by Ed McBain
“Ah-ha!” Donner said. “Now you’re talkin, man. That’s hooker turf, the King area. Lots of events there, lots of white men on the town uptown, lookin for bars, lookin for black pussy, spic pussy, now you’re talkin. Let me go on the earie.”
“I’m eager to find this broad,” Ollie said.
“How much are we talkin here?” Donner asked. “You tell me the Gucci was a two-bit transaction…”
“I’m thinking a C-note if you find her for me.”
“You’re thinking small, dad. This is the twenty-first century.”
“And Castleview is still a penitentiary,” Ollie said.
“Oh dear, don’t threaten me, dad.”
“It’s all I know how to do,” Ollie said, and grinned like a barracuda.
“Make it a deuce,” Donner said.
“Let’s see what you come up with.”
“Emmy,” Donner said. “Let’s see.”
AT A QUARTERto four that Thursday afternoon, just as the night shift was gathering before the muster desk downstairs, preparing to relieve on post at fourP .M., and just as detectives were beginning to wend their separate ways up the iron-runged stairway that led to the second-floor squadroom, Pamela Henderson stopped at the desk and asked Sergeant Murchison where she could find a Detective Steve Carella. Murchison picked up a phone, pushed a button on it, said a few words into the receiver, and then told her to go up the steps there to the second floor and down the corridor.
Carella was waiting inside the slatted wooden railing to greet her. He opened the gate, led her in, and offered her a chair at his desk.
Still wearing black—her husband had been dead only four days, after all—she looked somehow taller than she had in jeans and a turtleneck, perhaps because she was wearing high-heeled pumps with the black skirt and jacket. She sat, crossed her legs, and said, “Is this an inconvenient time? I sense a changing of the guard.”
“Not at all,” Carella said. “I had some papers to file, anyway.”
Pamela looked at him and nodded.
He sensed that she didn’t quite trust him.
He said, “Really, I’m in no hurry. How can I help you?”
Still, she hesitated.
“Really,” he said again.
She sighed heavily. Nodded again.
“I found some letters,” she said.
He glanced, he hoped surreptitiously, at the clock on the wall, and he thought, What this case doesn’t need at a quarter to four in the afternoon, ten to four already, after a long hard day when I’m ready to pack it in and go home to my wife and family, what this case definitely does not need is more complications, this case already has enough complications.
Ollie had called him earlier to tell him the gun was found on the wrong side of the hall. Now here was the murdered man’s wife telling him she’d found some letters, which he somehow suspected were not letters from her mother.
“Letters from whom?” he asked.
“Someone named Carrie.”
“As in Grant?”
“No, as in Stephen King.”
“A woman.”
“Yes. A woman.”
Landing on the word heavily. A woman. Yes.
“To whom were these letters addressed, Mrs. Henderson?”
“To my husband,” she said.
Carella pulled on the white cotton gloves.
THERE WERE THREEletters in all.
All of them written in a delicate hand, in purple ink on pale lavender writing paper. The stationery was obviously expensive, embossed with the monogrammed initials JSH. If there had been matching envelopes to go with the single sheet of paper in each envelope, they had not been used for these mailings. Instead, Carrie—for such was how she’d signed her name—had used plain white envelopes she could have bought in any variety store for ten cents apiece. In her same delicate handwriting, she had addressed the letters to Councilman Lester Henderson at his office downtown. Hand-lettered across the face of each envelope were the councilman’s name and address and the wordsPERSONAL AND PRIVATE . The envelopes had been postmarked at a post office in an area called Laughton’s Market, one of the city’s better neighborhoods.
The first letter read:
My darling Lester:
I can’t believe this is really happening! Will we really be alone together for two full nights? Will you really not have to watch a clock or catch a taxi? Will I be able to sleep in your arms all night long, wake up in your arms the next morning, linger in your arms, make love to you as often as I like, spoil you to within an inch of your life? Will this really happen this coming weekend? I can’t believe it. I’m afraid if I pinch myself, I’ll wake up. Hurry to me, my darling, hurry, hurry, hurry.
