The pusher Read online

  Pusher

  Ed McBain

  Published by the Penguin Group, December 1973. ISBN 0-451-15080-5

  This is for Evelyn and Dick

  The city in these pages is imaginary. The people, the places are all fictitious. The police routine is based on established investigatory technique.

  * * *

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  * * *

  Chapter One

  Winter came in like an anarchist with a bomb.

  Wild-eyed, shrieking, puffing hard, it caught the city in cold, froze the marrow and froze the heart.

  The wind roared under eaves and tore around corners, lifting hats and lifting skirts, caressing warm thighs with icy-cold fingers. The citizens blew on their hands and lifted their coat collars and tightened their mufflers. They had been enmeshed in the slow-dying lethargy of autumn, and now winter was upon them, rapping their teeth with knuckles of ice. The citizens grinned into the wind, but the wind was not in a smiling mood. The wind roared and bellowed, and snow spilled from the skies, covered the city with white and then, muddied and dirtied, yielded to the wind and the cold and turned to treacherous ice.

  The citizens deserted the streets. They sought pot-bellied stoves and hissing radiators. They drank cheap rye or expensive Scotch. They crawled under the covers alone, or they found the warmth of another body in the primitive ritual of love while the wind howled outside.

  Winter was going to be a bitch this year.

  The patrolman's name was Dick Genero, and he was cold. He didn't like winter, and that was that. You could sell him ice skating and skiing and bobsledding and hot rum toddies and all the other fictions of a happy, happy snowy season and he would still tell you to go drop dead someplace. Summer was Genero's season. He was one of those people, that's all. He liked warm sand and a hot sun and blue skies with hardly any clouds in them, and he also liked summer storms with lots of lightning, and he liked flowers blooming and gin-tonics, and you could take all the winters that ever were and stuff them into a beat up old tin can and dump them in the River Dix, and Genero would have been a very happy man.

  His ears were cold.

  "When your ears are cold, you're cold all over," Genero's mother used to say, and Genero's mother was a well of wisdom on weather conditions. Genero walked his beat with his cold ears, and he thought of his mother, and then unrelatedly and belatedly thought of his wife and wished he were home with her in bed. It was two o'clock in the morning, and any man in his right mind would not be walking the streets of the city at two in the morning with a temperature in the low twenties and a pretty woman at home in bed.

  The wind ripped at his winter overcoat, pierced the heavy blue material and licked at his winter blouse. The cold soaked into his undershirt, and Genero shivered and thought of his ears, remembering not to touch them because if you touched them when they were cold, they would fall off. His mother had told him that, too. He had been tempted on several occasions in his life to touch his ears when they were cold, just to see if they would fall off. He was, in truth, afraid they would not—and there would go a son's faith in his mom. So he dutifully kept his gloved hands away from his head, and he ducked his head against the wind and thought of Rosalie home in bed, and thought of Florida and Puerto Rico and the Virgin Isles and Africa, working his way south until he realized abruptly he had reached the South Pole, where the cold still persisted.

  It's warm, he told himself. Come on, now—it's warm.

  Look at all the bathing beauties in their scanty suits, Jesus, but this sand is hot today. Listen to that ocean, ah, thank God for the cool breeze, we can certainly use a cool breeze on a scorcher like today, that's for sure. And…

  And I'll bet maybe they will fall off if I touch them.

  The streets were empty. Well sure, that figured. Only idiots and cops were out tonight. He walked to the candy store and automatically tried the doorknob, cursing the proprietor for not having the store open so that a cop with his ears ready to fall off could go in and have a cup of coffee. Ingrates, he thought, all ingrates. Home and asleep while I'm trying the stupid doorknob. Who'd pull a burglary on a night like this, anyway? A man's fingers would freeze solid to the burglar's tools, the way fingers freeze solid to metal in the Arctic. There's a cheerful thought. Jesus, I am cold!

  He started up the street. Lanny's Bar was probably still open. He would stop there to see that no fights were in progress and perhaps sneak an against-regulations nip to take the edge off this cold. He could see nothing wrong with a little nip. A man could pretend he was chilly, true, but when a man's underwear showed the ability to stand unaided and independently in the middle of the street, it was time to dispense with the "chilly" fantasy and realize that freezing was but a stone's throw away. Genero clapped his gloved hands together and lifted his head.

  He saw the light.

  It came from somewhere up the street. The street was black except for the light. Genero stopped and squinted his eyes against the wind. The tailor shop, he thought instantly. That stupid ass Cohen is pressing clothes in the wee hours of the morn again. He would have to warn him. "Max," he would have to say, "you're a hell of a nice guy, but when you're going to be pressing late at night, give the house a ring and wise up us poor bastards, will you?"

  Then Max would nod and smile and give him a glass of that sweet wine he kept behind the counter. All at once, Max didn't seem so stupid.

  Max was the kind benefactor of all cops walking beats everywhere. Max's light was a shining beacon, the shop a sanctuary for ice-bound freighters. Get the bottle out, Max, Genero thought. I'm on my way.

  He headed for the tailor shop and the light, and he would have really enjoyed that glass of wine with Max, were it not for one thing:

  The light was not coming from the tailor shop.

