Crawley came swarming out the other window, his legs held by Gundy. He grabbed for Cartwright’s arm, growling, “All right, now, take it easy. Take it easy. This way, this way, just slide your feet along, don’t try to bring the other foot around, just slide over, easy, easy—”
And the man came stumbling in from the ledge.
“You took a chance,” said Crawley. “You took one hell of a chance.” It was two-thirty, and Crawley was driving him to the doctor’s office.
“I know,” said Levine. His hands were still shaking; he could still feel the ragged pounding of his heart within his chest.
“But you called his bluff,” said Crawley. “That kind, it’s just a bluff. They don’t really want to dive, they’re bluffing.”
“I know,” said Levine.
“But you still took a hell of a chance.”
“It—” Levine swallowed. It felt as though there were something hard caught in his throat. “It was the only way to get him in,” he said. “The wife wasn’t coming, and nothing else would bring him in. When the girlfriend failed—”
“It took guts, Abe. For a second there, I almost thought he was going to take you up on it.”
“So did I.”
Crawley pulled in at the curb in front of the doctor’s office. “I’ll pick you up around quarter to four,” he said.
“I can take a cab,” said Levine.
“Why? Why for the love of Mike? The city’s paying for the gas.”
Levine smiled at his partner. “All right,” he said. He got out of the car, went up the walk, up the stoop, onto the front porch. He looked back, watched the Chewy turn the corner. He whispered, “I wanted him to jump.”
Then he went in to find out if he was going to stay alive.
The Feel of the Trigger
Abraham Levine, Detective of Brooklyn’s Forty-third Precinct, sat at a desk in the squadroom and worriedly listened to his heart skip every eighth beat. It was two o’clock on Sunday morning, and he had the sports section of the Sunday Times open on the desk, but he wasn’t reading it. He hadn’t been reading it for about ten minutes now. Instead, he’d been listening to his heart.
A few months ago, he’d discovered the way to listen to his heart without anybody knowing he was doing it. He’d put his right elbow on the desk and press the heel of his right hand to his ear, hard enough to cut out all outside sound. At first it would sound like underwater that way, and then gradually he would become aware of a regular clicking sound. It wasn’t a beating or a thumping or anything like that, it was a click-click-click-click — click-click—
There it was again. Nine beats before the skip that time. It fluctuated between every eighth beat and every twelfth beat. The doctor had told him not to worry about that, lots of people had it, but that didn’t exactly reassure him. Lots of people died of heart attacks, too. Lots of people around the age of fifty-three.
“Abe? Don’t you feel good?”
Levine guiltily lowered his hand. He looked over at his shift partner, Jack Crawley, sitting with the Times crossword puzzle at another desk. “No, I’m okay,” he said. “I was just thinking.”
“About your heart?”
Levine wanted to say no, but he couldn’t. Jack knew him too well.
Crawley got to his feet, stretching, a big bulky harness bull. “You’re a hypochondriac, Abe,” he said. “You’re a good guy, but you got an obsession.”
“You’re right.” He grinned sheepishly. “I almost wish the phone would ring.”
Crawley mangled a cigarette out of the pack. “You went to the doctor, didn’t you? A couple of months ago. And what did he tell you?”
“He said I had nothing to worry about,” Levine admitted. “My blood pressure is a little high, that’s all.” He didn’t want to talk about the skipping.
“So there you are,” said Crawley reasonably. “You’re still on duty, aren’t you? If you had a bum heart, they’d retire you, right?”
“Right.”
“So relax. And don’t hope for the phone to ring. This is a quiet Saturday night. I’ve been waiting for this one for years.”
The Saturday night graveyard shift — Sunday morning, actually, midnight till eight — was usually the busiest shift in the week. Saturday night was the time when normal people got violent, and violent people got murderous, the time when precinct plainclothesmen were usually on the jump.
Tonight was unusual. Here it was, after two o’clock, and only one call so far, a bar hold-up over on 23rd. Rizzo and McFarlane were still out on that one, leaving Crawley and Levine to mind the store and read the Times.
Crawley now went back to the crossword puzzle, and Levine made an honest effort to read the sports section.
They read in silence for ten minutes, and then the phone rang on Crawley’s desk. Crawley scooped the receiver up to his ear, announced himself, and listened.
The conversation was brief. Crawley’s end of it was limited to yesses and got-its, and Levine waited, watching his wrestler’s face, trying to read there what the call was about.
Then Crawley broke the connection by depressing the cradle buttons, and said, over his shoulder, “Hold-up. Grocery store at Green and Tanahee. Owner shot. That was the beat cop, Wills.”
Levine got heavily to his feet and crossed the squadroom to the coatrack, while Crawley dialed a number and said, “Emergency, please.”
Levine shrugged into his coat, purposely not listening to Crawley’s half of the conversation. It was brief enough, anyway. When Crawley came over to get his own coat, he said, “DOA. Four bullets in him. One of these trigger-happy amateurs.”
“Any witnesses?”
“Wife. The beat man — Wills — says she thinks she recognized the guy.”
“Widow,” said Levine.
Crawley said, “What?”
Widow. Not wife any more, widow. “Nothing,” said Levine.
If you’re a man fifty-three years of age, there’s a statistical chance your heart will stop this year. But there’s no sense getting worried about it. There’s an even better statistical chance that it won’t stop this year. So, if you go to the doctor and he says don’t worry, then you shouldn’t worry. Don’t think morbid thoughts. Don’t think about death all the time, think about life. Think about your work, for instance.
But what if it so happens that your work, as often as not, is death? What if you’re a precinct detective, the one the wife calls when her husband just keeled over at the breakfast table, the one the hotel calls for the guest who never woke up this morning? What if the short end of the statistics is that end you most often see?
Levine sat in the squad car next to Crawley, who was driving, and looked out at the Brooklyn streets, trying to distract his mind. At two A.M.. Brooklyn is dull, with red neon signs and grimy windows in narrow streets. Levine wished he’d taken the wheel.
They reached the intersection of Tanahee and Green, and Crawley parked in a bus-stop zone. They got out of the car.
The store wasn’t exactly on the corner. It was two doors down Green, on the southeast side, occupying the ground floor of a red-brick tenement building. The plate-glass window was filthy, filled with show-boxes of Kellogg’s Pep and Tide and Premium Saltines. Inevitably, the letters SALADA were curved across the glass. The flap of the rolled-up green awning above the window had lettering on it, too: Fine Tailoring.
There were two slate steps up, and then the store. The glass in the door was so covered with cigarette and soft-drink decals it was almost impossible to see inside. On the reverse, they all said, “Thank you — call again.”
The door was closed now, and locked. Levine caught a glimpse of blue uniform through the decals, and rapped softly on the door. The young patrolman, Wills, recognized him and pulled the door open. “Stanton’s with her,” he said. “In back.” He meant the patrolman from the prowl car parked now out front.