters over which was a black cardigan-type candy store-owner sweater over which he had put on a white apron. He was standing behind a cart that displayed pretzels stacked on long round sticks. A walkie-talkie was set into the top of the cart.

The two nuns saying their beads were Detectives Meyer Meyer and Bert Kling, and they were really saying what a son of a bitch Byrnes had been to bawl them out that way in front of Hawes and Willis, embarrassing them and making them feel very foolish.

“I feel very foolish right now,” Meyer whispered.

“How come?” Kling whispered.

“I feel like I’m in drag,” Meyer whispered.

The passionate couple assignment had been the choice assignment, and Hawes and Willis had drawn straws for it. The reason it was so choice was that the other half of the passionate couple was herself quite choice, a police-woman named Eileen Burke, with whom Willis had worked on a mugging case many years back. Eileen had red hair and green eyes, Eileen had long legs, sleek and clean, full-calved, tapering to slender ankles, Eileen had very good breasts, and whereas Eileen was much taller than Willis (who only barely scraped past the five-foot-eight height requirement), he did not mind at all because big girls always seemed attracted to him, and vice versa.

“We’re supposed to be kissing,” he said to Eileen, and held her close in the warm sleeping bag.

“My lips are getting chapped,” she said.

“Your lips are very nice,” he said.

“We’re supposed to be here on business,” Eileen said.

“Mmm,” he answered.

“Get your hand off my behind,” she said.

“Oh, is that your behind?” he asked.

“Listen,” she said.

“I hear it,” he said. “Somebody’s coming. You’d better kiss me.”

She kissed him. Willis kept one eye on the bench. The person passing was a governess wheeling a baby carriage, God knew who would send an infant out on a day when the glacier was moving south. The woman and the carriage passed. Willis kept kissing Detective 2nd/Grade Eileen Burke.

“Mm frick sheb bron,” Eileen mumbled.

“Mmm?” Willis mumbled.

Eileen pulled her mouth away and caught her breath. “I said I think she’s gone.”

“What’s that?” Willis asked suddenly.

“Do not be afraid, guapa, it is only my pistol,” Eileen said, and laughed.

“I meant on the path. Listen.”

They listened.

Someone else was approaching the bench.

From where Patrolman Richard Genero sat in plain-clothes on the fourth bench, wearing dark glasses and patting the head of the German shepherd at his feet, tossing crumbs to the pigeons, wishing for summer, he could clearly see the young man who walked rapidly to the third bench, picked up the lunch pail, looked swiftly over his shoulder, and began walking not out of the park, but deeper into it.

Genero didn’t know quite what to do at first.

He had been pressed into duty only because there was a shortage of available men that afternoon (crime prevention being an arduous and difficult task on any given day, but especially on Saturday), and he had been placed in the position thought least vulnerable, it being assumed the man who picked up the lunch pail would immediately reverse direction and head out of the park again, onto Grover Avenue, where Faulk the pretzel man and Hawes, parked in his own car at the curb, would immediately collar him. But the suspect was coming into the park instead, heading for Genero’s bench, and Genero was a fellow who didn’t care very much for violence, so he sat there wishing he was home in bed, with his mother serving him hot minestrone and singing old Italian arias.

The dog at his feet had been trained for police work, and Genero had been taught a few hand signals and voice signals in the squadroom before heading out for his vigil on the fourth bench, but he was also afraid of dogs, especially big dogs, and the idea of giving this animal a kill command that might possibly be misunderstood filled Genero with fear and trembling. Suppose he gave the command and the dog leaped for his own jugular rather than for the throat of the young man who was perhaps three feet away now and walking quite rapidly, glancing over his shoulder every now and again? Suppose he did that and this beast tore him to shreds, what would his mother say to that? che bella cosa, you hadda to become a police, hah?

Willis, in the meantime, had slid his walkie-talkie up between Eileen Burke’s breasts and flashed the news to Hawes, parked in his own car on Grover Avenue, good place to be when your man is going the other way. Willis was now desperately trying to lower the zipper on the bag, which zipper seemed to have become somehow stuck. Willis didn’t mind being stuck in a sleeping bag with someone like Eileen Burke, who wiggled and wriggled along with him as they attempted to extricate themselves, but he suddenly fantasied the lieutenant chewing him out the way he had chewed out Kling and Meyer this morning and so he really was trying to lower that damn zipper while entertaining the further fantasy that Eileen Burke was beginning to enjoy all this adolescent tumbling. Genero, of course, didn’t know that Hawes had been alerted, he only knew that the suspect was abreast of him now, and passing the bench now, and moving swiftly beyond the bench now, so he got up and first took off the sun-glasses, and then unbuttoned the third button of his coat the way he had seen detectives do on television, and then reached in for his revolver and then shot himself in the leg.

The suspect began running.

Genero fell to the ground and the dog licked his face.

Willis got out of the sleeping bag and Eileen Burke buttoned her blouse and her coat and then adjusted her garters, and Hawes came running into the park and slipped on a patch of ice near the third bench and almost broke his neck.

“Stop, police!” Willis shouted.

And, miracle of miracles, the suspect stopped dead in his tracks and waited for Willis to approach him with his gun in his hand and lipstick all over his face.

Fuzz, 1968

Who raped who this time?” Hi Iron asked.

“Don’t talk dirty in my squadroom,” Meyer said, and winked at Willis.

“Where do you want to discuss this?” Willis asked Eileen.

“Oh, the old ‘Your place or mine?’ ploy,” Meyer said. “Is this the laundromat case?”

“It’s the laundromat case,” Willis said.

“A rapist in a laundromat?” Eileen asked, and stubbed out her cigarette.

“No, a guy who’s been holding up laundromats late at night. We figured we’d plant you in the one he’s gonna hit next—”

“How do you know which one he’ll hit next?” Eileen asked.

“Well, we’re guessing,” Willis said. “But there’s sort of a pattern.”

“Oh, the old modus operandi ploy,” Meyer said, and actually burst out laughing. Willis looked at him. Meyer shrugged and stopped laughing.

“Dress you up like a lady with dirty laundry,” Willis said.

“Sounds good to me,” Eileen said. “You’re the backup, huh?”

“I’m the backup.”

“Where will you be?”

“In a sleeping bag outside,” Willis said, and grinned.

“Sure,” she said, and grinned back.

“Remember?” he said.

“Memory like a judge,” she said.

“When do we start?” Ellen asked, and lit another cigarette.

“Tonight?” Willis said.

The laundromat was on the corner of Culver and Tenth, a neighborhood enclave that for many years had been exclusively Irish but that nowadays was a rich melting-pot mixture of Irish, black, and Puerto Rican. The melting pot here, as elsewhere in this city, never seemed to come to a precise boil, but that didn’t bother any of the residents; they all knew it was nonsense, anyway. Even though they all shopped the same supermarkets and clothing stores; even though they all bought gasoline at the same gas stations and rode the same subways; even though they washed their clothes at the same laundromats and ate hamburgers side by side in the same greasy spoons, they all knew that when it came to socializing it was the Irish with the Irish and the blacks with the blacks and the Puerto Ricans with the Puerto Ricans and never mind that brotherhood-of-man stuff.

Eileen, what with her peaches-and-cream complexion and her red hair and green eyes, could have passed for any daughter of Hibernian descent in the neighborhood — which, of course, was exactly what they were hoping for. It would not do to have the Dirty Panties Bandit, as the boys of the Eight-Seven had wittily taken to calling him, pop into the laundromat with his .357 Magnum in his fist, spot Eileen for a policewoman, and put a hole the size of a bowling ball in her ample chest. No, no. Eileen did not want to become a dead heroine. Eileen wanted to become the first lady Chief of Detectives in this city, but not over her own dead body. For the job tonight, she was dressed rather more sedately than she would have been if she’d been on the street trying to flush a rapist. Her red hair was pulled to the back of her head, held there with a rubber band, and covered with a dun-colored scarf knotted under her chin and hiding the pair of gold loop earrings she considered her good-luck charms. She was wearing a cloth coat that matched the scarf, and knee-length brown socks and brown rubber boots, and she was sitting on a yellow plastic chair in the very cold laundromat, watching her dirty laundry (or rather the dirty laundry supplied by the Eight-Seven) turn over and over in one of the washing machines while the neon sign in the window of the place flashed “Laundromat” first in orange, and then “Lavanderia” in green.

In the open handbag on her lap, the butt of a .38 Detective’s Special beckoned from behind a wad of Kleenex tissues.

The manager of the place did not know Eileen was a cop. The manager of the place was the night man, who came on at four and worked through till midnight, at which time he locked up the place and went home. Every morning, the owner of the laundromat would come around to unlock the machines, pour all the coins into a big gray sack, and take them to the bank. That was the owner’s job: emptying the machines of coins. The owner had thirty-seven laundromats all over the city, and he lived in a very good section of Majesta. He did not empty the machines at closing time because he thought that might be dangerous, which in fact it would have been. He preferred that his thirty seven night men all over the city simply lock the doors, turn on the burglar alarms, and go home. That was part of their job, the night men. The rest of their job was to make change for the ladies who brought in their dirty clothes, and to call for service if any of the machines broke down, and also to make sure nobody stole any of the cheap plastic furniture in the various laundromats, although the owner didn’t care much about that since he’d got a break on the stuff from his brother-in-law. Every now and then it occurred to the owner that his thirty-seven night men each had keys to the thirty-seven separate burglar alarms in the thirty-seven different locations and if they decided to go into cahoots with one of the crazies in this city, they could open the stores and break open the machines — but so what? Easy come, easy go. Besides, he liked to think all of his night men were pure and innocent.

Detective Hal Willis knew for damn sure that the night man at the laundromat on Tenth and Culver was as pure and as innocent as the driven snow so far as the true identity of Eileen Burke was concerned. The night man did not know she was a cop, nor did he know that Willis himself, angle-parked in an unmarked green Toronado in front of the bar next door to the laundromat, was also a cop. In fact, the night man did not have the faintest inkling that the Eight-Seven had chosen his nice little establishment for a stakeout on the assumption that the Dirty Panties Bandit would hit it next. The assumption seemed a good educated guess. The man had been working his way straight down Culver Avenue for the past three weeks, hitting laundromats on alternate sides of the avenue, inexorably moving farther and farther downtown. The place he’d hit three nights ago had been on the south side of the avenue. The laundromat they were staking out tonight was eight blocks farther downtown, on the north side of the avenue.

The Dirty Panties Bandit was no small-time thief, oh, no. In the two months during which he’d operated unchecked along Culver Avenue, first in the bordering precinct farther uptown, and then moving lower into the Eight-Seven’s territory, he had netted — or so the police had estimated from what the victimized women had told them — six hundred dollars in cash, twelve gold wedding bands, four gold lockets, a gold engagement ring with a one-carat diamond, and a total of twenty-two pairs of panties. These panties had not been lifted from the victims’ laundry baskets. Instead, the Dirty Panties Bandit — and hence his name — had asked all those hapless laundromat ladies to please remove their panties for him, which they had all readily agreed to do since they were looking into the rather large barrel of a .357 Magnum. No one had been raped — yet. No one had been harmed — yet. And whereas there was something darkly humorous, after all, about an armed robber taking home his victims’ panties, there was nothing at all humorous about the potential of a .357 Magnum. Sitting in the parked car outside the bar, Willis was very much aware of the caliber of the gun the laundromat robber carried. Sitting inside the laundromat, flanked by a Puerto Rican woman on her left and a black woman on her right, Eileen was even more aware of the devastating power of that gun.

She looked up at the wall clock.

It was only ten-fifteen, and the place wouldn’t be closing till midnight.

She was having a splendid time watching her laundry go round and round. The night man thought she was a little crazy, but then again everybody in this town was a little crazy. She had put the same batch of laundry through the machine five times already. Each time, she sat watching the laundry spinning in the machine. The night man didn’t notice that she alternately watched the front door of the place or looked through the plate-glass window each time a car pulled in. The neon fixture splashed orange and green on the floor of the laundromat: Lavenderia… Laundromat… Lavenderia… Laundromat. The laundry in the machines went round and round.

