of yours, the homicide from the other night.” The room was silent as Mulhearn jabbed a finger on the blackboard just beneath Cain’s name. Cain hadn’t felt this belittled since mean old Miss Vernon had pulled him by his ear up to the blackboard in third grade.
“From what I’ve seen, you got no leads at all. Hell, you haven’t even made an ID. So we’re moving it to inactive. Here.” He handed Cain an eraser. “You whiffed on that one, Citizen Cain. Strike one.”
“But I—”
“If you want it back, give me an ID by the end of the day. Otherwise, I’ll be shipping it over to the Borough Homicide Bureau at the close of business. So I don’t want to see it showing up on any more of your goddamn DD-64s for even ten minutes’ worth of your time. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.” Cain sheepishly erased it from the board. Never mind how he was supposed to ID the victim in the next eight hours if he couldn’t work the case.
“And remember, tomorrow night you’re coming out for choir practice with the rest of us.”
“Choir practice?”
“Drinks,” someone behind him offered, setting off a few giggles.
“At Caruso’s on Eighth, just above 44th,” Mulhearn continued. “Right after quitting time.” He turned to face the rest of the room. “Everyone else on board for that?”
“Yes, sir,” came the replies—some shouted, others mumbled. Mulhearn lowered his voice, as if to pretend the words were meant for him alone, even though he was still loud enough to overhear.
“If I or anyone else ever catches you lurking around the 95 Room again without a good reason, then you’ll be busted down to radio patrol faster than water off a duck’s ass. Now get the fuck to work, nimrod.”
Cain turned toward his desk. His colleagues had their heads down, trying to look busy. There were a few muffled laughs, but this was no time for challenges. The damage was done. And tomorrow night he’d be drinking with all of them. He could hardly wait.
Even on a good day, the squad room could be oppressive. Ten detectives shared floor space in two long rows of battered gray desks, with a row of windows along the back. Hovering above the room was a fog bank of cigarette smoke that rolled and tumbled like it might eventually produce rain. Mulhearn presided from a glass cubicle up front. Six of the detectives formed the squad for the 14th precinct, with their own lieutenant. The four desks closest to Mulhearn’s office were posted to district level—Cain, Wat Foley, Bert Simmons, and Yuri Zharkov, which meant technically they were supposed to handle the bigger cases for an area covering four precincts—the 14th, plus the 10th, 18th, and 20th.
Zharkov, a bulky hawk-nosed Russian in his late forties who spoke six languages, was the only one who’d yet made an effort to make Cain feel at home. The previous Friday they’d shared lunch on a park bench, swapping stories and eating from a greasy brown bag of piroshki—fried Slavic treats that Zharkov had picked up from a street vendor. Sort of like hushpuppies, except filled with ground meat and cabbage. Zharkov had come to New York as a boy in 1919 after his family migrated halfway across Russia, fleeing first the tsar and then the Bolsheviks. In his uniform days he had walked a beat in the rough-and-tumble 7th on the Lower East Side, strolling the waterfront from Clinton to Delancey with a Cossack’s zeal for the well-thumped cranium.
With their four adjacent precincts, the gumshoes of the third district covered about a sixth of Manhattan, from 14th Street up to 86th, bordered to the west by the Hudson, and to the east by Central Park and, below 59th, by Fifth Avenue. Plenty of interesting territory lay within—the meatpacking and garment districts of Chelsea; the glitz joints of Times Square; the workaday Midtown glories of Herald Square and the Empire State Building; the huge new complex of Rockefeller Center, with its sleek art deco towers that now dominated the Midtown
“From what I’ve seen, you got no leads at all. Hell, you haven’t even made an ID. So we’re moving it to inactive. Here.” He handed Cain an eraser. “You whiffed on that one, Citizen Cain. Strike one.”
“But I—”
“If you want it back, give me an ID by the end of the day. Otherwise, I’ll be shipping it over to the Borough Homicide Bureau at the close of business. So I don’t want to see it showing up on any more of your goddamn DD-64s for even ten minutes’ worth of your time. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.” Cain sheepishly erased it from the board. Never mind how he was supposed to ID the victim in the next eight hours if he couldn’t work the case.
“And remember, tomorrow night you’re coming out for choir practice with the rest of us.”
“Choir practice?”
“Drinks,” someone behind him offered, setting off a few giggles.
“At Caruso’s on Eighth, just above 44th,” Mulhearn continued. “Right after quitting time.” He turned to face the rest of the room. “Everyone else on board for that?”
“Yes, sir,” came the replies—some shouted, others mumbled. Mulhearn lowered his voice, as if to pretend the words were meant for him alone, even though he was still loud enough to overhear.
“If I or anyone else ever catches you lurking around the 95 Room again without a good reason, then you’ll be busted down to radio patrol faster than water off a duck’s ass. Now get the fuck to work, nimrod.”
Cain turned toward his desk. His colleagues had their heads down, trying to look busy. There were a few muffled laughs, but this was no time for challenges. The damage was done. And tomorrow night he’d be drinking with all of them. He could hardly wait.
Even on a good day, the squad room could be oppressive. Ten detectives shared floor space in two long rows of battered gray desks, with a row of windows along the back. Hovering above the room was a fog bank of cigarette smoke that rolled and tumbled like it might eventually produce rain. Mulhearn presided from a glass cubicle up front. Six of the detectives formed the squad for the 14th precinct, with their own lieutenant. The four desks closest to Mulhearn’s office were posted to district level—Cain, Wat Foley, Bert Simmons, and Yuri Zharkov, which meant technically they were supposed to handle the bigger cases for an area covering four precincts—the 14th, plus the 10th, 18th, and 20th.
Zharkov, a bulky hawk-nosed Russian in his late forties who spoke six languages, was the only one who’d yet made an effort to make Cain feel at home. The previous Friday they’d shared lunch on a park bench, swapping stories and eating from a greasy brown bag of piroshki—fried Slavic treats that Zharkov had picked up from a street vendor. Sort of like hushpuppies, except filled with ground meat and cabbage. Zharkov had come to New York as a boy in 1919 after his family migrated halfway across Russia, fleeing first the tsar and then the Bolsheviks. In his uniform days he had walked a beat in the rough-and-tumble 7th on the Lower East Side, strolling the waterfront from Clinton to Delancey with a Cossack’s zeal for the well-thumped cranium.
With their four adjacent precincts, the gumshoes of the third district covered about a sixth of Manhattan, from 14th Street up to 86th, bordered to the west by the Hudson, and to the east by Central Park and, below 59th, by Fifth Avenue. Plenty of interesting territory lay within—the meatpacking and garment districts of Chelsea; the glitz joints of Times Square; the workaday Midtown glories of Herald Square and the Empire State Building; the huge new complex of Rockefeller Center, with its sleek art deco towers that now dominated the Midtown
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