Mitchell Smith

By: Mitchell Smith

Synopsis:

The crime was ugly - a beautiful call girl hideously slain. But that was nothing compared to what was to come when two New York City Detectives pursued the case: a tough and seasoned maverick named Tom Nardon, and Ellie Klein, a female cop determined to over come past failure and disgrase, and earn her slot in the department’s elite. What they found as they moved through a maze of lower depth depravity and high power politics, petty corruption and cardinal sin, may murder look minor - and death as close as the first wrong step…

To Linda, my wife

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright C 1987 by Mitchell Smith All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a data base or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information address McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020.

This is an authorized reprint of a hardcover edition published by McGraw-Hill Book Company.

Onyx is a trademark of New American Library.

SIGNET, SIGNET CLASSIC, MENTOR, ONYX, PLUME, MERIDIAN and NAL BOOKS are published by NAL PENGUIN INC., 1633 Broadway, New York, New York 10019

First Onyx Printing, August, 1988

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Sally Gaither had been waiting to be found for a day and a night, sitting naked, wired to her folding chair in a small, shifting storm of steam and hot water, the pink ball bulging fat between her teeth.

She’d been alive the first few hours-in the most extraordinary agony for two. Then, scalded, her neat pale skin turned sagging, pouched, blistered, finally peeling slowly away in slender strips-her eyes rolled back, the pupils out of sight, Sally had gone mad. Insane, she became more complicated, had wonderful dreams in which she flew with flying flowers-was herself a tangerine rose, no longer moaning past the muffling ball. After a while of this, she died dreaming.

For the last of that day, she sat in her shower, and through the night as well. Then, Monday morning, company. Sue Elva Jacks used her key, and came on in.

“There’s the Chiefs blow job.” Keneally, in the bathroom, was speaking in mingled pique at Ellie Klein’s make-work position on the Commissioner’s Squad-where she served at the pleasure of the Chief of the department and out of a distinct pleasure of his own, the words allowing him to imagine her crouched on stockinged knees before Chief Delgado in his corner office downtown, ministering to that squat, aging man with snorting, gobbling noises.

Up yours breathed a heavy breath in Keneally’s ear, and he looked over his shoulder to see Nardone’s thick, unpleasant face, his sticky black eyes. In the living room, Ellie Klein was talking to the patrolman first-on-scene. They could hear her clear, breathless voice.

Keneally presented a finger, then stepped enough aside for Nardone to wedge himself in. The bathroom was packed with bulky, armed men—one with the Crime Scene Investigative Unit, one from Nineteenth Precinct, and Keneally and his commander from District Homicide all watching as an assistant medical examiner named Greenstein gently extracted a thoroughly cooked banana (shriveled and smaller than it had been, its skin still on) from Sally Gaither’s vagina. The small pink rubber ball had been wrenched from her mouth with some difficulty earlier, after the pictures, leaving the lolling corpse with a mighty, gaping grin.

“What are you doing here?” Maxfield to Nardone.

Maxfield was black, grayhaired and slender, and the senior detective in Division Homicide-a juicy post, leading straight as the Seventh Avenue subway to an inspector’s shield. Maxfield was generally regarded in the Department as stupid, but a cutie-riding the black bandwagon for all it was worth.

“What’s it to you?” Nardone to Maxfield. Nardone a devout Catholic, a righteous brute–ex-shoofly and present attendant spirit and guard dog to Ellie Klein. He and Klein had come to the Commissioner’s Squad by different routes-Nardone by shooting a connected-up dealer down-and, after that, in Internal Affairs, by turning too many sinful comrades in.

So, shoot-out to shoofly, to gilded exile from the real Force onto the Commissioner’s Queens. -Special events, sensitives, errands, and ass kissing, all orchestrated by Chief of the Department Delgado, himself beloved of the Commissioner.

Ellie’s had been another path. -Public relations. The “Klein” was an accident of marriage to a tall, thin young attorney with inquiring eyes, and not an authentic ethnicity.

Ellie was. WASP, maiden name Bowden, and was, if not beautiful, still quite pretty in a lanky, pale blond, slightly lantern-jawed way. Eyes equally pale, a puzzled, washed out blue.

An oddity on the Force, these days. And not entirely a successful one.

Good grades at the Academy; thought at first to be a corner. A crisp pistol shot-none of the wavering overcontrol most ladies indulged in.

Spirited n hand-to-hand, though it was difficult to be certain of a fair test there, the males taking it easier, the females making it harder for her as they struggled, sweating on the mats. She had an odd, yelping, jumping style of combat, intrinsically dissimilar to the grim dark determination the Italian and black girls showed, the nasty hysterical violence of the Irish. —Still, perfectly all right there, all right in hand-to-hand. And absolutely first class in law and regulations-a winner as well in formation, and the Department’s organizational charts.

Something of a failure in the locker room. There, in a sweat-dank ditch of women, where lovely breasts and buttocks jostled with tough talk, waste cans loaded with soaked tampons, an occasional towel-snapping bully-in that damp garden Ellie Klein failed to shine. The women noticed a certain delicacy of approach, almost reproach, carefully concealed behind a lattice of macha grunts and curses.

She wasn’t comfortable with them. -Not with any excuse of daintier class. Her father was, or had been, a carpenter out in Far Rockaway, and the family had never seen better days, except, perhaps, when a distant ancestor had owned a few hundred acres of Long Island, and that had been so long ago that the land had been more a malarial health menace than real estate gold. Nor was she educated beyond them. Two years at Sarah Lawrence on scholarship—she’d left at the beginning of her junior year, gone down to the Village to paint, and, a year later, met Nate Klein at a party-meant not much to hardworking girls who’d slogged through four years at Brooklyn College, CCNY, or NYU.

