McBain's Ladies Too: More Women of the 87th Precinct Read online

  Ed McBain

  McBain's Ladies Too: More Women of the 87th Precinct

  This is for

  Grace and Joe Penner

  Introduction

  When my publisher asked me to write an introduction to McBain's Ladies, the volume that preceded this one, I wrote to him as follows:

  For some time now, I’ve resisted writing the introduction you requested, despite having set aside blocks of time in which to do it. I kept wondering why. I think I now know why.

  My reluctance has nothing to do with avoiding work. A five-page intro is a leaf on the wind. I have learned over the years, however, to trust my instincts as they regard editorial suggestions, and my instincts tell me this is a bad idea. It would be a bad idea even if someone else wrote it. It is a bad idea because:

  Readers — this reader at least — tend to equate introductions with works of non-fiction or collections of short stones. Ladies and Ladies, Too are neither. Readers tend to believe introductions are boring — and they are usually right. Readers tend to skip introductions — as even you and I do. So why does a publisher or an editor feel an introduction is necessary? Either he doesn’t trust the book, or he doesn't trust the reader.

  That is what I wrote on August 28, 1987.

  As I sit at the keyboard now, it is a bit more than a year later.

  And I am writing an introduction.

  You may wonder why.

  I’ll tell you why.

  Too many people questioned the motives behind McBain's Ladies. One reviewer went so far as to suggest that a venal publisher decided to take (and I quote) "pecuniary advantage of Joe Public. That's you." Since McBain's Ladies did not contain any "new piece of work, essay, glossary, critical piece," or even the boring introduction my publisher had requested, the argument was that we were stealing tons of money from unsuspecting readers by selling them a mere book of excerpts. I would hate to tell that reviewer how little money I received for putting together both books; the knowledge would entirely destroy his theory. But in a profit-seeking world, profit-seeking motives are naturally expected. And when they are not there, they are imagined to be there.

  Another reviewer suggested that Ed McBain (that's me) had nothing further to say, and was therefore rehashing his old stuff while he sat by the river fishing. This reviewer will be unhappy to learn that a new Matthew Hope novel was published in 1988, several months after the publication of McBain's Ladies, and a new 87th Precinct novel will be published in January of 1989, a good six months before the publication of the book now in your hands. I haven't been fishing. Neither have I been aboard a yacht on the Riviera, spending the ill-gotten gains of the first Ladies book.

  Several other reviewers wondered why I was taking the risk of exposing to the reader how very little I really know about women. To one reviewer, Teddy Carella was a "Stepford wife" and Bert Kling was a "token sufferer" linked to women who invariably found themselves in trouble not of their own making — as if any woman might prefer being in trouble she herself had made. To another reviewer, all of the women were "as numb as bollards except in one throbbing particular." I had to look up bollard. It is a thick post on a ship or wharf, used for securing ropes or hawsers. I did not have to look up "throbbing particular." Well, I plead guilty to knowing almost nothing at all about women. But, given my male limitations, I do try to present them as people, which is all I try to do for the men in my novels. McBain's ladies are not there, as this same reviewer seemed to think, merely "to warm a policeman's sheets, or wet a tearful pillow, all ravishing or ravaged in the line of duty." Neither are the men in my novels there merely to warm a policewoman's sheets, or to shed tears on their own pillows, as they often do. And, while they are not quite ravishing, my men are also ravaged in the line of duty. I might suggest, by the way, that if hearing-impaired Teddy ever read the words "Stepford wife" on anyone's lips, male or female, she would hit that person on the head with a hammer, which is a good weapon for a woman to keep beside her bed.

  Why then?

  If I wasn't doing this for money, and I wasn't doing it because I'd dried up and had nothing further to write about, and I wasn't doing it to show off my regrettable ignorance about the opposite (to me, anyway) sex, why bother to put together two volumes of excerpts that did not contain any new piece of work, essay, glossary, or critical piece? What could my motive or motives possibly have been?

