The Con Man (87th Precinct) - By Ed McBain Page 0,22

of a combination of two words, one of which was unprintable. Brown had no time for jokes. He only had time for the files.

Somewhere in those files was the man he wanted.

Bert Kling was occupied with another kind of reading matter.

Bert Kling stood before the bulletin board in the detective squadroom. It was raining again, and the rain oozed against the windowpanes, and the harsh light behind the panes cast a sliding, running, dripping silhouette on the floor at his feet so that the room itself seemed to be slowly dissolving.

The vacations schedule had been posted on the bulletin board.

Kling studied it now. Two detectives studied it with him. One of the detectives was Meyer Meyer. The other was Roger Havilland.

“What’d you draw, kid?” Havilland asked.

“June tenth,” Kling replied.

“June tenth? Well, well, well, ain’t that a dandy time to start a holiday?” Havilland said, winking at Meyer.

“Yeah, dandy,” Kling said disgustedly. He had honestly not expected a choicer spot. He was the newest man on the squad—promoted from a rookie, at that—and so he could hardly have hoped to compete with the cops who had seniority. But he was nonetheless disappointed. June 10! Hell, that wasn’t even summer yet!

“I like my vacations at the early part of June,” Havilland went on. “Excellent time for vacations. I always ask for the end of April. I like it chilly. I wouldn’t think of leaving this lovely squadroom during the suffocating months of July and August. I like heat, don’t you, Meyer?”

Meyer’s blue eyes twinkled. He was always willing to go along with a gag, even when the gag originated with a man like Havilland whom Meyer did not particularly like. “Heat is wonderful,” Meyer said. “Last year was marvelous. I’ll never forget last year. A cop hater loose and the temperature in the nineties. That makes for a memorable summer.”

“Just think, kid,” Havilland said. “Maybe this summer’ll be a hot one, too. You can sit over there by the windows, where you get a nice breeze from the park. And you can think back over your nice cool vacation in the beginning of June.”

“You slay me, Havilland,” Kling said. He turned to start away from the bulletin board, and Havilland laid a beefy hand on his arm. There was strength in Havilland’s fingers. He was a big cop with a cherubic face, and a leer-like smile was on that face now. Kling disliked Havilland. He had disliked him even when he’d been a patrolman and had only heard of Havilland’s questioning tactics with suspects. Since he’d made 3rd/grade, he had had the opportunity to see Havilland in action, and his dislike had mounted in proportion to the number of times Havilland used his ham like fists on helpless prisoners. Havilland, you see, was a bull. He roared like a bull, and he gored like a bull, and he probably even snored like a bull. In truth, he had once been a gentle cop. But he’d once tried to break up a street fight, and the fighters had ganged up on him, taken away his service revolver, and broken his arm with a lead pipe. The compound fracture had to be broken and reset at the hospital. It healed painfully and slowly. It left Havilland with a philosophy: Hit first; ask later.

The broken arm, to Kling’s way of thinking, bought neither benediction nor salvation for Havilland. Neither did it buy understanding. It bought, perhaps, a little bit of insight into a man who was basically a son of a bitch. Kling wasn’t a psychiatrist. He only knew that he didn’t like the leer on Havilland’s face, and he didn’t like Havilland’s hand on his arm.

“Where you going on your vacation, kid?” Havilland asked. “You don’t want to waste that nice cool month of June, do you? Remember, it gets to be summer along about the twenty-first. Where you going, huh?”

“We haven’t decided yet,” Kling said.

“We? We? You going with somebody?”

“I’m going with my fiancée,” Kling said tightly.

“Your girl, huh?” Havilland said. He winked at Meyer, including him in a secret fraternity that Meyer did not feel like joining.

“Yes,” Kling said. “My girl.”

“Whatever you do,” Havilland said, winking at Kling this time, “don’t take her out of the state.”

“Why not?” Kling asked, the implication escaping him for a moment, immediately sorry as soon as Havilland opened his mouth in reply.

“Why, the Mann Act, kid!” Havilland said. “Watch out for those state lines.”

Kling stared at Havilland and then said, “How would you like a punch