At the end of Ed McBain’s 1962 novel Like Love, Steve Carella and Cotton Hawes watch as the confessed killer is taken out of the squadroom on his way to the detention cells on the first floor.
As he moves down the stairs, they listen “without a sense of triumph, without even a sense of completion.”
This was a crime that made sense — there was a detailed confession to explain it. But it made no sense.
The motive was clear, but wrong-headed. The killer was a victim of his own confusion and impetuosity — and innocence. Indeed, that’s how he was caught.
Often McBain’s long-running 87th Precinct series of police procedurals, the squadroom detectives come up against human nature in all its irrationality and chaos and rapid-firing emotions. They come up against tough criminals and, on a rare occasion, a clever bad guy.
But most of the people they meet or learn about — the victims, the eyewitnesses and, yes, the murderers too — are the typical flawed characters we know as human beings.
Sometimes, the 87th Precinct cops react with anger at what they encounter. Sometimes, with disgust, or sadness, or even humor.
And there are times when they just shake their heads.
“The dad man’s clothes”
That’s how the story ends in Like Love, the 16th book in the series that eventually numbered 55.
And it’s how the story ended in Give the Boys a Great Big Hand, the 11th book, published in 1960.
“Why do you suppose he put on the dead man’s clothes?” Kling shuddered. “Jesus, this whole damn case…”
“Maybe he knew,” Carella said.
“Knew what?”
“That he was a victim, too.”
Miscolo came in from the Clerical Office. The men in the squadroom were silent.
“Anybody want some coffee?” he said.
Nobody wanted any coffee.
“Broad daylight!”
In Like Love, it seems clear at first that the man and woman whose nearly nude bodies are found on a bed in a gas-filled apartment were partners in a suicide pact. There’s even a typed suicide note!
But, then, things just aren’t adding up. And it turns out that the relatives of the two dead people — Tommy Barlow and Irene Thayer — are all hiding something.
And, then, Carella is badly beaten — not once but twice.
The first blow came from behind, and it struck him at the base of the neck, sending him sprawling forward onto the [elevated platform] steps. He felt the impact of the sudden shock, felt himself blacking out as he fell forward, and thought only, Jesus, broad daylight! and then grasped fumblingly for the steps as he fell.
“A mental sleight of hand”
And, then, a guy is fatally stabbed — in broad daylight — in Grover Park although this is a killing that is more routine inasmuch as it seems gang-related. And, anyway, violence and death are a normal part of the life of the detectives, as McBain explains:
They cracked a few jokes — the photographer had one about the first astronaut to reach the moon — and they went about their work with a faintly detached air of busyness. That was a dead man lying in the grass there. They accepted his presence only by performing a mental sleight of hand that in effect denied his humanity. He was no longer a man, he was simply a problem.
And, then, someone takes a potshot at Hawes.
Hawes dropped at the sound of the first shot, just as the splintered hole appeared in the wooden door. The slug whistled past his head as he fell flat to the floor, and then ricocheted off the wall behind him and went caroming at a crazy angle down the hallway just as the second shot erupted.
“Like love”
Irene Thayer, the woman on the bed, was going to leave her husband Michael Thayer to sneak off to Las Vegas to get a quickie divorce in order to marry Tommy Barlow, the man on the bed.
Apparently, Irene had been meeting with Tommy for overnight trysts by telling her husband that she was going to visit her mother, a woman he didn’t get along with. After interviewing the husband, Hawes says to Carella:
“Well, for God’s sake, his wife is trotting out to see her mother every other week, and spending the night there, and he never even calls to check up? I don’t buy it.”
“You’re not married,” Carella said simply.
“Huh?”
“I don’t ask Teddy to give me a written report on her whereabouts. You either trust somebody or you don’t.”
Hawes isn’t buying it. It makes no sense to him.
“There are more things in heaven and hell, Horatio,” Carella misquoted, “than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“Like what?” Hawes asked.
“Like love,” Carella answered.
Because of love
When it comes to chaotic, irrational and downright crazy human actions, love is often at the heart of things.
And in Like Love, love in many versions is what moves just about everyone, including the detectives, to do what they do. Indeed, it is during an intimate evening with his girlfriend that Hawes gets the brainstorm that leads to the solution of the case of the two nearly nude bodies on the bed.
And how did they end up there?
It was all because of love — a twisted, misguided and fatally foolish kind of love. But a love, nonetheless.
And, in solving the case, the detectives are left “without a sense of triumph, without even a sense of completion.” Love can do that.
Patrick T. Reardon
8.8.26
Written by : Patrick T. Reardon
For more than three decades Patrick T. Reardon was an urban affairs writer, a feature writer, a columnist, and an editor for the Chicago Tribune. In 2000 he was one of a team of 50 staff members who won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Now a freelance writer and poet, he has contributed chapters to several books and is the author of Faith Stripped to Its Essence. His website is https://patricktreardon.com/.