Carrie
The second letter read:
My darling Lester:
When you receive this, it will be Tuesday. On Saturday morning I’ll be boarding an airplane that will fly me to the Raleigh Hotel in a city I’ve never visited, there to await the arrival of the man I love so very much. I cannot wait, I simply cannot wait. I love you to death, I adore you.
Carrie
Carella slipped the letters back into their envelopes.
“You know,” he said, “maybe it would be better if I…”
“I’ve read them all,” Pamela said. “Don’t worry about me. I’m beyond shock.”
He nodded, and opened the third envelope.
My darling Lester:
It will be Friday when you receive this. Tomorrow morning, I will take a taxi to the airport, and fly into your waiting arms. I love you, my darling, I adore you, I am completely and hopelessly madly in love with you, am I gushing? So allow me to gush. I’m nineteen, I’m entitled.
Carrie
“So, uh, where’d you find these?” Carella asked, folding the last letter, sliding it back into its envelope, busying himself with the task, not looking at Lester Henderson’s widow, who sat beside the desk in monumental silence.
“In his study. At the back of a drawer in his desk.”
“When was this?”
“This morning.”
He didn’t ask what she was doing in his desk. A man dies, you go through his things. Death robs everyone of privacy. Death has no respect for secrets. If you’re fucking a nineteen-year-old girl, don’t leave her letters around. Death will uncover them.
“Does the name mean anything to you?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“You don’t know anyone named Carrie?”
“No one.”
“How about the monogram. JSH. Do those initials ring a bell?”
“No.”
“They don’t seem to match the name ‘Carrie.’”
“No, they don’t.”
“Did you suspect any of this?”
“No.”
“Any idea your husband was…uh…?”
“No. This came as a total surprise.”
“Any…uh…past history of…uh…”
“Never. As far as I knew, he was completely faithful to me.”
“May I keep these letters?”
“Of course. That’s why I brought them here. Won’t there be fingerprints on them or something?”
“Well, yours certainly, and your husband’s. And, yes, maybe the girl’s, too.”
Nineteen. He guessed that was a girl. He guessed that was still a girl.
“If you’ll let us take your prints before you go,” he said. “For comparison.”
“Yes, of course.”
“We have your husband’s,” he said. He did not mention that cadavers were routinely printed at the morgue. He did not mention that even if they recovered some good prints for the girl, chances of finding anything on her in the system were exceedingly slim. Nineteen years old? Had she ever been in the armed services? Had she ever held a government job? What was the likelihood that a nineteen-year-old girl who wrote letters on expensive monogrammed stationery had ever been arrested for anything? Still, you went through the paces, and sometimes you
got lucky.
“Will you let me know if you learn anything?”
“I’ll call you right away,” he said.
“I hate him for this,” she said out of the blue.
THE BAR TWO BLOCKSfrom the Eighty-seventh Precinct station house was called Shanahan’s. At four-thirty that afternoon, forty-five minutes after the day watch was relieved, Eileen Burke and Andy Parker met there with Francisco Palacios, who was not too terribly tickled to be seen in a place where so many cops went for drinks after work. The Gaucho liked to keep a low profile.
On the other hand, if he was involved in the business of supplying information to the police, would he be doing it so blatantly out in the open? Mindful of the fact that another person in his profession—an informer named Danny Gimp—had been killed in a public place while sharing coffee and chocolate eclairs with yet another detective from the Eight-Seven, Palacios kept a roving eye on the people coming in and out of Shanahan’s, lest he, too, be cold-cocked for no reason whatsoever.
He was here this evening to tell Parker and Eileen what he had learned about the drug deal that would go down this Tuesday at midnight. The date and the time hadn’t changed. Neither had the names of the principal players. But he was now able to give them with some degree of certainty the exact location of the impending transaction.