A woman with a baby strapped to her back was at one of the machines, putting in another load. Eileen guessed she was no older than nineteen or twenty, a slender attractive blue-eyed blond who directed a nonstop flow of soft chatter over her shoulder to her near-dozing infant. Another woman was sitting on the yellow plastic chair next to Eileen’s, reading a magazine. She was a stout black woman, in her late thirties or early forties, Eileen guessed, wearing a bulky knit sweater over blue jeans and galoshes. Every now and then, she flipped a page of the magazine, looked up at the washing machines, and then flipped another page. A third woman came into the store, looked around frantically for a moment, seemed relieved to discover there were plenty of free machines, dashed out of the store, and returned a moment later with what appeared to be the week’s laundry for an entire Russian regiment. She asked the manager to change a five-dollar bill for her. He changed it from a coin dispenser attached to his belt, thumbing and clicking out the coins like a streetcar conductor. Eileen watched as he walked to a safe bolted to the floor and dropped the bill into a slot on its top, just as though he were making a night deposit at a bank. A sign on the wall advised any prospective holdup man: “Manager does not have combination to safe. Manager cannot change bills larger than five dollars.” Idly, Eileen wondered what the manager did when he ran out of coins. Did he run into the bar next door to ask the bartender for change? Did the bartender next door have a little coin dispenser attached to his belt? Idly, Eileen wondered why she wondered such things. And then she wondered if she’d ever meet a man who wondered the same things she wondered. That was when the Dirty Panties Bandit came into the store.

Eileen recognized him at once from the police-artist composites Willis had shown her back at the squadroom. He was a short slender while man wearing a navy pea coat and watch cap over dark brown, wide-wale corduroy trousers and tan suede desert boots. He had darling brown eyes and a very thin nose with a narrow mustache under it. There was a scar in his right eyebrow. The bell over the door tinkled as he came into the store. As he reached behind him with his left hand to close the door, Eileen’s hand went into the bag on her lap. She was closing her fingers around the butt of the .38 when the man’s right hand came out of his coat pocket. The Magnum would have looked enormous in any event. But because the man was so small and so thin, it looked like an artillery piece. The man’s hand was shaking. The gun in it flailed the room.

Eileen looked at the Magnum, looked at the man’s eyes, and felt the butt of her own pistol under her closing fingers. If she pulled the gun out now, she had maybe a thirty/seventy chance of bringing him down before he sprayed the room with bullets that could tear a man’s head off his body. In addition to herself and the robber, there were five other people in the store, three of them women, one of them an infant. Her hand froze motionless around the butt of the gun.

“All right, all right,” the man said in a thin, almost girlish voice, “nobody moves, nobody gets hurt.” His eyes darted. His hand was still shaking. Suddenly, he giggled. The giggle scared Eileen more than the gun in his hand did. The giggle was high and nervous and just enough off center to send a shiver racing up her spine. Her hand on the butt of the .38 suddenly began sweating.

“All I want is your money, all your money,” the man said. “And your—”

“I don’t have the combination to the safe,” the manager said.

“Who asked you for anything?” the man said, turning to him. “You just shut up, you hear me?”

“Yes, sir,” the manager said.

“You hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m talking to the ladies here, not you, you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So shut up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You!” the man said, and turned to the woman with the baby strapped to her back, jerking the gun at her, moving erratically, almost dancing across the floor of the laundromat, turning this way and that as though playing to an audience from a stage. Each time he turned, the woman with the baby on her back turned with him, so that she was always facing him, her body forming a barricade between him and the baby. She doesn’t know, Eileen thought, that a slug from that gun can go clear through her and the baby and the wall behind them, too.

“Your money!” the man said. “Hurry up! Your rings, too, give me your rings!”

“Just don’t shoot,” the woman said.

“Shut up! Give me your panties!”

“What?”

“Your panties, take off your panties, give them to me!”

The woman stared at him.

“Are you deaf?” he said, and danced toward her, and jabbed the gun at her. The woman already had a wad of dollar bills clutched in one fist and her wedding ring and engagement ring in the other, and she stood there uncertainly, knowing she had heard him say he wanted her panties, but not knowing whether he wanted her to give him the money and the jewelry first or—

“Hurry up!” he said. “Take them off! Hurry up!”

The woman quickly handed him the bills and rings and then reached up under her skirt and lowered her panties over her thighs and down to her ankles. She stepped out of them, picked them up, handed them to him, and quickly backed away from him as he stuffed them into his pocket.

“All of you!” he said, his voice higher now. “I want all of you to take off your panties. Give me your money! Give me all your money! And your rings! And your panties, take them off, hurry up!”

The black woman sitting on the chair alongside Eileen kept staring at the man as though he had popped out of a bottle, following his every move around the room, her eyes wide, disbelieving his demands, disbelieving the gun in his hand, disbelieving his very existence. She just kept staring at him and shaking her head in disbelief.

“You!” he said, dancing over to her. “Give me that necklace! Hurry up!”

“Ain’t but costume jewelry,” the woman said calmly.

“Give me your money!”

“Ain’t got but a dollar an’ a quarter in change,” the woman said.

“Give it to me!” he said, and held out his left hand.

The woman rummaged in her handbag. She took out a change purse. Ignoring the man, ignoring the gun not a foot from her nose, she unsnapped the purse, and reached into it, and took out coin after coin, transferring the coins from her right hand to the palm of her left hand, three quarters and five dimes, and then closing her fist on the coins, and bringing her fist to his open palm, and opening the fist and letting the coins fall (disdainfully, it seemed to Eileen) onto his palm.

“Now your panties,” he said.

“Nossir.”

“Take off your panties,” he said.

“Won’t do no such thing,” the woman said.

“What?”

“Won’t do no such thing. Ain’t just a matter of reachin’ up under m’skirt way that lady with the baby did, nossir. I’d have to take off fust m’galoshes and then m’jeans, an’ there ain’t no way I plan to stan’ here naked in front of two men I never seen in my life, nossir.”

The man waved the gun.

“Do what I tell you,” he said.

“Nossir,” the woman said.

Eileen tensed.

She wondered if she should make her move now, a bad situation could only get worse, she’d been taught that at the Academy and it was a rule she’d lived by and survived by all the years she’d been on the force, but a rule she’d somehow neglected tonight when this silly little son of a bitch walked through the door and pulled the cannon from his pocket, a bad situation can only get worse, make your move now, do it now, go for the money, go for broke, but now, now! And she wondered, too, if he would bother turning to fire at her once she pulled the gun from her handbag or would he instead fire at the black woman who was willing to risk getting shot and maybe killed rather than take off her jeans and then her panties in a room containing a trembling night man and an armed robber who maybe was or maybe wasn’t bonkers, make your move, stop thinking, stop wondering — but what if the baby gets shot?

It occurred to her that maybe the black woman would actually succeed in staring down the little man with the penchant for panties, get him to turn away in defeat, run for the door, out into the cold and into the waiting arms of Detective Hal Willis — which reminds me, where the hell are you, Willis? It would not hurt to have my backup come in behind this guy right now, it would not hurt to have his attention diverted from me to you, two guns against one, the good guys against the bad guys, where the hell are you? The little man was trembling violently now, the struggle inside him so intense that it seemed he would rattle himself to pieces, crumble into a pile of broken pink chalk around a huge weapon — he’s a closet rapist, she thought suddenly, the man’s a closet rapist!

The thought was blinding in its clarity. She knew now, or felt she knew, why he was running around town holding up laundromats. He was holding up laundromats because there were women in laundromats and he wanted to see those women taking off their panties. The holdups had nothing at all to do with money or jewelry, the man was after panties! The rings and the bracelets and the cash were all his cover, his beard, his smoke screen, the man wanted ladies’ panties, the man wanted the aroma of women on his loot, the man probably had a garageful of panties wherever he lived, the man was a closet rapist and she knew how to deal with rapists, she had certainly dealt with enough rapists in her lifetime, but that was her alone in a park, that was when the only life at stake had been her own, make your move, she thought, make it now!

“You!” she said sharply.

The man turned toward her. The gun turned at the same time.

“Take mine,” she said.

“What?” he said.

“Leave her alone. Take my panties.”

“What?”

“Reach under my skirt,” she whispered. “Rip off my panties.”

She thought for a terrifying moment that she’d made a costly mistake. His face contorted in what appeared to be rage, and the gun began shaking even more violently in his fist. Oh God, she thought, I’ve forced him out of the closet, I’ve forced him to see himself for what he is, that gun is his cock as sure as I’m sitting here, and he’s going to jerk it off into my face in the next ten seconds! And then a strange thing happened to his face, a strange smile replaced the anger, a strange secret smile touched the corners of his mouth, a secret communication flashed in his eyes, his eyes to her eyes, their secret, a secret to share, he lowered the gun, he moved toward her.

“Police!” she shouted, and the .38 came up out of the bag in the same instant that she came up off the plastic chair, and she rammed the muzzle of the gun into the hollow of his throat and said so quietly that only he could hear it, “Don’t even think it or I’ll shoot you dead!” And she would remember later and remember always the way the shouted word “Police!” had shattered the secret in his eyes, their shared secret, and she would always wonder if the way she’d disarmed him hadn’t been particularly cruel and unjust.

She clamped the handcuffs onto his wrists and then stooped to pick up the Magnum from where he’d dropped it on the laundromat floor.

Willis was trying to explain why he hadn’t happened to notice the Dirty Panties Bandit when he entered the laundromat. They had sent down for pizza, and now they sat in the relative 1:00 A.M. silence of the squadroom, eating Papa Joe’s really pretty good combination anchovies and pepperoni and drinking Miscolo’s really pretty lousy Colombian coffee; Detective Bert Kling was sitting with them, but he wasn’t eating or saying very much.

Eileen remembered him as a man with a huge appetite, and she wondered now if he was on a diet. He looked thinner than she recalled — well, that had been several years back — and he also looked somewhat drawn and pale and, well, unkempt. His straight blond hair was growing raggedly over his shirt collar and ears, and the collar itself looked a bit frayed, and his suit looked unpressed, and there were stains on the tie he was wearing. Eileen figured he was maybe coming in off a stakeout someplace. Maybe he was supposed to look like somebody who was going to seed. And maybe those dark shadows under his eyes were all part of the role he was playing out there on the street, in which case he should get not only a commendation but an Academy Award besides.

Willis was very apologetic.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said, “I figured we didn’t have a chance of our man showing. Because on the other jobs, he usually hit between ten and ten-thirty, and it was almost eleven when this guy came running out of the bar—”

“Wail a minute,” Eileen said. “What guy?”

“Came running out of the bar next door,” Willis said. “Bert, don’t you want some of this?”

“Thanks,” Kling said, and shook his head.

“Yelling, ‘Police, police,’” Willis said.

“When was this?” Eileen asked.

“I told you, a little before eleven,” Willis said. “Even so, if I thought we had a chance of our man showing I’d have said screw it, let some other cop handle whatever it is in the bar there. But I mean it, Eileen, I figured we’d had it for tonight.”

“So you went in the bar?”

“No. Well, yes. But not right away, no. I got out of the car, and I asked the guy what the trouble was, and he asked me did I see a cop anywhere because there was somebody with a knife in the bar and I told him I was a cop and he said I ought to go in there and take the knife away before somebody got cut.”

“So naturally you went right in,” Eileen said, and winked at Kling. Kling did not wink back. Kling lifted his coffee cup and sipped at it.

He seemed not to be listening to what Willis was saying. He seemed almost comatose. Eileen wondered what was wrong with him.

“No, I still gave it a bit of thought,” Willis said. “I would have rushed in immediately, of course—”

“Of course,” Eileen said.

“To disarm that guy… who by the way turned out to be a girl… but I was worried about you being all alone there in the laundromat in case Mr. Bloomers did decide to show up.”

“Mr. Bloomers!” Eileen said, and burst out laughing. She was still feeling very high after the bust, and she wished that Kling wouldn’t sit there like a zombie but would instead join in the general postmortem celebration.

“So I looked through the window,” Willis said.

“Of the bar?”

“No, the laundromat. And saw that everything was still cool, you were sitting there next to a lady reading a magazine and this other lady was carrying about seven tons of laundry into the store, so I figured you’d be safe for another minute or two while I went in there and settled the thing with the knife, especially since I didn’t think our man was going to show anyway. So I went in the bar, and there’s this very nicely dressed middle-class-looking lady wearing eyesglasses and her hair swept up on her head and a dispatch case sitting on the bar as if she’s a lawyer or an accountant who stopped in for a pink lady on the way home and she’s got an eight-foot-long switchblade in her right hand and she’s swinging it in front of her like this, back and forth, slicing the air with it, you know, and I’m surprised first of all that it’s a lady and next that it’s a switchblade she’s holding, which is not exactly a lady’s weapon. Also, I do not wish to get cut,” Willis said.

