by Ed McBain
“I don’t know what we’ll do without him,” he said, and clutched her to him. She nodded into his shoulder, the tears flowing freely down her face. “Call me if you need anything,” he said, holding her at arm’s length now, looking down into her tearful face. “All right?”
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you, Jeff.”
“Call me,” he said again, and patted her hand, and then nodded to Kling in farewell, and worked his way through the crowd of mourners to the front door.
“My husband’s partner,” she said. “Jeff Colbert. I don’t know what I’d have done without him. He’s been marvelous.”
“Mrs. Wilkins,” Kling said, “I’ll say the same thing he said. Call me. If you think of anything, however unimportant it may seem, call me.” He took out his wallet, found a card, handed it to her. “Any time of the day or night,” he said. “The message will get to me.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“Either my partner or I will stay in touch,” he said, and wondered where the hell Parker was.
TEDDY HADN’T SEENEileen Burke since she’d begun therapy, and the change in her now was virtually miraculous. Where earlier there had been a troubled police detective who couldn’t seem to reconcile her professional life with her personal life, there was now a woman who seemed in complete control of both. Wearing blue jeans and a green blazer that matched the color of her eyes, Eileen sat opposite her in the Chinese restaurant they’d chosen, her hands flashing across the table. She had learned to sign a little.
For you, she signed.Because we’re friends .
The signing was shaky, but well intentioned. Moreover, like many people learning a foreign language—which, in a sense, signing was—Eileen could understand it better than she could speak it. Teddy was grateful for that; she had a lot to tell her.
The two women would have attracted attention even if they hadn’t been signing. Neither of them would ever have thought this of herself, but each was startlingly beautiful in her own Irish way, Eileen with her fair complexion and fiery red hair, Teddy with her dark eyes and black hair. But the fact that they were signing to each other across the table, their fingers excitedly flying—well, Eileen’s weren’t quitesoaring, but she was trying—captured the interest of the largely Chinese clientele lunching here.
Teddy was telling her what had happened outside the clinic yesterday. Eileen watched her fingers. She was signing more slowly than she might have with her husband or her children, but the fire in her eyes conveyed the excitement she felt in recalling the incident. Teddy was saying that the people planning the clinic defense had briefed them against engaging in any physical or verbal dialogue, or any other conduct that would escalate the potential for violence. She signed the words now:Verbal dialogue .
The irony had not been lost on her, nor was it lost on Eileen now. Teddy could not have answered the taunts hurled at her even if she’d chosen to.
I stood there with the blood running down my face,she signed…
…running down her neck and her shoulders and into the crew neck of the T-shirt, her eyes locked with the priest’s eyes for he was the one leading the verbal assault, he was the one directing the chanting as though conducting a church choir, seeing the hurtful words on his lips, the contorted faces of the others, the sheervolume of the attack lost on her, but this they did not know. Their words were literally falling on deaf ears.
She would neither yield nor bend.
The men and women who had come here today to defend the clinic stood shoulder to shoulder with her, and turned their smoldering eyes onto the nine whose frenzy seemed to rise in direct proportion to the silence Teddy would have kept in any event, but which she was incapable of breaking then or any other time. Her gaze fixed, her mouth set, she stared directly into the face of the priest who’d thrown the blood. Behind him, the sky was bluer than any there’d been so far this spring—“Murderers, give the childrenlife! Murderers , give the children…”
“The sons of bitches,” Eileen said, and tried to sign it, but Teddy had already read her lips.
Her own fingers were moving again.
For twenty minutes they…
…tried to provoke a response from her, nine of them in a tight semicircle, raping her with their taunting shouts while the blood caked around her eyes and in the curves and ridges of her unhearing ears and at the corners of her mouth. The PRO-CHOICE shirt was sticky with blood, its blue turned purple from the infusion of red.
She kept staring into the priest’s dark eyes.
It was such a beautiful spring day, she signed now.
Eileen looked at her. Green eyes wide in expectation.
So?she signed.
This she knew how to sign.
Simple word.
So?
Teddy opened her eyes as wide as Eileen’s, and raised her eyebrows and her shoulders in remembered surprise.
They simplyleft! she signed.
“Good,” Eileen whispered, and nodded. She clumsily signedYou did it, girl , and reached across the table to take Teddy’s hands in her own.
Teddy smiled.
Yep, the smile said.
She didn’t even have to sign it.
THE WOMAN whoopened the door of the white clapboard house on Merriwether Lane was in her seventies, Budd guessed. White-haired and stooped, wearing absurdly large eyeglasses whose frames glittered with what appeared to be sequins, she peered at his detective shield and I.D. card, and then said, “Yes, sir, how can I help you?”
“This is my partner,” he said, “Detective Dellarosa.”
“Yes?”
Somewhat impatiently. Seventy fuckin years old, Budd thought, in a big hurry to go someplace.
“May we come in, please?” he asked.
“What’s this about?” she asked.
“Does a man named Rubin Shanks live here?”
“He does.”
“We’d like to ask him a few questions, please.”
“My husband isn’t fit to answer any questions,” she said.
“Can you tell meyour name, ma’am?”