Hers was simply a slightly different rhythm. Just different enough to irritate. The others weren’t cruel to her everyone, after all, was grownup, busy, intent on graduating, getting on the force. Some were pleasant to her, and one of them liked her very much.

The instructors, always alert for the oddball, if not too much else, picked up those vibes, on and off the mat, and let the tall blonde through with all her good grades, but with no corresponding word of mouth: here comes a solid cop.

They weren’t wrong.

Her first assignment was administrative, Personnel waiting to see if she had a friend downtowns rabbi. Ellie had no friend, but at the time still had a husband. Klein spoke to a fellow lawyer-a senior partner in Temple, Wright, Wright and Sharecroft-and the man, amused by Ellie’s choice of profession, mentioned her career lag to a captain in Tactical Command-like the attorney, a dedicated bridge player. In this way, Ellie was relieved of her responsibilities in the Property Clerk’s office, and put on patrol.

She lasted two years with one of the lowest arrest records in her precinct-an admittedly low-action area in Queens-and then blotted her sheet badly, within a week or two of summer vacation.

A very large black detective named Bayard Drew had, with his partner, stopped two handsome long-haired white boys on a corner. -Bayard had seen an inescapable outline of switchblade in one boy’s pocket, and being out of temper for personal reasons, stood the boy and his friend up against a wall for a look-see. Broad daylight, with passersby.

Ellie, on her one footpatrol shift in the week, passed by just in time to make her mistake.

As Drew patted the boy down, the young man became suddenly and furiously violent, and got his knife out.

Drew, grappling with him in embarrassed surprise, twice the boy’s size, made a distracted grab for the knife-wrist, missed it-, and received a serious wound-a cut up along his forearm that sliced veins and arteries in two.

At that, Drew raised his other fist, hit the boy a collected punch, and knocked him into the building wall and unconscious. Then he attempted to stanch the flow of blood. His partner was occupied with the other boy, who had seen an opportunity in the confusion, and determined to take advantage of it.

It was up to Officer Klein, and she muffed it.

Given time, just a moment or two to consider, Ellie would certainly have done what she should-taken out her sap (frowned on, but more effective in a tussle than the stick), closed with the boy still struggling, struck him hard on the head several times to assist in subduing him-and then gone to the aid of the injured officer, applying pressure to the site of bleeding, using a folded or wadded cloth if necessary, while summoning aid with her belt radio.

But Ellie wasn’t given time to consider. She came to the corner-mildly curious because of an elderly couple standing in the middle of the street staring at something happening out of her sight—cleared the corner, and saw Drew cut and the blood come spurting out.

He’d barely had time to punch the boy when she rushed to him, fluttering, crying out-reaching to touch his draining arm, then withdraw her hand as quickly. Her cries were, in fact, just the ones she’d offered when trying three years before to attack Marie Valonte, kick her in the groin, strike her across the throat with the edge of her hand, take her on the hip, and throw her to the mat to kneel on her head and subdue her utterly.

Marie had been a sweet-tempered chunky girl, very religious, and had cooperatively collapsed under Ellie’s assault, but shifted her dark-curled head abruptly when Ellie, kneeling, had pressed upon an earring.

These cries, then, without the attendant violence, were much the same that Ellie now employed in succoring Detective Drew. She pawed, touched the arm, and leaped away, uttering cries. She was also weeping.

This spectacle, this extraordinary behavior observed by so many interested people on the corner and in the street adjacent, and a cause of terrific chagrin for both Detective Drew and his breathless partner-the one gripping his own arm in the fiercest way, the other more relaxed, with his prisoner kneeling peaceful at his feet, the short muzzle of a .38 Detective Special touching the boy gently on his right ear-resulted in Ellie Klein’s swift transfer to Manhattan, to a children’s shelter program there, as Department Liaison.

Here also, she muddied her sheet in many minor ways getting once into a furious dispute with a Puerto Rican mother who had seared a particular devil out of her little girl on the big back burner of her stove. Ellie was accused of striking this lady, and in front of a witness, a social worker-almost the worst thing a police officer can do. Had the social worker not been a veteran of those wars, and kind to cops, Ellie Klein would have been up on charges and out on her ass.

So things stood in her career-her commander, answering an inspector from District who had inquired who the pussy might be, and how good a cop, had replied that she was a nice girl-meaning that she was competent at daily police work, intelligent, industrious, honest, and not to be relied upon in an emergency.

So she was ruined, judged as simply the wrong material for the job-when, abruptly, she was given her chance, and given with it a few moments to prepare.

She and Klein had been divorced for two years when a tenement in the barrio, at East 108th Street, caught fire from tattered wiring in its old boiler room, and burned.

The divorce had been painful for Ellie, who had thought herself in love with her handsome, clever husband. They had been together for six years, Klein almost always humorous, joking with her over thousands of small matters, but grimly and pleasantly serious in bed. He had occasionally taken advantage of her long legs to have her parade before him in highheeled shoes, garter belt, and wide-brim straw hat, kicking and prancing like a horse, which motions made her small breasts shake, her pale buttocks, already slightly slack, tremble whitely in the shadowed light of their bedroom lamp. Or he would ask her to march through the whole of their neat apartment-to no music but her soft panting, her faint gasps of effort as she danced.

After such performances, he had the habit of taking her strongly. Twice, he’d anointed her between the buttocks and entered her there, pleasing himself and hurting her, then pleasing them both.