“The thing is she’s being very careful, this woman,” he said. “I think she got burned once before, really bad, by some sharpies up from Miami, so she wants to make sure nobody does it to her again. Five times already, she changed the location. It’s always a basement, she likes to do business in basements cause nobody can get in and out too fast if they have to run up and down steps. When the Miami guys took her, it was on a rooftop. She figured a rooftop would be safe,verdad? Instead, she handed over the crack and next thing you know she’s looking at half a dozen Glocks and the Miami guys are jumping over to the next roof, and it’s so long, see you on the beach, honey. Ever since then, it’s basements, does anybody want another beer?”
“I’m fine,” Eileen said.
“I could use one,” Parker said.
Palacios signaled to the waiter, who slouched over to the table and took their order for two fresh brews. A pair of heavy-looking guys came through the front door, and Palacios gave them the once-over, but they turned out to be two off-duty cops who went over to join some buddies at another table. Eileen was still trying to find out a little bit more about this mysterious deal that was about to happen in some mysterious basement.
“Who are the players here?” she asked. “You say they haven’t changed, so who are they?”
“I think you had traffic before with the lady selling the crack,” Palacios said. “You remember a black woman named Rosita Washington, she’s half-Spanish?”
Eileen shook her head. “Who are the buyers?”
“Three guys who are total amateurs,” Palacios said. “They’re the ones who are dangerous. Ah,gracias, señor, ” he said to the waiter, and immediately picked up his beer mug. Tilting it in Eileen’s direction, he said, “To the beautiful lady,” and drank. Eileen acknowledged the toast dead-panned. “The three of them think all black people are stupid,” Palacios said, “but if they try to rip off Rosie Washington, there’s gonna be real trouble, I can tell you.”
“All black peopleare stupid,” Parker said, not for nothing was he a close friend of Ollie Weeks.
“Not as stupid as these three jerks, believe me,” Palacios said. “You heard of The Three Stooges? Shake hands with these guys. I don’t know how they raised the three hundred thou they need for the deal,if they raised it. But I can tell you, if they go in empty-handed they’re dead on the platter. Rosie ain’t gonna get stiffed a second time.”
“Who are they?” Eileen asked.
“Three jackasses named Harry Curtis, Constantine Skevopoulos, and Lonnie Doyle. You know them?”
“No,” Parker said.
“No,” Eileen said.
“Grifters from the year one. Which is why I think they might try to rip off Rosie, in which case run for cover,niños, run for cover. Thing you should do, you want my advice, is go down the basement, yell ‘Cops, freeze!’ and bust all of them before any shooting starts. You nail Rosie for possession of the coke, and you nail the three dopes for tryin’a buy it, is my advice.”
“Thanks,” Parker said drily.
“Where is this basement?” Eileen asked.
“3211 Culver. Between Tenth and Eleventh.”
“I gotta pee,” Parker said, and rose, and headed for the men’s room. One of the heavy-looking guys who’d come in earlier walked over to the juke box, put some coins in it, and pushed some buttons. Sinatra came out singing “It Was a Very Good Year.” You didn’t hear Sinatra too often these days. Eileen missed him. She sat listening, swaying in time with the music. He was singing now about city girls who lived up the stairs.
“Do you like to dance?” Palacios asked.
“Yes, I like to dance,” she said.
“You want to come dancing with me sometime?”
She looked at him.
“No, I don’t think so,” she said.
“Why not? I’m a very good dancer.”
“I don’t doubt it, Cowboy.”
“So?”
“You also have four wives.”
“Had,”Palacios said. “Past tense. Had. I’m divorced now. Four times.”
“Terrific recommendation,” Eileen said.
“Come on, we go dancing one night.”
“Cowboy, we’ve got enough on you to send you away for twenty years.”
“So? Meanwhile, we go dancing.”
“I’m a cop,” Eileen said.
