"Mitchell Smith - Daydreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Mitchell)

curious because of an elderly couple standing in the middle of the
street staring at something happening out of her sight--cleared the
corner, and saw Drew cut and the blood come spurting out.

He'd barely had time to punch the boy when she rushed to him,
fluttering, crying out-reaching to touch his draining arm, then withdraw
her hand as quickly. Her cries were, in fact, just the ones she'd
offered when trying three years before to attack Marie Valonte, kick her
in the groin, strike her across the throat with the edge of her hand,
take her on the hip, and throw her to the mat to kneel on her head and
subdue her utterly.

Marie had been a sweet-tempered chunky girl, very religious, and had
cooperatively collapsed under Ellie's assault, but shifted her
dark-curled head abruptly when Ellie, kneeling, had pressed upon an
earring.

These cries, then, without the attendant violence, were much the same
that Ellie now employed in succoring Detective Drew. She pawed, touched
the arm, and leaped away, uttering cries. She was also weeping.

This spectacle, this extraordinary behavior observed by so many
interested people on the corner and in the street adjacent, and a cause
of terrific chagrin for both Detective Drew and his breathless
partner-the one gripping his own arm in the fiercest way, the other more
relaxed, with his prisoner kneeling peaceful at his feet, the short
muzzle of a .38 Detective Special touching the boy gently on his right
ear-resulted in Ellie Klein's swift transfer to Manhattan, to a
children's shelter program there, as Department Liaison.

Here also, she muddied her sheet in many minor ways getting once into a
furious dispute with a Puerto Rican mother who had seared a particular
devil out of her little girl on the big back burner of her stove. Ellie
was accused of striking this lady, and in front of a witness, a social
worker-almost the worst thing a police officer can do. Had the social
worker not been a veteran of those wars, and kind to cops, Ellie Klein
would have been up on charges and out on her ass.

So things stood in her career-her commander, answering an inspector from
District who had inquired who the pussy might be, and how good a cop,
had replied that she was a nice girl-meaning that she was competent at
daily police work, intelligent, industrious, honest, and not to be
relied upon in an emergency.

So she was ruined, judged as simply the wrong material for the job-when,
abruptly, she was given her chance, and given with it a few moments to
prepare.

She and Klein had been divorced for two years when a tenement in the
barrio, at East 108th Street, caught fire from tattered wiring in its