Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here! Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  I Nightshade

  II Daywatch

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Praise for Ed McBain & the 87th Precinct

  “Raw and realistic…The bad guys are very bad, and the good guys are better.” —Detroit Free Press

  “Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series…simply the best police procedurals being written in the United States.” —Washington Post

  “The best crime writer in the business.” —Houston Post

  “Ed McBain is a national treasure.” —Mystery News

  “It’s hard to think of anyone better at what he does. In fact, it’s impossible.” —Robert B. Parker

  “I never read Ed McBain without the awful thought that I still have a lot to learn. And when you think you’re catching up, he gets better.”

  —Tony Hillerman

  “McBain is the unquestioned king…light years ahead of anyone else in the field.” —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “McBain tells great stories.” —Elmore Leonard

  “Pure prose poetry…It is such writers as McBain who bring the great American urban mythology to life.” —The London Times

  “The McBain stamp: sharp dialogue and crisp plotting.”

  —Miami Herald

  “You’ll be engrossed by McBain’s fast, lean prose.” —Chicago Tribune

  “McBain redefines the American police novel…he can stop you dead in your tracks with a line of dialogue.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “The wit, the pacing, his relish for the drama of human diversity [are] what you remember about McBain novels.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “McBain is a top pro, at the top of his game.” —Los Angeles Daily News

  HAIL, HAIL,THE

  GANG’S ALL HERE!

  AN 87TH PRECINCT NOVEL

  ED McBAIN

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright (c) 1971 Ed McBain Republished in 2011

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612181646

  ISBN-10: 1612181643

  The city in these pages is imaginary.

  The people, the places are all fictitious.

  Only the police routine is based on

  established investigatory techniques.

  Nightshade

  The morning hours of the night come imperceptibly here.

  It is a minute before midnight on the peeling face of the hanging wall clock, and then it is midnight, and then the minute hand moves visibly and with a lurch into the new day. The morning hours have begun, but scarcely anyone has noticed. The stale coffee in soggy cardboard containers tastes the same as it did thirty seconds ago, the spastic rhythm of the clacking typewriters continues unabated, a drunk across the room shouts that the world is full of brutality, and cigarette smoke drifts up toward the face of the clock, where, unnoticed and unmourned, the old day has already been dead for two minutes. The telephone rings.

  The men in this room are part of a tired routine, somewhat shabby about the edges, as faded and as gloomy as the room itself, with its cigarette-scarred desks and its smudged green walls. This could be the office of a failing insurance company were it not for the evidence of the holstered pistols hanging from belts on the backs of wooden chairs painted a darker green than the walls. The furniture is ancient, the typewriters are ancient, the building itself is ancient—which is perhaps only fitting since these men are involved in what is an ancient pursuit, a pursuit once considered honorable. They are law enforcers. They are, in the words of the drunk still hurling epithets from the grilled detention cage across the room, rotten prick cop bastards.

  The telephone continues to ring.

  The little girl lying in the alley behind the theater was wearing a belted white trench coat wet with blood. There was blood on the floor of the alley, and blood on the metal fire door behind her, and blood on her face and matted in her blond hair, blood on her miniskirt and on the lavender tights she wore. A neon sign across the street stained the girl’s ebbing life juices green and then orange, while, from the open knife wound in her chest, the blood sprouted like some ghastly night flower, dark and rich, red, orange, green, pulsing in time to the neon flicker, a grotesque psychedelic light show, and then losing the rhythm, welling up with less force and power. She opened her mouth, she tried to speak, and the scream of an ambulance approaching the theater seemed to come instead from her mouth on a fresh bubble of blood. The blood stopped, her life ended, the girl’s eyes rolled back into her head. Detective Steve Carella turned away as the ambulance attendants rushed a stretcher into the alley. He told them the girl was already dead.

  “We got here in seven minutes,” one of the attendants said.

  “Nobody’s blaming you,” Carella answered.

  “This is Saturday night,” the attendant complained. “Streets are full of traffic. Even with the damn siren.”

  Carella walked to the unmarked sedan parked at the curb. Detective Cotton Hawes, sitting behind the wheel, rolled down his frost-rimed window and said, “How is she?”

  “We’ve got a homicide,” Carella answered.

  The boy was eighteen years old, and he had been picked up not ten minutes ago for breaking off car aerials. He had broken off twelve on the same street, strewing them behind him like a Johnny Appleseed planting radios; a cruising squad car had spotted him as he tried to twist off the aerial of a 1966 Cadillac. He was drunk or stoned or both, and when Sergeant Murchison at the muster desk asked him to read the Miranda-Escobedo warning signs on the wall, printed in both English and Spanish, he could read neither. The arresting patrolman took the boy to the squadroom upstairs, where Detective Bert Kling was talking to Hawes on the telephone. He signaled for the patrolman to wait with his prisoner on the bench outside the slatted wooden rail divider and then buzzed Murchison at the desk downstairs.

