Where There's Smoke полностью

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“How soon you need this?”

“Right away.”

Henry looked at his watch. “It’s only a quarter past eleven,” he said. “Half the hoods I know are still asleep. Where can I reach you later?”

“You can leave a message at my apartment. Have you still got the number?”

“Tattooed on my brain,” Henry said, and grinned again.

The precinct commanded by Captain Ferdinand Cupera was one the city had overlooked in its recent, frantic re­building and/or renovation program. This meant that it had been on the same spot since 1927, the year in which it was built. And despite an annual interior coat of apple-green paint, there was no hiding the building’s decrepi­tude. The thing to remember about any police station is that it’s used twenty-four hours a day by rotating teams of detectives, uniformed policemen, clerks, criminals, and victims. The furniture, the water coolers, the typewriters, the telephones, the holding cells, the lockers, the Coca-Cola machine, and the toilets never get a rest. Given this constant use (and abuse), it’s a wonder any of them—in­cluding the new sleekly modern yellow-brick precincts the city had spent a fortune to construct—managed to survive at all.

I climbed the broad flat steps leading to the double wooden entrance doors, green globes flanking the steps, the numeral “12” lettered on each in white. A patrolman stopped me just outside the muster room, and I flashed the gold, and he said, “Anyone special you want to see, Loot?” I told him I was there to see Captain Cupera, and then I walked in toward the familiar muster desk, identi­cal to the one in the precinct uptown, where I’d spent twenty-four years of my professional life. A sergeant sat behind the high wooden desk, reading a magazine. I stopped at the brass railing in front of the desk, saw the sign advising all visitors that they must state their busi­ness to the sergeant, saw the Miranda-Escobedo rights poster printed in English and Spanish and tacked to the wall behind the desk, saw the electrical board with warn­ing lights that would flash red if any of the holding-cell doors were open, saw the board with keys on it, saw the sergeant’s battery of telephones, and the duty chart, and the calendar and the muster book open on the worn, smooth top of the desk, saw all of these things and felt not the faintest trace of nostalgia.

The sergeant looked up. “Help you?” he said.

I showed him my shield, told him who I was, and said I would like to see the captain. He lifted a telephone, held a brief conversation with Coop, and then asked me if I knew the way. I told him I did, and went across the muster room, past the Dispatcher’s Office and the Cleri­cal Office and the swing room, where a patrolman was sitting in his undershirt sipping hot coffee from a mug, his uniform jacket draped over the back of a wooden chair. I knocked on the frosted-glass door marked Com­manding Officer.

“Come in,” Coop called, and I opened the door and went into his office. It was larger than the one I’d occupied on the second floor of the building uptown. This was proper and fitting, since I’d commanded only eighteen detectives, whereas Coop was in charge of an entire precinct—two hundred cops in all, including the plain-clothesmen, over whom he had authority superseding the detective-lieutenant’s. He was sitting behind a desk piled high with paperwork. There were four barred windows in the room. Two of them were open to the mild September breeze. A shaft of sunlight speared the armchair in front of his desk. He rose the moment I entered, extended his hand, and said, “Long time no see.” His voice still carried the faintest trace of a Spanish accent, though he had come from Puerto Rico nearly forty years before. “Sit down,” he said. “You want some coffee?”

“Thanks,” I said, “I’m in a hurry.”

“You just got here,” he said, looking mildly offended.

“Coop,” I said, “I want to report a missing corpse.”

“A missing what!”

“Corpse.”

“Ha ha,” he said mirthlessly.

“Illegally removed from the premises of one Abner Boone, 3418 Hennessy Street at or about three A.M. Mr. Boone is an undertaker.”

“You’re serious?” Coop said.

“I’m serious. The deceased answers to the name of An­thony Gibson, forty-two years old—”

“Just a second,” Coop said, and began writing.

“Five-eleven, a hundred and eighty-five pounds, dark hair, brown eyes.”

“What’s your interest in this stiff?”

“I promised to get it back before ten tomorrow morn­ing.”

“Benny, if you want to keep playing cops and robbers, why don’t you come back on the force?” Coop said. He was the only man in the world who called me Benny. A lot of women called me Benny, but that was forgivable. I tolerated the diminutive when Coop used it only because he gave it such a distinctive Old World twist, making it sound more like “Baynee.”

“Well, this looks like an interesting case,” I said.

“They all look interesting,” Coop said.

“There’ve only been four so far. That’s not a lot.”