A hand closed on my shoulder and a voice said, “Uh-uh. Cut it out.”
I looked up at a cop in a new, starched uniform. He had a baby face. If the uniform had been boy scout khaki you might have figured he was a little old for that sort of thing, but only a little. Blond hair peeked out from under the visored cap, baby blue eyes appraised me. I suddenly thought if they let boys like this on the police force I was getting old but I’m only thirty.
“Did you know Bert Archer?” the young cop asked me. Waiting for my answer, he removed his cap and ran the fingers of one hand through his blond hair like the teeth of a comb. I’d have bet he spent a lot of time preening in front of a mirror.
“Yeah,” I said. “She’s got no right to talk like that about Bert Archer.”
I’d squawked right into his baby face. He turned away from the gin fumes distastefully and said, “Brother. Did you tie into one. Drinking alone?”
I shrugged.
“Listen, mister. We have enough trouble now. Don’t make me run you in.”
“What’s she got against old Bert?”
“It will come out in the coroner’s inquest.”
The girl kept on crying. The cop just looked at me, trying to decide whether to run me in or not. I took deep breaths and became drunker by the minute on stuff I’d downed half an hour ago. The heat, probably.
Other cops drifted in and out of the crowd, disappearing into Tolliver’s Funland. The ambulance attendants entered their buggy and took off, siren wailing because they were in a hurry to sprawl out on their cots at the hospital until another call came. Soon another vehicle slipped into their spot at the curb, looking like a cross between an ambulance and a panel truck. Two men climbed out with a big wicker basket, and that should have sobered me. It made me higher. I lit a cigarette and dragged it down to an ember in a minute flat, thinking that would help. I wound up as high as and with a sore throat.
Tolliver’s Funland swallowed the basket and its attendants. Another crew of men came out with cameras and flash attachments, talking about the weather and how the chiefs wife was probably going to have triplets, she looked so big in her seventh month. When the basket boys hit Surf Avenue again they had to struggle with their burden. The blond cop strutted about, patting his nightstick against the palm of his hand and clearing an aisle through the crowd.
I lurched over to the heavy basket and lifted the lid before anyone could stop me. My tongue was so thick I didn’t think I could clamp my teeth shut in front of it. A lady or a eunuch in the crowd screamed.
The cop’s nightstick crushed my fingers against the wicker. “Cut it out, mister,” the blond kid said.
“That’s Bert,” I said. “Christ, that’s Bert.”
The dark-haired girl honked again. The wicker basket bobbed on through the aisle in the crowd.
“I have a good mind to run you down to the precinct,” the blond cop told me. “Just who do you think you are?”
“Forget it. I was all ginned up. I’m sober now.” And I was. Looking inside the basket had flushed the gin from my brain. It was Bert. Bert had fought with an infantry platoon through the hills of Korea and stayed alive despite the best efforts of the gooks so he could return to Tolliver’s Funland in Coney Island and get himself killed.
“What’s your name?”
“Gideon Frey. I’m sorry, officer. Bert and I…”
“Where are, you from?”
“Camp Kilmer. I just got separated yesterday. What happened in there?”
“Mind your own business.” He tried on a sneer for size but the way I looked at him said it was five years away from being perfected.
“I’m his friend. I’ve got a right to know.”
“You veterans are alt alike. Think the world owes you a living. Why don’t you wise up and act like other people?”
“What’s the matter, the Army reject you?” He had a way of bringing out the worst in me. Besides, if I didn’t act nasty I was going to sit down on the sidewalk near the dark-haired girl and bawl like a baby.
“How well did you know the deceased?” The cop was scribbling in a little pad with a mechanical pencil.
“We built the best damned kill-proof bunker in Korea,” I said. “We swapped stories and dry socks and C-rations. We got scared together and went out on patrols together.”
“Had you seen him earlier today?”
“Go practice your questions on someone else,” I said. It surprised him so much he stuttered over it three times before he told me to answer his questions and shut up. He stuttered some more when I informed him it was impossible to do both.
“I’m going to run you in,” he threatened me.
“O.K. If it will make you happy. But get this straight. The guy who died was my friend. Bert Archer. It doesn’t mean a thing to you but it means a lot to me. Are you from Homicide?”
“No. They told me to get names and addresses.”
“Fine. Then get them. Any questions you ask they’re going to ask all over again, only better. Why don’t you just run along and stop the kids from throwing candy wrappers on the beach?”
His knuckles whitened on the grip of the nightstick. “I’m going to run you in.”
“Am I your first?” I wanted to know.
I was striking out blindly. Later on I was going to have to live with the thought of Bert being dead. Now I couldn’t.
“I’ll ask the questions!”
I lit a cigarette and blew smoke in his face, making him cough. I offered him one and he reached out to take it, but I withdrew the pack and said, “Careful. You’re on duty. You’ll never make wolf scout this way.”
“Where do you live, wise guy?”
“I told you. I bought some civilian clothes and came straight here from Camp Kilmer. My duffle’s in a locker at Penn Station. I was going to report to Bert and start working here, then worry about a place to live.”
“Don’t get snotty. Then he hired you?”
“We were friends. We were going to work together and open our own Tolliver’s some day.”
“The people here wouldn’t have liked that.” It wasn’t the cop, but a throaty woman’s voice, sort of like a younger Marlene Dietrich without the Kraut flavor. She was standing close to us in the crowd and maybe she’d been there listening a long time. Wearing spike-heeled shoes that swelled her insteps out in full, rounded curves, she was my height, an even six feet. I don’t know what made me start at the bottom and work my way up, but I did and she had it all and I kept on liking it better and better until I saw the face. Don’t get me wrong. She was beautiful, if you like your women tanned with high cheekbones and flesh drawn taut over them and white-blonde hair longer than it’s supposed to be worn today and eyes under arched brows a deep blue like the eastern sky on a clear day just after the sun goes down.
But I’d seen her dog-eared photograph a hundred times on the southern slope of Hill 311 in Korea, a hundred more times on the crest, and half that on the northern slope before we’d both been hit by the same round of artillery fire and talked about how much better our own bunker was than the one we’d commandeered from the Reds while we waited for the doc to stop the bleeding and kill the pain in the aid station. And I saw it another hundred times, that picture, when we lay bandaged and doped on canvas cots in the field hospital with two Negroes calling across the squad tent, “Hey, this is better than the Waldorf-Astoria!”
This was Karen Tanner who Bert said he was going to marry. The way Karen looked, smiling and interested, she had just arrived and no one had told her about Bert. “You must be Gideon Frey,” she said, offering a long-fingered hand for a quick, mannish shake. “What’s all the fuss about? I’ll vouch for him if he’s in any kind of trouble, Billy. So will Bert. This is Bert’s friend from Korea.”