There was no one else in the garage at a quarter to 2:00 in the morning.
The pillars supporting the roof stood like bulky sentinels spaced some ten feet apart from each other, four of them marking off the distance between him and the elevator. The garage was brightly lighted. His heels clicked on the cement floor as he moved toward the elevator. His footfalls echoed. He was passing the third pillar when a man with a gun in his hand stepped out from behind it, directly into his path.
He reached immediately into his coat for his own gun.
His hand closed on the stock.
He was starting to pull the gun free of its holster when the man standing in his path fired. The man fired directly into his face. He felt only the fierce sharp pain of the first bullet. His body was already jerking backward with the force of the impact when the second bullet entered his head. He did not feel this bullet. He did not feel anything anymore. His hand was still inside his coat, the fingers wrapped around the butt of the pistol, when he collapsed to the cold cement floor of the garage.
It was beginning to snow again. Lightly. Fat fluffy flakes drifting down lazily from the sky. Arthur Brown was driving. Bert Kling sat beside him on the front seat of the five-year-old unmarked sedan. Eileen Burke was sitting in the back. She had still been in the squadroom when the homicide squeal came in, and she’d asked Kling if he’d mind dropping her off at the subway on his way to the scene. Kling had merely grunted. Kling was a charmer, Eileen thought.
Brown was a huge man who looked even more enormous in his bulky overcoat. The coat was gray and it had a fake black fur collar. He was wearing black leather gloves that matched the black collar. Brown was supposed to be what people nowadays called a “black” man, but Brown knew that his complexion did not match the color of either the black collar or the black gloves. Whenever he looked at himself in the mirror, he saw someone with a chocolate-colored skin looking back at him, but he did not think of himself as a “chocolate” man. Neither did he think of himself as a Negro anymore; somehow, if a black man thought of himself as a Negro, he was thinking obsequiously. Negro had become a derogatory term, God alone knew when or how. Brown’s father used to call himself “a person of color,” which Brown thought was a very hoity-toity expression even when it was still okay for black men to call themselves Negroes. (Brown noticed that Ebony magazine capitalized the word Black, and he often wondered why.) He guessed he still thought of himself as colored, and he sincerely hoped there was nothing wrong with that. Nowadays, a nigger didn’t know what he was supposed to think.
Brown was the kind of black man white men crossed the street to avoid. If you were white, and you saw Brown approaching on the same side of the street, you automatically assumed he was going to mug you, or cut you with a razor, or do something else terrible to you. That was partially due to the fact that Brown was six feet four inches tall and weighed 220 pounds. It was also partially (mostly) due to the fact that Brown was black, or colored, or whatever you chose to call him, but he certainly was not white. A white man approaching Brown might not have crossed the street if Brown had also been a white man; unfortunately, Brown never had the opportunity to conduct such an experiment. The fact remained that when Brown was casually walking down the street minding his own business, white people crossed over to the other side. Sometimes even white cops crossed over to the other side. Nobody wanted trouble with someone who looked the way Brown looked. Even black people sometimes crossed the street when Brown approached, but only because he looked so bad-ass.
Brown knew he was, in fact, very handsome.
Whenever Brown looked in the mirror, he saw a very handsome chocolate-colored man looking back at him out of soulful brown eyes. Brown liked himself a lot. Brown was very comfortable with himself. Brown was glad he was a cop because he knew that the real reason white people crossed the street when they saw him was because they thought all black people were thieves or murderers. He frequently regretted the day he was promoted into the Detective Division because then he could no longer wear his identifying blue uniform, the contradiction to his identifying brown skin. Brown especially liked to bust people of his own race. He especially liked it when some black dude said, “Come on, brother, give me a break.” That man was no more Brown’s brother than Brown was brother to a hippopotamus. In Brown’s world, there were the good guys and the bad guys, white or black, it made no difference. Brown was one of the good guys. All those guys breaking the law out there were the bad guys. Tonight, one of the bad guys had left somebody dead and bleeding on the floor of a garage under a building on fancy Silvermine Road, and Kling had caught the squeal, and Brown was his partner, and they were two good guys riding out into the gently falling snow, with another good guy (who happened to be a girl) sitting on the back seat — which reminded him; he had to drop her off at the subway station.
“The one on Culver and Fourth okay?” he asked her.
“That’ll be fine, Artie,” Eileen said.
Kling was hunkered down inside his coat, looking out at the falling snow. The car heater rattled and clunked, something wrong with the fan. The car was the worst one the squad owned. Brown wondered how come whenever it was his turn to check out a car, he got this one. Worst car in the entire city, maybe. Ripe tomato accelerator, rattled like a $2 whore, something wrong with the exhaust, the damn car always smelled of carbon monoxide, they were probably poisoning themselves on the way to the homicide.
“Willis says you nabbed the guy who was running around pulling down bloomers, huh?” Brown said.
“Yeah,” Eileen said, grinning.
“Good thing, too,” Brown said. “This kind of weather, lady needs her underdrawers.” He began laughing. Eileen laughed, too. Kling sat staring through the windshield.
“Will you be all right on the subway, this hour of the night?” Brown asked.
“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” Eileen said.
He pulled the car into the curb.
“You sure now?”
“Positive. G’night, Artie,” she said, and opened the door. “G’night, Bert.”
“Good night,” Brown said. “Take care.”
Kling said nothing. Eileen shrugged and closed the door behind her. Brown watched as she went down the steps into the subway. He pulled the car away from the curb the moment her head disappeared from sight.
“What was that address again?” he asked Kling.
“1114 Silvermine,” Kling said.
“That near the Oval?”
“Few blocks west.”
There were two patrol cars parked at the curb when Brown pulled in. Their dome lights were flashing blue and red into the falling snow. Kling and Brown got out of the car, had a brief conversation with the patrolman who’d been left at the sidewalk to keep an eye on both cars (the theft of police cars not being unheard of in this city), and then walked down the ramp into the underground garage. The place was lighted with sodium lamps. The three patrolmen from the cars upstairs were standing around a man lying on the cement floor some eight feet from the elevator. The elevator door was red. The man’s blood flowed from his open skull toward the matching red elevator door.
“Detective Brown,” Brown said. “My partner, Detective Kling.”
“Right,” one of the patrolmen said, and nodded.
“Who was the first car on the scene?”
“We were,” another patrolman said. “Boy Car.”