  I will tell you.

  Both Ladies and Ladies, Too are labors of love.

  I put these books together for the reader and for myself. Not every 87th Precinct reader has read every novel in the series. Over the years, I continued to receive a great many letters asking for details on the prominently featured women in the series. In which book did Teddy learn she was going to have a baby? In which book did Kling meet Augusta Blair? Who killed Claire Townsend? Who did Hawes take on that skiing trip? And so on. Often, I myself did not know the answers to these questions without checking back through the body of work. So it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to track down some of these women chronologically, focusing on the high points of their lives in a way that might be interesting for the reader and, yes, for myself. And since many of the readers expressed a fascination with some of the women who'd put in only brief appearances, most of them less than law-abiding…

  Who was the woman who kept Carella chained to a radiator?

  What was the name of Santo Chadderton's jailer?

  Who killed Jeremiah Newman?

  …why not single out a few of the more interesting ones and lead them into the spotlight as well?

  There were risks involved, but none of them was the risk of exposing my admitted ignorance about women. The risks were, in fact, twofold. First, the writing would be uneven. I started the 87th Precinct series in 1956, and by the time I began putting together the two volumes of excerpts, I had been writing the books for thirty years. If my writing had not improved in all that time, it would indeed have been a good idea to go fishing. In rereading some of the older books, I found the writing barely adequate to the task. But that was the way I wrote then, and this is the way I write now. Ice is a far, far cry from Cop Hater. And when I write Exit, to be published after my death, I hope that it too will be light years away from Lullaby, the most recent novel in the series. So the biggest risk was that I would be revealing what an appallingly bad writer I was back then when both the series and I were very young.

  The companion risk was that in trimming out most of the pure mystery elements, I would be left with a group of women floundering around looking for a plot. Or worse, by merely hinting at the mysteries, I would baffle the reader. The dangers of either boredom or bafflement were stronger in Ladies, which traced the women through many different books spanning a good many years, than in the present volume, where each excerpt is taken from a single different novel in the series. In the first volume, I hope I presented the stories of my women in a readable and exciting way. In the present volume, the task was easier.

  Both books, by the way, were put together during the same work period. First Ladies and then, immediately following it, Ladies, Too. In other words, the zillions of dollars my publishers and I made on the first collection of excerpts was not what prompted us to foist upon "Joe Public" a second fraudulent entry. The books were conceived as a pair, and offered to my publisher as a pair, for better or worse, till death do us part.

  I put these books together to inform the reader and to inform myself. For as much as the reader wanted to know how these women had developed over the years, so did I. As much as the reader wanted a score card telling who were the good guys and who were the bad guys, so did I.
In the first volume, we had mostly the good guys. In this one, we've got mostly the bad guys. The word "Ladies" in the first book was not intended to be sexist. When I was growing up in a Manhattan slum, calling a woman a lady wasn't a terrible thing to do. It was, in fact, a sign of enormous respect that had filtered down into the streets from old-world tradition and custom. The word "Ladies" in this second volume is perhaps intended satirically, but satire is what closes on Saturday night. In any event, here are more women of the 87th Precinct. I trust the book, and I trust the reader, too.

  Ed McBain

  Norwalk, Connecticut

  September 6, 1988

  The pregnant hooker

  Well, there it is, Carella thought. Same old precinct. Hasn't changed a bit since I first started working here, probably won't change even after I'm dead and gone. Same rotten precinct.

  He was walking uptown from the subway kiosk on Grover Avenue, approaching the station house from the west. He normally drove to work, but the streets in Riverhead hadn't yet been plowed when he'd awakened this morning, and he figured the subway would be faster. As it was, a switch had frozen shut somewhere on the track just before the train plunged underground at Lindblad Avenue, and he'd had to wait with another hundred shivering passengers until the trouble on the line was cleared. It was now almost 9:00 a.m. Carella was an hour and fifteen minutes late.

