Two hours was too much for Donald Walker, though. Two minutes was too much, if it came to that. The insides of his veins were twitching like poison ivy. He knew he was going to die. Lying on the tangled sheets, looking at the spotted ceiling, his mind lost all comprehension of time; he was a hungry infant at 3:00 A.M. He might have been in that room for a week or a month. Like an infant, he now thought of his mother. Once again, he made his wracked body leave the foul room and move down to the pay phone in the lobby. He dialed his mother’s number; no answer. He was abandoned. He snuffled back his runny nose as tears of frustration ran down his face and bathed the mouthpiece of the telephone.
No mother. Poor Donald! Then he thought of his wife. Same difference. He dialed again, the number of the real estate office in Jackson Heights where his wife worked as a secretary-receptionist. Contact.
“Hello?”
“Ella,” he croaked, “Ella, I …”
“Hello? Donald, is that you? Is something wrong?”
“Ella, I need … I’m sick, baby.”
“Oh no! What’s wrong? Are you in Stamford? Where’s Billy?”
After a chilling silence, the croaking voice resumed.
“Ella, I didn’t go to Stamford. Shit, Ella, I’m in big trouble, I need help!”
“Trouble? What are you talking about, Donald? What kind of trouble? What did you do?”
“Can’t tell you, baby, he kill me. I need … I need some, uh, money.”
“What? Who’s going to kill you? Oh, Donald, Jesus, you didn’t do anything stupid, did you?”
“Ella, don’t ask no questions, just get over here with some money.”
“Money! Donald, you come home this minute, you hear! I want to know what you’ve been doing. I can’t believe this …”
“I can’t, dammit! He gonna kill me. I’m sick, godammit to hell!”
Here he gave a groan of such mortal agony that even over the wires his wife realized that whatever her husband had gotten into was outside the zone of ordinary domestic troubles.
“OK, Donnie, be calm, honey. What do you want me to do?”
“Bring some money, anything, and some clothes. I’m at the Olympia Hotel on Tenth Avenue. Room Ten. And hurry, Ella, huh?” The line went dead. After that, Ella Walker went to the ladies’ room, sat in a booth, and cried for a while. Then she washed her face and returned to her desk. As she had learned to do from earliest childhood, she now turned to her family in time of trouble. With trembling hand she punched out the number of the Midtown South Precinct and asked to speak with her brother, Detective Second Class Emerson Dunbar, Homicide.
When his sister called, Sonny Dunbar was walking down Eighth Avenue in the lower Forties, with the beginnings of a nasty headache, doing his job, but not liking it very much. His job at that moment was looking for a skell named Dingleberry, who, according to a snitch named Rufus, had been seen lately in the company of a prostitute named Booey Starr, or (if you were her mother), Francine Williams, now deceased. Since Booey had probably not hit herself in the head with a claw hammer twenty or so times, her death had been duly judged a homicide and added to the 153 open cases that were Dunbar’s particular responsibility.
Dunbar had been a New York cop for fifteen years, a detective for ten. Before that he had jumped out of some airplanes for the U.S. Army and before that he had gone to high school in Queens, about two miles from where he now lived, in St. Albans. His high-school career had been undistinguished, except on the football field, where he turned out to be very good at stopping other players from catching footballs, or if they did catch them, stopping them from running very far. He was an All-State safety on two teams, got the usual offers from faraway schools and turned them all down.
This was remarkable, but Sonny Dunbar had always taken the long view. He hated classrooms, and knew he wasn’t good enough for a sure slot in the pros. He didn’t care to be another Big Ten black jock with a meaningless B.A. in phys ed. So he enlisted, spent three years with the airborne as an MP, figured he was tough enough for anything after that, and joined the cops.
He had put on about ten pounds in the years since, which hardly showed on his wide-shouldered, six-two, two-hundred-pound frame. He didn’t like the way some cops let themselves get sloppy, and he had a reputation on the squad as something of a dude, not as splendid, perhaps, as the members of the special narcotics squads, but his wardrobe came out of his own pocket. It helped that his wife was an executive with a restaurant chain.
Today he was wearing a cream-linen jacket, tan slacks, lemon-yellow shirt, and a dark-blue silk tie. He had cordovan tassel loafers (no gumshoes for him) on his feet and a cream fedora on his head. And sunglasses; Sonny Dunbar was definitely Broadway. He had left his car at a cab stand on 43rd and was cutting across Eighth to a drug store for an Alka-Seltzer. Moving fast, he was just about to enter its doorway when the thought hit him that he had a roll of film in the car that he had promised to bring in for developing two days ago. Almost without any conscious effort, he hit the pivot and began moving in the opposite direction, and a kid in sneakers carrying a large leather handbag crashed into him at full speed.
Dunbar staggered, but the kid went sprawling and banged his head on a parking meter. Dunbar was about to apologize and help the kid to his feet, when he noticed the big handbag. Although many young men in that area of New York carried handbags, this particular young man did not look like that kind of young man. He was wearing a dirty brown jacket, jeans, and the expensive athletic footwear that street cops call “perp shoes.”
Dunbar’s impression that the kid was a Times Square bandit was soon confirmed by a distraught woman, blonde, and well dressed in an arty way, who came dashing unsteadily up the street in heeled boots. “There he is! He took my bag,” she shouted. “Somebody get a cop! Oh, thank God!” She addressed this last remark not to heaven but to her handbag, which she clutched to her breast like a lost child. “Thank God! My entire LIFE is in this bag.” She noticed Dunbar, who was staring glumly at the fallen robber. “Say, mister, did you catch him? Listen, can you hold onto him while I go and call the cops?”
Dunbar thought, just my luck, a solid citizen. He said, “Well, Miss, that won’t be necessary. I happen to be a police officer.” He pulled out his gold shield and showed it to her.
The woman laughed. “Unbelievable!”
“Yeah, ain’t it, though,” answered Dunbar, with very little enthusiasm. He wrote down the woman’s name and address and then hauled the young robber to his feet. The kid tried to shake off Dunbar’s grip.
“Hey, man, wha chu doin’? I din do nothin’.” Dunbar pushed him against a wall, back cuffed him in one smooth motion, and then patted him down, extracting a large sheath knife from his jacket pocket.
“Right, mutt, you din do nothin’, but I’m going to arrest you for purse snatching anyway. Let’s go.”
Half an hour later, after the perp had been booked and caged at the Midtown South Precinct, Dunbar was rummaging through his desk for a package of Alka-Seltzer, when Petromani, the desk sergeant, came into the squad room. “Sonny, call your sister Ella. What’re you looking for?”
“Alka-Seltzer. My head’s coming off. You got any?”
“I got aspirin and Tylenol. I got Empirin and I think I got something for menstrual cramps. Listen, you should call your sister, she sounded really uptight.”
“Yeah, the toilet probably won’t flush. My brother-in-law is not what you call a take-charge individual, so she still calls me when something goes wrong.” He reached for the phone.