Free Cop Hater by Ed McBain Page A

Squaresville, fellas, I'm telling you. He wouldn't know a .45 from a cement mixer."
    "He's owned a few in his life," Carella said.
    "Playing with them, playing with them. If one of them things ever went off within a hundred yards of him, he'd have diarrhea for a week. Take it from me, he don't care about nothin' but heroin. Listen, they don't call him Dizzy for nothin'. He's dizzy. He's got butterflies up here. He chases them away with H."
    "I don't trust junkies," Bush said.
    "Neither do I," Danny answered. "But this guy ain't a killer, take it from me. He don't even know how to kill time."
    "Do us a favor," Carella said.
    "Sure."
    "Find him for us. You know our number." "Sure. I'll buzz you in an hour or so. This is gonna be a cinch. Hopheads are a cinch."
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter NINE
     
    the heat on that July 26th reached a high of 95.6 at twelve noon. At the precinct house, two fans circulated the soggy air that crawled past the open windows and the grilles behind them. Everything in the Detective Squad Room seemed to wilt under the steady, malignant pressure of the heat. Only the file cabinets and the desks stood at strict attention. Reports, file cards, carbon paper, envelopes, memos, all of these were damp and sticky to the touch, clinging to wherever they were dropped, clinging with a moist limpidity.
    The men in the Squad Room worked in their shirt sleeves. Their shirts were stained with perspiration, large dark amoeba blots which nibbled at the cloth, spreading from beneath the armpits, spreading from the hollow of the spinal column. The fans did not help the heat at all. The fans circulated the suffocating breath of the city, and the men sucked in the breath and typed up their reports in triplicate, and checked their worksheets, and dreamt of Summers in the White Mountains, or Summers in Atlantic City with the ocean slapping their faces. They called complainants, and they called suspects, and their hands sweated on the black plastic of the phone, and they could feel Heat like a living thing which invaded their bodies and seared them with a million white-hot daggers.
    Lieutenant Byrnes was as hot as any man in the Squad Room. His office was just to the left of the slatted dividing railing, and it had a large corner window, but the window was wide open and not a breath of a breeze came through it. The reporter sitting opposite him looked cool. The reporter's name was Savage, and the reporter was wearing a blue seersucker suit and a dark blue Panama, and the reporter was smoking a cigarette and casually puffing the smoke up at the ceiling where the heat held it in a solid blue-grey mass.
    "There's nothing more I can tell you," Byrnes said. The reporter annoyed him immensely. He did not for a moment believe that any man on this earth had been born with a name like "Savage." He further did not believe that any man on this earth, on this day, could actually be as cool as Savage pretended he was.
    "Nothing more, Lieutenant?" Savage asked, his voice very soft. He was a handsome man with close-cropped blond hair and a straight, almost-feminine nose. His eyes were grey, cool. Cool.
    "Nothing," the Lieutenant said. "What the hell did you expect? If we knew who did it, we'd have him in here, don't you think?"
    "I should imagine so," Savage said. "Suspects?"
    "We're working on it."
    "Suspects?" Savage repeated.
    "A few. The suspects are our business. You splash them on your front page, and they'll head for Europe."
    "Think a kid did it?"
    "What do you mean, a kid?"
    "A teen-ager."
    "Anybody could've done it," Byrnes said. "For all I know, you did it."
    Savage smiled, exposing bright white teeth. "Lots of teenage gangs in this precinct, aren't there?"
    "We've got the gangs under control. This precinct isn't the garden spot of the city, Savage, but we like to feel we're doing the best job possible here. Now I realize your newspaper may take offense at that, but we really try, Savage, we honestly try to do our little