  The light came from farther up the street, spilling from the open mouth of the basement steps under one of the tenements. For a moment, Genero was puzzled. If not Max…

  Genero quickened his step. Quite unconsciously, he drew off his right glove and yanked his service revolver from its holster. The faces of the buildings were closed with sleep. Only the light pierced the darkness, and he approached the light warily, stopping before the steps where they descended beyond the hanging chain to enter the bowels of the tenement.

  A door was hooded in shadow beneath the brick stoop of the building, and a window was set high up in the brick alongside the door. The window was caked with grime, but it glowed like a single wakeful eye. Cautiously, Genero climbed over the chain and started down the steps.

  A narrow alley ran straight as an arrow to the back yard of the tenement. The garbage cans were in for the night, stacked haphazardly in the alleyway, dispelling their stench on the crisp December air. Genero glanced quickly up the alleyway, and then walked quietly to the door.

  He stood listening. There was no sound from beyond the door. He held the revolver ready in his right hand, and with his left hand, he twisted the doorknob.

  Surprisingly, the door swung open.

  Genero backed away suddenly. He was sweating. His ears were still cold, but he was sweating. He listened to the sound of his own breathing, listened for other sounds in the cold sleeping city, listened for the silent scrape of a foot, something, anything. He listened for a long time, and then he entered the bas
ement room.

  The light came from a naked bulb suspended from a thick wire cord. It hung absolutely motionless. It did not swing, it did not make the slightest movement, so that the wire cord seemed almost to have been frozen into a slender steel rod. An orange crate rested on the floor beneath the light bulb. There were four bottle caps on the crate. Genero pulled out his pocket flash and swung the arc around the room. There were pin-up pictures on one of the walls, pasted close together, breasts to buttocks, cramped for space. The opposite wall was bare. There was a cot at the far end of the room, and there was a barred window over it.

  Genero swung the light a little to the left and then, startled, pulled back, the .38 jerking upward spasmodically.

  A boy was sitting on the cot.

  His face was blue. He was leaning forward. He was leaning forward at a most precarious angle, and when the first cold shock of discovery left Genero, he wondered why the boy didn't fall forward onto his face. That was when he saw the rope.

  One end of the rope was fastened to the barred window. The other end was knotted around the boy's neck. The boy kept leaning forward expectantly as if he wanted to get up off the cot and break into a spring. His eyes were wide, and his mouth was open, and there seemed to be life coiled deep within his body, ready to unspring and catapult him into the room. Only the color of his face and the position of his arms betrayed the fact that he was dead. The blue of the face was a sickly hue; his arms lay like heavy sleepers at his sides, the hands turned palms upward. Several inches from one hand was an empty hypodermic syringe.

  Tentatively, somewhat frightened, somewhat ashamed of his superstitious dread of a dead body, Genero took a step closer and studied the blue face in the beam of the flash. To prove he wasn't frightened at all, he stood looking into the blank eyes for a moment or two longer than he felt he had to.

  Then he hurried from the room, trembling, and headed for the nearest call box.

  * * *

  Chapter Two

  The word had gone out long before Kling and Carella arrived.

  Death had silently invaded the night, and death—like Macbeth—had murdered sleep, and there were lights in the windows now, and people leaned out into the bitter cold of winter, staring down at the five patrolmen who clustered in an uneasy and somehow guilty-looking knot on the pavement. There were people in the streets, too, talking in hushed whispers, wearing overcoats thrown over pajamas. The Mercury sedan swung into the block, looking like any pleasure car except for the short radio aerial protruding from the center of the roof. The car carried MD license plates, hut the two men who stepped from it were not doctors; they were detectives.

  Carella walked briskly to the patrolmen. He was a tall man, dressed now in a brown sharkskin suit and charcoal-brown overcoat. He was hatless, and his hair was clipped close to his head, and he walked with the athletic nonchalance of a baseball player. He gave an impression of tightness, tight skin drawn taut over hard muscle, tight skin over high cheekbones that gave his face a somewhat Oriental appearance.

  "Who called in?" he asked the closest patrolman.

  "Dick," the cop answered.

  "Where is he?"

  "Downstairs with the stiff."

  "Come on, Bert," Carella said over his shoulder, and Kling followed obediently and silently. The patrolmen studied Kling with pretended aloofness, not quite able to hide their envy. Kling was a new detective, a twenty-four-year-old kid who'd come up from the ranks. "Come up," hell. "Shot up" was a better way to put it. "Streaked up" was, in fact, the best way to put it. Kling had cracked a homicide, and the other patrolmen called it dumb luck, but the Commissioner called it "unusual perceptiveness and tenacity," and since the Commissioner's opinion was somewhat more highly respected than the opinions of beat-walkers, a rookie patrolman had been promoted to 3rd Grade Detective in less time than it took to pronounce the rank.

  So the patrolmen smiled bleakly at Kling as he climbed over the chain after Carella, and the greenish tint to their faces was not caused by the cold.

  "What's the matter with him?" one of the patrolmen whispered. "Don't he say hello no more?"

