Murchison was a desk cop, and he wasn’t used to reacting too quickly, but there was something urgent about this scream, and he put two and two together immediately and realized that the person screaming must be the girl named Anne Gilroy who had sashayed out of here just a minute ago on the arm of Bert Kling. He came around the muster desk with all the swiftness of a corpulent man past fifty, reaching for his holstered revolver as he puffed toward the main doors, though he couldn’t understand what could possibly be happening on the front steps of a police station, especially to a girl who was in the company of a detective.
What was happening — and this surprised Murchison no end because he expected to find a couple of hoods maybe threatening the girl or something — what was happening was that another blond girl was hitting Kling on the head with a dispatch case. It took a moment for Murchison to recognize the other blond girl as Cindy Forrest, whom he had seen around enough times to know that she was Kling’s girl, and he had never seen her with such a terrible look on her face. The only time he had ever seen a woman with such a look on her face was the time his Aunt Moira had caught his Uncle John screwing the lady upstairs on the front-room sofa of her apartment. Aunt Moira had gone up to get a recipe for glazed oranges and had got instead her glassy eyed husband humping the bejabbers out of the woman who until then had been her very good friend. Aunt Moira had chased Uncle John into the hallway and down the steps with his pants barely buttoned, hitting him on the head with a broom she grabbed on the third-floor landing, chasing Uncle John clear into the streets where Murchison and some of his boyhood friends were playing Knuckles near Ben the Kosher Delicatessen. The look on Aunt Moira’s face had been something terrible and fiery to see, all right, and the same look was on Cindy Forrest’s young and pretty face this very moment as she continued to clobber Kling with the brown leather dispatch case. The blond girl, Anne Gilroy, kept screaming for her to stop, but there was no stopping a lady when she got the Aunt Moira look. Kling, big detective that he was, was trying to cover his face and the top of his head with both hands while Cindy did her demolition work. The girl Anne Gilroy kept screaming as Murchison rushed down the steps yelling, “All right, break it up,” sounding exactly like a cop. The only thing Cindy seemed intent on breaking up, however, was Kling’s head, so Murchison stepped between them, gingerly avoiding the flailing dispatch case, and then shoved Kling down the steps and out of range, and shouted at Cindy, “You’re striking a police officer, miss,” which she undoubtedly knew, and the girl Anne Gilroy screamed once again, and then there was silence.
“You rotten son of a bitch,” Cindy said to Kling.
“It’s all right, Dave,” Kling said from the bottom of the steps. “I can handle it.”
“Oh, you certainly can handle it, you bastard,” Cindy said.
“Are you all right?” Anne Gilroy asked.
“I’m fine, Anne,” Kling answered.
“Oh, Anne, is it?” Cindy shouted, and swung the dispatch case at her. Murchison stepped into the line of fire, deflected the case with the hack of his arm, and then yanked Cindy away from the girl and shouted, “Now, goddamn you, Cindy, do you want to wind up in the cooler?”
By this time a crowd of patrolmen had gathered in the muster room, embarrassing Kling, who liked to maintain a sort of detective superiority over the rank and file. The patrolmen were enormously entertained by the spectacle of Sergeant Murchison trying to keep apart two very dishy blondes, one of whom happened to be Kling’s girl, while Kling stood by looking abashed.
“All right, break it up,” Kling said to them, also sounding like a cop. The other cops thought this was amusing, but none of them laughed. Neither did any of them break it up. Instead, they crowded into the doorway, ogled the girl in the red and blue mini, ogled Cindy, too (even though she was more sedately dressed in a blue shift), and then glanced first to Kling and then to Murchison to see who would make the next move.
Neither of them did.
Instead, Cindy turned on her heel, tilted her nose up, and marched down the steps and past Kling.
“Cindy, wait, let me explain!” Kling cried, obviously thinking he was in an old Doris Day movie, and immediately ran up the street after her.
“I want to press charges,” Anne Gilroy said to Murchison.
“Oh, go home, miss,” Murchison said, and then went up the steps and shoved past the patrolmen in the doorway and went back to the switchboard, where the most he’d have to contend with was something like a lady bleeding to death on the sidewalk.
Kling used his own key on the door, and then twisted the knob, and shoved the door inward, but Cindy had taken the precaution of fastening the safety chain, and the door abruptly jarred to a stop, open some two-and-a-half inches, but refusing to budge further.
“Cindy,” he shouted, “take off this chain! I want to talk to you.”
“I don’t want to talk to you!” she shouted back.
“Take off this chain, or I’ll break the door off the hinges!”
“Go break your bimbo’s door, why don’t you?”
“She’s not a bimbo!”
“Don’t defend her, you louse!” Cindy shouted.
“Cindy, I’m warning you, I’ll kick this door in!”
“You do, and I’ll call the police!”
“I am the police.”
“Go police your bimbo, louse.”
“Okay, honey, I warned you.”
“You’d better have a search warrant,” she shouted, “or I’ll sue you and the city and the…”
Kling kicked in the door efficiently and effortlessly. Cindy stood facing him with her fists clenched.
“Don’t come in here,” she said. “You’re not wanted here. You’re not wanted here ever again. Go home. Go away. Go to hell.”
“I want to talk to you.”
“I don’t want to talk to you ever again as long as I live, that’s final.”
“What are you so sore about?”
“I don’t like liars and cheats and rotten miserable liars. Now get out of here, Bert, I mean it.”
“Who’s a liar?”
“You are.”
“How am I…”
“You said you loved me.”
“I do love you.”
“Ha!”
“That girl…”
“That slut….”
“She’s not a slut.”
“That’s right, she’s a sweet Irish virgin. Go hold her hand a little, why don’t you? Get out of here, Bert, before I hit you again.”
“Listen, there’s nothing…”
“That’s right, there’s nothing, there’s absolutely nothing between us ever again, get out of here.”
“Lower your voice, you’ll have the whole damn building in here.”
“All snuggly-cozy, arm in arm, batting her eyes…”
“She had information…”
“Oh, I’ll just bet she has information.”