Ed McBain_87th Precinct 47 Read Online Free PDF Page A

please.
    “Kling wondered if Deputy Chief Surgeon Sharyn Everard Cooke had ever been inside a detective squadroom. You worked here at
     the Eight-Seven long enough, you began believing everybody in the entire
city
had been here before, everybody knew
precisely
what it looked like, down to the tiniest fingernail scraping. But he couldn’t imagine Sharyn’s job taking her anywhere near
     the outer reaches of the solar system here, which he sometimes felt the 87th Precinct was. A planet devoid of anything but
     the basest form of animal life, an airless, sunless, apple-green void where nothing ever changed, everything remained always
     and ever exactly the same.
    He wondered if her office at Rankin Plaza was painted the same bilious green as the squadroom here. If so, was it as soiled
     as the paint on the walls of this room that was used and abused twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days
     a year,
six
in leap year, which this happened to be? He could remember the squadroom being painted only once in all the time he’d worked
     here. He was not looking forward to
that
experience again anytime soon, thank you. He supposed
apple green
and
shoddy
were the operative interplanetary words that best described the squadroom, or in fact the entire station house. Well, maybe
shoddy
was too mild a word, perhaps a better description would have been
seedy
or even
shabby,
although to tell the truth the only valid description was
shitty, a word
he had not yet used in the deputy chief’s presence, and might never find an opportunity to use with her ever in his lifetime
     if last night’s date was any indication.
    The Italian restaurant she’d chosen was called La Traviata, which might have led one to believe they’d be piping operatic
     music into the place, but instead they seemed to favor Frank Sinatra’s Hundred Greatest Hits. Which was okay with Kling. He
     was a Sinatra fan, and he really didn’t mind hearing him sing “Kiss” over and over again, even if by the fifth time around
     he knew all the lyrics by heart.
    Kiss …
    It all begins with a kiss …
    But kisses wither
    And die
    Unless
    The first caress …
    And so on.
    But then “One for My Baby” came on for the third time.
    The conversation had hit one of those unexpected roadblocks by then, although Kling couldn’t figure out what he’d said or
     done to cause her sudden silence. Being a detective, he knew that people sometimes reacted belatedly to something that’d been
     said or done minutes or even hours ago—sometimes
years
ago, as was the case with a lady they’d arrested recently for poisoning her husband twelve years
after
he’d called her a whore in front of their entire bowling team. So he was sitting there across from her, trying to figure
     out why all at once she looked so thoughtfully sullen, when, gee whiz, what a surprise, here came “One for My Baby” again.
     Hoping to yank her out of whatever the hell was bugging her, and thinking he was making a brilliant observation besides, he
     remarked that here was a song that merely
threatened
to tell a story, but never got around to actually
telling
the story.
    “Guy’s had a disastrous love affair,” he said, “and he keeps promising the bartender he’ll tell him all about it, but all
     he ever does is
tell
him he’s going to tell him.”
    Blank expression on her face.
    As if she were ten thousand miles away.
    He wondered suddenly if she herself was trying to recover from a disastrous love affair. If so, was she thinking about whoever
     the guy might have been? And if so, when had the ill-fated romance ended? Twelve years ago? Twelve days ago? Last night?
    He let it go.
    Concentrated instead on the linguini with white clam sauce.
    “Is it because I’m black?” she asked suddenly.
    “Is what because you’re black?” he asked.
    “That you asked me out.”
    “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
    Is
it? he wondered.
    Before now, he’d never dated a black woman in