“That the time you see the doctor?”
Levine looked up, startled, called back from years away. Crawley was standing beside the desk, looking down at him, and Levine blinked, not having heard the question.
Crawley reached down and tapped the paper with a horny fingernail. “Three o’clock,” he explained. “That the time you see the doctor?”
“Oh,” said Levine. “Yes. Three o’clock.”
Crawley said, “Take it easy, Abe.”
“Sure,” said Levine. He managed a weak smile. “No sense worrying beforehand, huh?”
“My brother,” said Crawley, “he had one of those cardiograph things just a couple of months ago. He’s just around your age, and man, he was worried. And the doctor tells him, ‘You’ll live to be a hundred.’ ”
“And then you’ll die,” said Levine.
“What the hell, Abe, we all got to go sometime.”
“Sure.”
“Listen, Abe, you want to go on home? It’s a dull day, nothing doing, I can—”
“Don’t say that,” Levine warned him. “The phone will ring.” The phone rang as he was talking and he grinned, shrugging with palms up. “See?”
“Let me see what it is,” said Crawley, reaching for the phone. “Probably nothing important. You can go on home and take it easy till three o’clock. It’s only ten now and— Hello?” The last word spoken into the phone mouthpiece. “Yeah, this is Crawley.”
Levine watched Crawley’s face, trying to read in it the nature of the call. Crawley had been his partner for seven years, since old Jake Moshby had retired, and in that time they had become good friends, as close as two such different men could get to one another.
Crawley was a big man, somewhat overweight, somewhere in his middle forties. His clothes hung awkwardly on him, not as though they were too large or too small but as though they had been planned for a man of completely different proportions. His face was rugged, squarish, heavy-jowled. He looked like a tough cop, and he played the role very well.
Crawley had once described the quality of their partnership with reasonable accuracy. “With your brains and my beauty, Abe, we’ve got it made.”
Now Levine watched Crawley’s face as the big man listened impassively to the phone, finally nodding and saying, “Okay, I’ll go right on up there. Yeah, I know, that’s what I figure, too.” And he hung up.
“What is it, Jack?” Levine asked, getting up from the desk.
“A phony,” said Crawley. “I can handle it, Abe. You go on home.”
“I’d rather have some work to do. What is it?”
Crawley was striding for the door, Levine after him. “Man on a ledge,” he said. “A phony. They’re all phonies. The ones that really mean to jump do it right away, get it over with. Guys like this one, all they want is a little attention, somebody to tell them it’s all okay, come on back in, everything’s forgiven.”
The two of them walked down the long green hall toward the front of the precinct. Man on a ledge, Levine thought. Don’t jump. Don’t die. For God’s sake, don’t die.
The address was an office building on Flatbush Avenue, a few blocks down from the bridge, near A&S and the major Brooklyn movie houses. A small crowd had gathered on the sidewalk across the street, looking up, but most of the pedestrians stopped only for a second or two, only long enough to see what the small crowd was gaping at, and then hurried on wherever they were going. They were still involved in life, they had things to do, they didn’t have time to watch a man die.
Traffic on this side was being rerouted away from this block of Flatbush, around via Fulton or Willoughby or DeKalb. It was a little after ten o’clock on a sunny day in late June, warm without the humidity that would hit the city a week or two farther into the summer, but the uniformed cop who waved at them to make the turn was sweating, his blue shirt stained a darker blue, his forehead creased with strain above the sunglasses.
Crawley was driving their car, an unmarked black ’56 Chevy, no siren, and he braked to a stop in front of the patrolman. He stuck his head and arm out the window, dangling his wallet open so the badge showed. “Precinct,” he called.
“Oh,” said the cop. He stepped aside to let them pass. “You didn’t have any siren or light or anything,” he explained.
“We don’t want to make our friend nervous,” Crawley told him.
The cop glanced up, then looked back at Crawley. “He’s making me nervous,” he said.
Crawley laughed. “A phony,” he told the cop. “Wait and see.”
On his side of the car, Levine had leaned his head out the window, was looking up, studying the man on the ledge.
It was an office building, eight stories high. Not a very tall building, particularly for New York, but plenty tall enough for the purposes of the man standing on the ledge that girdled the building at the sixth floor level. The first floor of the building was mainly a bank and partially a luncheonette. The second floor, according to the lettering strung along the front windows, was entirely given over to a loan company, and Levine could understand the advantage of the location. A man had his loan request turned down by the bank, all he had to do was go up one flight of stairs — or one flight in the elevator, more likely — and there was the loan company.
And if the loan company failed him too, there was a nice ledge on the sixth floor.
Levine wondered if this particular case had anything to do with money. Almost everything had something to do with money. Things that he became aware of because he was a cop, almost all of them had something to do with money. The psychoanalysts are wrong, he thought. It isn’t sex that’s at the center of all the pain in the world, it’s money. Even when a cop answers a call from neighbors complaining about a couple screaming and fighting and throwing things at one another, nine times out of ten it’s the same old thing they’re arguing about. Money.
Levine’s eyes traveled up the facade of the building, beyond the loan company’s windows. None of the windows higher up bore the lettering of firm names. On the sixth floor, most of the windows were open, heads were sticking out into the air. And in the middle of it all, just out of reach of the windows on either side of him, was the man on the ledge.
Levine squinted, trying to see the man better against the brightness of the day. He wore a suit — it looked gray, but might be black — and a white shirt and dark tie, and the open suit coat and the tie were both whipping in the breeze up there. The man was standing as though crucified, back flat against the wall of the building, legs spread maybe two feet apart, arms out straight to either side of him, hands pressed palm-in against the stone surface of the wall.
The man was terrified. Levine was much too far away to see his face or read the expression there, but he didn’t need any more than the posture of the body on the ledge. Taut, pasted to the wall, wide-spread. The man was terrified.
Crawley was right, of course. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the man on the ledge is a phony. He doesn’t really expect to have to kill himself, though he will do it if pressed too hard. But he’s out there on the ledge for one purpose and one purpose only: to be seen. He wants to be seen, he wants to be noticed. Whatever his unfulfilled demands on life, whatever his frustrations or problems, he wants other people to be forced to be aware of them, and to agree to help him overcome them.