The Pusher

Chapter Ten

There were four bulls in the Squad Room of the 87th on the night Maria Hernandez was stabbed.

Detectives Meyer and Willis were sitting at one of the desks, drinking coffee. Detective Bongiorno was typing up a DD report to be turned over to the Safe and Loft Squad. Detective Temple was sitting at the telephone, catching.

"I don't like coffee in containers," Meyer said to Willis. Meyer was a Jew whose father had a hilarious sense of humor. And since Meyer had been a change-of-life baby, which in a sense, had been a big practical joke on the old man, the old man had decided to play his own little joke on his son. And since his son's surname was Meyer, he could think of nothing more side-splitting than to make his son's given name Meyer, too. In those days, babies were born at home, delivered by midwives. There was none of the hospital pressure to name a child. Meyer's father withheld his choice of a name until the briss. He announced it just as the moile was performing the circumcision, and the resultant shock almost caused him to have a castrated son.

Fortunately, Meyer Meyer emerged intact, if not altogether triumphant. A name like Meyer Meyer is a difficult burden to bear, especially if you live in a neighborhood where kids were wont to slit your throat if you happened to have blue eyes. Remarkably, considering the Meyer Meyer handle, and considering the unfortunate coincidence that had provided Meyer with blue eyes, he had managed to survive. He attributed his survival to an almost supernaturally patient attitude. Meyer Meyer was the most patient man in the world. But when a man bears the burden of a double-barreled name, and when a man is raised as an Orthodox Jew in a predominantly Gentile neighborhood, and when a man has made patience his credo, something's got to give. Meyer Meyer, though he was only thirty-seven years old, was as bald as a cue ball.

"It simply doesn't taste like coffee," he expanded.

"No? Then what does it taste like?" Willis asked, sipping.

"It tastes like cardboard, if you want to know. Now, don't misunderstand me. I like cardboard. My wife often serves cardboard for dinner. She has some wonderful recipes for cardboard."

"She must have got them from my wife," Temple called over.

"Well," Meyer said, "you know how wives are. Always exchanging recipes. But my point is that I wouldn't want you to believe I'm prejudiced against cardboard. Not at all. In fact, I might honestly say that the taste of cardboard is a taste cultivated among gourmets and civilized humans all over the world."

"Then what's your beef?" Willis asked, smiling.

"Expectancy," Meyer said patiently.

"I don't get it," Willis said.

"Hal, when my wife serves dinner, I expect the taste of cardboard. We have been married, God bless her, for twelve years now and she has never disappointed me on the matter of dinner. I expect the taste of cardboard, and it is the cardboard taste I get. But when I order coffee from the local luncheonette, my taste buds are geared to enjoy the tongue-tingling tang of coffee. As you might say, my face is fixed for coffee."

"So?"

"So the disappointment, after the great expectations, is almost too great to bear. I order coffee, and I'm forced to drink cardboard."

"Who's forcing you?" Willis asked.

"To tell you the truth," Meyer said, "I'm beginning to forget what coffee in a cup tastes like. Everything in my life tastes like cardboard now. It's a sad thing."

"I'm weeping," Temple said.

"There are compensations, I suppose," Meyer said wearily.

"And what are they?" Willis asked, still smiling.

"A friend of mine has a wife who has cultivated the knack of making everything taste like sawdust." Willis laughed aloud, and Meyer chuckled and then shrugged. "I suppose cardboard is better than sawdust, already."

"You should switch wives every now and then," Temple advised. "Break the monotony."

"Of the meals, you mean?" Meyer asked.

"What else?" Temple said, shrugging grandly.

"Knowing your filthy mind," Meyer began, and the telephone on Temple's desk rang. Temple lifted the receiver.

"87th Squad," he said, "Detective Temple." He listened. The Squad Room was silent. "Uh-huh," he said. "Okay, I'll send some men. Right." He hung up. "Knifing on South 14th," he said. "Levine's already called an ambulance. Meyer, Hal, you want to take this?"

Meyer went to the clothes rack and began shrugging into his coat. "How come," he wanted to know, "you're always catching when it's cold outside?"

"What hospital?" Willis asked.

"General," Temple said. "Call in later, will you? This looks pretty serious."

"How so?" Meyer asked.

"It may turn into a homicide."

Meyer had never liked the smell of hospitals. His mother had died of cancer in a hospital, and he would always remember her pain-wracked face, and he would always remember the smells of sickness and death, the hospital smells that had invaded his nostrils and entrenched themselves there forever.