  “Dave,” he said, “we’ve got a homicide in the alley of the Eleventh Street Theater. You want to get it rolling?”

  “Right,” Murchison said, and hung up.

  Homicides are a common occurrence in this city, and each one is treated identically, the grisly horror of violent death reduced to routine by a police force that would otherwise be overwhelmed by statistics. At the muster desk switchboard downstairs, while upstairs Kling waved the patrolman and his prisoner into the squadroom, Sergeant Murchison first reported the murder to Captain Frick, who commanded the 87th Precinct, and then to Lieutenant Byrnes, who commanded the 87th Detective Squad. He then phoned Homicide, who in turn set into motion an escalating process of notification that spread cancerously to include the police laboratory; the Telegraph, Telephone, and Teletype Bureau at Headquarters; the medical examiner; the district attorney; the district commander of the Detective Division; the chief of detectives; and finally the police commissioner himself. Someone had thoughtlessly robbed a young woman of her life, and now a lot of sleepy-eyed men were being shaken out of their beds on a cold October night.

  Upstairs, the clock on the squadroom wall read 12:30 A.M. The boy who had broken off twelve car aerials sat in a chair alongside Bert Kling’s desk. Kling took one look at him and yelled to Miscolo in the clerical office to bring
in a pot of strong coffee. Across the room, the drunk in the detention cage wanted to know where he was. In a little while, they would release him with a warning to try to stay sober till morning.

  But the night was young.

  They arrived alone or in pairs, blowing on their hands, shoulders hunched against the bitter cold, breaths pluming whitely from their lips. They marked the dead girl’s position in the alleyway, they took her picture, they made drawings of the scene, they searched for the murder weapon and found none, and then they stood around speculating on sudden death. In this alleyway alongside a theater, the policemen were the stars and the celebrities, and a curious crowd thronged the sidewalk where a barricade had already been set up, anxious for a glimpse of these men with their shields pinned to their overcoats—the identifying Playbills of law enforcement, without which you could not tell the civilians from the plainclothes cops.

  Monoghan and Monroe had arrived from Homicide, and they watched dispassionately now as the assistant medical examiner fluttered around the dead girl. They were both wearing black overcoats, black mufflers, and black fedoras, both heavier men than Carella, who stood between them with the lean look of an overtrained athlete, a pained expression on his face.

  “He done some job on her,” Monroe said.

  “Son of a bitch,” Monoghan added.

  “You identified her yet?”

  “I’m waiting for the ME to get through,” Carella answered.

  “Might help to know what she was doing here in the alley. What’s that door there?” Monroe asked.

  “Stage entrance.”

  “Think she was in the show?”

  “I don’t know,” Carella said.

  “Well, what the hell,” Monoghan said, “they’re finished with her pocketbook there, ain’t they? Why don’t you look through it? You finished with that pocketbook there?” he yelled to one of the lab technicians.

  “Yeah, anytime you want it,” the technician shouted back.

  “Go on, Carella, take a look.”

  The technician wiped the blood off the dead girl’s bag, and handed it to Carella. Monoghan and Monroe crowded in on him as he twisted open the clasp.

  “Bring it over to the light,” Monroe said.

  The light, with a metal shade, hung over the stage door. So violently had the girl been stabbed that flecks of blood had even dotted the enameled white underside of the shade. In her bag they found a driver’s license identifying her as Mercy Howell of 1113 Rutherford Avenue, Age 24, Height 5‘3”, Eyes Blue. They found an Actors Equity card in her name, as well as credit cards for two of the city’s largest department stores. They found an unopened package of Virginia Slims and a book of matches advertising an art course. They found a rat-tailed comb. They found $17.43 in cash. They found a package of Kleenex and an appointment book. They found a ballpoint pen with shreds of tobacco clinging to its tip, an eyelash curler, two subway tokens, and an advertisement for a see-through blouse, clipped from one of the local newspapers.

  In the pocket of her trench coat, when the ME had finished with her and pronounced her dead from multiple stab wounds in the chest and throat, they found an unfired Browning .25-caliber automatic. They tagged the gun and the handbag, and they moved the girl out of the alleyway and into the waiting ambulance for removal to the morgue. There was now nothing left of Mercy Howell but a chalked outline of her body and a pool of her blood on the alley floor.

  “You sober enough to understand me?” Kling asked the boy.

  “I was never drunk to begin with,” the boy answered.

  “Okay then, here we go,” Kling said. “In keeping with the Supreme Court decision in Miranda v. Arizona, we are not permitted to ask you any questions until you are warned of your right to counsel and your privilege against self-incrimination.”

