Calypso (87th Precinct) by McBain Ed

Author:McBain, Ed [McBain, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AmazonEncore
Published: 2011-12-24T05:00:00+00:00

There is nothing cops like better than continuity, even if it takes a couple of corpses to provide it. Before Alex Leopold raised his baffled head, Carella and Meyer were looking for a connection between the dead George Chadderton and his missing brother, Santo. Now, thanks to a few .38-caliber Smith & Wesson slugs, they were looking for a connection between a dead calypso singer and a dead hooker, both of them black, both of them from Diamondback, both of them possibly killed with the same weapon. Now that the preliminary connection had been made, Carella asked Ballistics to compare the bullets that had slain Clara Jean Hawkins with the bullets that had slain George Chadderton in an attempt to pinpoint positively whether or not the same weapon had been used in both murders. He asked for a rush on the comparison tests, and Gombes promised he’d get back to him by four that afternoon, saying he would ordinarily have tackled the job sooner except that they’d just got what seemed like a breakthrough in a sniper case that had been baffling the Three-Six for months, and he had to get to that first. He called back at ten minutes to 5:00. He called to report that the same gun, most likely a .38 Smith & Wesson, either the Regulation Police or the Terrier, had very definitely been used in both murders. He asked Carella if there was anything else he could do for him at the moment. Carella told him no, and thanked him, and then hung up and sat staring at the phone for several moments.

He had by that time spent most of the afternoon with Leopold and Meyer, doing all the leg work he’d earlier suggested. Together they had hit all of Midtown South’s hot-bed hotels and massage parlors, and had talked to most of the pimps in the precinct’s Lousy File, but they still had not come up with a make on Joey Peace. Sighing, Carella picked up the phone again and called first Danny Gimp and then Fats Donner, both highly valued police informers, to ask if they know a hooker named Clara Jean Hawkins or a pimp named Joey Peace. Fats Donner, who was rather more sexually oriented than Danny Gimp, laughed when he heard the pimp’s name, and then asked if it was spelled P-I-E-C-E, which he thought might be a singularly good name for a pimp. He had nonetheless never heard of a gentleman of leisure who called himself by such a moniker. Neither had Danny Gimp. Both men promised to go on the earie, but each expressed doubt that he’d come up with anything. “Very often,” Fats said in his most unctuously oily, pale blubbery way, “a pimp will use a nickname known only to the girls in his own stable. This as protection against other pimps, not to mention the law.” Carella thanked him for the invaluable insight into the world’s oldest profession, and then hung up.

He was feeling testy and irritable.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.