Ed McBain_87th Precinct 22 by Fuzz Page A

her Ph.D., and then pass the state boards, and then practice psychology; a nutty girl who was capable of sending to the squadroom a six-foot high heart cut out of plywood and painted red and lettered in yellow with the words Cynthia Forrest Loves Detective 3rd/Grade Bertram Kling, So Is That A Crime?, as she had done on St. Valentine’s Day just last month (and which Kling had still not heard the end of from all his comical colleagues); an emotional girl who could burst into tears at the sight of a blind man playing an accordian on The Stem, to whom she gave a five-dollar bill, merely put the bill silently into the cup, soundlessly, it did not even make a rustle, and turned away to weep into Kling’s shoulder; a passionate girl who clung to him fiercely in the night and who woke him sometimes at six in the morning to say, “Hey, Cop, I have to go to work in a few hours, are you interested?” to which Kling invariably answered, “No, I am not interested in sex and things like that,” and then kissed her until she was dizzy and afterwards sat across from her at the kitchen table in her apartment, staring at her, marveling at her beauty and once caused her to blush when he said, “There’s a woman who sells
pidaguas
on Mason Avenue, her name is Iluminada, she was born in Puerta Rico. Your name should be Illuminada, Cindy. You fill the room with light.”
    Boy, was he in love.
    But, it being March, and the streets still banked high with February snow, and the winds howling, and thewolves growling and chasing civilians in troikas who cracked whips and huddled in bear rugs, it being a bitter cold winter which seemed to have started in September and showed no signs of abating till next August, when possibly, but just possibly, all the snow might melt and the flowers would bloom—it being that kind of a treacherous winter, what better to do than discuss police work? What better to do than rush along the frozen street on Cindy’s lunch hour with her hand clutched tightly in the crook of his arm and the wind whipping around them and drowning out Kling’s voice as he tried to tell her of the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Parks Commissioner Cowper.
    “Yes, it
sounds
very mysterious,” Cindy said, and brought her hand out of her pocket in an attempt to keep the wind from tearing the kerchief from her head. “Listen, Bert,” she said, “I’m really very tired of winter, aren’t you tired of it?”
    “Yeah,” Kling said. “Listen, Cindy, you know who I hope this isn’t?”
    “Hope who isn’t?” she said.
    “The guy who made the calls. The guy who killed the commissioner. You know who I hope we’re not up against?”
    “Who?” she asked.
    “The deaf man,” he said.
    “What?” she said.
    “He was a guy we went up against a few years back, it must have been maybe seven, eight years ago. He tore this whole damn city apart trying to rob a bank. He was the smartest crook we ever came up against.”
    “Who?”
Cindy said.
    “The deaf man,” Kling said again.
    “Yes, but what’s his name?”
    “We don’t know his name. We never caught him. He jumped in the river and we thought he drowned, but maybe he’s back now. Like Frankenstein.”
    “Like Frankenstein’s monster, you mean,” Cindy said.
    “Yeah, like him. Remember he was supposed to have died in that fire, but he didn’t.”
    “I remember.”
    “That was a scary picture,” Kling said.
    “I wet my pants when I saw it,” Cindy said. “And that was on television.”
    “You wet your pants on
television?”
Kling said. “In front of forty million
people?”
    “No, I saw
Frankenstein
on television,” Cindy said, and grinned and poked him.
    “The deaf man,” Kling said. “I hope it’s not him.”
    It was the first time any man on the squad had voiced the possibility that the commissioner’s murderer was the man who had given them so much trouble so many years ago. The thought was somewhat numbing. Bert Kling was a young