  If Kling heard him, he gave no sign. He followed Carella into the basement room. Dick Genero was standing under the light bulb, biting his lip.

  "Hi, Dick," Carella said.

  "Hello, Steve. Bert." Genero seemed very nervous.

  "Dick," Kling acknowledged.

  "When'd you find him?" Carella asked.

  "Few minutes before I called in. He's over there." Genero did not turn to look at the body.

  "You touch anything?"

  "Jesus, no!"

  "Good. Was he alone when you got here?"

  "Yeah. Yeah, he was alone. Listen, Steve, you mind if I go upstairs for some air? It's a little… a little stuffy in here."

  "In a minute," Carella said. "Was the light burning?"

  "What? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was." Genero paused. "That's how I happened to come down. I figured maybe a burglar. When I come down, there he was." Genero flicked his eyes toward the body on the cot.

  Carella walked to where the boy sat suspended by the rope. "How old can he be?" he asked of no one. "Fifteen, sixteen?" No one answered.

  "It looks… it looks like he hung himself, don't it?" Genero asked. Studiously, he avoided looking at the boy.

  "It looks that way," Carella said. He did not realize that he was unconsciously shaking his head, or that there was a pained expression on his face. He sighed and turned to Kling. "We'd better wait until the Homicide boys get here. They raise a stink if we leave them seconds. What time is it, Bert?"

  Kling looked at his watch. "Two eleven," he said.

  "Want to start keeping a timetable, Dick?"

  "Sure," Genero said. He took a black pad from his hip pocket and began writing into it. Carella watched him.

  "Let's go up and get that air," he said.

  Most suicides don't realize the headaches they cause.

  They slash their wrists, or turn on the gas jets, or shoot themselves, or bang a slew of parallel wounds into their skulls with a hatchet, or leap from the nearest window, or sometimes chew a little cyanide, or—as seemed to be the case with the boy on the cot—they hang themselves. But they don't give a thought to the headaches of the law enforcers.

  A suicide, you see, is initially treated exactly like a homicide. And in a homicide, there are a few people concerned with law enforcement who must be notified. These few people are:

  The police commissioner.

  The chief of detectives.

  The district commander of the detective division.

  Homicide North or Homicide South, depending upon where the body was found.

  The squad and precinct commanding officers of the precinct in which the body was found.

  The medical examiner.

  The district attorney.

  The telegraph, telephone and teletype bureau at headquarters.

  The police laboratory.

  The police photographers.

  The police stenographers.

  Not all of these people, of course, descend simultaneously upon the scene of a suicide. Some of them have no earthly reason for climbing out of bed at an ungodly hour, and some of them simply leave the job to lesser paid and highly trained subordinates. You can always count on a diehard contingent of night owls, however, and this group will include a few Homicide dicks, a photographer, an assistant medical examiner, a handful of patrolmen, a pair or more of dicks from the local precinct, and a few lab technicians. A stenographer may or may not come along for the show.

  At 2:11 or thereabouts in the morning, nobody feels much like working.

  Oh sure, a corpse breaks up the dull monotony of the midnight tour; and it's nice to renew acquaintances with old friends from Homicide South; and maybe the photographer has a few choice samples of French postcard art to pass around; but all in all, nobody has much heartfelt enthusiasm for a suicide at 2:11. Especially when it's cold.

  There was no questioni
ng the fact that it was cold.

  The dicks from Homicide South looked as if someone had pulled them from the freezer compartment a few moments before. They walked stiff-legged to the sidewalk, their hands thrust into their coat pockets, their heads bent, their fedoras pulled low over their faces. One lifted his head long enough to say hello to Carella, and then they both followed him and Kling into the basement room.

  "Little better down here," the first cop said. He rubbed his hands together, glanced over at the body, and then said, "I don't suppose anybody has a flask with him?" He looked at the faces of the other cops. "No, I didn't suppose so," he said sourly.

  "Patrolman named Dick Genero discovered the body at about 2:04," Carella said. "The light was burning, and nothing's been touched."

  The first Homicide cop grunted, and then sighed. "Well, better get to work, huh?" he asked with eager enthusiasm.

  The second Homicide cop looked at the body. "Stupid," he mumbled. "Why didn't he wait until morning?" He glanced at Kling. "Who are you?" he asked.

  "Bert Kling," Kling said, and then—as if the question had been burning his throat since he'd first seen the body —he asked, "I thought the body had to be swinging free in a hanging suicide."

  The Homicide cop stared at Kling, and then turned to Carella. "Is this guy a cop?" he asked.

  "Sure," Carella said.

  "I thought maybe you brought one of your relatives along for a thrill." He turned back to Kling. "No, son," he said, "the body don't have to be swinging free. You want proof?" He pointed to the cot. "There's a hanging suicide, and the body ain't swinging free, now, is it?"

  "Well, no, it isn't."

  "You're quite a whiz," Carella said. He was not smiling. He caught the Homicide cop's eyes and held them.

  "I get by," the Homicide cop said. "I ain't from the crackjack 87th Precinct, but I been on the force twenty-two years now, and I've broken up a few ticktack-toe games in my time."