Ed McBain_87th Precinct 48

by Nocturne

  “I know she had money,” she said out loud.

  The boys turned to look at her. Bookends in black silk. The sheet lowered to their waists, Priscilla sitting there naked, breasts exposed. The boys made sly eye contact across her.

  “Your grandmother, you mean?” Georgie asked.

  Priscilla nodded. “Otherwise, why’d she keep saying I’d be taken care of?”

  “How about taking care of this a little?” Tony asked, and glanced down at the sheet.

  “She the one lived in the rat hole on Lincoln Street?” Georgie asked.

  “Take care of this a little,” Tony said, impressed by his earlier witty remark.

  “She meant when she died,” Priscilla said. “I’d be taken care of when she died.”

  “How?” Georgie said. “She didn’t have a pot to piss in.”

  “I don’t know how. But she said she’d take care of me.”

  “Take care of this a little,” Tony said again.

  “Maybe she had a bank account,” Priscilla suggested.

  “Maybe she left a will,” Georgie said.

  “Who knows?”

  “Maybe she left you millions.”

  “Who knows?”

  Tony was thinking these two had just escalated an old lady’s empty pisspot into a fortune. “There are two old people in a nursing home,” he said. “The man’s ninety-two, the woman’s ninety. They start a relationship. What they do, he goes into her room, and gets in bed with her, and they watch television together with his penis in her hand. That’s the extent of the relationship. She holds his penis in her hand while they watch television.”

  “Don’t you ever think of anything else?” Priscilla asked.

  “No, wait, this is a good one. The woman is passing her girlfriend’s room one night—she’s ninety years old, too, the girlfriend—and lo and behold, what does she see? Her man is in bed with the girlfriend. They’re watching television, she’s holding his penis in her hand. The woman is outraged. ‘How can you do this to me?’ she wants to know. ‘Is she prettier than I am? Is she smarter than I am? What has she got that I haven’t got?’The guy answers, ‘Parkinson’s.’ ”

  “That’s sick,” Priscilla said, laughing.

  “But funny,” Tony said, laughing with her.

  “I don’t get it,” Georgie said.

  “Parkinson’s,” Tony explained.

  “Yeah, Parkinson’s, Parkinson’s, I still don’t get it.”

  “You shake,” Priscilla said.

  “What?”

  “When you have Parkinson’s.”

  “She’s jacking him off,” Tony explained.

  “So what was the other one doing?”

  “Just holding him in her hand.”

  “I thought she was jacking him off, too.”

  “No, she was just holding him in her hand,” Tony said, and looked across at Priscilla. “Which is little enough to ask,” he suggested pointedly.

  “I’ll bet all that money is still in her apartment,” Priscilla said.

  At that moment, a knock sounded on the door to the suite.

  Jamal knew something the cops didn’t know and that was where Yolande had been at what time. She had called him around five-thirty in the morning, told him she was just leaving the Stardust and would be home soon as she caught a cab. He’d asked her what the take was and she said close to two large, and he told her to hurry on home, baby, Carlyle’s already here, we’ll wait up for you. So from the Stardust to the alley on St. Sab’s and First would’ve taken five, ten minutes at most, which would’ve put her uptown at twenty to six, a quarter to six, depending on how long it took her to find a taxi. Never mind the time in the corner of the picture: 07:22:03. All Jamal knew was that Yolande had been there almost an hour and a half before that. But who’d been there with her?

  Jamal knew the nighttime city.

  He knew the people who frequented the night.

  He kissed Carlyle goodbye and went out into the glare of a cold winter morning.

  He didn’t have to go very far.

  Richard the First had bought six bottles of Dom Pérignon, and he and all the other Richards had already consumed three of them by eleven-ten that morning. Or at least that’s what black Richard thought. What he didn’t know was that the other three Richards weren’t drinking at all, but were instead laughing it up while one or the other of them took a walk to the bathroom, back and forth, emptying glass after glass of champagne behind his back, dumping down the toilet bubbly that had cost $107.99 a fifth.

  The idea was to get Richard drunk.

  The idea was to drown him.

  What the bellhop delivered to Priscilla’s suite was a plain white envelope with her name written on the front of it. She recognized her grandmother’s frail handwriting at once, tipped the bellhop a dollar, and immediately tore open the flap of the envelope.

  A key was inside the envelope.

  The accompanying note, in her grandmother’s hand, read:

  My darling Priscilla,

  Go to looker number 136 at the Rendell Road

  Bus Terminal.

  Your Loving grandmother,

  Svetlana.

  Priscilla went to the phone, picked up the receiver, and dialed the front desk.

  “This is Priscilla Stetson,” she told an assistant manager. “A letter was just delivered to me?”

  “Yes, Miss Stetson?”

  “Can you tell me who left it at the desk?”

  “A tall blond man.”

  “Did he give you his name?”

  “No, he just said to be certain it was sent up to your suite. Sort of.”

  “What do you mean sort of.”

  “Well, he had a very heavy accent.”

  “What kind of accent?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Thank you,” Priscilla said, and hung up.

  “What the hell is this?” she asked aloud. “A spy movie?”

