Give the Boys a Great Big Hand
- Автор: Хантер Эван
- Серия: 87th Precinct #11
- Год: 1960
- Язык: английский
- Год: Simon & Schuster
- Жанр: Полицейские детективы
Электронная книга - «Give the Boys a Great Big Hand». Краткое содержание книги:
“Hey!” he yelled after the bus. “You forgot your bag!”
Genera picked up the bag — a small, blue overnight bag issued by an airline. He unzipped the bag and reached into it. Then he gripped the bus-stop sign for support.
The bag held... a severed human hand.
The police lab gave both bag and hand a thorough examination and discovered next to nothing. Steve Carella, Cotton Hawes, Meyer Meyer and the other 87th Precinct detectives had a murderer to find, and they had to begin without even knowing who the victim was.
The Missing Persons Bureau files supplied two leads, both of which led nowhere.
Everything that looked even faintly like a clue was checked and double-checked and they all led to the same place — a dead end.
Then, when the break finally came and several clues turned up at once, they neatly contradicted each other. It was the toughest case the 87th Precinct detectives had ever faced.
“Hello, Frankie,” he said. “Steve come in yet?”
“He called in about ten minutes ago,” Hernandez answered. “Said to tell you he was going straight to the docks to talk to the captain of the Farren.”
“Okay,” Hawes said. “Anything else?”
“Got a report from Grossman on the meat cleaver.”
“What mea — oh yeah, yeah, the Androvich woman.” He paused. “Any luck?”
“Negative. Not a thing on it but yesterday’s roast.”
“Where is everybody, anyway?” Hawes asked. “It’s so quiet around here.”
“There was a burglary last night, grocery store on Culver. Andy and Meyer are out on it. The loot called in to say he’d be late. Wife’s got a fever, and he’s waiting for the doctor.”
“Isn’t Kling supposed to be in today?”
Hernandez shook his head. “Swapped with Carella.”
“Who’s catching, anyway?” Hawes said. “You got a copy of the duty sheet around?”
“I’m catching,” Hernandez said.
“Boy, it sure is quiet around here,” Hawes said. “Is Miscolo around? I’d like some tea.”
“He was here a little while ago. I think he went down to talk to the Captain.”
“Days like this... ,” Hawes started, and then let the sentence trail. After a while, he said, “Frankie, you ever get the feeling that life just isn’t real?”
Perhaps he’d asked the wrong person. Life, to Frankie Hernandez, was very real indeed. Hernandez, you see, had taken upon himself the almost impossible task of proving to the world at large that Puerto Ricans could be the good guys in life’s little drama. He did not know who’d been handling his people’s press relations before he happened upon the scene, but he did know that someone was handling it all wrong. He had never had the urge to mug anyone, or knife anyone, or even to have a single puff of a marijuana cigarette. He had grown up in the territory of the 87th Precinct, in one of the worst slums in the world, and he had never so much as stolen a postage stamp, or even a sidelong glance at the whores who paraded La Vía de Putas. He was a devout Catholic whose father worked hard for a living, and whose mother was concerned solely with the proper upbringing of the four children she had brought into the world. When Hernandez decided to become a cop, his mother and father approved heartily. He became a rookie when he was twenty-two years old, after having served a four-year hitch in the Marines and distinguishing himself in combat during the hell that was Iwo Jima. In his father’s candy store, a picture of Frankie Hernandez in full battle dress was pasted to the mirror behind the counter, alongside the Coca-Cola sign. Frankie’s father never failed to tell any stranger in the store that the picture was of his son Frankie who was now “a detective in the city’s police.”
It hadn’t been easy for Hernandez to become a detective in the city’s police. To begin with, he’d found a certain amount of prejudice within the department itself, brotherhood edicts notwithstanding. And, coupled with this was a rather peculiar attitude on the part of some of the citizens of the precinct. They felt, he soon discovered, that since he was “one of them” he was expected to look the other way whenever they became involved in police trouble. Well, unfortunately, Frankie Hernandez was incapable of looking the other way. He had sworn the oath, and he was now wearing the uniform, and he had a job to perform.