He did not like doctors, either. His dislike of doctors probably had its origin in the fact that a doctor had originally diagnosed his mother's malignant cancer as a sebaceous cyst. But aside and apart from this indisputably prejudiced viewpoint, he also found doctors unbearably conceited and possessed of, to Meyer, a completely unwarranted sense of self-importance. Meyer was not a man to scoff at education. He himself was a college graduate who happened to be a cop. A medical man was a college graduate who happened to have a doctorate. The doctorate, in Meyer's mind, simply meant four years of additional schooling. These years of schooling, necessary before a physician could begin practice, were akin to the years of apprenticeship any man had to serve in any given field before he became a success in that field. Why then did most doctors feel superior to, for example, advertising men? Meyer would never understand it.

He supposed it broke down to the basic drive for survival. A doctor allegedly held survival in his hands. Meyer's impression, however, was that the physicians had inadvertently and quite unconsciously correctly labeled the pursuit of their chosen profession: practice. As far as Meyer was concerned, all doctors were doing just that: practicing. And until they got perfect, he would stay away from them.

Unfortunately the intern in whose hands the life of Maria Hernandez lay did not help to raise Meyer's opinion of medical men in general.

He was a young boy with bright blond hair clipped close to his scalp. His eyes were brown, and his features were regular, and he looked very handsome and very clean in his hospital tunic. He also looked very frightened. He had perhaps seen cut-up cadavers in medical school, but Maria Hernandez was the first live person he'd seen so mutilated. He stood in the hospital corridor, puffing nervously on a cigarette, talking to Meyer and Willis.

"What's her condition now?" Willis asked.

"Critical," the young doctor said.

"How critical? How much longer has she got?"

"That's… that's hard to say. She's… she's very badly cut. We've… we've managed to stop the blood, but there was so much loss before she got to us…" The Doctor swallowed. "It's hard to say."

"May we talk to her, Doctor Fredericks?" Meyer asked.

"I… I don't think so."

"Can she talk?"

"I… I don't know."

"For Christ's sake, pull yourself together!" Meyer said irritably.

"I beg your pardon?" Fredericks said.

"If you have to vomit, go ahead," Meyer said. "Then come back and talk sensibly."

"What?" Fredericks said. "What?"

"All right, listen to me," Meyer said very patiently. "I know you're in charge of this great big shining hospital, and you're probably the world's foremost brain surgeon, and a little Puerto Rican girl bleeding her guts out over your floors is an inconvenience. But—"

"I didn't say—"

"But," Meyer continued, "it so happens that someone stabbed that little girl, and our job is to find whoever did it so that it won't happen again and cause you further inconvenience. A dying declaration is competent evidence. If the person has no hope of recovery, and if we get a declaration, the courts will admit it. Now—is that little girl going to live, or isn't she?"

Fredericks seemed stunned.

"Is she?"

"I don't think so."

"Then may we talk to her?"

"I would have to check that."

"Well then, would you please, for the love of God, go check it?"

"Yes. Yes, I'll do that. You understand, the responsibility is not mine. I couldn't grant permission for questioning the girl without check—"

"Go, go, already," Meyer said. "Check. Hurry."

"Yes," Fredericks said, and he hurried off down the corridor in a fury of sudden starched energy.

"You know the questions we're supposed to ask?" Willis said. "To make this admissible?"

"I think so. You want to run over them?"

"Yeah, we'd better. I think we should get a stenographer up here, too."

"Depends on how much time there is. Maybe there's a loose secretary hanging around the hospital. A police stenographer would take—"

"No, not enough time for that. We'll ask Fredericks if someone can take shorthand. Think she'll be able to sign?"

"I don't know. What about the questions?"

"The name and the address first," Willis said.

"Yes. Then, Do you now believe that you are about to die?"

"Yeah," Willis said. "What comes next?"

"Jesus, I hate this, you know?" Meyer said.

"Something about Do you hope to recover…?"

"No, no, it's Have you no hope of recovery from the effects of the injury you have received?" Meyer shook his head. "Jesus, I hate this."

"And then the business about Are you willing to make a true statement of how you received the injury from which you are now suffering? That's all of it, isn't it?"

"Yes," Meyer said. "Jesus, that little girl in there…"

"Yeah," Willis said. Both men fell silent. They could hear the quiet thrum of the hospital all around them, like a giant white heart pumping blood. In a little while, they heard footsteps echoing down the corridor.

"Here's Fredericks now," Willis said.

Dr. Fredericks approached them. He was sweating, and his tunic looked rumpled and soiled.

"How about it?" Meyer said. "Did you get us permission?"

"It doesn't matter," Fredericks said.

"Huh?"

"The girl is dead."