“Margaret Shanks.”
“Mrs. Shanks, we’ve been talking to the man runs the Shell station downtown on Laker? He says he gave your husband a lift back here two days ago….”
“Yes?”
“Did he?”
“What’s this about?” she said again.
“It’s about your husband leaving a blue 1987 Acura Legend coupe at that Shell station yesterday.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” she said.
“Man there says the car was pushed in cause your husband couldn’t get it started. He left it there with his keys and the man drove him home. Is that right, ma’am?”
“We don’t own a blue car.”
“What kind of cardo you own, ma’am?”
“A black one.”
“What year and make, ma’am?”
“I don’t know what this is all about.”
“What year and make, ma’am?”
“A 1987 Acura.”
“Would it be a Legend, ma’am?”
“Yes.”
“A coupe?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me where that car is now?”
“Right here in the garage.”
“Ma’am, we’d really like to talk to your husband, if that’s okay with you.”
“I told you, my husband isn’t…”
“Who’s that, Meg?”
The detectives looked past her to where a white-haired, balding man appeared behind her left shoulder. He, too, was wearing eyeglasses. He seemed older than the woman, closer to eighty, Budd guessed.
“It’s no one,” she said. “Go back to your television.”
“Well, who is it?” he insisted.
Tall, brawny man, must’ve been a bruiser when he was young. Looking out at them now from behind the thick-lensed glasses, puzzled look on his face.
“Fox Hill Police,” Dellarosa said. “Okay to come in, sir?”
>
“I told you he…”
“Sure, come on in. Something happen? Was there an accident?”
“He really can’t…”
“Come on in, have some coffee,” he said, and the cops stepped past Mrs. Shanks and into the house. Absent the invitation, they’d have needed a warrant. Now they were legal.
The house was simply furnished. Little development house that must’ve cost them twenty thousand dollars when they’d bought it forty, fifty years ago, worth a hundred grand or more now. The television set was going. One of the soap operas. Big heads talking sexual innuendo. America in the daytime.
“Are you Rubin Shanks?” Budd asked.
The man blinked. His eyes behind the glasses looked totally bewildered.
“Meg?” he said.
“You’re Rubin Shanks,” she told him.
He didn’t seem convinced. Blinked again behind his eyeglasses, looked to her for confirmation. She noddedYes , patiently but irritably.
“Mr. Shanks,” Budd said, “do you know the Shell station downtown on Laker Street?”
“I certainly do,” Shanks said. “Meg, would you bring these fellers some coffee? How do you take your coffee, fellers?”
“There isn’t any coffee,” she said.
“Why don’t you make some coffee for them, hon? Take a few minutes, fellers, if you don’t mind wai…”
“Thank you, but that’s okay, Mr. Shanks, we just want to ask you a few questions,” Budd said.
“What about?”
“Did you push a car into that service station yesterday afternoon?”
“What service station?”
“The one on Laker.”
“Laker?”
“Laker Street. Downtown.”
“Oh. Oh. Yesterday. Was I downtown yesterday, Meg?”
“You were downtown,” she said.
“Right, right,” he said, “it was two young fellers who pushed me. Right. I couldn’t get it started. They helped me get it to the service station.”
“Car wouldn’t start for you, is that it?” Budd asked.
“Keywouldn’t turn,” Shanks said, and shrugged. “Couldn’t get it to turn at the station, neither, they figured there was something wrong with where you put the key in. What do you call that, Meg? Where you put the key in?”
“The ignition,” she said.
“Figured it was frozen or something.”
“Uh-huh,” Budd said, and looked at his partner.
“What were you doing in town?” Dellarosa asked.
“Went to see my buddies down the Parade.”
“The Parade Bar? Down there on Laker?”
“Yessir. Stopped in to say hello to some of my old navy buddies.”
“Were you drinking, Mr. Shanks?”
“Nossir, I was not. Just drove downtown to say hello to some of my buddies, is all.”
“He drive that car all the time, ma’am?” Budd asked.
“I tell him not to,” she said. “He won’t listen.”
“Been driving since I was sixteen,” Shanks said.
“When you went to that bar, sir, do you remember where you parked your car?”
“What bar?”
“The Parade, sir. Where you said you went yesterday.”
“Is that where I went, Meg?”
“That’s what you told them, Rubin.”
“So where’d I park the car?”
“That’s what they want to know.”
“Must’ve been right where I found it later. Front of the Grand Union. But it wouldn’t start. Key wouldn’t turn in the…what’d you call it, Meg?”
“The ignition.”
“How’d your car get back here, sir?”
Shanks looked at his wife. The same bewildered, lost look again.
“Meg?” he said. “How’d it get back here?”
“I drove it back,” she said.
“Where’d you find it, ma’am?”
“Is he going to get in trouble?”
“Where’d you find it, can you tell us?”
“Near the movie theater.”
“No, Meg,” Shanks said, “it was in front of the Grand Union. Right where I left it.”
“Rubin,” she said, “youforgot where you left it.”
“No, I didn’t. It was right there where I left it. I got in, put the key in the ig…”
“Rubin, you got in thewrong car.”