“So? Cops don’t dance?”
“Let it go, Cowboy.”
“I’ll ask you again.”
She looked at him another time. She was thinking he was handsome as hell, and she hadn’t been to bed with anyone for the past six months now, and she’d heard Hispanic lovers were the cat’s ass, so why not go dancing one night? She was also thinking you don’t get involved with guys on the other side of the law, this man would be doing time at Castleview if we hadn’t let him walk in exchange for his services. So thanks, Cowboy, she thought.
“Thanks, Cowboy,” she said, “but no.”
Parker was back.
“Lay it out for me one more time,” he told Palacios.
OH SHIT, Suzie thought, it’s about to get complicated again.
Just when I dared hope things would stay clear and simple forever, Harry brings his dumb-ass friends home with him again, and they’re sitting there in the living room playing cards at eight o’clock at night, and talking about their next brilliant scheme to make a million dollars without having to work for it.
The last time they had a great idea was four weeks ago, when they decided to stick up a floating crap game in Diamondback. Twelve humongous black guys in the game, any one of them could’ve broken these three wimps in half without lifting a finger, they decide to go stick it up. What happened was it was raining that night, and the game got called off, which was lucky for her husband and his pals, or there would’ve been three broken heads around here. So now they were planning another one of their grand capers, but maybe—if they got lucky again—it would rain again and save them a lot of heartache and grief.
She sometimes wondered why she stayed married to Harry Curtis. Sometimes wondered, in fact, why she’d married him in the first place. Well, she always did go for big men. Suzie Q, they used to call her when she was in her teens—well, some of her friends still called her that. Short for Suzie Quinn. Now she was Susan Q. Curtis, twenty-three years old and married to a man who was twice her age and big all over, including his ideas.
The thing of it was that Harry Curtis thought all black people were stupid, and all you had to do was trick them out of their money, usually by sticking a gun in their face. It really was a good thing him and his bright cronies hadn’t held up that crap game because from what Luella tol
d her down at the beauty parlor where she worked, the people in that game were truly Diamondback “gangstas,” Luella’s word, a bit of information her brilliant husband shrugged off when she later told him about it.
It was Suzie herself who had casually mentioned the time and location of the crap game to Harry, who in turn had mentioned it to his two brainy buddies, who had decided that here was a score worthy of their combined talents. Never mind she also later mentioned the guys in the game were gangstas, that didn’t scare them off, oh no, they were three big macho men with three big pistolas, and they weren’t afraid of no niggers up there in Diamondback. Lucky thing it rained that night. Though now Suzie wondered what kind of gangstas these guys could’ve been if they’d got scared off of their game by a little rain. Well, a lot of rain.
She could hear their voices coming from the other room.
“Cocaine,” one of them was saying. Lonnie. Her husband’s oldest friend. Went to high school together, went to jail together, but that was another story. And besides, it was only for a year and a half after all was said and done. And they’d met some nice people there.
“See your five and raise you five,” her husband said.
“High grade snow,” Lonnie said.
“What does that make it?”
This from Constantine, the one with the dopey grin and the fidgety shoulders. Constantine in motion was a wondrous thing to behold.
“It makes it a ten-dollar raise,” Harry said.
“Too steep for me,” Constantine said.
“Asking price, three hundred thou,” Lonnie said. “Call.”
“So it’s just you and me, Lon,” Harry said, and chuckled. She guessed maybe that was one of the reasons she married him. That deep low chuckle of his. And also his size, of course.
“Where we gonna get three hundred thou?” Constantine asked. She could visualize his shoulders twitching. As if he was trying to shake off bugs.
“We don’t hafta get it,” Lonnie said.
“Beat kings full,” her husband said.
“Four deuces, sport,” Lonnie said.
“Then how we gonna buy the coke?” Constantine asked.
“Weain’t gonna buy it,” Lonnie said. “We gonnasteal it.”