“Naturally,” Eileen said.

“Naturally,” Willis said. “In fact, I’m beginning to think I’d better go check on you again, make sure the panties nut hasn’t shown up after all. But just then the guy who came out in the street yelling ‘Police, police,’ now says to the crazy lady with the stiletto, ‘I warned you, Grace, this man is a policeman.’ Which means I now have to uphold law and order, which is the last thing on earth I wish to do.”

“What’d you do?” Eileen asked.

She was really interested now. She had never come up against a woman wielding a dangerous weapon, her line of specialty being men, of sorts. Usually she leveled her gun at a would-be rapist’s privates, figuring she’d threaten him where he lived. Tonight, she had rammed the gun into the hollow of the man’s throat. The barrel of the gun had left a bruise there, she had seen the bruise when she was putting the cuffs on him. But how do you begin taking a knife away from an angry woman? You couldn’t threaten to shoot her in the balls, could you?

“I walked over to her and I said, ‘Grace, that’s a mighty fine knife you’ve got there, I wonder if you’d mind giving it to me.’”

“That was a mistake,” Eileen said. “She might’ve given it to you, all right, she might’ve really given it to you.”

“But she didn’t,” Willis said. “Instead, she turned to the guy who’d run out of the bar—”

“The ‘Police, police’ guy?”

“Yeah, and she said, ‘Harry,’ or whatever the hell his name was, ‘Harry, how can you keep cheating on me this way?’ and then she burst into tears and handed the knife to the bartender instead of to me, and Harry took her in his arms—”

“Excuse me, huh?” Kling said, and got up from behind the desk, and walked out of the squadroom.

“Oh God,” Willis said.

“Huh?” Eileen said.

“I forgot,” Willis said. “He probably thinks I told that story on purpose. I’d better go talk to him, Excuse me, okay? I’m sorry, Eileen, excuse me.”

“Sure,” she said, puzzled, and watched while Willis went through the gate in the slatted rail divider and down the corridor after Kling. There were some things she would never in a million years understand about the guys who worked up here. Never. She picked up another slice of pizza. It was cold. And she hadn’t even got a chance to tell anyone about how absolutely brilliant and courageous and deadly forceful she’d been in that laundromat.

It was beginning to snow again. Lightly. Fat fluffy flakes drifting down lazily from the sky. Arthur Brown was driving. Bert Kling sat beside him on the front seat of the five-year-old unmarked sedan, Eileen was sitting in the back. She had still been in the squadroom when the homicide squeal came in, and she’d asked Kling if he’d mind dropping her off at the subway on his way to the scene. Kling had merely grunted. Kling was a charmer, Eileen thought.

Brown was a huge man who looked even more enormous in his bulky overcoat. The coat was gray and it had a fake black fur collar. He was wearing black leather gloves that matched the black collar. Brown was supposed to be what people nowadays called a “black” man, but Brown knew that his complexion did not match the color of either the black collar or the black gloves. Whenever he looked at himself in the mirror, he saw someone with a chocolate-colored skin looking back at him, but he did not think of himself as a “chocolate” man. Neither did he think of himself as a Negro anymore; somehow, if a black man thought of himself as a Negro, he was thinking obsequiously. Negro had become a derogatory term, God alone knew when or how. Brown’s father used to call himself “a person of color” which Brown thought was a very hoity-toity expression even when it was still okay for black men to call themselves Negroes. (Brown noticed that Ebony magazine capitalized the word Black, and he often wondered why.) He guessed he still thought of himself as colored, and he sincerely hoped there was nothing wrong with that. Nowadays, a nigger didn’t know what he was supposed to think.

Brown was the kind of black man white men crossed the street to avoid. If you were white, and you saw Brown approaching on the same side of the street, you automatically assumed he was going to mug you, or cut you with a razor, or do something else terrible to you. That was partially due to the fact that Brown was six feet four inches tall and weighed two hundred and twenty pounds. It was also partially (mostly) due to the fact that Brown was black, or colored, or whatever you chose to call him, but he certainly was not white. A white man approaching Brown might not have crossed the street if Brown had also been a white man; unfortunately, Brown never had the opportunity to conduct such an experiment. The fact remained that when Brown was casually walking down the street minding his own business, white people crossed over to the other side. Sometimes even white cops crossed over to the other side. Nobody wanted trouble with someone who looked the way Brown looked. Even black people sometimes crossed the street when Brown approached, but only because he looked so bad-ass.

Brown knew he was, in fact, very handsome.

Whenever Brown looked in the mirror, he saw a very handsome chocolate-colored man looking back at him out of soulful brown eyes. Brown liked himself a lot. Brown was very comfortable with himself. Brown was glad he was a cop because he knew that the real reason white people crossed the street when they saw him was because they thought all black people were thieves or murderers. He frequently regretted the day he was promoted into the Detective Division because then he could no longer wear his identifying blue uniform, the contradiction to his identifying brown skin. Brown especially liked to bust people of his own race. He especially liked it when some black dude said, “Come on, brother, give me a break.” That man was no more Brown’s brother than Brown was brother to a hippopotamus. In Brown’s world, there were the good guys and the bad guys, white or black, it made no difference. Brown was one of the good guys. All those guys breaking the law out there were the bad guys. Tonight, one of the bad guys had left somebody dead and bleeding on the floor of a garage under a building on fancy Silvermine Road, and Kling had caught the squeal, and Brown was his partner, and they were two good guys riding out into the gently falling snow, with another good guy (who happened to be a girl) sitting on the backseat — which reminded him: He had to drop her off at the subway station.

“The one on Culver and Fourth okay?” he asked her.

“That’ll be fine, Artie,” Eileen said.

Kling was hunkered down inside his coat, looking out at the falling snow. The car heater rattled and clunked, something wrong with the man. The car was the worst one the squad owned. Brown wondered how come whenever it was his turn to check out a car, he got this one. Worst car in the entire city, maybe. Ripe tomato accelerator, rattled like a two-dollar whore, something wrong with the exhaust, the damn car always smelled of carbon monoxide, they were probably poisoning themselves on the way to the homicide.

“Willis says you nabbed the guy who was running around pulling down bloomers, huh?” Brown said.

“Yeah,” Eileen said, grinning.

“Good thing, too,” Brown said. “This kind of weather, lady needs her under drawers.” He began laughing. Eileen laughed, too. Kling sat staring through the windshield.

“Will you be all right on the subway, this hour of the night?” Brown asked.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” Eileen said.

He pulled the car into the curb.

“You sure now?”

“Positive. G’night, Artie,” she said, and opened the door. “G’night, Bert.”

“Good night,” Brown said. “Take care.”

Kling said nothing. Eileen shrugged and closed the door behind her. Brown watched as she went down the steps into the subway. He pulled the car away from the curb the moment her head disappeared from sight.

“Hey, hi!” the voice said.

He was approaching the elevators, his head bent, his eyes on the marble floor. He did not recognize the voice, nor did he even realize at first that it was he who was being addressed. But he looked up because someone had stepped into his path. The someone was Eileen Burke.

She was wearing a simple brown suit with a green blouse that was sort of ruffly at the throat, the green the color of her eyes, her long red hair swept efficiently back from her face, standing tall in high-heeled brown pumps a shade darker than the suit. She was carrying a shoulder bag, and he could see into the bag to where the barrel of a revolver seemed planted in a bed of crumpled Kleenexes. The picture on her plastic I.D. card, clipped to the lapel of her suit, showed a younger Eileen Burke, her red hair done in the frizzies. She was smiling — in the picture, and in person.

“What are you doing down here?” she asked. “Nobody comes here on a Sunday.”

“I need a picture from the I.S.,” he said. She seemed waiting for him to say more. “How about you?” he added.

“I work here. Special Forces is here. Right on this floor, in fact. Come on in for a cup of coffee,” she said, and her smile widened.

“No, thanks, I’m sort of in a hurry,” Kling said, even though he was in no hurry at all.

“Okay,” Eileen said, and shrugged. “Actually, I’m glad I ran into you. I was going to call later in the day, anyway.”

“Oh?” Kling said.

“I think I lost an earring up there. Either there or in the laundromat with the panty perpetrator. If it was the laundromat, good-bye, Charlie. But if it was the squadroom, or maybe the car — when you were dropping me off last night, you know…”

“Yeah,” Kling said.

“It was just a simple gold hoop earring, about the size of a quarter. Nothing ostentatious when you’re doing dirty laundry, right?”

“Which ear was it?” he asked.

“The right,” she said. “Huh? What difference does it make? I mean, it was the right ear, but earrings are interchangeable, so—”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Kling said. He was looking at her right ear, or at the space beyond her right ear or wherever. He was certainly not looking at her face, certainly not allowing his eyes to meet her eyes. What the hell is wrong with him? she wondered.

“Well, take a look up there, okay?” she said. “If you find it, give me a call. I’m with Special Forces — well, you know that — but I’m in and out all the time, so just leave a message. That is, if you happen to find the earring.” She hesitated, and then said, “The right one, that is. If you find the left one, it’s the wrong one.” She smiled. He did not return the smile. “Well, see you around the pool hall,” she said, and spread her hand in a farewell fan, and turned on her heel, and walked away from him.

Kling pressed the button for the elevator.

The phone on Kling’s desk began ringing just as he and Brown were leaving the squadroom. He leaned over the slatted rail divider and picked up the receiver.

“Kling,” he said.

“Bert, it’s Eileen.”

“Oh, hi,” he said. “I was going to call you later today.”

“Did you find it?”

“Just where you said it was. Backseat of the car.”

“You know how many earrings I’ve lost in the backseats of cars?” Eileen said.

Kling said nothing.

“Years ago, of course,” she said.

Kling still said nothing.

“When I was a teenager,” she said.

The silence lengthened.

“Well,” she said, “I’m glad you found it.”

“What do you want me to do with it?” Kling asked.

“I don’t suppose you’ll be coming down this way for anything, will you?”

“Well…”

“Court? Or the lab? D.A.’s office? Anything like that?”

“No, but…”

She waited.

“Actually, I live down near the bridge,” Kling said.

“The Calm’s Point Bridge?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, well, good! Do you know A View From the Bridge?”

“What?”

“It’s under the bridge, actually, right on the Dix. A little wine bar.”

“Oh.”

“It’s just… I don’t want to take you out of your way.”

“Well…”

“Does five sound okay?” Eileen asked.

“I was just leaving the office, I don’t know what time—”

“It’s just at the end of Lamb Street, under the bridge, right on the river, you can’t miss it. Five o’clock, okay? My treat, it’ll be a reward, sort of.”

“Well…”

“Or have you made other plans?” Eileen asked.

“No. No other plans.”

“Five o’clock, then?”

“Okay,” he said.

“Good,” she said, and hung up.

Kling had a bewildered look on his face.

“What was that?” Brown asked.

“Eileen’s earring,” Kling said.

“What?” Brown said.

“Forget it,” Kling said.

The ceiling of A View From the Bridge was adorned with wineglasses, the foot of each glass captured between narrow wooden slats, the stem and bowl hanging downward to create an overall impression of a vast, wall-to-wall chandelier glistening with reflected light from the fireplace on one wall of the room. The fireplace wall was made of brick, and the surrounding walls were wood-paneled except for the one lacing the river, a wide expanse of glass through which Kling could see the water beyond and the tugboats moving slowly through the rapidly gathering dusk. It was five-thirty by the clock over the bar facing the entrance doorway.

The wine bar, at this hour, was crowded with men and women who, presumably, worked in the myriad courthouses, municipal buildings, law offices, and brokerage firms that housed the judicial, economic, legal, and governmental power structure in this oldest part of the city. There was a pleasant conversational hum in the place, punctuated by relaxed laughter, a coziness encouraged by the blazing fire and the flickering glow of candles in ruby-red holders on each of the round tables. Kling had never been to England, but he suspected that a pub in London might have looked and sounded exactly like this at the end of a long working day. He recognized an assistant D.A. he knew, said hello to him, and then looked for Eileen.

She was sitting at a table by the window, staring out over the river. The candle in its ruby holder cast flickering highlights into her hair, red reflecting red. Her chin was resting on the cupped palm of her hand. She looked pensive and contained, and for a moment he debated intruding on whatever mood she was sharing with the dark waters of the river beyond. He took off his coat, hung it on a wall rack just inside the door, and then moved across the room to where she was sitting. She turned away from the river as he moved toward her, as though sensing his approach.

“Hi,” he said, “I’m sorry I’m late, we ran into something.”

