Read Online Westlake, Donald E - Novel 41 by Levine (v1.1) - Free Book Online

Levine watched Crawley 's face as the big man listened impassively
to the phone, finally nodding and saying, "Okay, I'll go right on up
there. Yeah, I know, that's what I figure, too." And he hung up.
                   "What is it. Jack?" Levine asked, getting up from the desk.
                   "A phony," said Crawley . "I can handle it, Abe. You go on
home."
                   "I'd rather have some work to do. What is
it?"
                   Crawley was
striding for the door, Levine after him. "Man on a ledge," he said. "A phony. They're all phonies. The ones that really
mean to jump do it right away, get it over with. Guys like this one, all they
want is a little attention, somebody to tell them it's
all okay, come on back in, everything's forgiven."
                   The two of them walked down the long green
hall toward the front of the precinct. Man on a ledge, Levine thought. Don't
jump. Don't die. For God's sake, don't die.
                   The address was an office building on Flatbush Avenue , a few blocks down from the bridge, near
A&S and the major Brooklyn movie houses. A small crowd had gathered on
the sidewalk across the street, looking up, but most of the pedestrians stopped
only for a second or two, only long enough to see what the small crowd was
gaping at, and then hurried on wherever they were going. They were still
involved in life, they had things to do, they didn't
have time to watch a man die.
                   Traffic on this side was being rerouted away from
this block of Flatbush, around via Fulton or Willoughby or DeKalb. It was a litde after ten o'clock on a sunny day in late June, warm without
the humidity that would hit the city a week or two farther into the summer, but
the uniformed cop who waved at them to make the turn was sweating, his blue
shirt stained a darker blue, his forehead creased with strain above the
sunglasses.
                   Crawley was
driving their car, an unmarked black '56 Chevy, no siren, and he braked to a
stop in front of the patrolman. He stuck his head and arm out the window,
danghng his wallet open so the badge showed. "Precinct," he called.
                   "Oh," said the cop. He stepped aside
to let them pass. "You didn't have any siren or light or anything,"
he explained.
                   "We don't want to make our friend
nervous," Crawley told him.
                   The cop glanced up, then looked back at Crawley . "He's making me nervous," he
said.
                   Crawley laughed. "A phony," he told the cop. "Wait and see."
                   On his side of the car, Levine had leaned his
head out the window, was looking up, studying the man
on the ledge.
                   It was an office building, eight stories high.
Not a very tall building, particularly for New York , but plenty tall enough for the purposes of
the man standing on the ledge that girdled the building at the sixth floor
level. The first floor of the building was mainly a bank and partiailly a
luncheonette. The second floor, according to the lettering strung along the
front windows, was entirely given over to a loan company, and Levine could
understand the advantage of the location. A man had his loan request turned
down by the bank, all he had to do was go up one flight of stairs —or one
flight in the elevator, more likely —and there was the loan company.
                   And if the loan company failed him too, there
was a nice ledge on the sixth floor.
                   Levine wondered if this particular case had
anything to do with money. Almost everything had something to do with money.
Things that he became aware of because he was a cop, almost all of them had
something to do with money. The psychoanalysts are wrong, he thought. It isn't
sex that's at the center of all the pain in the world, it's money. Even when a cop answers