  “What does that mean?” the boy asked. “Self-incrimination?”

  “I’m about to explain that to you now,” Kling said.

  “This coffee stinks.”

  “First, you have the right to remain silent if you so choose,” Kling said. “Do you understand that?”

  “I understand it.”

  “Second, you do not have to answer any police questions if you don’t want to. Do you understand that?”

  “What the hell are you asking me if I understand for? Do I look like a moron or something?”

  “The law requires that I ask whether or not you understand these specific warnings. Did you understand what I just said about not having to answer…?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I understood.”

  “All right. Third, if you do decide to answer any questions, the answers may be used as evidence against you, do you…?”

  “What the hell did I do, break off a couple of car aerials? Jesus!”

  “Did you understand that?”

  “I understood it.”

  “You also have the right to consult with an attorney before or during police questioning. If you do not have the money to hire a lawyer, a lawyer will be appointed to consult with you.”

  Kling gave this warning straight-faced even though he knew that under the Criminal Procedure Code of the city for which he worked, a public defender could not be appointed by the courts until the preliminary hearing. There was no legal provision for the courts or the police to appoint counsel during questioning, and there were certainly no police funds set aside for the appointment of attorneys. In theory, a call to the Legal Aid Society should have brought a lawyer up there to the old squadroom within minutes, ready and eager to offer counsel to any indigent person desiring it. But, in practice, if this boy sitting beside Kling told him in the next three seconds that he was unable to pay for his own attorney and would like one provided, Kling would not have known just what the hell to do—other than call off the questioning.

  “I understand,” the boy said.

  “You’ve signified that you understand all the warnings,” Kling said, “and now I ask you whether you are willing to answer my questions without an attorney here to counsel you.”

  “Go shit in your hat,” the boy said. “I don’t want to answer nothing.”

  So that was that.

  They booked him for criminal mischief, a class-A misdemeanor defined as intentional or reckless damage to the property of another person, and they took him downstairs to a holding cell, to await transportation to the Criminal Courts Building for arraignment.

  The phone was ringing again, and a woman was waiting on the bench just outside the squadroom.

  The watchman’s booth was just inside the metal stage door. An electric clock on the wall behind the watchman’s stool read 1:10 A.M. The watchman was a man in his late seventies who did not at all mind being questioned by the police. He came on duty, he told them, at 7:30 each night. The company call was for 8:00, and he was there at the stage door waiting to greet everybody as they arrived to get made up and in costume. Curtain went down at 11:20, and usually most of the kids were out of the theater by 11:45 or, latest, midnight. He stayed on till 9:00 the next morning, when the theater box office opened.

  “Ain’t much to do during the night except hang around and make sure nobody runs off with the scenery,” he said, and chuckled.

  “Did you happen to notice what time Mercy Howell left the theater?” Carella asked.

  “She the one got killed?” the old man asked.

  “Yes,” Hawes said. “Mercy Howell. About this high, blonde hair, blue eyes.”

  “They’re all about that high, with blonde hair and blue eyes,” the old man said, and chuckled again. “I don’t know hardly none of them by name. Shows come and go, you know. Be a hell of a chore to have to remember all the kids who go in and out that door.”

  “Do you sit here by the door all night?” Carella asked.

  “Well, no, not all night. What I do, is I lock the door after everybody’s out and then I check the lights, make sure just the work light’s on. I won’t touch the switchboard, not allowed to, but I can turn out lights in the lobby, for
example, if somebody left them on, or down in the toilets, sometimes they leave lights on down in the toilets. Then I come back here to the booth and read or listen to the radio. Along about two o’clock, I check the theater again, make sure we ain’t got no fires or nothing, and then I come back here and make the rounds again at four o’clock, and six o’clock, and again about eight. That’s what I do.”

  “You say you lock this door…”

  “That’s right.”

  “Would you remember what time you locked it tonight?”

  “Oh, must’ve been about ten minutes to twelve. Soon as I knew everybody was out.”

  “How do you know when they’re out?”

  “I give a yell up the stairs there. You see those stairs there? They go up to the dressing rooms. Dressing rooms are all upstairs in this house. So I go to the steps, and I yell, ‘Locking up! Anybody here?’ And if somebody yells back, I know somebody’s here, and I say, ‘Let’s shake it, honey,’ if it’s a girl, and if it’s a boy, I say, ‘Let’s hurry it up, sonny.’” The old man chuckled again. “With this show, it’s sometimes hard to tell which’s the girls and which’s the boys. I manage, though,” he said, and again chuckled.

  “So you locked that door at ten minutes to twelve?”

  “Right.”

  “And everybody had left the theater by that time.”