“I just got here myself,” she said.

He pulled out the chair opposite her.

“So,” she said. “You found it.”

“Right where you said it’d be.” He reached into his jacket pocket. “Let me give it to you before it gets lost again,” he said, and placed the shining circle of gold on the table between them. He noticed all at once that she was wearing the mate to it on her right ear. He watched as she lifted the earring from the table, reached up with her left hand to pull down the lobe of her left ear, and crossed her right hand over her body to fasten the earring. The gesture reminded him suddenly and painfully of the numberless times he had watched Augusta putting on or taking off earrings, the peculiarly female tilt of her head, her hair falling in an auburn cascade. Augusta had pierced ears; Eileen’s earrings were clip-ons.

“So,” she said, and smiled, and then suddenly looked at him with something like embarrassment on her face, as though she’d been caught in an intimate act when she thought she’d been unobserved. The smile faltered for an instant. She looked quickly across the room to where the waiter was taking an order at another table. “What do you prefer?” she asked. “White or red?”

“White’ll be fine,” he said. “But listen, I want to pay for this. There’s no need—”

“Absolutely out of the question,” she said. “After all the trouble I put you to?”

“It was no trouble at—”

“No way,” she said, and signaled to the waiter.

Kling fell silent. She looked across at him, studying his face, a policewoman suddenly alerted to something odd.

“This really does bother you, doesn’t it?” she said.

“No, no.”

“My paying, I mean.”

“Well… no,” he said, but he meant yes. One of the things that had been most troubling about his marriage was the fact that Augusta’s exorbitant salary had paid for most of the luxuries they’d enjoyed.

The waiter was standing by the table now, the wine list in his hand, Clued by the fact that she was the one who’d signaled him, and no longer surprised by women who did the ordering and picked up the tab, he extended the leather-covered folder to her. “Yes, miss?” he said.

“I believe the gentleman would like to do the ordering,” Eileen said. Kling looked at her. “He’ll want the check, too,” she added.

“Whatever turns you on,” the waiter said, and handed the list to Kling.

“I’m not so good at this,” he said.

“Neither am I,” she said.

“Where you thinking of a white or a red?” the waiter asked.

“A white,” Kling said.

“A dry white?”

“Well… sure.”

“May I suggest the Pouilly-Fume, sir? It’s a nice dry white with a somewhat smoky taste.”

“Eileen?”

“Yes, that sounds fine,” she said.

“Yes, the… uh… Pooey Foo May, please,” Kling said, and handed the wine list back as if it had caught fire in his hands. “Sounds like a Chinese dish,” he said to Eileen as the waiter walked off.

“Did you see the French movie, it’s a classic,” she said. “I forget the title. With Gerard Philippe and… Michele Morgan, I think. She’s an older woman and he’s a very young man, and he takes her to a fancy French restaurant—”

“No, I don’t think so,” Kling said.

“Anyway, he’s trying to impress her, you know, and when the wine steward brings the wine he ordered, and pours a little into his glass to taste it, he lakes a little sip — she’s watching him all the while, and the steward is watching him, too — and he rolls it around on his tongue, and says, ‘This wine tastes of cork.’ The wine steward looks at him — they’re all supposed to be such bastards, you know, French waiters — and he pours a little of the wine into his little silver tasting cup, whatever they call it, and he takes a sip, and rolls it around in his mouth, and everybody in the place is watching them because they know they’re lovers, and there’s nothing in the world a Frenchman likes better than a lover. And finally, the steward nods very solemnly, and says, ‘Monsieur is correct, this wine does taste of cork,’ and he goes away to get a fresh bottle, and Gerard Philippe smiles, and Michele Morgan smiles, and everybody in the entire place smiles.”

Eileen was smiling now.

“It was a very lovely scene,” she said.

“I don’t much care for foreign movies,” Kling said. “I mean, the ones with subtitles.”

“This one had subtitles,” Eileen said. “But it was beautiful.”

“That scene did sound very good,” Kling said.

“Le Diable au Corps, that was it.”

Kling looked at her, puzzled.

“The title,” she said. “It means ‘Devil in the Flesh.’”

“That’s a good title,” Kling said.

“Yes,” Eileen said.

“The Pouilly-Fume,” the waiter said, and pulled the cork. He wiped the lip of the bottle with his towel, and then poured a little wine into Kling’s glass. Kling looked at Eileen, lifted the glass, brought it to his lips, sipped at the wine, rolled the wine around in his mouth, raised his eyebrows, and said, “This wine tastes of cork.”

Eileen burst out laughing.

“Cork?” the waiter said.

“I’m joking,” Kling said, “it’s really fine.”

“Because, really, if it’s—”

“No, no, it’s fine, really.”

Eileen was still laughing. The waiter frowned at her as he poured the wine into her glass, and then filled Kling’s. He was still frowning when he walked away from the table. They raised their glasses.

“Here’s to golden days and purple nights,” Eileen said, and clinked her glass against his.

“Cheers,” he said.

“My Uncle Matt always used to say that,” Eileen said. “He drank like a fish.” She brought the glass to her lips. “Be funny if it really tasted of cork, wouldn’t it?” she said, and then sipped at the wine.

“Does it?” Kling asked.

“No, no, it’s very good. Try it,” she said. “For real this time.”

He drank.

“Good?” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Actually, it was Micheline Presle, I think,” she said. “The heroine.”

They sat silently for several moments. Out on the river, a tugboat hooted into the night.

“So,” she said, “what are you working on?”

“That homicide we caught when you were up there Saturday

“How does it look?”

“Puzzling,” Kling said.

“That’s what makes them interesting,” Eileen said.

“I suppose.”

“My stuff is hardly ever puzzling. I’m always the bait for some lunatic out there, hoping he’ll take the hook.”

“I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes,” Kling said.

“It does get scary every now and then.”

“I’ll bet.”

“So listen, who asked me to become a cop, right?”

“How’d you happen to get into it?”

“Uncle Matt. He of the golden days and purple nights, the big drinker. He was a cop. I loved him to death, so I figured I’d become a cop, too. He worked out of the old Hundred and Tenth in Riverhead. That is, till he caught it one night in a bar brawl. He wasn’t even on duty. Just sitting there drinking his sour-mash bourbon when some guy came in with a sawed-off shotgun and a red plaid kerchief over his face. Uncle Matt went for his service revolver and the guy shot him dead.” Eileen paused. “The guy got fifty-two dollars and thirty-six cents from the cash register. He also got away clean. I keep hoping I’ll run into him one day. Sawed-off shotgun and red plaid kerchief. I’ll blow him away without batting an eyelash.”

She batted both eyelashes now.

“Tough talk on the lady, huh?” she said, and smiled. “So how about you?” she said. “How’d you get into it?”

“Seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” he said, and shrugged.

“How about now? Does it still seem like the right thing?”

“I guess so.” He shrugged again. “You get sort of… it wears you down, you know.”

“Mm,” she said.

“Everything out there,” he said, and fell silent.

They sipped some more wine.

“What are you working on?” he asked.

“Thursday,” she said. “I won’t start till Thursday night.”

“And what’s that?”

“Some guy’s been raping nurses outside Worth Memorial. On their way to the subway, when they’re crossing that park outside the hospital, do you know the park? In Chinatown?”

“Yes,” Kling said, and nodded.

“Pretty big park for that part of the city. He hits the ones coming off the four-to-midnight, three of them in the past three months, always when there’s no moon.”

“I gather there’ll be no moon this Thursday night.”

“No moon at all,” she said. “Don’t you just love that song?”

“What song?”

“‘No Moon at All.’”

“I don’t know it,” Kling said. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, this certainly isn’t the ‘We both like the same things’ scene, is it?”

“I don’t know what scene that is,” Kling said.

“In the movies. What’s your favorite color? Yellow. Mine, too! What’s your favorite flower? Geraniums. Mine, too! Gee, we both like the same things!” She laughed again.

“Well, at least we both like the wine,” Kling said, and smiled, and poured her glass full again. “Will you be dressed like a nurse?” he asked.

“Oh, sure. Do you think that’s sexy?”

“What?”

“Nurses. Their uniforms, I mean.”

“I’ve never thought about it.”

“Lots of men have things for nurses, you know. I guess it’s because they figure they’ve seen it all, nurses. Guys lying around naked on operating tables and so forth. They figure nurses are experienced.”

“Mm,” Kling said.

“Somebody once told me — this man I used to date, he was an editor at a paperback house — he told me if you put the word nurse in a title, you’re guaranteed a million-copy sale.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s what he told me.”

“I guess he would know.”

“But nurses don’t turn you on, huh?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I’ll have to show you what I look like,” Eileen said. Her eyes met his. “In my nurse’s outfit.”

Kling said nothing.

“It must have something to do with white, too,” Eileen said. “The fact that a nurse’s uniform is white. Like a bride’s gown, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” Kling said.

“The conflicting image, do you know? The experienced virgin. Not that too many brides today are virgins,” she said, and shrugged. “Nobody would even expect that today, would they? A man, I mean. That his bride’s going to be a virgin?”

“I guess not,” Kling said.

“You’ve never been married, have you?” she said.

“I’ve been married,” he said.

“I didn’t know that.”

“Yes,” he said.

“And?”

Kling hesitated.

“I was recently divorced,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Well,” he said, and lifted his wineglass, avoiding her steady gaze. “How about you?” he said. He was looking out over the river now.

“Still hoping for Mr. Right,” she said. “I keep having this fantasy… well, I really shouldn’t tell you this.”

“No, go ahead,” he said, turning back to her.

“Well… really, it’s silly,” she said, and he could swear that she was blushing, but perhaps it was only the red glow of the candle in its holder. “I keep fantasizing that one of those rapists out there will succeed one night, do you know? I won’t be able to get my gun on him in time, he’ll do whatever he wants and — surprise — he’ll turn out to be Prince Charming! I’ll fall madly in love with him, and we’ll live happily ever after. Whatever you do, don’t tell that to Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem. I’ll get drummed out of the women’s movement.”

“The old rape fantasy,” Kling said.

“Except that I happen to deal with real rape,” Eileen said. “And I know it isn’t fun and games.”

“Mm,” Kling said.

“So why should I fantasize about it? I mean, I’ve come within a hairsbreadth of it so many times…”

“Maybe that’s what accounts for the fantasy,” Kling said. “The fantasy makes it seem less frightening. Your work. What you have to do. Maybe,” he said, and shrugged.

“We’ve just had our ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you all this’ scene, haven’t we?”

“I suppose so,” he said, and smiled.

“Somebody ought to write a book about all the different kinds of clichéd scenes,” she said. “The one I like best, I think, is when the killer has a gun on the guy who’s been chasing him, and he says something like, ‘It’s safe to tell you this now because in three seconds flat you’ll be dead,’ and then proceeds to brag about all the people he killed and how and why he killed them.”

“I wish it was that easy,” Kling said, still smiling.

“Or what I call the ‘Uh-oh!’ scene. Where we see a wife in bed with her lover, and then we cut away to the husband putting his key in the door latch, and we’re all supposed to go, ‘Uh-oh, here it comes!’ Don’t you just love that scene?”

The smile dropped from his face.

She looked into his eyes, trying to read them, knowing she’d somehow made a dreadful mistake, and trying to understand what she’d said that had been so terribly wrong. Until that moment, they’d seemed—

“I’d better get the check,” he said.

She knew better than to press it. If there was one thing she’d learned as a decoy, it was patience.

“Sure,” she said, “I’ve got to run, too. Hey, thanks for bringing the earring back, really. I appreciate it.”

“No problem,” Kling said, but he wasn’t looking at her, he was signaling to the waiter instead.

They sat in silence while they waited for the check. When they left the place, they shook hands politely on the sidewalk outside and walked off in opposite directions.

When the telephone rang, it startled Kling.

The phone was on an end table beside the bed, and the first ring slammed into the silence of the room like a pistol shot, causing him to sit bolt upright, his heart pounding. He grabbed for the receiver.

“Hello?” he said.

“Hi, this is Eileen,” she said.

“Oh, hi,” he said.

“You sound out of breath.”

“No, I… it was very quiet in here. When the phone rang, it surprised me.” His heart was still pounding.

“You weren’t asleep, were you? I didn’t—”

“No, no, I was just lying here.”

“In bed?”

“Yes.”

“I’m in bed, too,” she said.

He said nothing.

“I wanted to apologize,” she said.

“What for?”

“I didn’t know about the divorce,” she said.

“Well, that’s okay.”

