The Con Man Read Online Free

The Con Man
Book: The Con Man Read Online Free
Author: Ed McBain
Pages:
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Homicide North—since all suicides or suspected suicides are treated exactly like homicides.
    And, finally, a copy was sent to the Detective Division of the 87th Precinct, in which territory the body had been found.
    Sam Grossman’s men washed their hands.
    There was something about Paul Blaney that made Carella’s flesh crawl. Perhaps it was the idea of Blaney dealing with death as an occupation, but Carella suspected it was the man’s personality and not his job. He had, after all, dealt with many men whose occupation was death. With Blaney, however, it seemed to be more a preoccupation than an occupation, and so Carella stood before him, towering over him, and he could feel a nest of spiders in his stomach, and he wanted to scratch himself or take a bath.
    The two men stood in the clean antiseptic examination room of the morgue alongside the stainless steel table, with its troughs to gather in the flow of blood, with its stainless steel basin to capture the blood and hold it in a ruby pool. Blaney was a short man with a balding head and a scraggly black mustache. He was the only man Carella had ever met who owned violet eyes.
    Carella stood opposite him, a big man, but not a heavy one. He gave an impression of athletic tightness; every muscle and sinew in his body pulled into a wiry bundle of power. His eyes were brown, slanting downward to meet high cheekbones so that his face had an almost Oriental look. He wore his brown hairshort. He wore a gray sports jacket and charcoal slacks, and the jacket stretched wide across the breadth of his shoulders, angled in sharply to cover narrow hips and a flat, hard stomach.
    “What do you make of it?” he asked Blaney.
    “I hate floaters,” Blaney said. “I hate to look at them. The goddamned things make me sick.”
    “Nobody likes floaters,” Carella said.
    “Me especially,” Blaney said, nodding vigorously. “They always give me the floaters. If you’ve got seniority around here, you can pull anything you want. So I’m low man on the totem pole. So whenever a goddamned floater comes in, everybody else suddenly has corpses in Siberia. Is that fair? That I should get the floaters?”
    “Somebody’s got to get them.”
    “Sure, but why me? Listen, I don’t complain about anything they give me. We’ve had stiffs in here so burned up you wouldn’t even know they were human. You ever handle charred flesh? Okay, but do I complain? We get automobile accident victims where a guy’s head is hanging from his neck by one strand of skin. I take it in stride. I’m an ME, and you’ve got to take the good ones with the bad ones. But why should I get all the floaters? How come nobody else gets the floaters?”
    “Look—” Carella started, but Blaney was just gathering steam, just picking up speed.
    “There isn’t anybody in the goddamn department who does a better job than me. Trouble is, I haven’t got seniority. It’s all politics. Who do you think gets the nice posh jobs? The old fuddies who’ve been cutting up stiffs for forty years. But I do a neat, thorough job. Thorough. I’m thorough. I don’t overlook anything. Not a thing. So I get the floaters!”
    “Maybe they figure you’re so expert they wouldn’t trust them to anyone else,” Carella said drily.
    “Huh?” Blaney said. “Expert?”
    “Certainly. You’re a good man, Blaney. Floaters are tough. You can’t trust them with just any damn butcher.”
    Blaney’s violet eyes softened a shade. “I never thought of it that way,” he said. He smiled slightly, and then the smile vanished before a suspicious lowering of his brows as he thought the problem over again.
    “What about this one?” Carella asked, not wanting Blaney to start thinking too hard.
    “Oh,” Blaney said. “Yeah. Well, I got a report there—all the junk. Been in the water about four months, I would say. I just got done with the heart.”
    “And?”
    “You know anything about the heart?”
    “Not very much, no.”
    “Right
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