And besides, there was The Cause.
Frankie Hernandez had to prove to the neighborhood, the people of the neighborhood, the police department, the city, and maybe even the world that Puerto Ricans were people. Colleagues the likes of Andy Parker sometimes made The Cause difficult. Before Andy Parker, there had been patrolmen colleagues who’d made The Cause just as difficult. Hernandez imagined that if he ever became chief of detectives or even police commissioner, there would be Andy Parkers surrounding those high offices, too, ever ready to remind him that The Cause was something to be fought constantly, day and night.
So for Frankie Hernandez, life was always real. Sometimes, in fact, it got too goddamn real.
“No, I never got that feeling, Cotton,” he said.
“I guess it’s the rain,” Hawes answered, and he yawned.
The S.S. Farren had been named after a famous and honorable White Plains gentleman called Jack Farren. But whereas the flesh-and-blood Farren was a kind, amiable, sympathetic, lovable coot who always carried a clean handkerchief, the namesake looked like a ship that was mean, rotten, rusty, dirty, and snot-nosed.
The captain of the ship looked the same way.
He was a hulk of a man with a three-days’ beard stubble on his chin. He picked his teeth with a matchbook cover all the while Carella talked to him, sucking air interminably in an attempt to loosen breakfast from his molars. They sat in the captain’s cabin, a coffin of a compartment, the bulkheads of which dripped sweat and rust. The captain sucked at his teeth and prodded with his soggy matchbook cover. The rain slanted outside the single porthole. The compartment stank of living, of food, of human waste.
“What can you tell me about Karl Androvich?” Carella asked.
“What do you want to know?” the captain said. His name was Kissovsky. He sounded like a bear. He moved with all the subtle grace of a Panzer division.
“Has he been sailing with you long?”
Kissovsky shrugged. “Two, three years. He in trouble? What did he get himself into since he jumped ship?”
“Nothing that we know of. Is he a good sailor?”
“Good as most. Sailors ain’t worth a damn today. When I was a young man, sailors was sailors.” He sucked air between his teeth.
“Ships were made of wood,” Carella said, “and men were made of iron.”
“What? Oh, yeah.” Kissovsky tried a smile that somehow formed as a leer. “I ain’t that old, buddy,” he said. “But we had sailors when I was a kid, not beatniks looking for banana boats so they can practice that... what do you call it... Zen? And then come back to write about it. We had men! Men!”
“Then Androvich wasn’t a good sailor?”
“Good as most until he jumped ship,” Kissovsky said. “The minute he jumped ship, he became a bad sailor. I had to make the run down with a man short in the crew. I had the crew stretched tight as it was. One man short didn’t help the situation any, I can tell you. A ship is like a little city, buddy. There’s guys that sweep the streets, and guys that run the trains, and guys that turn on the lights at night, and guys that run the restaurants, and that’s what makes the city go, you see. Okay. You lose the guy who turns on the lights, so nobody can see. You lose the guy who runs the restaurant, so nobody eats. Either that, or you got to find somebody else to do the job, and that means taking him away from another job, so no matter how you slice it, it screws up the china closet. Androvich screwed up the china closet real fine. Besides, he was a lousy sailor, anyway.”
“How so?”
“Out for kicks,” Kissovsky said, tossing one hand upward in a salute to God. “Live, live, burn, burn, bright like a Roman candle, bullshit! Every port we hit, Androvich went ashore and come back drunk as a fish. And dames? All over the lot! It’s a wonder this guy didn’t come down with the Oriental Crud or something, the way he was knocking around. Kicks! That’s all he was looking for. Kicks!”
“A girl in every port, huh?” Carella said.
“Sure, and drunk as a pig. I used to tell him you got a sweet little wife waiting for you home, you want to bring her back a present from one of these exotic tomatoes, is that what you want to do? He used to laugh at me. Ha, ha, ha. Big joke. Life was a big joke. So he jumps ship, and he screws up the chocolate pudding. That’s a sailor, huh?”