“I wouldn’t have said what I said if I’d known.”

What she meant, he realized, was that she hadn’t known about the circumstances of the divorce. She had found out since yesterday, it was common currency in the department, and now she was apologizing for having described what she’d called an “Uh-oh!” scene, the wife in bed with her lover, the husband coming up the steps, the very damn thing that had happened to Kling.

“That’s okay,” he said.

It was not okay.

“I’ve just made it worse, haven’t I?” she said.

He was about to say, “No, don’t be silly, thanks for calling,” when he thought, unexpectedly, Yes, you have made it worse, and he said, “As a matter of fact, you have.”

“I’m sorry. I only wanted—”

“What’d they tell you?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Come on,” he said. “Whoever told you about it.”

“Only that there’d been some kind of problem.”

“Uh-huh. What kind of problem?”

“Just a problem.”

“My wife was playing around, right?”

“Well, yes, that’s what I was told.”

“Fine,” he said.

There was a long silence on the line.

“Well,” she said, and sighed. “I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry if I upset you yesterday.”

“You didn’t upset me,” he said.

“You sound upset.”

“I am upset,” he said.

“Bert…” she said, and hesitated. “Please don’t be mad at me, okay? Please don’t!” and he could swear that suddenly she was crying. The next thing he heard was a click on the line.

He looked at the phone receiver.

“What?” he said to the empty room.

Had she been crying?

He hadn’t wanted to make her cry, he hardly knew the girl. He went to the window and stared out at the cars moving steadily across the city, their headlights piercing the night. It was snowing again. Would it ever stop snowing? He had not wanted to make her cry. What the hell was wrong with him? Augusta is wrong with me, he thought, and went back to the bed.

It might have been easier to forget her if only he didn’t have to see her face everywhere he turned. Your average divorced couple, especially if there were no kids involved, you hardly ever ran into each other after the final decree. You started to forget. Sometimes you forgot even the good things you’d shared, which was bad but which was the nature of the beast called divorce. With Augusta, it was different. Augusta was a model. You couldn’t pass a magazine rack without seeing her face on the cover of at least one magazine each and every month, sometimes two. You couldn’t turn on television without seeing her in a hair commercial (she had such beautiful hair) or a toothpaste commercial, or just last week in a nail-polish commercial, Augusta’s hands fanned out in front of her gorgeous face, the nails long and bright red, as if they’d been dipped in fresh blood, the smile on her lace — ahh, Jesus, that wonderful smile. It got so he didn’t want to turn on the TV set anymore, for fear Augusta would leap out of the tube at him, and he’d start remembering again, and begin crying again.

He lay fully dressed on the bed in the small apartment he was renting near the bridge, his hands behind his head, his head turned so that he could see through the window, see the cars moving on the bridge to Calm’s Point — the theater crowd, he guessed; the shows had all broken by now, and people were heading home. People going home together. He took a deep breath.

His gun was in a holster on the dresser across the room.

He thought about the gun a lot.

Whenever he wasn’t thinking about Augusta, he was thinking about the gun.

He didn’t know why he’d let Brown take all that stuff home with him, he’d have welcomed the opportunity to go through it himself, give him something to do tonight instead of thinking about either Augusta or the gun. He knew Brown hated paperwork, he’d have been happy to take the load off his hands. But Brown had tiptoed around him, they all tiptoed around him these days, No, Bert, that’s fine, you just go out and have a good time, hear? I’ll be through with this stuff by morning, we’ll talk it over then, okay? It was as if somebody very close to him had died. They all knew somebody had died, and they were uncomfortable with him, the way people are always uncomfortable with mourners, never knowing where to hide their hands, never knowing what to say in condolence. He’d be doing them all a favor, not only himself. Take the gun and…

Come on, he thought.

He turned his head on the pillow, and looked up at the ceiling.

He knew the ceiling by heart. He knew every peak and valley in the rough plaster, knew every smear of dirt, every cobweb. He didn’t know some people the way he knew that ceiling. Sometimes, when he thought of Augusta, the ceiling blurred, he could not see his old friend the ceiling through his own tears. If he used the gun, he’d have to be careful of the angle. Wouldn’t want to have the bullet take off the top of his skull and then put a hole in the ceiling besides, not his old friend the ceiling. He smiled. He figured somebody smiling wasn’t somebody about to eat his own gun. Not yet, anyway.

Damnit, he really hadn’t wanted to make her cry.

He sat up abruptly, reached for the Isola directory on the end table, and thumbed through it, not expecting to find a listing for her, and not surprised when he didn’t. Nowadays, with thieves getting out of prison ten minutes after you locked them up, not too many cops were eager to list their home numbers in the city’s telephone books. He dialed Communications downtown, a number he knew by heart, and told the clerk who answered the phone that he wanted extension 12.

“Departmental Directory,” a woman’s voice said.

“Home number for a police officer,” Kling said.

“Is this a police officer calling?”

“It is,” Kling said.

“Your name, please?”

“Bertram A. Kling.”

“Your rank and shield number, please?”

“Detective/Third, seven-four-five-seven-nine.”

“And the party?”

“Eileen Burke.”

There was a silence on the line.

“Is this a joke?” the woman said.

“A joke? What do you mean?”

“She called here ten minutes ago, wanting your number.”

“We’re working a case together,” Kling said, and wondered why he’d lied.

“So did she call you?”

“She called me.”

“So why didn’t you ask her what her number was?”

“I forgot,” Kling said.

“This isn’t a dating service,” the woman said.

“I told you, we’re working a case together,” Kling said.

“Sure,” the woman said. “Hold on, let me run this through.”

He waited. He knew she was making a computer check on him verifying that he was a bona fide cop. He looked through the window. It was snowing more heavily now. Come on, he thought.

“Hello?” the woman said.

“I’m still here,” Kling said.

“Our computers are down, I had to do it manually.”

“Am I a real cop?” Kling said.

“Who knows nowadays?” the woman answered. “Here’s the number, have you got a pencil?”

He wrote down the number, thanked her for her time, and then pressed one of the receiver rest buttons on top of the phone. He released the button, got a dial tone, was about to dial, and then hesitated. What am I starting here? he wondered. I don’t want to start anything here. I’m not ready to start anything. He put the phone back on the cradle. He owed her an apology, didn’t he? Or did he? What the hell, he thought, and went back to the phone, and dialed her number.

“hello?” she said. Her voice sounded very small and a trifle sniffly.

“This is Bert,” he said.

“Hello,” she said. The same small sniffly voice.

“Bert Kling,” he said.

“I know,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to yell at you.”

“That’s okay,” she said.

“Really, I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” she said again.

There was a long silence on the line.

“So… how are you?” he said.

“Fine, I guess,” she said.

There was another long silence.

“Is your apartment cold?” she asked.

“No, it’s fine. Nice and warm.”

“I’m freezing to death here,” she said. “I’m going to call the Ombudsman’s Office first thing tomorrow morning. They’re not supposed to turn off the heat so early, are they?”

“Eleven o’clock, I thought.”

“Is it eleven already?”

“It’s almost midnight.”

“Another day, another dollar,” Eileen said, and sighed. “Anyway, they’re not supposed to turn it off entirely, are they?”

“Sixty-two, I think.”

“The radiators here are ice-cold,” she said. “I have four blankets on the bed.”

“You ought to get an electric blanket,” Kling said.

“I’m afraid of them. I’m afraid I’ll catch on fire or something.”

“No, no, they’re very safe.”

“Do you have an electric blanket?”

“No. But I’m told they’re very safe.”

“Or electrocuted,” she said.

“Well,” he said, “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. And really, I am sorry for—”

“Me, too.” She paused. “This is the Tm-Sorry-You’re-Sorry’ scene, isn’t it?” she said.

“I guess so.”

“Yeah, that’s what it is,” she said.

Silence again.

“Well,” he said, “it’s late, I don’t want to—”

“No, don’t go,” she said. “Talk to me.”

She had asked him not to go, she had asked him to talk to her, and suddenly he could think of nothing else to say. The silence on the line lengthened. On the street outside, he heard the distinctive wail of a 911 Emergency truck, and wondered which poor bastard had jumped off a bridge or got himself pinned under a subway train.

“Do you ever get scared?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“I mean, on the job.”

“Yes.”

“I’m scared,” she said.

“What about?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“The nurse thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, just don’t—”

“I mean, I’m always a little scared, but not like this time.” She hesitated. “He blinded one of them,” she said. “One of the nurses he raped.”

“Boy,”Kling said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, what you have to do… just be careful, that’s all.”

“Yeah, I’m always careful,” she said.

“Who’s your backup on this?”

“Two of them. I’ve got two of them.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“Abrahams and McCann, do you know them?”

“No.”

“They’re out of the Chinatown Precinct.”

“I don’t know them.”

“They seem okay, but… well, a backup can’t stay glued to you, you know, otherwise he’ll scare off the guy you’re trying to catch.”

“Yeah, but they’ll be there if you need them.”

“I guess.”

“Sure, they will.”

“How long does it take to put out somebody’s eyes?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t worry about that, really, that’s not going to help, worrying about it. Just make sure you’ve got your hand on your gun, that’s all.”

“In my bag, yeah.”

“Wherever you carry it.”

“That’s where I carry it.”

“Make sure it’s in your hand. And keep your finger inside the trigger guard.”

“Yeah, I always do.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to carry a spare, either.”

“Where would I carry a spare?”

“Strap it to your ankle. Wear slacks. Nurses are allowed to wear slacks, aren’t they?”

“Oh, sure. But they like a leg show, you see. I’ll be wearing the uniform, you know, like a dress. The white uniform.”

“Who do you mean? Rank? They told you to wear a dress?”

“I’m sorry, what—”

“You said they like a leg show…”

“Oh. I meant the lunatics out there. They like a little leg, a little ass. Shake your boobs, lure them out of the bushes.”

“Yeah, well,” Kling said.

“I’ll be wearing one of those starched things, you know, with a little white cap, and white panty hose, and this big black cape. I already tried it on today, it’ll be at the hospital when I check in tomorrow night.”

“What time will that be?”

“When I get to the hospital, or when I go out?”

“Both?”

“I’m due there at eleven. I’ll be hitting the park at a little after midnight.”

“Well, be careful.”

“I will.”

They were silent for a moment.

“Maybe I could tuck it in my bra or something. The spare.”

“Yeah, get yourself one of those little guns…”

“Yeah, like a derringer or something.”

“No, that won’t help you, that’s Mickey Mouse time. I’m talking about something like a Browning or a Bernardelli, those little pocket automatics, you know?”

“Yeah,” she said, “tuck it in my bra.”

“As a spare, you know.”

“Yeah.”

“You can pick one up anywhere in the city,” Kling said. “Cost you something like thirty, forty dollars.”

“But those are small-caliber guns, aren’t they?” she asked. “Twenty-twos? Or twenty-fives?”

“That doesn’t mean anything, the caliber. A gun like a twenty-two can do more damage than a thirty-eight. When Reagan got shot, everybody was saying he was lucky it was only a twenty-two the guy used, but that was wrong thinking. I was talking to this guy at Ballistics… Dorfsman, do you know Dorfsman?”

“No,” Eileen said.

“Anyway, he told me you have to think of the human body like a room with furniture in it. You shoot a thirty-eight or a forty-five through one wall of the room, the slug goes right out through another wall. But you shoot a twenty-two or a twenty-five into that room, it hasn’t got the power to exit, you understand? It hits a sofa, it ricochets off and hits the television set, it ricochets off that and hits a lamp — those are all the organs inside the body, you understand? Like the heart, or the kidneys, or the lungs, the bullet just goes bouncing around inside there doing a lot of damage. So you don’t have to worry about the caliber, I mean it. Those little guns can really hurt somebody.”

“Yeah,” Eileen said, and hesitated. “I’m still scared,” she said.

“No, don’t be. You’ll be fine.”

“Maybe it’s because of what I told you yesterday,” she said. “My fantasy, you know. I never told that to anyone in my life. Now I feel as it I’m tempting God or something. Because I said it out loud. About…you know, wanting to get raped.”

“Well, you don’t really want to get raped.”

“I know I don’t.”

“So that’s got nothing to do with it.”

“Except for fun and games,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Getting raped.”

“Oh.”

“You know,” she said. “You tear off my panties and my bra, I struggle a little… like that. Pretending.”

“Sure,” he said.

“To spice it up a little,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“But not for real.”

“No.”

She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “It’s too bad tomorrow night is for real.”

“Take the spare along,” Kling said.