  It was bitterly cold. He could understand how a switch could freeze in this weather; his own switch felt shrunken and limp in his trousers, even though he was wearing long woolen underwear. Just before Christmas, his wife had suggested that that he needed was a willy-warmer. He had never heard it called a willy before. He asked her where she'd picked up the expression. She said her uncle had always called her cousin's wee apparatus a willy. That figured. She had been Theodora Franklin before he'd married her, four-fifths Irish with (as she was fond of saying) a fifth of Scotch thrown in. So naturally her cousin owned a "wee apparatus" and naturally her uncle called it a "willy" and naturally she'd suggested just before Christmas that what a nice Italian boy like Carella could use in his stocking on Christmas morning was a nice mink willy-warmer. Carella told her he already had a willy-warmer, and it was better than mink. Teddy blushed.

  He climbed the steps leading to the front door of the station house. A pair of green globes flanked the wooden entrance doors, the numerals 87 painted on each in white. The doorknob on the one operable door was the original brass one that had been installed when the building was new, sometime shortly after the turn of the century. It was polished bright by constant hand-rubbings, like the toes of a bronze saint in St. Peter's Cathedral. Carella grasped the knob, and twisted it, and opened the door, and stepped into the huge ground-floor muster room that was always colder than any place else in the building. This morning, compared with the glacier outside, it felt almost cozy.

  The high muster desk was on the right side of the cavernous room, looking almost like a judge's altar of justice except for the waist-high brass railing before it and Sergeant Dave Murchison behind it, framed on one side by a sign that requested all visitors to stop and state their business, and on the other by an open ledger that held the records — in the process known as "booking" — of the various and sundry criminals who passed this way, day and night. Murchison wasn't booking anyone at the moment. Murchison was drinking a cup of coffee. He held the mug in thick fingers, the steam rising in a cloud around his jowly face. Murchison was a man in his fifties, somewhat stout, bundled now in a worn blue cardigan sweater that made him look chubbier than he actually was and that, besides, was nonregulation. He looked up as Carella passed the desk.

  "Half a day today?" he asked.

  ''Morning, Dave," Carella said. "How's it going?"

  "Quiet down here," Murchison said, "but wait till you get upstairs."

  "So what else is new?" Carella said, and sighed heavily, and walked for perhaps the ten-thousandth time past the inconspicuous and dirty white sign nailed to the wall, its black lettering announcing detective division, its pointing, crudely drawn hand signaling any visitors to take the steps up to the second floor. The stairs leading up were metal, and narrow, and scrupulously clean. They went up for a total of sixteen risers, then turned back on themselves and continued on up for another sixteen risers, and there he was, automatically turning to the right in the dimly lighted corridor. He opened the first of the doors labeled with a lockers sign, went directly to his own locker in a row second closest to the door, twisted the dial on the combination lock, opened the locker door, and hung up his coat and his muffler. He debated taking off the long Johns. No, on a day like today, the squadroom would be cold.

  He went out of the locker room and started down the corridor, passing a wooden bench on his left and wondering for the thousandth time who had carved the initials C.J. in a heart on one arm of the bench, passing a backless bench on the right and set into a narrow alcove before the sealed doors of what had once been an elevator shaft, passing a door also on the right and marked MEN'S LAVATORY, and a door on his left over which a small sign read clerical. The detective squadroom was at the end of the corridor.

  He saw first the familiar slatted wooden rail divider. Beyond that, he saw desks and telephones, and a bulletin board with various photographs and notices on it, and a hanging light globe, and beyond that more desks and the grilled windows that opened on the front of the building. He couldn't see very much that went on beyond the railing on his right because two huge metal filing cabinets blocked the desks on that side of the room. But the sounds coming from beyond the cabinets told him the place was a zoo this morning.

