Tal considered the invitation but his eyes were drawn back to the picture, the stars, the moon, the infinity signs. “Thanks but think I’ll pass. I’m going back to the office for a while. All that evidence we took out of the foundation? I wanta look over the data a little more.”
“Suit yourself, Einstein,” the homicide cop said. He started back into the house but paused and turned back. “Data plural,” he said, pointing a huge finger at Tal’s chest.
“Data plural,” Tal agreed.
LaTour vanished inside, the screen door swinging shut behind him with a bang.
Ed McBain was born in 1956, when Evan Hunter was thirty years old. I am both of these people. What happened was that Pocket Books, Inc., had published the paperback edition of The Blackboard Jungle (by Evan Hunter) and wanted to know if I had any ideas for a mystery series. I came up with the notion of the 87th Precinct, and they gave me a contract for three paperback books, “to see how it goes.” I was advised to put a pseudonym on the new series because “If it becomes known that Evan Hunter is writing mystery novels, it could be damaging to your career as a serious novelist,” quote, unquote. When I finished the first book, Cop Hater, I still didn’t have a new name. I went out into the kitchen, where my wife was feeding my twin sons, and I said, “How’s Ed McBain?” She thought for a moment, and then said, “Good.”
Fiddlers, which will be published this year, is the fifty-sixth title in the 87th Precinct series; frankly, I can’t see that the Evan Hunter career has suffered at all. Between them, Hunter and McBain have written more than a hundred novels. McBain has never written a screenplay, but Hunter has written several, including The Birds for Alfred Hitchcock. The most recent Hunter novel was The Moment She Was Gone. The most recent McBain was Alice in Jeopardy, the first in a new mystery series.
But only once have they ever actually written anything together: Hunter wrote the first half of Candyland and McBain wrote the second half.
They still speak to each other.
Merely Hate
Ed McBain
A blue Star of David had been spray-painted on the windshield of the dead driver’s taxi.
“This is pretty unusual,” Monoghan said.
“The blue star?” Monroe asked.
“Well, that, too,” Monoghan agreed.
The two homicide detectives flanked Carella like a pair of book-ends. They were each wearing black suits, white shirts, and black ties, and they looked somewhat like morticians, which was not a far cry from their actual calling. In this city, detectives from Homicide Division were overseers of death, expected to serve in an advisory and supervisory capacity. The actual murder investigation was handled by the precinct that caught the squeal — in this case, the Eight-Seven.
“But I was referring to a cabbie getting killed,” Monoghan explained. “Since they started using them plastic partitions... what, four, five years ago?... yellow-cab homicides have gone down to practically zip.”
Except for tonight, Carella thought.
Tall and slender, standing in an easy slouch, Steve Carella looked like an athlete, which he wasn’t. The blue star bothered him. It bothered his partner, too. Meyer was hoping the blue star wasn’t the start of something. In this city — in this world — things started too fast and took too long to end.
“Trip sheet looks routine,” Monroe said, looking at the clipboard he’d recovered from the cab, glancing over the times and locations handwritten on the sheet. “Came on at midnight, last fare was dropped off at one-forty. When did you guys catch the squeal?”
Car four, in the Eight-Seven’s Adam Sector, had discovered the cab parked at the curb on Ainsley Avenue at two-thirty in the morning. The driver was slumped over the wheel, a bullet hole at the base of his skull. Blood was running down the back of his neck, into his collar. Blue paint was running down his windshield. The uniforms had phoned the detective squadroom some five minutes later.
“We got to the scene at a quarter to three,” Carella said.
“Here’s the ME, looks like,” Monoghan said.
Carl Blaney was getting out of a black sedan marked with the seal of the Medical Examiner’s Office. Blaney was the only person Carella knew who had violet eyes. Then again, he didn’t know Liz Taylor.
“What’s this I see?” he asked, indicating the clipboard in Monroe’s hand. “You been compromising the crime scene?”
“Told you,” Monoghan said knowingly.
“It was in plain sight,” Monroe explained.
“This the vie?” Blaney asked, striding over to the cab and looking in through the open window on the driver’s side. It was a mild night at the beginning of May. Spectators who’d gathered on the sidewalk beyond the yellow CRIME SCENE tapes were in their shirt sleeves. The detectives in sport jackets and ties, Blaney and the homicide dicks in suits and ties, all looked particularly formal, as if they’d come to the wrong street party.
“MCU been here yet?” Blaney asked.
“We’re waiting,” Carella said.
Blaney was referring to the Mobile Crime Unit, which was called the CSI in some cities. Before they sanctified the scene, not even the ME was supposed to touch anything. Monroe felt this was another personal jab, just because he’d lifted the goddamn clipboard from the front seat. But he’d never liked Blaney, so fuck him.
“Why don’t we tarry over a cup of coffee?” Blaney suggested, and without waiting for company, started walking toward an all-night diner across the street. This was a black neighborhood, and this stretch of turf was largely retail, with all of the shops closed at three-fifteen in the morning. The diner was the only place ablaze with illumination, although lights had come on in many of the tenements above the shuttered shops.
The sidewalk crowd parted to let Blaney through, as if he were a visiting dignitary come to restore order in Baghdad. Carella and Meyer ambled along after him. Monoghan and Monroe lingered near the taxi, where three or four blues stood around scratching their asses. Casually, Monroe tossed the clipboard through the open window and onto the front seat on the passenger side.
There were maybe half a dozen patrons in the diner when Blaney and the two detectives walked in. A man and a woman sitting in one of the booths were both black. The girl was wearing a purple silk dress and strappy high-heeled sandals. The man was wearing a beige linen suit with wide lapels. Carella and Meyer each figured them for a hooker and her pimp, which was profiling because for all they knew, the pair could have been a gainfully employed, happily married couple coming home from a late party. Everyone sitting on stools at the counter was black, too. So was the man behind it. They all knew this was the Law here, and the Law frequently spelled trouble in the hood, so they all fell silent when the three men took stools at the counter and ordered coffee.
“So how’s the world treating you these days?” Blaney asked the detectives.
“Fine,” Carella said briefly. He had come on at midnight, and it had already been a long night.
The counterman brought their coffees.
Bald and burly and blue-eyed, Meyer picked up his coffee cup, smiled across the counter, and asked, “How you doing?”
“Okay,” the counterman said warily.
“When did you come to work tonight?”
“Midnight.”
“Me, too,” Meyer said. “Were you here an hour or so ago?”
“I was here, yessir.”