“Oh, I will, don’t worry.”

“Well,” he said, “I guess—”

“No, don’t go,” she said. “Talk to me.”

Suddenly, and again, he could think of nothing else to say.

“Tell me what happened,” she said. “The divorce.”

“I’m not sure I want to,” he said.

“Will you tell me one day?”

“Maybe.”

“Only if you want to,” she said. “Bert…” She hesitated. “Thank you. I feel a lot better now.”

“Well, good,” he said. “Listen, if you want to…

“Yes?”

“Give me a call tomorrow night. When you come in, I mean. When it’s all over. Let me know how it went, okay?”

“Well, that’s liable to be pretty late.”

“I’m usually up late.”

“Well, if you’d like me to.”

“Yes, I would.”

“It’ll be after midnight, you know.”

“That’s okay.”

“Maybe later, if we make the collar. Time we book him—”

“Whenever,” Kling said. “Just call me whenever.”

“Okay,” she said. “Well,” she said.

“Well, good night,” he said.

“Good night, Bert,” she said, and hung up.

She felt stupid with a gun in her bra.

The gun was a .22-caliber Llama with a six-shot capacity, deadly enough, she supposed, if push came to shove. Its overall length was four and three-quarter inches, just small enough to fit cozily if uncomfortably between her breasts. It weighed only thirteen and a half ounces, but it felt like thirteen and a half pounds tucked there inside her bra, and besides, the metal was cold. That was because she had left the top three buttons of the uniform unfastened, in case she needed to get in there in a hurry. The wind was blowing up under the flapping black cape she was wearing, straight from the North Pole and directly into the open V-necked wedge of the uniform. Her breasts were cold, and her nipples were cold and erect besides — but maybe that was because she was scared to death.

She did not like the setup, she had told them that from the start. Even after the dry run this afternoon, she had voiced her complaints. It had taken her eight minutes to cross the park on the winding path that ran more or less diagonally through it, walking at a slightly faster than normal clip, the way a woman alone at midnight would be expected to walk through a deserted park. She had argued for a classic bookend surveillance, one of her backup men ahead of her, the other behind, at reasonably safe distances. Both of her backups were old-timers from the Chinatown Precinct, both of them Detectives/First. Abrahams (“Call me Morrie,” he said back at the precinct, when they were laying out their strategy) argued that anybody walking point would scare off their rapist if he made a head-on approach. McCann (“I’m Mickey,” he told her) argued that if the guy made his approach from behind, he’d spot the follow-up man and call it all off. Eileen could see the sense of what they were saying, but she still didn’t like the way they were proposing to do it. What they wanted to do was plant one of them at either end of the path, at opposite ends of the park. That meant that if their man hit when she was midway through the park, the way he’d done on his last three outings, she’d be four minutes away from either one of them — okay, say three minutes, if they came at a gallop.

“If I’m in trouble,” she said, “you won’t be able to reach me in time. Why can’t we put you under the trees someplace, hiding under those trees in the middle of the park? That’s where he hit the last three times. If you’re under the trees there, we won’t have four minutes separating us.”

“Three minutes,” Abrahams said.

“That’s where he hit the last three times,” she said again.

“Suppose he scouts the area this time?” McCann said.

“And spots two guys hiding under the trees there?” Abrahams said.

“He’ll call it off,” McCann said.

“You’ll have the transmitter in your bag,” Abrahams said.

“A lot of good that’ll do if he decides to stick an ice pick in my eye,” Eileen said.

“Voice-activated,” McCann said.

“Terrific,” Eileen said. “Will that get you there any faster? I could yell bloody murder, and it’ll still take you three minutes — minimum — to get from either end of that park. In three minutes, I can be a statistic.”

Abrahams laughed.

“Very funny,” Eileen said. “Only it’s my ass we’re talking about here.”

“I dig this broad,” Abrahams said, laughing.

“That radio can pick up a whisper from twenty-five feet away,” McCann said.

“So what?” Eileen said. “It’ll still take you three minutes to reach me from where you guys want to plant yourselves. Look, Morrie, why don’t you go in? How about you, Mickey? Either one of you in drag, how does that sound? I’ll sit outside the park, listening to the radio,

“I really dig this broad,” Abrahams said, laughing.

“So what do you want to do?” McCann asked her.

“i told you. The trees. We hide you under the trees.”

“Be pointless. The guy combs the park first, he spots us, he knows we’ve got it staked out. That’s what you want to do, we might as well forget the whole thing.”

“Lei him go on raping those nurses there,” Abrahams said.

Both men looked at her.

So that was what it got down to at last, that was what it always got down to in the long run. You had to show them you were just as good as they were, willing to take the same chances they’d have taken in similar circumstances, prove to them you had balls.

“Okay,” she said, and sighed.

“Better take off those earrings,” McCann said.

“I’m wearing the earrings,” she said.

“Nurses don’t wear earrings. I never seen a nurse wearing earrings. He’ll spot the earrings.”

“I’m wearing the earrings,” she said flatly.

So here I am, she thought, ball-less to be sure, but wearing my good-luck earrings, and carrying one gun tucked in my bra, and another gun in my shoulder bag alongside the battery-powered, voice-activated FM transmitter that can pick up a whisper from twenty-five feet away according to McCann, who, by her current estimate, was now two and a half minutes away at the southeast corner of the park, with Abrahams three and a half minutes away at the northwest corner.

If he’s going to make his move, she thought, this is where he’ll make it, right here, halfway through the park, far from the streetlights. Trees on either side of the path, spruces, hemlocks, pines, snow-covered terrain beyond them. Jump out of the trees, drag me off the path the way he did with the others, this is where he hit the last three times, this is where he’ll do it now. The descriptions of the man had been conflicting, they always seemed to be when the offense was rape. One of the victims had described him as being black, another as white. The girl he’d blinded had sobbingly told the investigating officer that her assailant was short and squat, built like a gorilla. The other two nurses insisted that he was very tall, with the slender, muscular body of a weight lifter. He’d been variously described as wearing a business suit, a black leather jacket and blue jeans, and a jogging suit. One of the nurses said he was in his mid-forties, another said he was no older than twenty-five, the third had no opinion whatever about his age. The first nurse he’d raped said he was blond. The second one said he’d been wearing a peaked hat, like a baseball cap. The one he’d blinded — her hand began sweating on the butt of the .38 in her shoulder bag.

It was funny the way her hands always started sweating whenever she found herself in a tight situation. She wondered if McCann’s hands were sweating. Three minutes behind her now, Abrahams equidistant at the other end of the park. She wondered if the transmitter was picking up the clicking of her boots on the asphalt path. The path was shoveled clear of snow, but there were still some patches of ice on it, and she skirted one of those now, and looked into the darkness ahead, her eyes accustomed to the dark, and thought she saw something under the trees ahead, and almost stopped dead in her tracks — but that was not what a good decoy was supposed to do. A good decoy marched right into it, a good decoy allowed her man to make his move, a good decoy—

She thought at first she was hearing things.

Her hand tightened on the butt of the gun.

Somebody whistling?

What?

She kept walking, peering into the darkness ahead, past the midway point now, McCann a bit more than three and a half minutes behind her, Abrahams two and a half minutes away in the opposite direction, still too far away, and saw a boy on a skateboard coming up the path, whistling as he curved the board in graceful arcs back and forth across the path. He couldn’t have been older than thirteen or fourteen, a hatless youngster wearing a blue ski parka and jeans, sneakered feet expertly guiding the skateboard, arms akimbo as he balanced himself, a midnight whistler enjoying the dark silence of the empty park, closer now, still whistling. She smiled, and her hand relaxed on the butt of the gun.

And then, suddenly, he swerved the board into her, bending at the knees, leaning all his weight to one side so that the board slid out from under him, the wheels coming at her, the underside slamming her across the shins. She was pulling the gun from her bag when he punched her in the face. The gun went off while it was still inside the bag, blowing out leather and cigarettes and chewing gum and Kleenex tissues — but not the radio, she hoped, Jesus, not the radio!

In the next thirty seconds, it couldn’t have been longer than that, her finger tightening in reflex on the trigger again, the gun’s explosion shattering the stillness of the night again, their breaths pluming brokenly from their mouths, merging, blowing away on the wind, she thought, remembered, Force part of psychological interplay, he punched her over the breast, Attendant danger of being severely beaten or killed, the gun went off a third time, his fist smashed into her mouth, But he’s just a kid. She tasted blood, felt herself going limp, he was grabbing her right arm, turning her, behind her now, forcing her to her knees, he was going to break her arm, “Let go of it!” yanking on the arm, pulling up on it, “Let go!” her hand opened, the gun clattered to the asphalt.

She tied to get to the feet as he came around her, but he shoved her back onto the path, hard, knocking the wind out of her. As he started to straddle her, she kicked out at him with her booted left foot, white skirts flying, the black heel of the boot catching him on the thigh, a little too low for the money. She wondered how many seconds had gone by now, wondered where McCann and Abrahams were, she’d told them the setup was no good, she’d told them — he began slapping her. Straddling her, slapping her, both hands moving, the slaps somehow more painful than the punches had been, dizzying, big callused hands punishing her cheeks and her jaw, back and forth, her head flailing with each successive slap, his weight on her chest, pressing on her breasts — the gun. She remembered the gun in her bra.

She tried to twist away from him, her arms pinioned by his thighs on either side of her, tried to turn her head to avoid the incessant slaps, and idiotically noticed the nurse’s cap lying white and still on the path where it had fallen. She could not free her arms or her hands, she could not get to the gun.

The slapping stopped abruptly.

There was only the darkness now, and the sound of his vaporized breath coming in short, ragged bursts from his mouth. His hands reached for the front of the uniform. He grasped the fabric. He tore open the front, buttons flying, reached her bra and her breasts — and stopped again. He had seen the gun, he must have seen the gun. His silence now was more frightening than his earlier fury had been. One gun might have meant a streetwise lady who knew the city’s parks were dangerous. Another gun, this one hidden in a bra, could mean only one thing. The lady was a cop. He shifted his weight. She knew he was reaching for something in his pants pocket. She knew the something would be a weapon, and she thought, He’s going to blind me.

In that moment, fear turned to ice. Cold, crystalline, hard. In that moment, she knew she couldn’t count on the cavalry or the marines getting here in time, there was nobody here but us chickens, boss, and nobody to look after little Eileen but little Eileen herself. She took advantage of the shift of his body weight to the left, his right hand going into his pocket, the balance an uneasy one for the barest fraction of a second, enough time for her to emulate the movement of his own body, her left shoulder rising in easy symmetry with his own cant, their bodies in motion together for only a fraction of a second, movement responding to movement as though they were true lovers, and suddenly she lurched, every ounce of strength concentrated in that left shoulder, adding her own weight and momentum to his already off-center tilt — and he toppled over.

His right hand was still in his pocket as she scrambled to her feet. He rolled over onto the path, his right hand coming free of his pocket, the switchblade knife snapping open just as she pulled the Llama out of her bra. She knew she would kill him if he moved. He saw the gun in her hand, steady, leveled at his head, and perhaps he saw the look in her eyes as well, though there was no moon. She liked to think later that what happened next had nothing to do with the sound of footsteps pounding on the path from the north and south, nothing to do with the approach of either Abrahams or McCann.

He dropped the knife.

First he said, “Don’t hurt me.”

Then he said, “Don’t tell on me.”

“You okay?” Abrahams asked.

She nodded. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. The gun in her hand was trembling now.

“I would’ve killed him,” she whispered.

“What?” Abrahams said.

“A kid,” she whispered.

“We better call for a meat wagon,” McCann said. “It looks to me like she’s—

“I’m all right!” she said fiercely, and both men stared at her. “I’m all right,” she said more softly, and felt suddenly faint, and hoped against hope that she wouldn’t pass out in front of these two hairbags from the Chinatown Precinct, and stood there sucking in great gulps of air until the queasiness and the dizziness passed, and then she smiled weakly and said, “What kept you?”

He was exhausted, but the first thing he did when he came into the apartment was dial Eileen’s number. There was no answer. He let the phone ring a dozen times, hung up, dialed it again, slowly and carefully this time, and let it ring another dozen times. Still no answer. He thumbed through the R’s in his directory, and found the listing for Frank Riley, a man who’d gone through the Academy with him, and who was now a Detective/Second working out of the Chinatown Precinct. He dialed the precinct, told the desk sergeant who he was, and then asked if he had any information on the stakeout outside Worth Memorial earlier that night. The desk sergeant didn’t know anything about any stakeout. He put Kling through to the squadroom upstairs, where he talked to a weary detective on the graveyard shift. The detective told him he heard it had gone down as scheduled, but he didn’t know all the details. When Kling asked him if Detective Burke was okay, he said there was nobody by that name on the Chinatown Squad.

