Manhattan Is My Beat Read Online Free PDF

got?”
    Manelli said to him, “Here’s what it looks like, Captain. This lady comes to pick up a videotape. She calls on the intercom and we think the perp answers. Probably after he does the vic.”
    Does
the vic. Rune stared at the detective, furious at the callousness.
    “Pops him three in the chest. No defensive wounds, so it happened fast. He never even tried to dodge. And one in the TV.”
    “The TV?”
    Rune followed their eyes. The killer had shot out the TV set. A spidery fracture surrounded a small black hole in the upper right. It was, she noticed, a very old, cheap set.
    Manelli continued. “Then this neighbor up the hall—” He looked at his notebook. “Amanda LeClerc. She comes upstairs and finds him dead.”
    “Nobody hears anything?” the captain asked.
    “No. Not even the shots … Okay, then the killer or his backup’s in a car in the alley. He bolts and takes out one witness.”
    And nearly me too, Rune thought. As if they care.
    Manelli consulted his notebook again. “Name’s Susan Edelman. Lives next door.” He nodded toward the building where Rune had seen the jogger stretching.
    “Ice her?” the captain asked.
    Ice … do
… These people had no respect for human beings.
    “No,” Manelli said. “But Edelman’s in no shape to say anything. Not for a while.”
    Rune remembered the woman lying on the greasy cobblestones of the alley. Blood on her pink jogging suit. Remembered feeling guilty that she’d put down the poor woman for being a yuppie, for being pert.
    “This young lady”—Nodding at Rune—”saw the car too. Says she didn’t see much.”
    “Yeah?” the captain asked. “You get a look at the perp?”
    “The what?”
    “Perp.”
    Rune shook her head. “I speak English. It’s my native language.”
    “The driver.”
    “No.”
    “How many people were in the car?” the captain continued.
    “I don’t know. There was glare. I told
him
that.”
    “Yeah,” the captain said doubtfully. “Some people think there’s glare when they just don’t
want
to see anything. But you don’t hafta worry. We take care of witnesses. You’ll be safe.”
    “I wasn’t a witness. I didn’t see anything. I was getting out of the way of a car that was trying to run me over. It’s a little distracting….”
    Her eyes strayed again to the corpse; she found she’d eased to the side of the slow detective. Finally she forced herself to look away. She glanced up at Manelli.
    “The tape,” she said.
    “What?”
    “Can I get the tape? I’m supposed to take it back to where I work.”
    She saw the cover for the cassette.
Manhattan Is My Beat
.
    Manelli walked over to the VCR and pushed eject. A clatter of the mechanism. The tape eased out. Manelli motioned to a crime-scene cop, who walked over. The detective asked, “Whatta you think? Can she have it?”
    “One of my biggest fears.” The crime-scene officer’s latex-gloved hand lifted the cassette out of the VCR; he looked it over.
    “What’s that?” Manelli asked the officer.
    “I rent
Debbie Does Dallas
and get hit by a bus before I can return it. My widow gets a bill for two thousand bucks for some sleazy porn and—”
    Rune said angrily, “That’s
not
what he rented and I don’t think you should joke.”
    The technician cleared his throat, kept an awkward grin on his face. He didn’t apologize. He said, “Thing is, look at the TV. You know, him shooting it out? Maybe it’s a coincidence but I’d say we better dust this tape pretty careful. Maybe the perp looked at it. And we do that, well, I’ll tell you I wouldn’t run it through
my
VCR with powder on it. This shit’ll gum up anything.”
    Rune said, “You can’t just take our tape.”
    She didn’t care about Washington Square Video’s inventory. No, what bothered her was that the cops were keeping the one thing that connected her to Robert Kelly. Stupid, she thought. But she wanted that tape.
    “We can actually. Yeah.”
    “No, you can’t. It’s