“No,” he said. “No, I didn’t, Meg.”
“Rubin, that wasn’tour car. That was somebodyelse’s car.”
“It was?” he said, and looked at the detectives. “How could it have been somebody else’s car?” he said. “I know my own car, don’t I?”
“Mr. Shanks,” Budd said, “a man named Herman Friedlich was on the jitney going to the city this morning when he looked out the window and saw his car sitting there at that Shell station. He got off the bus, ran over there, put his key in the ignition, and was starting the car when the owner ran out and told him to get out of his customer’s car. Mr. Friedlich told him it washis car, and that it’d been stolen yesterday.”
“Stolen?” Shanks said, and looked at his wife.
“Yes, sir, it was reported stolen at five-forty-fiveP .M. yesterday. When Mr. Friedlich called us, he said he’d left the car unlocked…”
“He did?” Shanks said.
“Yes, sir, because he was just going in the Grand Union for a bottle of milk. When he came out, the car was gone.”
“Should’ve locked it,” Shanks said. “Nowadays.”
“Yes, sir, he should’ve.”
“But what’s that got to do withme ?”
“You got in the wrongcar , Rubin,” his wife said impatiently, and then turned to Budd. “I’m sorry,” she said, “he forgets.”
“Ma’am…didn’t the garage call last night to tell you your husband had left the wrong key?”
“Yes, they did.”
“And didn’t you go down there with your son…your son lives here in Fox Hill, too, doesn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t he drive you to the garage, and didn’t you tell the owner—a man named Jake Sutton—didn’t you ask him to give you the keys he had and you’d look for the other ones when you got home?”
“Yes. Because…”
“Because when you saw that blue car sitting there, you knew right off it wasn’t yours, didn’t you? You knew your husband had taken another man’s car and…”
“I was afraid he’d get in trouble.”
“So they gave you back the keys toyour car…”
“Yes.”
“And then your son must’ve driven you around town…”
“Yes, looking for the car.”
“And when you found it, you drove it back here to your garage.”
“I didn’t want him to get in trouble.”
“Even though you must’ve realized he’d got in another man’s car, had the thing pushed all the way to the Shell station…”
“Young fellers saw I was having trouble,” Shanks said, “asked if I wanted a push.”
“You’re a goddamnfool ,” his wife said.
“Margaret,” he said, “I behaved in the proper manner. The key wouldn’t turn, so I took the car in to have it looked at. Who are these people? Are they saying I stole somebody’s car?”
His wife sighed heavily.
“What now?” she asked. “Are you going to arrest him?”
“Arrest me?” Shanks said. “What for? What’d I do?”
“How long has he been this way?” Dellarosa asked.
“Too long,” Margaret said, and sighed again.
THE STENCILEDblack lettering read:
This was not the name of a synagogue.
The DSS stood for Department of Social Services. The Temple stood for Temple Street Armory. Yesterday afternoon, Meyer had gone back to the Old Chancery for yet another visit, this time to check the stenciling on the blanket that had been wrapped around Jane Doe when she w
as dropped off at the railroad station. The stenciling was, in fact, identical to what he’d seen lettered in one corner of Charlie’s blanket. But while he was there, Dr. Elman had informed him of something more important.
During the night, Jane Doe had died of cardiac arrest. It was Dr. Elman’s theory that the woman may have had a history of ventricular arrhythmia. If she’d been taking medication for the ailment, something like Quinidine three times a day in 320 mg doses, and then was suddenlydeprived of the drug, abandonedwithout the drug and unable to tell anyone she’dbeen on the drug…well, the results were inevitable. Was what Dr. Elman had theorized. Which was why Meyer was here at the Temple Street Shelter today. Or maybe he’d have been here, anyway. Maybe tracking down whoever had dumped those two old people was terribly important to him. Maybe he thought too often of the little old lady who’d drowned in her own bathtub after putting her wig on a stand across the room.
He had called the shelter the moment Elman gave him the news, and was told that the supervisor had left for the day and wouldn’t be in again till sometime after noon Saturday, nice hours supervisors kept. So here was Meyer now—on his day off, no less—talking to a man named Harold Laughton, who immediately told him that the reason he’d left so early yesterday was that he’d had to go to the dentist to get a tooth pulled and his dentist had warned him beforehand that there might be some pain the morning after, in which case he might want to take it a bit easy, which was why he’d left word that he might not be in till after noon sometime. So herehe was, too, even though his mouth was killing him. So what did Meyer want, anyway?
Meyer wanted to know if Mr. Laughton recognized either of these blankets.
Mr. Laughton certainly did.
“Those blankets belong to my shelter,” he said.
They were talking in Laughton’s jerry-built office at the rear of the old brick building on Temple Street. There was a wooden desk in the office and a wooden coatrack and two wooden chairs. One wall of the office had a plate-glass panel that started at about waist high and overlooked the armory’s drill floor, furnished now with hundreds of cots crammed head to toe from brick wall to brick wall. At the foot of each cot was a khaki-colored blanket identical to the ones Meyer had placed on Laughton’s desk.
“Where’d you get these?” Laughton asked.
Meyer told him where he’d got them.