He was wondering who to try next when the knock sounded on his door. He went to the door.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“Me,” she answered. Her voice sounded very weary and very small.

He look off the night chain, unlocked the dead bolt, and opened the door. She was wearing a navy pea jacket over blue jeans and black boots. Her long red hair was hanging loose around her face. In the dim illumination of the hallway light bulb, he could see that her face was discolored and bruised, her lip swollen.

“Okay to come in?” she asked.

“Come in,” he said, and immediately, “Are you okay?”

“Tired,” she said.

He locked the door behind her, and put on the night chain. When he turned from the door, she was sitting on the edge of the bed.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“We got him,” she said. “Fourteen years old,” she said. “I almost killed him,” she said.

Their eyes met.

“Would you mind very much making love to me?” she said.

Ice, 1983

The two women were sizing each other up.

Annie Rawles had been told that Eileen Burke was the best decoy in Special Forces. Eileen had been told that Annie Rawles was a hard-nosed Rape Squad cop who’d once worked out of Robbery and had shot down two hoods trying to rip off a midtown bank. Eileen was looking at a woman with eyes the color of loam behind glasses that gave her a scholarly look, wedge-cut hair the color of midnight, firm cupcake breasts, and a slender boy’s body. They were both about the same age, Eileen guessed, give or take a year or so. Eileen kept wondering how somebody who looked so much like a bookkeeper could have pulled her service revolver and blown away two desperate punks facing a max of twenty years hard time.

“What do you think?” Annie asked.

“You say this isn’t the only repeat?” Eileen said.

They were still sizing each other up. Eileen figured this wasn’t a matter of choice. If Annie Rawles had asked for her, and if her lieutenant had assigned Eileen to the job, then that was it, they both outranked her. Still, she liked to know whom she’d be working with. Annie was wondering if Eileen was really as good at the job as they’d said she was. She looked a little flashy for a decoy. Spot her strutting along in high heels with those tits bouncing, a rapist would make her in a minute and run for the hills. This was a very special rapist they were dealing with here; Annie didn’t want an amateur screwing it up.

“We’ve got three women say they were raped more than once by this same guy. Fits the description in each case,” Annie said. “There may be more, we haven’t run an m.o. cross-check.”

“When will you be doing that?” Eileen asked; she liked to know whom she was working with, how efficient they were. It wouldn’t be Annie Rawles’s ass out there on the street, it would be her own.

“Working on that now,” Annie said. She liked Eileen’s question. She knew she was asking Eileen to put herself in a dangerous position. The man had already slashed one of the victims, left her face scarred. At the same time, that was the job. If Eileen didn’t like Special Forces, she should ask for transfer to something else. Annie didn’t know that Eileen was considering just that possibility, but not for any reason Annie might have understood.

“All over the city, or any special location?” Eileen asked.

“Anyplace, anytime.”

“I’m only one person,” Eileen said.

“There’ll be other decoys. But what I have in mind for you…”

“How many?”

“Six, if I can get them.”

“Counting me?”

“Yes.”

“Who are the others?”

“I’ve got their names here, you want to look them over,” Annie said, and handed her a typewritten sheet.

Eileen read it over carefully. She knew all of the women on the list. Most of them knew their jobs. One of them didn’t. She refrained from voicing this opinion; no sense bad-mouthing anybody.

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“Look okay to you?”

“Sure.” She hesitated. “Connie needs a bit more experience,” she said tactfully. “You might want to save her for something less complicated. Good cop, but this guy’s got a knife, you said…”

“And he’s used it,” Annie said.

“Yeah, so save Connie for something a little less complicated.” Both women understood the euphemism. “Less complicated” meant “less dangerous.” Nobody wanted a lady cop slashed because she was incapable of handling something like this.

“What age groups?” Eileen asked. “The victims.”

“The three we know about for sure… let me look at this a minute.” Annie picked up another typewritten sheet. “One of them is forty-six. Another is twenty-eight. This last one — Mary Hollings, the one last Saturday night — is thirty-seven. He’s raped her three times already.”

“Same guy each time, huh? You’re positive about that?”

“According to the descriptions.”

“What do they say he looks like?”

“In his thirties, black hair and blue eyes…”

“White?”

“White. About six feet tall… well, it varies there. We’ve got him ranging from five-ten to six-two. About a hundred and eighty pounds, very muscular, very strong.”

“Any identifying marks? Scars? Tattoos?”

“None of the victims mentioned any.”

“Same guy each time,” Eileen said, as if trying to lend credibility to it by repeating it. “That’s unusual, isn’t it? Guy coming back to the same victim?”

“Very,” Annie said. “Which is why I thought…”

“With your rapists, usually…”

“I know.”

“They don’t care who they get, it’s got nothing to do with lust.”

“I know.”

“So the m.o. would seem to indicate he has favorites or something that doesn’t jibe with the psychology of it.”

“I know.”

“So what’s the plan? Cover these victims or cruise their neighborhoods?”

“We don’t think they’re random victims,” Annie said. “That’s why I’d like you to…”

“Then cruising’s out, right?”

Annie nodded. “This last one — Mary Hollings — is a redhead.”

“Oh,” Eileen said. “Okay, I get it.”

“About your size,” Annie said. “A little shorter. What are you, five-ten, five-eleven?”

“I wish,” Eileen said, and smiled. “Five-nine.”

“She’s five-seven.”

“Built like me?”

“Zoftig, I’d say.”

“Bovine, I’d say,” Eileen said, and smiled.

“Hardly,” Annie said, and returned the smile.

“So you want me to be Mary Hollings, is that it?”

“If you think you can pass.”

“You know the lady, I don’t,” Eileen said.

“It’s a reasonable likeness,” Annie said. “Up close, he’ll tip in a minute. But by that time, it should be too late.”

“Where does she live?” Eileen asked.

“1840 Laramie Crescent.”

“Up in the Eight-Seven?”

“Yes.”

“Does she work, this woman?” ‘Cause if she runs a computer terminal or something…”

“She’s divorced, living on alimony payments.”

“Lucky her,” Eileen said. “I’ll need her daily routine…”

“You can get that directly from her,” Annie said.

“Where do we hide her, meanwhile?”

“She’ll be leaving for California day after tomorrow. She has a sister out there.”

“Better give her a wig, case he’s watching the apartment when she leaves.”

“We will.”

“How about other tenants in the building? Won’t they know I’m not…?”

“We figured you could pass yourself off as the sister. I doubt he’ll be talking to any of the tenants.”

“Any security there?”

“No.”

“Elevator operator?”

“No.”

“So it’s just between me and them. The tenants, I mean.”

“And him,” Annie said.

“What about boyfriends and such? What about social clubs or other places where they know her?”

“She’ll be telling all her friends she’s going out of town. If anyone calls while you’re in the apartment, you’re the sister.”

“Suppose he calls?”

“He hasn’t yet, we don’t think he will. He’s not a heavy breather.”

“Different psychology,” Eileen said, nodding.

“We figure you can go wherever she was in the habit of going, we don’t think he’ll follow you inside. Go in, hang around, do your nails, whatever, then come out again. If he’s watching, he’ll pick up the trail again outside. It should work. I hope.”

“I never had one like this before.”

“Neither have I.”

“I’ll need a cross-checked breakdown,” Eileen said. “On Mary I Hollings and the other two victims.”

“We’re working that up now. We didn’t think there was a pattern until now. I mean…”

Eileen detected a crack in the hard-nosed veneer.

“It’s just…”

Again Annie hesitated.

“These other two… one’s out in Riverhead, the other’s in Calm’s Point, it’s a big city. I didn’t realize till Saturday, after I talked to Mary Hollings… I mean, it just didn’t register before then. That these were serial rapes. That he’s hitting the same women more than once. Came to me like a bolt out of the blue. Now that we know there’s a pattern, we’re cross-checking similarities on these three victims we’re sure were attacked by the same guy, see if we can’t come up with anything in their backgrounds that might have singled them out. It’s a place to start.”

“You using the computer?”

“Not only for the three,” Annie said, nodding. “We’re running a check on every rape reported since the beginning of the year. If there are other victims who were serially raped…”

“When do I get the printouts?” Eileen asked.

“As soon as I get them.”

“And when’s that?”

“I know it’s your ass out there,” Annie said softly.

Eileen said nothing.

“I know he has a knife,” Annie said.

Eileen still said nothing.

“I’d no more risk your life than I would my own,” Annie said, and Eileen thought of her facing down two armed robbers in the marbled lobby in a midtown bank.

“When do I start?” she asked.

A musician roamed from table to table, strumming his guitar and singing Mexican songs. When he got to Eileen’s table, he played “Cielito Lindo” for her, optimistically, she thought; the sky outside had been bloated with threatening black clouds when she’d entered the restaurant. The rain had stopped entirely at about four in the afternoon, but the clouds had begun building again at dusk, piling up massively and ominously overhead. By six-fifteen, when she’d left the apartment to walk here, she could already hear the sound of distant thunder in the next state, beyond the river.

She was having her coffee — the wall clock read twenty minutes past seven — when the first lightning flash came, illuminating the curtained window facing the street. The following boom of thunder was ear-shattering; she hunched her shoulders in anticipation, and even so its volume shocked her. The rain came then, unleashed in fury, enforced by a keening wind, battering the window and pelting the sidewalk outside. She lighted a cigarette and smoked it while she finished her coffee. It was almost seven-thirty when she paid her bill and went to the checkroom for the raincoat and umbrella she’d left there.

The raincoat was Mary’s. It fit her a bit too snugly, but she thought it might be recognizable to him, and if the rain came — as it most certainly had — visibility might be poor; she did not want to lose him because he couldn’t see her. The umbrella was Mary’s, too, a delicate little red plaid thing that was more stylish than protective, especially against what was raging outside just now. The rain boots were Eileen’s. Rubber with floppy tops. She had chosen them exactly because the tops were floppy. Strapped to her ankle inside the right boot was a holster containing a lightweight Browning .380 automatic pistol, her spare. Her regulation pistol was a .38 Detective’s Special, and she was carrying that in a shoulder bag slung over her left shoulder for an easy cross-body draw.

She tipped the checkroom girl a dollar (wondering if this was too much), put on the raincoat, reslung the shoulder bag, and then walked out into the small entry alcove. A pair of glass doors, with the word Ocho engraved on one and Rios on the other, faced the street outside, lashed with rain now. Lightning flashed as she pushed open one of the doors. She backed inside again, waited for the boom of thunder to fade, and then stepped out into the rain, opening the umbrella.

A gust of wind almost tore the umbrella from her grasp. She turned into the wind, fighting it, refusing to allow it to turn the umbrella inside out. Angling it over her face and shoulders, using it as a shield to bully her way through the driving rain, she started for the corner. The route she had traced out this afternoon would take her one block west on a brightly lighted avenue — deserted now because of the storm — and then two blocks north on less well lighted streets to Mary’s apartment. She did not expect him to make his move while she was on the avenue. But on that two-block walk to the apartment—

She suddenly wished she’d asked for a backup.

Stupid, playing it this way.

And yet, if she’d planted her backups, say, on the other side of the street, one walking fifty feet ahead of her, the other fifty feet behind, he’d be sure to spot them, wouldn’t he? Three women walking out here in the rain in the classic triangle pattern? Sure to spot them. Or suppose she’d planted them in any one of the darkened doorways or alley ways along the route she’d walked this afternoon, and suppose he checked out that same route, saw two ladies lurking in doorways — not many hookers up here, and certainly none on the side streets where there wasn’t any business — no, he’d tip, he’d run, they’d lose him. Better without any backups. And still, she wished she had one.

She took a deep breath as she turned the corner off the avenue.

The blocks would be longer now.

Your side streets were always longer than your streets on the avenue. Maybe twice as long. Plenty of opportunity for him in there. Two long blocks.

It was raining inside the floppy tops of the boots. She could feel the backup pistol inside the right boot, the butt cold against the nylon of her panty hose. She was wearing panties under the panty hose, great protection against a knife, oh, sure, great big chastity belt he could slash open in a minute. She was holding the umbrella with both hands now, trying to keep it from being carried away by the wind. She wondered suddenly if she shouldn’t just throw the damn thing away, put her right hand onto the butt of the .38 in her bag — He pulls that knife, don’t ask questions, just blow him away. Annie’s advice. Not that she needed it.