  Detective Richard Genero's portable radio, sitting on the corner of his desk in miniaturized Japanese splendor, blasted a rock tune into the already dissonant din. Genero's little symphony meant that the lieutenant wasn't in yet. Without a by-your-leave, Carella went directly to Genero's desk, and turned off the radio. It helped, but not much. The sounds in this squadroom were as much a part of his working days as were the look and the feel of it. He sometimes felt he was more at home in this scarred and flaking, resonating apple-green room than he was in his own living room.

  Everyone on the squad thought Carella looked short when he wore a turtleneck. He was not short. He was close to six feet tall, with the wide shoulders, narrow hips, and sinewy movements of a natural athlete — which he was not. His eyes, brown and slanted slightly downward, gave his face a somewhat Oriental look that prompted the squadroom wags to claim he was distantly related to Takashi Fujiwara, the only Japanese-American detective on the squad. Tack told them it was true; he and Carella were, in fact, cousins — a blatant lie. But Tack was very young, and he admired Carella a great deal, and was really fonder of him than he was of his no-good real cousins. Carella knew how to say "Good morning" in Japanese. Whenever Tack came into the squadroom — morning, noon, or night — Carella said, "Oh-hi-oh." Tack answered, "Hello, cousin."

  Carella was wearing a turtleneck shirt under his sports jacket that Saturday morning. The first thing Meyer Meyer said to him was, "Those things make you look short."

  "They keep me warm," Carella said.

  "Is it better to be warm or tall?" Meyer asked philosophically, and went back to his typing.

  He did not, even under normal circumstances, enjoy typing. Today, because of the very pregnant lady across the room who was shouting Spanish obscenities at the world in general and at Detective Cotton Hawes and an appreciative chorus of early-morning drunks in particular, Meyer found it even more difficult to concentrate on the keyboard in front of him. Patiently, doggedly, he kept typing, while across the room the pregnant lady was loudly questioning Cotton Hawes's legitimacy.

  Meyer's patience was an acquired skill, nurtured over the years until it had reached a finely honed edge of perfection. He had certainly not been born patient. He had, however, been born with all the attributes that would later make a life of patience an absolute necessity if he were to survive. Meyer's father had been a very comical man. At th
e bris, the traditional circumcision ceremony, Meyer's father made his announcement. The announcement concerned the name of his new offspring. The boy was to be called Meyer Meyer. The old man thought this was exceedingly humorous. The moyle didn't think it was so humorous. When he heard the announcement, his hand almost slipped. In that moment, he almost deprived Meyer of something more than a normal name. Fortunately, Meyer Meyer emerged unscathed.

  But being an Orthodox Jew in a predominantly gentile neighborhood can be trying even if your name isn't Meyer Meyer. As with all things, something had to give. Meyer Meyer had begun losing his hair when he was still rather young. He was now completely bald, a burly man with china blue eyes, slightly taller than Carella — even when Carella wasn't wearing a turtleneck. He was smoking a cigar as he typed, and wishing he could have a cigarette. He had begun smoking cigars on Father's Day last year when his daughter presented him with an expensive box in an attempt to break his cigarette habit. He still sneaked a cigarette every now and then, but he was determined to quit entirely and irrevocably. On a day like today, with the squadroom erupting so early in the morning, he found his patience a bit strained, his determination somewhat undermined.

  Across the room, the pregnant lady — in a mixture of streetwise English and hooker's Spanish — yelled, "So how comes, pendego, you kippin me here when I couldn't make even a blind man happy in my condition?"

  Her condition was imminent. Perhaps that was why the four drunks in the detention cage in the corner of the room found her so comical. Or perhaps it was because she was wearing nothing but a half-slip under her black cloth coat. The coat was unbuttoned, and the pregnant lady's belly ballooned over the elastic waistband of the peach-colored slip. Above that, her naked breasts, swollen with the threat of parturition, bobbed indignantly and rather perkily in time to her words, which the drunks found hilarious.