The McBain Brief by Ed McBain Page B

what you suspect is that the three of us figured out a scheme to get a little sexual pleasure at a minimal weekly cost . . . if that’s what you suspect, which is a lie, we’ll be happy to cut you in on the deal, we’ll put you back in the picture starting tonight. I’ll ask Solly to rewrite the script so that there’s a great deal of action between The Girl and The Leading Man, we’ll do that right away, if that’s what you suspect, though of course it’s a lie.”
    â€œI love her,” Harry said.
    â€œYou what?”
    â€œI love her. I’ve asked her to marry me.”
    â€œHarry,” I said, “that’s in the movie! ”
    â€œIt’s in real life, too,” he said. “She’s going to marry me, we’re leaving this city as soon as you and I are finished with our talk here. You just try to go anywhere near her, or telephone her, or anything, and I’ll call the police. I’m sure what you did here was illegal. You signed a contract with her, and also with me, and we’re supposed to get a percentage of the profits on this movie you were making without any goddamn film in the camera!”
    â€œHarry,” I said, “you can’t fault us for a small oversight like forgetting to put film in the camera.”
    He hit me in the nose then, and broke it.
    I will never forgive Harry. Never. I don’t mean about the nosebecause to tell the truth my nose was never such a prize to begin with, and besides, they taped it up nice, and the bones knitted, though a little crooked. I am talking about the way he ruined our dream. Solly tells me the best laid plans, and all that, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. And Ben has been going around town telling anybody who’ll listen that the idea was his to begin with, which it wasn’t, and anyway that’s not the point. The point is he’s killing any chance we might possibly have of finding ourselves another girl, and making her a star, too, when if only he’d shut up . . .
    Ah, what the hell.
    That’s show biz.

The Prisoner
    T hey were telling the same tired jokes in the squadroom when Randolph came in with his prisoner.
    Outside the grilled windows, October lay like a copper coin, and the sun struck only glancing blows at the pavement. The season had changed, but the jokes had not, and the climate inside the squadroom was one of stale cigarette smoke and male perspiration. For a tired moment, Randolph had the feeling that the room was suspended in time, unchanging, unmoving and that he would see the same faces and hear the same jokes until he was an old, old man.
    He had led the girl up the precinct steps, past the hanging green globes, past the desk in the entrance corridor, nodding perfunctorily at the desk sergeant. He had walked beneath the white sign with its black-lettered DETECTIVE DIVISION and its pointing hand, and then had climbed the steps to the second floor of the building, never once looking back at the girl, knowing that in her terror and uncertainty she was following him. When he reached the slatted rail divider, which separated the corridor from the detective squadroom, he heard Burroughs telling his old joke,and perhaps it was the joke which caused him to turn harshly to the girl.
    â€œSit down,” he said. “On that bench!”
    The girl winced at the sound of his voice. She was a thin girl wearing a straight skirt and a faded green cardigan. Her hair was a bleached blonde, the roots growing in brown. She had wide blue eyes, and they served as the focal point of an otherwise uninteresting face. She had slashed lipstick across her mouth in a wide, garish red smear. She flinched when Randolph spoke, and then she backed away from him and went to sit on the wooden bench in the corridor, opposite the men’s room.
    Randolph glanced at her briefly, the way he would look at a bulletin board notice about the Policeman’s Ball. Then he