23 Shotgun by Ed McBain

Author:Ed McBain
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780451156747
Publisher: Signet
Published: 1968-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Thursday was Halloween, so naturally nothing happened on either case. That’s because on Halloween there are ghouls and goblins and witches and spooks stirring on the sweet October air, and they put a hex on anybody trying to do good. The detectives of the 87th were trying to do good by solving those several murders, but it was no use, not on Halloween. So both cases sat right where they were. Besides, there was plenty of other mischief to take care of on that Thursday, October 31.

Carella knew, of course, that Halloween was in reality the day before All Saints’ Day, a church festival celebrated on November 1 each year in honor of all the saints. He further knew that All Saints’ Day was sometimes called All-hallows (hallow meaning saint), and Halloween, before it got bastardized, was originally called Allhallows Even (even being another way of saying eve), and even even became contracted to e’en, hence Hallowe’en, and finally everybody dropped the apostrophe and it became Halloween, a long way from Allhallows Even perhaps, but that’s the way the witch’s brew bubbles, bubeluh.

To Carella, Allhallows Even sounded a great deal more pious than Halloween, but pious was the last thing Halloween had become in America. So perhaps the bastardized and contracted handle was really quite descriptive of an unofficial holiday that had evolved over the years into an excuse for malicious mischief across the length and breadth of the nation. The mischief had been present when Carella was a boy too, but it all seemed far more innocent in those days. In those days he would roam the October streets wearing a fleece-lined pseudo–World War I leather aviator’s helmet with goggles, carrying either a piece of colored chalk (or white chalk, for that matter, though colored chalk was far more desirable); or else a stick stripped from an orange crate, the end of which had been chalked; or else a sock full of flour. The idea was to chase a person, preferably a girl, and either chalk a line down her back, or slap her with the stick, thereby chalking her back, or hit her with the sock full of flour, which also left a mark on her back. You then shouted “Halloween!” and ran like hell, usually giggling. The girl giggled too. Everybody giggled. It was good clean fun, or so it seemed in Carella’s memory. At night, the kids would build an enormous bonfire in the middle of the city street, tossing into it wood scavenged from empty lots, old furniture and crates begged from apartment-building superintendents during the long, exciting day. The flames would leap skyward, shooting sparks and cinders, the boys would run into the street like hobgoblins themselves, to throw more fuel onto the fire, and then the collection of wood exhausted itself, and the flames dwindled, and the girls all went upstairs while the boys stood around the smoldering fire and peed on it.

That was Halloween, Carella thought.

Today…

Well, today, for example, two kids had

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