Alley coming up on her right. Narrow space between two of the buildings, stacked with garbage cans when she’d passed it this afternoon. Too narrow for action? The guy wasn’t looking to dance, he was looking to rape, and the width of the alley seemed to preclude the space for that. Ever get raped on top of a garbage can? she asked herself. Don’t ask questions, just blow him away. Dark doorway in the building beyond the alley. Lights in the next building and the one after that. Lamppost on the corner. The sky suddenly split by a streak of lightning. Thunder booming on the night. A gust of wind turned the umbrella inside out. She threw it into the garbage can on the corner and felt the immediate onslaught of the rain on her naked head. Should have worn a hat, she thought. Or one of those plastic things you tie under your chin. Her hand found the butt of the .38 in her shoulder bag.

She crossed the street.

Another lamppost on the corner opposite.

Darkness beyond that.

An alley coming up, she knew. Wider than the first had been, a car’s width across, at least. Nice place to tango. Plenty of room. Her hand tightened on the gun butt. Nothing. Nobody in the alley that she could see, no footsteps behind her after she passed it. Lighted buildings ahead now, looking potbelly warm in the rain. Another alley way up ahead, two buildings down from Mary’s. What if they’d been wrong? What if he didn’t plan to hit tonight? She kept walking, her hand on the gun butt. She skirted a puddle on the sidewalk. More lightning, she winced; more thunder, she winced again. Passing the only other alley now, dark and wide, but not as wide as the last one had been. Garbage cans. A scraggly wet cat sitting on one of the cans, peering out at the falling rain. Cat would’ve bolted if somebody was in there, no? She was passing the alley when he grabbed her.

He grabbed her from behind, his left arm looping around her neck and yanking her off her feet. She fell back against him, her right hand already yanking the pistol out of her bag. The cat shrieked and leaped off the garbage can, skittering underfoot as it streaked out into the rain.

“Hello, Mary,” he whispered, and she pulled the gun free.

“This is a knife, Mary,” he said, and his right hand came up suddenly, and she felt the sharp tip of the blade against her ribs, just below her heart.

“Just drop the gun, Mary,” he said. “You still have the gun, huh, Mary? Same as last time. Well, just drop it, nice and easy, drop it on the ground, Mary.”

He prodded her with the knife. The tip poked at the lightweight raincoat, poked at the thin fabric of her blouse beneath it, poked at her ribs. His left arm was still looped around her neck, holding her tight in the crook of his elbow. The pistol was in her hand, but he was behind her, and powerless in his grip, and the pressure of the knife blade was more insistent now.

“Do it!” he said urgently, and she dropped the pistol.

It clattered to the alleyway floor. Lightning shattered the night. There was an enormous boom of thunder. He dragged her deeper into the alley, into the darkness, past the garbage cans to where a loading platform was set in the wall some three feet above the floor. A pair of rusted iron doors were behind the platform. He threw her onto the platform, and her hand went immediately into the top of her floppy rubber boot, groping for the butt of the Browning.

“Don’t force me to cut you,” he said.

She yanked the pistol out of its holster.

She was bringing it up into firing position when he slashed her.

She dropped the gun at once, her hand going up to her face where sudden fire blazed a trail across her cheek. Her hand came away wet, she thought it was the rain at first, but the wet was sticky and thick, and she knew it was blood — he had cut her cheek, she was bleeding from the cheek! And suddenly she was overcome by a fear she had never before known in her life.

“Good girl,” he said.

There was another flash of lightning, more thunder. The knife was under her dress now, she dared not move, he was picking at the nylon of the panty hose with the knife, catching at it, plucking at it; she winced below, tightened there in horrified reaction, afraid of the knife, fearful he would use it again where she was infinitely more vulnerable. The tip of the blade caught the fabric, held. There was a sound of the nylon ripping, the whisper of the knife as it opened the panty hose over her crotch and the panties underneath. He laughed when he realized she was also wearing panties.

“Expecting a rape?” he asked, still laughing, and then slashed the panties, too, and now she was open to the cold of the night, her legs spread and trembling, the rain beating down on her face and mingling there with the blood, washing the blood from her cheek burning hot where the gash crossed it, her eyes widening in terror when he placed the cold flat of the knife against her vagina and said, “Want me to cut you here, too, Mary?”

She shook her head, No, please. Mumbled the words incoherently. Said them aloud at last, “No, please,” trembling beneath him as he moved between her legs and put the knife to her throat again, “Please,” she said. “Don’t… cut me again. Please.”

“Want me to fuck you instead?” he said.

She shook her head again. No! she thought. But she said instead, “Don’t cut me again.”

“You want to get fucked instead, isn’t that right, Mary?”

No! she thought. “Yes,” she said. Don’t cut me, she thought. Please.

“Say it, Mary.”

“Don’t cut me,” she said.

“Say it, Mary!”

“Fuck me in… instead,” she said.

“You want my baby, don’t you, Mary?”

Oh God, no, she thought, oh God, that’s it! “Yes,” she said, “I want your baby.”

“The hell you do,” he said, and laughed.

Lightning tore the night close by. Thunder boomed into the alleyway, immediately overhead, echoing.

She knew all the things to do, knew all about going for the eyes, clawing at the jelly of the eyes, blinding the bastard, she knew all about that. She knew what to do if he forced you to blow him, knew all about fondling his balls and taking him in your mouth, and then biting down hard on his cock and squeezing his balls tight at the same time, knew all about how to send a rapist shrieking into the night in pain. But a knife was at her throat.

The tip of the sharp blade was in the hollow of her throat where a tiny pulse beat wildly. He had slashed her face, she could still feel the slow steady ooze of blood from the cut, fire blazing along the length of the cut from one end to the other. The rain pelted her face and her legs, her skirt up around her thighs, the cold, wet concrete of the platform beneath her, the rusted iron doors behind her. And then — suddenly — she felt the rigid thrust of him below, against her unreceptive lips, and thought he would tear her with the force of his penetration, rip her as if with the knife itself, still at her throat, poised to cut.

She trembled in fear, and in shame, and in helpless desperation, suffering his pounding below, sobbing now, repeatedly begging him to stop, afraid of screaming lest the knife pierce the flesh of her throat as surely as he himself was piercing her flesh below. And when he shuddered convulsively — the knife tip trembling against her throat and then lay motionless upon her for several moments, she could only think, It’s over, he’s done, and the shame washed over her again, the utter sense of degradation caused by his invasion, and she sobbed more scathingly. And realized in that instant that this was not a working cop here in a dark alley, her underwear torn, her’ legs spread, a stranger’s sperm inside her. No. This was a frightened victim, a helpless violated woman. And she closed her eyes against the rain and the tears and the pain.

“Now go get your abortion,” he said.

He rolled off her.

She wondered where her gun was. Her guns.

She heard him running out of the alley on the patter of the rain.

She lay there in pain, above and below, her eyes closed tight.

She lay there for a very long while.

Then she stumbled out of the alley, and found the nearest patrol box, and called in the crime.

And fainted as lightning flashed again, and did not hear the following boom of thunder.

She was sitting up in bed, her hands flat on the sheet, when Kling entered the room. Her head was turned away from him. The window oozed raindrops, framed a gray view of buildings beyond.

“Hi,” he said.

When she turned toward the door, he saw the bandage on her left cheek. A thick wad of cotton layers covered with adhesive plaster tape. She’d been crying; the flesh around her eyes was red and puffy. She smiled and lifted one hand from the sheet in greeting. The hand dropped again, limply, white against the white sheet.

“Hi,” she said.

He came to the bed. He kissed her on the cheek that wasn’t bandaged.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, fine,” she said.

“I was just talking to the doctor, he says they’ll be releasing you later today.”

“Good,” she said.

He did not know what else to say. He knew what had happened to her. He did not know what to say.

“Some cop, huh?” she said. “Let him scare me out of both my guns, let him…” She turned her face away again. Rain slithered down the windowpanes.

“He raped me, Bert.”

“I know.”

“How…?” Her voice caught. “How do you feel about that?”

“I want to kill him,” Kling said.

“Sure, but… how do… how do you feel about me getting raped?”

He looked at her, puzzled. Her head was still turned away from him, as though she were trying to hide the patch on her cheek and by extension the wound that testified to her surrender.

“About letting him rape me,” she said.

“You didn’t let him do anything.”

“I’m a cop,” she said.

“Honey…”

“I should have…” She shook her head. “I was too scared, Bert,” she said. Her voice was very low.

“I’ve been scared,” he said.

“I was afraid he’d kill me.”

She turned to look at him.

Their eyes met. Tears were forming in her eyes. She blinked them back.

“A cop isn’t supposed to get that scared, Bert. A cop is supposed to… to… I threw away my gun! The minute he stuck that knife in my ribs, I panicked, Bert, I threw away my gun! I had it in my hand but I threw it away!”

“I’d have done the same…”

“I had a spare in my boot, a little Browning. I reached into the boot, I had the gun in my hand, ready to fire, when he… he… cut me.”

Kling was silent.

“I didn’t think it would hurt that much, Bert. Getting cut. You cut yourself shaving your legs or your armpits, it stings for a minute but this was my face, Bert, he cut my face, and oh Jesus, how it hurt! I’m no beauty, I know that, but it’s the only face I have, and when he…”

“You’re gorgeous,” he said.

“Not anymore,” she said, and turned away from him again. “That was when I — when he cut me and I lost the second gun — that was when I knew I… I’d do… I’d do anything he wanted me to do. I let him rape me, Bert. I let him do it.”

“You’d be dead otherwise,” Kling said.

“So damn helpless,” she said, and shook her head again.

He said nothing.

“So now…” Her voice caught again. “I guess you’ll always wonder whether I was asking for it, huh?”

“Cut it out,” he said.

“Isn’t that what men are supposed to wonder when their wives or their girlfriends get…?”

“You were asking for it,” Kling said. “That’s why you were out there, that was your job. You were doing your job, Eileen, and you got hurt. And that’s…”

“I also got raped!.” she said, and turned to him, her eyes flashing.

“That was part of getting hurt,” he said.

“No!” she said. “You’ve been hurt on the job, but nobody ever raped you afterward! There’s a difference, Bert.”

“I understand the difference,” he said.

“I’m not sure you do,” she said. “Because if you did, you wouldn’t be giving me this ‘line of duty’ bullshit!”

“Eileen…”

“He didn’t rape a cop, he raped a woman! He raped me, Bert! Because I’m a woman!”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t know,” she said. “How can you know? You’re a man, and men don’t get raped.”

“Men get raped,” he said softly.

“Where?” she said. “In prison? Only because there aren’t any women handy.”

“Men get raped,” he said again, but did not elaborate.

She looked at him. The pain in his eyes was as deep as the pain she had felt last night when the knife ripped across her face. She kept studying his eyes, searching his face. Her anger dissipated. This was Bert sitting here with her, this was not some vague enemy named Man, this was Bert Kling — and he, after all, was not the man who’d raped her.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“That’s okay.”

“I shouldn’t be taking it out on you.”

“Who else?” he said, and smiled.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Really.”

She searched for his hand. He took her hand in both his own.

“I never thought this could happen to me,” she said, and sighed. “Never in a million years. I’ve been scared out there, you’re always a little scared…”

“Yes,” he said.

“But I never thought this could happen. Remember how I used to kid around about my rape fantasies?”

“Yes.”

“It’s only a fantasy when it isn’t real,” she said. “I used to think… I guess I thought… I mean, I was scared, Bert, even with backups I was scared. But not of being raped. Hurt, maybe, but not raped. I was a cop, how could a cop possibly…?”

“You’re still a cop,” he said.

“You better believe it,” she said. “Remember what I was telling you? About feeling degraded by decoy work? About maybe asking for a transfer?”

“I remember.”

“Well, now they’ll have to blast me out of this job with dynamite.”

“Good,” he said, and kissed her hand.

“‘Cause I mean… doesn’t somebody have to be out there? To make sure this doesn’t happen to other women? I mean, there has to be somebody out there, doesn’t there?”

“Sure,” he said. “You.”

“Yeah, me,” she said, and sighed deeply.

He held her hand to his cheek.

They were silent for several moments.

She almost turned her face away again.

Instead, she held his eyes with her own and said, “Will you…?”

Her voice caught again.

“Will you love me as much with a scar?”

Lightning, 1984