Free Calypso by Ed McBain Page B

was getting close to who did it…"
        "Right," Carella said. "So let's find out what happened back then, okay? Which one do you want?"
        "They sound like a vaudeville team," Meyer said. "Barragan and Bones."
        "I'll flip you," Carella said.
        "Not with your coin," Meyer said. "If we flip, we use a neutral coin."
        "My coin is neutral," Carella said.
        "No, your coin is crooked. He has a crooked coin, kid."
        "I say, old boy, are you trying to escape?" Kling said, and began laughing again.
        "Have you got a quarter?" Carella asked him.
        Still laughing, Kling reached into his pocket. Carella accepted the coin, examined both sides of it, and handed it to Meyer for his approval.
        "Okay," Meyer said, "heads or tails?"
        "Heads," Carella said.
        Meyer flipped the coin. It hit the corner of Kling's desk, flew off it at an angle, struck the floor on its edge and went rolling across the room to collide with the wall behind the water cooler. Carella and Meyer both ran across the room. Squatting near the cooler, they examined the coin.
        "It's tails," Meyer said triumphantly.
        "Okay, you get the vaudeville performer of your choice," Carella said.
        "Barragan's way the hell out in Calm's Point," Meyer said. "I'll take Bones."
        
***
        
        Some days you can't make a nickel.
        Frederick Bones's address was indeed 687 Downes, which was in the heart (or perhaps the kidney) of Isola and only a fifteen-minute subway ride from the station house. Meyer drove the distance downtown in his beat-up old Chevy, his wife, Sarah, enjoying the rights to the family's second car, a used Mercedes-Benz. Meyer knew exactly what his father (rest his soul) would have said if he'd lived to see the car: "Are you buying from the Germans already? What kind of Jew are you?" Meyer sometimes wondered.
        He had no such doubts about what kind of Jew his father Max had been. His father Max had been a comical Jew. It was Max who'd decided to send his only son through life with a double-barreled monicker-Meyer Meyer, very funny, Pop. "Meyer Meyer, Jew on Fire," the kids used to call him when he was growing up in a neighborhood that was almost exclusively Gentile. He kept trying to think of clever taunts with which he might counterattack. Somehow, "Dominick Rizzo, Full of Shitzo," did not do the trick, especially since it only caused Dominick to come after him with a baseball bat the very same day Meyer had his poetic inspiration, occasioning the taking of six stitches at the right side of Meyer's head in order to keep his ear from falling off. "Patrick Cassidy, Kiss My Assidy" resulted in fifteen-year-old, two-hundred-pound Patrick chasing twelve-year-old, one-hundred-and-twenty-pound Meyer for eight blocks before he caught him, whereupon Patrick lowered his trousers, flashed a huge harvest moon, and ordered Meyer to kiss it unless he wanted a broken Hebe head. Meyer bit Patrick on the ass instead, an unprovoked and inconsiderate attack that contributed little toward relieving Judeo-Hibernian tensions. When Meyer got home later that afternoon, he washed his mouth out with Listerine, but the taste of Patrick's Irish ass lingered and did not improve the taste of his mother's fine knaydls. At the dinner table that night, his comical father Max told a joke about an Italian sewer worker who complained about taking shit from a Jew.
        It was not until Meyer got to be sixteen years old and five-feet eleven and three-quarter inches tall that the kids in the neighborhood stopped calling him names. He had begun lifting weights by then, and when he wasn't pumping iron, he was pumping gas at the local service station and wishing he would hurry up and gain the extra quarter of an inch that would make him a six-footer. He figured that once he got to be six feet tall and weighed a hundred and ninety pounds, he would grab Dominick and Patrick