Cop Hater (87th Precinct, #1)

by Ed McBain

“Going to see the girlfriend, Steve?” the desk sergeant asked. “Yep,” Carella answered.

Hank Bush left the precinct at 11:52 when his relief showed up.

The man with the .45 waited in the shadows.

Yes, this was his man. His hand tightened on the .45.

Both men fired simultaneously. He felt the cop’s bullet rip into his shoulder, but the .45 was bucking now, again and again, and he saw the cop clutch at his chest and fall for the pavement. The Detective’s Special lay several feet from the cop’s body now.

The cop had him, his thick arms churning. He fought, pulling free, and the cop clutched at his head, and he felt hair wrench loose, and then the cop’s fingers clawed at his face, ripping, gouging. He fired again. The cop doubled over and then fell to the pavement, his face colliding with the harsh concrete.

His shoulder was bleeding badly. He cursed the cop, and he stood over him, and his blood dripped onto the lifeless shoulders, and he held the .45 out at arm’s length and squeezed the trigger again. The cop’s head gave a sideward lurch and then was still.

The cop on the sidewalk was Hank Bush.

Sam Grossman was a police lieutenant. He was also a lab technician.

“Figure he’d been shot two or three times already, and possibly knew he’d be a dead pigeon before this was over. Whatever the case, he knew we could use more information on the bastard doing the shooting.” “The hair, you mean?” Carella asked. “Yes. We found clumps of hair on the sidewalk. All the hairs had living roots, so we’d have known they were pulled away by force even if we hadn’t found some in the palms and fingers of Hank’s hands. But he was thinking overtime. He also tore a goodly chunk of meat from the ambusher’s face. That told us a few things, too.”

“The killer is a male, white, adult, not over say fifty years of age. He is a mechanic, possibly highly skilled and highly paid. He is dark complected, his skin is oily, he has a heavy beard which he tries to disguise with talc. His hair is dark brown, and he is approximately six feet tall. Within the past two days, he took a haircut and a singe. He is fast, possibly indicating a man who is not overweight. Judging from the hair, he should weigh about one‐eighty. He is wounded, most likely above the waist, and not superficially.”

Ballistics pried Hank’s slug out of the brick wall of the building, and from the angle—assuming Hank only had time to shoot from a draw—they figured the man was struck somewhere around the shoulder. This indicates a tall man—I mean, when you put the blood drops and the slug together.”

“Don’t thank me,” Grossman said. “Huh?” “Thank Hank.”

XXXXX APPREHEND SUSPICION OF MURDER XXX UNIDENTIFIED MALE WHITE CAUCASIAN ADULT BELOW FIFTY XXXXX POSSIBLE HEIGHT SIX FEET OR OVER XXX POSSIBLE WEIGHT ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY XXX DARK HAIR SWARTHY COMPLEXION HEAVY BEARD XXXX USES HAIR PREPARATION AND TALC TRADENAME “SKYLARK” XXXX SHOES MAY POSSIBLY CARRY HEELS WITH “O’SULLIVAN” TRADENAME XXXX MAN ASSUMED TO BE SKILLED MECHANIC MAY POSSIBLY SEEK SUCH WORK XXXXX GUNWOUND ABOVE WAIST POSSIBLE SHOULDER HIGH MAN MAY SEEK DOCTOR XXXX THIS MAN IS DANGEROUS AND ARMED WITH COLT .45 AUTOMATIC XX

“They’ve been sending messages to me,” Miss Bailey said. “They think I’m one of them. I don’t know why. They come out of the walls and give me messages.” “Who comes out of the walls?” Carella asked. “The cockroach‐men. That’s why I asked if there was a bug in this corner.”

“They killed Bush because he wasn’t a bush, he was a tree in disguise. They hate all plant life.”

Bert Kling seemed to be in high spirits that night.

The police had all sorts of problems.

The room, the apartment, seemed to Carella to be the intricately cluttered design for a comedy of manners. Hank must have been as out of place here as a plumber at a literary tea.

Mrs. Bush belonged in this room. This room had been designed for Mrs. Bush, designed for femininity, and the Male Animal be damned.

She looked at him wide‐eyed. Her eyes were very brown, her hair was very blonde, her complexion was fair and unmarred. She was a beautiful woman, and he did not like considering her such. He wanted her to be dowdy and forlorn. He did not want her looking fresh and lovely. Goddamn it, what was there about this room that suffocated a man? He felt like the last male alive, surrounded by bare‐breasted beauties on a tropical island surrounded by man‐eating sharks. There was no place to run to. The island was called Amazonia or something, and the island was female to the core, and he was the last man alive. The room and Alice Bush.

“Why?” “Because I’ll fall all to pieces if I don’t. He’s in the ground, Steve. It’s not going to help for me to wail and moan all over the place.” “I suppose not.” “We’ve got to go on living, don’t we? We can’t simply give up because someone we love is gone, can we?” “No,” Carella agreed.

He could not blame her, he knew that. She was only being herself, being Alice Bush, being woman. She was only a pawn of fate, a girl who automatically embodied womanhood, a girl who…hell!

“Hank should have killed him,” she said. Surprisingly, there was no viciousness attached to the words. The words themselves bore all the lethal potential of a coiled rattler, but the delivery made them harmless. “Yes,” Carella agreed. “He should have.”

“Let me hear them,” he said. “A cop hater,” she replied. “Maybe.” “It has to be. Who else would senselessly take three lives? It has to be a cop hater, Steve. Doesn’t Homicide North think so?” “I haven’t talked to them in the past few days. That’s what they thought in the beginning, I know.”

