"An overdose of heroin, to be exact. A large overdose. A dose far in excess of the fatal 0.2 gram." Soames paused. "In fact, our young friend Hernandez took enough heroin to kill, if you'll pardon the expression, Mr. Kling, a bull."
There were about eight million things to do.
There always seemed to be more things wanting doing than a man could possibly get to, and sometimes Peter Byrnes wished for two heads and twice that many arms. With coldly rational illogic, he knew the situation was undoubtedly the same in any kind of business, while simultaneously telling himself that no business could be the rat race police work was.
Peter Byrnes was a detective and a lieutenant, and he headed the squad of bulls who called the 87th Precinct their home. It was, in a somewhat wry way, their home- the way a rusty LCI in the Philippines eventually becomes home to a sailor from Detroit
The precinct house, in all honesty, was not a very homey place. It did not boast chintz curtains or pop-up toasters or garbage-disposal units or comfortable easy chairs or a dog named Rover who eagerly bounced into the living room with pipe and slippers. It presented a cold stone facade to Grover Park, which hemmed in the precinct territory on the south. Beyond the facade, just inside the entranceway arch, was a square room with a bare wooden floor and a desk that looked like the judge's bench in a courtroom. A sign on the desk sternly announced: ALL VISITORS MUST STOP AT DESK. When a visitor so stopped, he met either the desk lieutenant or the desk sergeant, both of whom were polite, enthusiastic and pained in the neck to please the public.
There were detention cells on the first floor of the building, and upstairs behind mesh-covered windows-mesh-covered because the neighborhood kids had a delightful penchant for hurling stones at anything faintly smacking of the Law-were the Locker Room, the Clerical office, the Detective Squad Room and other sundry and comfortable little cubicles, among which were the Men's Room and Lieutenant Byrnes' office.
In defense of the lieutenant's office, it is fair to say there were no urinals lining the walls.
It is also fair to say that the lieutenant liked his office. He had occupied it for a good many years now, and had come to respect it the way a man comes to respect a somewhat threadbare glove he uses for gardening. At times, of course, and especially in a precinct like the 87th, the weeds in the garden grew a little thick. It was at such times that Byrnes devoutly wished for the extra head and arms.
Thanksgiving had not helped at all, and the approaching holidays were making things even worse. It seemed that whenever the holidays rolled around, the people in Byrnes' precinct declared a field day for crime. Knifings in Grover Park, for example, were a year-round occurrence and certainly nothing to get excited about. But with the approach of the holidays, the precinct people burst with Christmas spirit and happily set about the task of decorating the park's scant green patches with rivers of red in honor of the festive season. There had been sixteen knifings in the park during the past week.
The fencing of stolen goods along Culver Avenue was a well-known pastime of the precinct people, too. You could buy anything from a used African witch doctor's mask to a new eggbeater if you happened to come along at the right time with the right amount of cash. This despite the law that made receiving stolen goods a misdemeanor (if the value of such goods was less than $100) and a felony (if the value was more than a C-note). The law didn't disturb the professional shoplifters who toiled by day and sold by night. Nor did it bother the drug addicts who stole to sell to buy to feed their habits. It didn't bother the people who bought the stolen goods, either. Culver Avenue was, in their eyes, the biggest discount house in the city.
It bothered only the cops.
And it bothered them especially during the holiday season. The department stores were very crowded during that joyous season and shoplifters enjoyed the freedom and protective coloring of the sardine pack. And, too, customers for the hot stuff were abundant since there were Christmas lists to worry about, and there was nothing like a fast turnover to spur on a thief to bigger and better endeavors. Everyone, it seemed, was anxious to get his Christmas shopping done early this year, and so Byrnes and his bulls had their hands full.
The prostitutes on Whore Street also had their hands full. Whatever there was about the Yule season that led a man uptown to seek a slice of exotica, Byrnes would never know. But uptown they sought, and Whore Street was the happy hunting grounds-and the climactic culmination of a night's sporting was very often a mugging and rolling in an alleyway.
