It is estimated that half a billion dollars’ worth of bogus auto parts are sold annually, all bearing the names of respectable firms. When the parts break down or fail to work, it’s the company whose label is on the products that loses a customer and may gain a lawsuit.
At Christmastime a few years ago Chicago was flooded with 200,000 watches purporting to be Bulovas. “Bulov” was printed on the dial face and the number seventeen appeared beneath the name. The seventeen was interpreted to mean the number of jewels in the works, but each watch was sixteen short. The watches were worth three dollars and sold for twenty-six.
Naturally the manufacturers of honest merchandise who have spent years earning reputations for integrity, and millions on acquainting the public with the superiority of their products, are not too pleased when their trademark is swiped and affixed to crumbling goods. They sell fewer products because of the competition and they lose good will when customers find themselves stung with a shoddy product under a nationally known label.
Some companies have gotten injunctions against the offenders, but the profits are so huge that the culprits merely laughed at the court orders. Getting evidence against brand-name counterfeiters that will stand up in court is highly expensive, time-consuming, and difficult, entailing the hiring of an army of private investigators. In addition, state laws about the practice are extremely hazy, and there is no federal law declaring that this type of forgery is a crime, unless misrepresented goods are sold through the mails.
The Bulova Watch Company, thoroughly aroused, spent bushels of money to break up the Chicago watch-counterfeiting ring. When the trial was over, the ringleader got ten days in jail and his confederates got suspended sentences. Bad perfume comes in good bottles, untrustworthy brakes are put into autos, and people buy burned-out TV tubes. They are all counterfeit, and not much can be done about it.
It kind of makes you long for the days of good old King Canute.
The Empty Hours
by Ed McBain
1
They thought she was colored at first.
The patrolman who investigated the complaint didn’t expect to find a dead woman. This was the first time he’d seen a corpse, and he was somewhat shaken by the ludicrously relaxed grotesqueness of the girl lying on her back on the rug, and his hand trembled a little as he made out his report. But when he came to the blank line calling for an identification of RACE, he unhesitatingly wrote “Negro.”
The call had been taken at Headquarters by a patrolman in the central Complaint Bureau. He sat at a desk with a pad of printed forms before him, and he copied down the information, shrugged because this seemed like a routine squeal, rolled the form and slipped it into a metal carrier, and then shot it by pneumatic tube to the radio room. A dispatcher there read the complaint form, shrugged because this seemed like a routine squeal, studied the precinct map on the wall opposite his desk, and then dispatched car eleven of the 87th Precinct to the scene.
The girl was dead.
She may have been a pretty girl, but she was hideous in death, distorted by the expanding gases inside her skin case. She was wearing a sweater and skirt, and she was barefoot, and her skirt had pulled back when she fell to the rug. Her head was twisted at a curious angle, the short black hair cradled by the rug, her eyes open and brown in a bloated face. The patrolman felt a sudden impulse to pull the girl’s skirt down over her knees. He knew, suddenly, she would have wanted this. Death had caught her in this indecent posture, robbing her of female instinct. There were things this girl would never do again, so many things, all of which must have seemed enormously important to the girl herself. But the single universal thing was an infinitesimal detail, magnified now by death: she would never again perform the simple feminine and somehow beautiful act of pulling her skirt down over her knees.
The patrolman sighed and finished his report. The image of the dead girl remained in his mind all the way down to the squad car.
It was hot in the squadroom on that night in early August. The men working the graveyard shift had reported for duty at 6:00 P.M., and they would not go home until 8:00 the following morning. They were all detectives and perhaps privileged members of the police force, but there were many policemen — Detective Meyer Meyer among them — who maintained that a uniformed cop’s life made a hell of a lot more sense than a detective’s.
“Sure, it does,” Meyer insisted now, sitting at his desk in his shirtsleeves. “A patrolman’s schedule provides regularity and security. It gives a man a home life.”
“This squadroom is your home, Meyer,” Carella said. “Admit it.”
“Sure,” Meyer answered, grinning. “I can’t wait to come to work each day.” He passed a hand over his bald pate. “You know what I like especially about this place? The interior decoration. The decor. It’s very restful.”
“Oh, you don’t like your fellow workers, huh?” Carella said. He slid off the desk and winked at Cotton Hawes, who was standing at one of the filing cabinets. Then he walked toward the water cooler at the other end of the room, just inside the slatted railing that divided squadroom from corridor. He moved with a nonchalant ease that was deceptive. Steve Carella had never been one of those weight-lifting goons, and the image he presented was hardly one of bulging muscular power. But there was a quiet strength about the man and the way he moved, a confidence in the way he casually accepted the capabilities and limitations of his body. He stopped at the water cooler, filled a paper cup, and turned to look at Meyer again.
“No, I like my colleagues,” Meyer said. “In fact, Steve, if I had my choice in all the world of who to work with, I would choose you honorable, decent guys. Sure.” Meyer nodded, building steam. “In fact, I’m thinking of having some medals cast off, so I can hand them out to you guys. Boy, am I lucky to have this job! I may come to work without pay from now on. I may just refuse my salary, this job is so enriching. I want to thank you guys. You make me recognize the real values in life.”
“He makes a nice speech,” Hawes said.
“He should run the lineup. It would break the monotony. How come you don’t run the lineup, Meyer?”
“Steve, I been offered the job,” Meyer said seriously. “I told them I’m needed right here at the 87th, the garden spot of all the precincts. Why, they offered me chief of detectives, and when I said no, they offered me commissioner, but I was loyal to the squad.”
“Let’s give him a medal,” Hawes said, and the telephone rang.
Meyer lifted the receiver. “87th Squad. Detective Meyer. What? Yeah, just a second.” He pulled a pad into place and began writing. “Yeah, I got it. Right. Right. Right. Okay.” He hung up. Carella had walked to his desk. “A little colored girl,” Meyer said.
“Yeah?”
“In a furnished room on South Eleventh.”
“Yeah?”
“Dead,” Meyer said.
2
The city doesn’t seem to be itself in the very early hours of the morning.
She is a woman, of course, and time will never change that. She awakes as a woman, tentatively touching the day in a yawning, smiling stretch, her lips free of color, her hair tousled, warm from sleep, her body richer, an innocent girlish quality about her as sunlight stains the eastern sky and covers her with early heat. She dresses in furnished rooms in crummy rundown slums, and she dresses in Hall Avenue penthouses, and in the countless apartments that crowd the buildings of Isola and Riverhead and Calm’s Point, in the private houses that line the streets of Bethtown and Majesta, and she emerges a different woman, sleek and businesslike, attractive but not sexy, a look of utter competence about her, manicured and polished, but with no time for nonsense, there is a long working day ahead of her. At 5:00 a metamorphosis takes place. She does not change her costume, this city, this woman, she wears the same frock or the same suit, the same high-heeled pumps or the same suburban loafers, but something breaks through that immaculate shell, a mood, a tone, an undercurrent. She is a different woman who sits in the bars and cocktail lounges, who relaxes on the patios or on the terraces shelving the skyscrapers, a different woman with a somewhat lazily inviting grin, a somewhat tired expression, an impenetrable knowledge on her face and in her eyes: she lifts her glass, she laughs gently, the evening sits expectantly on the skyline, the sky is awash with the purple of day’s end.