Calypso by Ed McBain Read Free Book Online

shit . He had treated a grieving widow like a goddamn assassin. There was no excuse. He was tired, but that was no excuse. He had listened to Monoghan and Monroe making jokes about death and dying, and he had been irritated by their banter, but that was no excuse, either. Nor was the rain an excuse. Nothing could excuse his having played cop with a woman who'd been feeling only intense grief over the death of her husband. He sometimes believed that if he stayed at this job long enough, he would forget entirely what it meant to feel anything at all.
        "This is your case," the manual advised, "stick with the investigation." Stick with it in the pouring rain where a man lay with his open skull seeping his brains onto the sidewalk, stick with it in a hospital room reeking of antiseptic, stick with it in a tenement apartment at two in the morning, the clock throwing minutes into the empty hours of the night while a woman wept tears for her man who was dead. Search her closet for the clothes the killer wore. Get her to talk about her husband's possible infidelities. Be a fucking cop.
        He should have gone home. The squadroom clock read ten minutes to three now. Technically, it was already Saturday morning, though it still felt like Friday night, and it was still raining. Technically, his tour had ended at midnight, and he'd have gone home then if the Chadderton squeal hadn't come in at a quarter to twelve, just when Parker and Willis were supposed to relieve. He was exhausted and irritable, and feeling hugely like a horse's ass for his handling of the Chadderton woman, feeling not a little self-pity besides, poor public servant forced to deal with the more violent side of life, low pay and long hours, lousy working conditions and departmental pressures for swift arrests and convictions-he should have gone home to bed. But the notebook was here on his desk, sitting with its frayed blue cover and its pages of lyrics written by the dead man, urging scrutiny. He rose, stretched, went to the water cooler, drank a paper cup full of water, and then went back to the desk. The clock on the wall read 3:05 a.m. The squadroom was silent, a poorly lighted mausoleum of empty desks and stilled typewriters. Beyond the slatted wooden railing that separated the squadroom from the corridor outside, he could see a light burning behind the frosted glass door to the locker room, and beyond that the banister post for the iron-runged steps that led to the muster room on the first floor of the building. Downstairs, a telephone rang. He heard a patrolman greeting another patrolman coming in off the street. Alone in the squadroom, Carella opened the notebook.
        He had never been to Trinidad, had never witnessed the monumental calypso contests that took place in the carnival tents at Port of Spain each year before Ash Wednesday. But as he leafed through the pages of the notebook now, the words scribbled in pencil seemed suddenly to pulse with the Afro-Spanish rhythms that had been their base, and he might have been there at Mardi Gras, swaying to the music that swelled from the corrugated-iron and palm-leaf tents, the men and women in the audience snapping their fingers and shouting the call-and-response, the performers ingeniously twisting their rhythms and rhymes, singing out their sarcasm, their protest, their indignation:
        
         Now I tell you, my friends, in this here city
         They's a mayor he think he sittin real pretty
         Livin downtown fat suckin he mama titty
         Never givin no mind how the nigger live shitty.
        
         Now this mayor fat mama buy she pretty blue gown
         Throw a fancy dress ball City Hall downtown
         While the nigger man dance for the pusher uptown
         And the nigger lady she chasin rats all aroun.
        
         What the mayor forget is the booth at the school
         Come November when the nigger he play it real cool
         Close the