  The white man who approached Jamal the moment he came out of his building was named Curly Joe Simms, and he ran book up here in Diamondback. Jamal knew him because every now and then he would exchange a girl for a horse, so to speak, asking Curly Joe to lay two bills on a nag as an even swap for an hour with one of his girls. Jamal never ran more than two girls at any time. And nobody underage, thanks. He knew the law escalated from a class-A mis to a class-D felony if a person promoted “prostitution activity by two or more prostitutes” or “profited from prostitution of a person less than nineteen years old.” He figured a judge might go easier on him if he didn’t have say, five, six girls in his stable, ha ha. Anyway, even two girls were a handful, and to tell the truth, he got tired of them pretty soon and was always on the lookout for fresh talent.

  Curly Joe was bald, of course, and he was wearing earmuffs on this frighteningly cold morning, his hands in the pockets of a brown woolen coat buttoned over a green muffler, his eyes watery, his nose red. He had not been waiting for Jamal, but when he spotted him coming out of his building, he walked right over.

  “Jahm,” he said. “It’s me.”

  Jamal recognized him at once, and figured he was looking for a piece of ass.

  “How you doin, man?” he said.

  “Good, how you been?”

  “I’m survivin,” Jamal said.

  “Cold as a fuckin witch’s tit, ain’t it?”

  “Cold,” Jamal agreed.

  “Was that your girl last night?” Curly Joe asked. “Got herself juked on St. Sab’s?”

  “Yeah,” Jamal said cautiously.

  “I thought I recognized her from that time.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What a shame, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’d she get all the way down there?”

  Jamal looked at him.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Cause I seen her up here not long before,” Curly Joe said.

  “What do you mean?” Jamal asked again.

  “Musta b
een six or so in the morning. I was in the diner havin a coffee. She got out of a taxi.”

  Jamal waited.

  “You know Richie Cooper?”

  “I know him,” Jamal said.

  “She went off with him and three young kids were pissing in the gutter. I seen them from the diner.”

  He had finally passed out, and they were dragging him into the bathroom where they had filled the tub with water. Not passed out entirely cold, but so sklonked he couldn’t walk or even stand, didn’t know what the hell was happening to him, just kept waving one arm in the air like a symphony conductor except that he was singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as they dragged him across the floor by the ankles. Something fell out of his pocket, the switchblade knife he’d threatened them with earlier tonight. Richard the First stooped to pick it up, jammed it in the pocket of his own jacket. He was sweating heavily. They were about to kill someone, but this had to be done. The girl had been an accident, but this was murder, but it had to be done. They all knew that. The three Richards were now one Richard acting in concert, dragging yet another Richard into the bathroom where the tub full of water waited.

  The water looked brownish, this city.

  Richard the Third was the strongest of them, he grabbed black Richard under the arms, while the other two each grabbed a leg. “One … two … three,” he said, and they hoisted him off the floor and swung him into the tub.

  “Hey!” he yelled.

  Too late.

  Jamal knew Richard as a dope dealer pulled down what, five, six bills a day, maybe a thou when business was good and the cotton was high. Used to be in trade together many a moon back, before Jamal tipped to the fact that dealing was a hazardous occupation whereas living off the sweat and toil of the female persuasion was less strenuous and nowhere near as dangerous.

  What puzzled Jamal now was what Yolande had been doing with Richard and three white dudes at six this morning, directly after she’d phoned to say she was on the way home. Had Richard decided to do a little freelance pimping on his own? In which case he had to be taught about territorial imperative and not stepping on a fellow entrepreneur’s toes. Or had Yolande and Richard decided to share an early morning breakfast with the three honkies? In which case, what had happened to the red patent-leather handbag containing—by Yolande’s own admission on the phone—close to two thousand dollars?

  Teaching Richard a lesson was no longer necessary now that Yolande was dead.

  Recovering that handbag with the money in it was of prime importance, however, and it was memory of that bag and anticipation of what was in that bag that propelled Jamal up the steps two at a time to Richard’s third-floor apartment.

  The time was three minutes to noon.

  He started fighting the minute they threw him in the tub. He didn’t know how to swim and the first thing that entered his mind was that he had somehow fallen into a swimming pool and was going to drown.

  Only the second half of this supposition was true.

  Jamal was thinking if Richard didn’t hand that bag over the minute he asked for it, he was going to beat him senseless.

  No cyanosis.

  No bruises on the galea of the scalp.

  No punctate hemorrhages in the conjunctivae.

  And now no dark red fluid blood in the heart, or excess serous fluid in the lungs.

  Ergo, no suffocation.

  Considering the way she had bled, Blaney wondered if the girl had died from a botched abortion.

  If the Pro-Lifers—a hypocritical designation if ever he’d heard one, and don’t send me letters, he thought—had scared her away from seeking help at any of the city’s legal clinics, perhaps she’d found a back-alley butcher to do the job or, worse yet, maybe she’d tried to do it herself. Too many desperate women attempted tearing the fetal membrane to release the amniotic fluid, thereby causing uterine contractions and expulsion of the fetus. They used whatever long thin object they could find, not just the coat hanger depicted in the Pro-Choice propaganda—and don’t you write to me, either, he thought—but also umbrella ribs and knitting needles.