“Well, Reardon and Foster were partners, so we could assume that possibly some jerk was carrying a grudge against them. They worked together…maybe they rubbed some idiot the wrong way.” “Yes?” “But Hank never worked with them. Oh, well maybe not never. Maybe once or twice on a plant or something. He never made an important arrest with either of them along, though. Our records show that.”

“How’d the killer know that these men were cops? They were all in plainclothes. Unless he’d had contact with them before, how could he know?”

“He killed three detectives. Maybe it was chance. I don’t think so. All right, how the hell could he tell the patrolmen from the detectives?”

He left the apartment and walked down to the street. It was very hot in the street. Curiously, he felt like going to bed with somebody. Anybody.

Hal Willis was the only really small detective Carella had ever known. He passed the minimum height requirement of five‐eight, of course, but just barely. And contrasted against the imposing bulk of the other bulls in the division, he looked more like a soft‐shoe dancer than a tough cop. That he was a tough cop, there was no doubt. His bones were slight, and his face was thin, and he looked as if he would have trouble swatting a fly, but anyone who’d ever tangled with Hal Willis did not want the dubious pleasure again. Hal Willis was a judo expert.

“Doctor on Thirty‐Fifth North. Has a man in his office with a bullet wound in his left shoulder.”

“Where is he?” “Gone,” Dr. Russell said.

“I called as soon as I saw the wound. I excused myself, went out to my private office, and placed the call. When I came back, he was gone.”

The prints were sent to the Bureau of Identification. A thorough search was made of the files. The search proved fruitless, and the prints were sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation while the detectives sat back to wait.

In the meantime, a police artist went to see Dr. Russell. Listening to Dr. Russell’s description, he began drawing a picture of the suspect. He made changes as Dr. Russell suggested them—“No, the nose is a little too long; yes, that’s better. Try to give a little curl to his lip there. Yes, yes, that’s it…”—and he finally came up with a drawing which tallied with Dr. Russell’s recollection of the man he had examined. The picture was sent to each metropolitan daily and to each television station in the area, together with a verbal description of the wanted man.

“Harriet, let him go,” Byrnes said. “He’s a good boy, and he won’t get into any trouble. Look, take my word for it. For God’s sake, it’s only an amusement park.”

Watch this kid.

“Women,” Byrnes said, not disagreeably. “My son wants to go out to Jollyland tonight with some of the boys. She doesn’t think he should. Can’t see why he wants to go there in the middle of the week. She says she’s read newspaper stories about boys getting into fights with other boys at these places. For Pete’s sake, it’s just an amusement park. The kid is seventeen.”

“If you’re going to watch them every minute, they’ll feel like prisoners. Okay, what are the odds on a fight starting at a place like that? Larry knows enough to avoid trouble. He’s a good kid. You met him, didn’t you, Steve?”

Ah, what the hell! These women never cut the umbilical cord.

Byrnes took the envelope. Hastily, he tore open the flap and pulled out the folded letter. “Hell!” he erupted. “Hell and damnation!” “Bad?” “They’ve got nothing on him!” Byrnes shouted. “Goddamnit! Goddamnit to hell!” “Not even service prints?” “Nothing. The son of a bitch was probably Four‐F!”

That night, a boy named Miguel Aretta was taken to Juvenile House. The police had picked him up as one of the boys who’d been missing from the roundup of The Grovers. It did not take the police long to discover that Miguel was the boy who’d zip‐gunned Bert Kling.

Miguel Aretta was fifteen years old. It could be assumed that he just didn’t know any better.

“My name’s Savage.” “Oh,” Carella said. He regarded the reporter sourly. “You in the fraternity, too?” Savage asked. “Which one?” “The fraternity against Savage. Eeta Piecea Cliff.”

“You stuck your nose in the wrong place,” Carella answered. “Because you did, a cop is in the hospital and a kid is in Juvenile House, awaiting trial. What do you want me to do, give you a medal?”

“Are you going to follow me all the way home?” “I’d prefer buying you a drink,” Savage said. He looked at Carella expectantly. Carella weighed the offer. “All right,” he said. Savage extended his hand. “My friends call me Cliff. I didn’t get your name.” “Steve Carella.” They shook. “Pleased to know you. Let’s get that drink.”

“Is this for publication?” Carella asked. “Hell no. I’m just trying to jell my own ideas on it. Once this thing is broken, there’ll be a lot of feature coverage. To do a good job, I want to be acquainted with every facet of the investigation.”

“Sure. Provided it’s not for publication.” “Scout’s honor,” Savage said. “The department doesn’t like individual cops trying to glorify—” “Not a word of this will get into print,” Savage said. “Believe me.”

“Look, police work is like any other kind of work—except we happen to deal with crime. If you run an import‐export business, you play certain hunches and others you don’t. It’s the same with us. If you have a hunch, you don’t go around making a million‐dollar deal on it until you’ve checked it.”

“All right, look at it this way. These men were cops. Three of them were killed in a row. What’s the automatic conclusion?” “Somebody doesn’t like cops.” “Right. A cop hater.” “So?” “Take off their uniforms. What have you got then?” “They weren’t wearing uniforms. None of them were uniform cops.” “I know. I was speaking figuratively. I meant, make them ordinary citizens. Not cops. What do you have then? Certainly not a cop hater.” “But they were cops.” “They were men first. Cops only coincidentally and secondarily.” “You feel, then, that the fact that they were cops had nothing to do with the reason they were killed.” “Maybe. That’s what I want to dig into a little deeper.”

Carella shrugged. “It’s difficult to discuss this with you because I’m not sure I know what I’m talking about. I only have this idea, that’s all. This idea that motive may go deeper than the shields these men wore.”