“That’s just a warning,” he said. “Don’t scream when I’m gone, you understand?”
“I understand,” she said levelly. Willis, where are you? her mind shrieked. For God’s sake, where are you?
She had to detain this man. She had to hold him until Willis showed. Come on, Willis.
“Who are you?” she asked.
His hand went out again, and her head rocked from his strong slap.
“Shut up!” he warned. “I’m taking off now.”
If this was Clifford, she had a chance. If this was Clifford, she would have to move in a few seconds, and she tensed herself for the move, knowing only that she had to hold the man until Willis arrived.
There!
He was going into it now.
“Clifford thanks you, madam,” he said, and his arm swept across his waist, and he went into a low bow, and Eileen clasped both hands together, raised them high over head, and swung them at the back of his neck as if she were wielding a hammer.
The blow caught him completely by surprise. He began to pitch forward, and she brought up her knee, catching him under the jaw. His arms opened wide. He dropped the purse and staggered backward, and when he lifted his head again, Eileen was standing with a spike-heeled shoe in one hand. She didn’t wait for his attack. With one foot shoeless, she hobbled forward and swung out at his head.
He backed away, missing her swing, and then he bellowed like a wounded bear, and cut loose with a roundhouse blow that caught her just below her bosom. She felt the sharp knifing pain, and then he was hitting her again, hitting her cruelly and viciously now. She dropped the shoe, and she caught at his clothes, one hand going to his face, living to rip, trying to claw, forgetting all her police knowledge in that one desperate lunge for self-survival, using a woman’s weapons — nails.
She missed his face, and she stumbled forward, catching at his jacket again, clawing at the breast pocket. He pulled away, and she felt the material tear, and then she was holding the torn shield of his pocket patch in her hands, and he hit her again, full on the jaw, and she fell back against the wall and heard Willis’s running footsteps.
The mugger stooped down for the fallen purse, seizing it by the shoulder straps as Willis burst into the alley, a gun in his fist.
Clifford came erect, swinging the bag as he stood. The bag caught Willis on the side of the head, and he staggered sideward, the gun going off in his hand. He shook his head, saw the mugger taking flight, shot without aiming, shot again, missing both times. Clifford turned the corner, and Willis took off after him, rounding the same bend.
The mugger was nowhere in sight.
He went back to where Eileen sat propped against the wall of the building. Her knees were up, and her skirt was pulled back, and she sat in a very unladylike position, cradling her head. Her left eye was beginning to throb painfully. When she lifted her head, Willis winced.
“He clipped you,” he said.
“Where the hell were you?” Eileen answered.
The Mugger, 1956
The black lunch pail containing approximately fifty thousand scraps of newspaper was placed in the center of the third bench on the Clinton Street footpath into Grover Park by Detective Cotton Hawes, who was wearing thermal underwear and two sweaters and a business suit and an overcoat and ear muffs. Hawes was an expert skier, and he had skied on days when the temperature at the base was four below zero and the temperature at the summit was thirty below, had skied on days when his feet went and his hands went and he boomed the mountain non-stop not for fun or sport but just to get near the fire in the base lodge before he shattered into a hundred brittle pieces. But he had never been this cold before. It was bad enough to be working on Saturday, but it was indecent to be working when the weather threatened to gelatinize a man’s blood.
Among the other people who were braving the unseasonable winds and temperatures that Saturday were:
1) A pretzel salesman at the entrance to the Clinton Street footpath.
2) Two nuns saying their beads on the second bench into the park.
3) A passionate couple necking in a sleeping bag on the grass behind the third bench.
4) A blind man sitting on the fourth bench, patting his seeing eye German shepherd and scattering bread crumbs to the pigeons.
The pretzel salesman was a detective named Stanley Faulk, recruited from the 88th across the park, a man of fifty-eight who wore a gray handlebar mustache as his trademark. The mustache made it quite simple to identify him when he was working in his own territory, thereby diminishing his value on plants. But it also served to strike terror into the hearts of hoods near and wide, in much the same way that the green-and-white color combination of a radio motor patrol car is supposed to frighten criminals and serve as a deterrent. Faulk wasn’t too happy about being called into service for the 87th on a day like this one, but he was bundled up warmly in several sweaters over which was a black cardigan-type candy store-owner sweater over which he had put on a white apron. He was standing behind a cart that displayed pretzels stacked on long round sticks. A walkie-talkie was set into the top of the cart.
The two nuns saying their beads were Detectives Meyer Meyer and Bert Kling, and they were really saying what a son of a bitch Byrnes had been to bawl them out that way in front of Hawes and Willis, embarrassing them and making them feel very foolish.
“I feel very foolish right now,” Meyer whispered.
“How come?” Kling whispered.
“I feel like I’m in drag,” Meyer whispered.
The passionate couple assignment had been the choice assignment, and Hawes and Willis had drawn straws for it. The reason it was so choice was that the other half of the passionate couple was herself quite choice, a police-woman named Eileen Burke, with whom Willis had worked on a mugging case many years back. Eileen had red hair and green eyes, Eileen had long legs, sleek and clean, full-calved, tapering to slender ankles, Eileen had very good breasts, and whereas Eileen was much taller than Willis (who only barely scraped past the five-foot-eight height requirement), he did not mind at all because big girls always seemed attracted to him, and vice versa.
“We’re supposed to be kissing,” he said to Eileen, and held her close in the warm sleeping bag.
“My lips are getting chapped,” she said.
“Your lips are very nice,” he said.
“We’re supposed to be here on business,” Eileen said.
“Mmm,” he answered.
“Get your hand off my behind,” she said.
“Oh, is that your behind?” he asked.
“Listen,” she said.
“I hear it,” he said. “Somebody’s coming. You’d better kiss me.”
She kissed him. Willis kept one eye on the bench. The person passing was a governess wheeling a baby carriage, God knew who would send an infant out on a day when the glacier was moving south. The woman and the carriage passed. Willis kept kissing Detective 2nd/Grade Eileen Burke.
“Mm frick sheb bron,” Eileen mumbled.
“Mmm?” Willis mumbled.
Eileen pulled her mouth away and caught her breath. “I said I think she’s gone.”
“What’s that?” Willis asked suddenly.
“Do not be afraid, guapa, it is only my pistol,” Eileen said, and laughed.
“I meant on the path. Listen.”
They listened.
Someone else was approaching the bench.
From where Patrolman Richard Genero sat in plain-clothes on the fourth bench, wearing dark glasses and patting the head of the German shepherd at his feet, tossing crumbs to the pigeons, wishing for summer, he could clearly see the young man who walked rapidly to the third bench, picked up the lunch pail, looked swiftly over his shoulder, and began walking not out of the park, but deeper into it.