'Til Death (87th Precinct) - By Ed McBain Page 0,48

case, he was having difficulty standing. He had carried a chair to the center of the dance floor, and he stood on the chair now, wobbling unsteadily, his arms flailing the air, and he tried to maintain his balance and signal for silence simultaneously. The wedding guests had also drunk too much—perhaps—or perhaps danced too strenuously. They were a long time coming to silence and perhaps they never would have were it not for the fear that Tony Carella would fall off that chair unless someone began listening to him soon.

“I’m a very lucky man today,” Tony said to the hushed guests. “My daughter Angela has married a wonderful boy. Tommy! Tommy? Where’s Tommy?”

He climbed down off the chair and searched for Tommy in the crowd, dragging him into the light that spilled from the bandstand.

“My son-in-law!” he shouted, and the wedding guests applauded. “A wonderful boy, and a wonderful wedding, and a wonderful night! And now, we going to explode fireworks. We going to make the whole night explode for my two children! Is everybody ready?”

And the wedding guests cheered as Marty Sokolin lowered the muzzle of the rifle to the window sill and leveled his sights on Tommy Giordano’s head.

If police work is half doggedness and half patience, it is also half luck and half blind faith. Four halves, obviously, equal two wholes. Two holes were what Meyer Meyer and Bob O’Brien needed in their heads the way they needed the legwork they were doing in tracking down Marty Sokolin.

Meyer Meyer would have been extremely content to have lingered in the delicatessen sniffing of the savory smells there, rather than to leave the place in search of a potential killer. The smells of a delicatessen, especially a kosher deli, had always been mysterious, intriguing scents to Meyer. When he was a boy, he had no idea that people actually went into delicatessens to make purchases. His mother would take him for a stroll away from their Gentile neighborhood, into the nearest ghetto, and there she would seek out a delicatessen. Standing in the door to the shop, she would allow little Meyer to sniff to his heart’s content. Until the time he was fifteen and bought his first nickel a shtickel, Meyer held the unshakable conviction that delicatessens were for smelling only. He still felt rather uneasy when making a purchase in one, somewhat like a heathen defiling a temple.

He did not make a purchase in the delicatessen on Dover Plains Avenue. He made inquiries concerning the man with the trombone case, was promptly rebuffed, and then went into the street in further search of what was beginning to look like a rather elusive needle. The search was conducted in a very scientific manner based on established investigatory technique. The search was conducted by stopping passers-by and asking them if they had seen a man carrying a trombone case.

Now such painstaking investigatory technique is surely recommended by Scotland Yard and the Nassau County Police and the Sureté and the Gestapo. It is calculated to separate, through a process of carefully phrased questions (such as, “Did you see a man with a trombone case walk by here?) those citizens who had and those who had not witnessed the passage of the sought suspect. It was important, of course, to snap off the questions with the properly authoritative and universally accepted police tone. Police tone is a part of police procedure. The sentence, “Did you see a man with a trombone case walk by here?” when delivered by a layman untrained in police tone could result in a plethora of confused answers. When delivered by a man who had attended the Police Academy, a man well versed in the ways of investigatory technique, a man skilled at the art of interrogation, the question assumed significance. Faced with its scientific inevitability, the person questioned was skillfully led to the point where only one of two answers was possible: yes or no. I did, or I did not see a man with a trombone case walk by here.

Meyer Meyer and Bob O’Brien, skilled inquisitors that they were, received a total of twelve “no’s” before they received a “yes.”

The “yes” led them up a street parallel to Charles Avenue. On the front stoop of a two-story frame dwelling, they got their second “yes” and began to feel that their luck she was running good. The second “yes” came from an old man with an ear trumpet.

“Did you see a man with a trombone