  Blaney was a doctor.

  He felt the best and only place to perform a gynecological procedure was in a hospital.

  Period.

  By a trained physician.

  Period.

  But here in the silence of the morgue, there were no moral or religious judgments to be made, no political agendas to be met.

  There was only search and discovery.

  How had the girl died?

  Period.

  Blaney found no fetus, nor any fetal parts, in the girl’s genital tract or peritoneal cavity. Moreover, after he had measured the thickness, length and width of the uterus, the density of the uterine wall, the length of the uterine cavity, the circumference of both the internal and external vaginal openings, and the length of the lower part of the uterus, he found no indication that the girl had been pregnant before her death. Nor was there any indication that the vaginal vault had been accidentally punctured while she’d been seeking to abort herself, unsurprising in that there had been nothing to abort.

  What he found instead was a massive assault on the uterus by a sharp instrument with a saw-toothed edge. The instrument had passed through the cervix, wreaking havoc in its relentless wake, and had ripped through the abdominal cavity where it caused hugely significant damage; Blaney found eighteen inches of the small intestine severed and hanging in the uterus. The pain would have been excruciating. Hemorrhaging would have been profuse. The girl could have died within minutes.

  Which might have been a blessing, he guessed.

  Only one of the three Richards knew he had just for the fun of it inserted a bread knife with a serrated blade into the girl’s vagina. The other two didn’t know such a thing had happened although later they saw a lot of blood running down the inside of her legs and figured it was the black guy with his big shlong had hurt her somehow. Even the one who’d experimented with the knife didn’t realize this was what had killed her. He figured the bag over her head had done it, the girl’s stupidity in not informing them that the game had gone too far. She should have told them. No one had wanted her dead.

  Every one of them wanted black Richard dead.

  Black Richard was their link to the dead girl, who had died by accident, after all, and for whom they most certainly were not about to ruin their lives, all three of them accepted at Harvard? Hey.

  So as Richard thrashed around in the tub, trying to keep his head above water, the three other Richards kept forcing him back under again, time after time, avoiding his pummeling fists, trying not to get themselves all wet, trying just to for Christ’s sake drown him.

  They were succeeding in doing just that, Richard finally succumbing to their overpowering insistence, subsiding below the surface of the water, hands unclenching at last, a final thin bubble of air escaping his mouth and rising, rising, when a voice behind them yelled, “The fuck you doin?”

  They were each and separately, all three Richards, overwhelmed by a powerful feeling of déjà vu all over again, a black man standing there with outraged surprise on his face, only this time Richard the First had a knife, and he snapped the blade open at once because the last thing on earth they needed was yet another asshole linking them to a murder.

  Jamal remembered too late what his sacred mother had taught him about the streets of this here city, and that was Mind yo own business, son, an stay out of harm’s way. But this wasn’t a city street, this was the bathroom of a onetime business associate and sometime friend, and he was being drowned in a bathtub by three fuckin college boys, or whatever they were, and one of them had a knife in his fist and he was coming at Jamal with a tiny little smile on his face. It was then that Jamal knew this was serious. Man with a big mother knife in his hand and a smile on his face was dangerous. But, of course, all of this was too late, the memory of his mother’s admonition, the memory of smiles he had seen on the faces of other would-be assassins, of wh
om there were far too many in this part of the city in this part of the world.

  Smiling, Richard the First slashed Jamal’s jugular with a single swipe of the blade, and then dropped the knife as if it were on fire.

  The other two Richards went pale.

  And now it became the tale of a handbag.

  The door to Svetlana Dyalovich’s apartment was padlocked and a printed crime scene notice was tacked to it. But Meyer and Kling had obtained a key from the Property Clerk’s Office, and they marched right in.

  “What a dump,” Meyer said.

  “Smells, too,” Kling said.

  “Cat piss,” Meyer agreed.

  A pair of uniformed cops had already delivered the old lady’s dead cat to the Humane Society for cremation, but Meyer and Kling didn’t know that, and besides the apartment still stank. They did know that Carella and Hawes, and presumably the technicians from the Mobile Crime Unit, had conducted a thorough search of the apartment. But this morning Carella had suggested that they might have missed something—namely a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in cash—and another run-through might be a good idea.

  They both thought about that kind of money for a moment.

  A hundred and twenty-five thousand was about a third more than their combined annual salaries.

  It was a sobering thought.

  They began looking.

  There was a dead man in the bathtub and another dead man on the bathroom floor. One of them had been drowned, and the other’s throat had been slit. This almost had comic possibilities. Too bad the one bleeding all over the tile floor wasn’t named Richard, too. Then there would have been five Richards in the apartment instead of just four, three of whom were running around looking for a red patent-leather bag. The fourth one wasn’t doing any running at all. The fourth one would never do any running ever again. Nor swimming, either, which he’d never learned to do, anyway. None of the live Richards knew who the other dead man was, and they were squeamish about going through his pockets for identification. Slitting a man’s throat was one thing. Frisking him was quite another.