Til Death Read Free

gag, anyway. Somebody with a warped sense of humor.”
    “Maybe,” Tommy said, but he didn’t seem convinced.
    “Where’s your phone?” Carella asked.
    “In the bedroom.”
    Carella started out of the kitchen. He paused. “Tommy, would you mind a few extra guests at your wedding?” he asked.
    “No. Why?”
    “Well, if this isn’t a gag—and it probably is—but if it isn’t, we don’t want anything happening to the groom, do we?” He grinned. “And the nice thing about having a cop for a brother-in-law is that he can get bodyguards whenever he needs them. Even on a Sunday.”
    There is no such day as Sunday in the police department. Sunday is exactly the same as Monday and Tuesday and all those other days. If you happen to have the duty on Sunday, that’s it. You don’t go to the commissioner or the chaplain or the mayor. You go to the squadroom. If Christmas happens to fall on one of your duty days, that’s extremely unfortunate, too, unless you can arrange a switch with a cop who isn’t celebrating Christmas. Life is just one merry round in the police department.
    On Sunday morning, June 22, Detective/2nd Grade Meyer Meyer was catching in the squadroom of the 87th Precinct. It was not a bad day to be in charge of the six-man detective team that had begun its shift at 8:00 A.M. and that would work through until 6:00 P.M. that evening. There was a mild breeze on the air, andthe sky was a cloudless blue, and sunlight was pouring through the meshed grill screening over the squadroom’s windows. The squadroom, shoddy with time and use, was quite comfortable on a day such as this. There were days when the city’s temperature soared into the nineties, and on those days the squadroom of the 87th Precinct resembled nothing so much as a big iron coffin. But not today. Today, a man could sit without his trousers crawling up his behind. Today, a man could type up reports or answer phones or dig in the files without danger of melting into a small unidentifiable puddle on the squadroom floor.
    Meyer Meyer was quite content. Puffing on his pipe, he studied the Wanted circulars on his desk and thought about how nice it was to be alive in June.
    Bob O’Brien, six feet and one inch tall in his bare feet, weighing in at 210 pounds, stomped across the room and collapsed into the chair beside Meyer’s desk. Meyer felt an immediate sense of doom, because if ever there was a jinxed cop it was O’Brien. Since the time he’d been forced to kill a neighborhood butcher years ago—a man he’d known since he was a boy—O’Brien seemed to find himself constantly in the kind of scrapes wherein gunplay was absolutely necessary. He had not wanted to kill Eddie the butcher. But Eddie’d been a little out of his head and had come raving out of his shop swinging a meat cleaver at an innocent woman. O’Brien tried to stop him, but it was no use. Eddie knocked him to the pavement and then raised the meat cleaver and O’Brien, acting reflexively, drew his service revolver and fired. He killed Eddie with a single shot. And that night he went home and wept like a baby. He had killed six men since that time. In each of the shootings, he had not wanted to draw his gun—but circumstances so combined to force him into the act of legal murder. And whenever he was forced to kill, he still wept. Not openly. He wept inside, where it hurts most.
    The cops of the 87th Squad were not a superstitious bunch, but they nonetheless shied away from answering a complaint with Bob O’Brien along. With O’Brien along, there was bound to be shooting. They did not know why. It certainly wasn’t Bob’s fault He was always the last person on the scene to draw a gun, and he never did so until it became absolutely necessary. But with O’Brien along, there would undoubtedly be shooting and the cops of the 87th were normal-type human beings who did not long to become involved in gun duels. They knew that if O’Brien went out to break up a marble game