Ed McBain_87th Precinct 48

by Nocturne

  Richard the First knew the girl’s handbag had to be in this apartment someplace. It didn’t have legs, did it? She herself had carried it up here, and they themselves had carried her out of here without it. So where the hell was it? He was eager to find that bag because it contained traveler’s checks with their signatures on them, and these could all too easily link them to the dead girl, and by extension the man they’d drowned and the one whose throat they’d slit.

  In his mind, the three Richards had acted and were still acting in concert. No longer was it he alone who’d slit the second black man’s throat. Now it was they who’d done it. Just as it was they who were now looking for the patent-leather bag that would irrevocably tie them to the girl who’d died by accident because she’d been too reticent to tell them she was having difficulty breathing. An asthmatic shouldn’t have been in her profession, anyway, the things unfeeling men asked her to do with her mouth.

  Neither of the other two Richards quite shared the first Richard’s feelings about the second murder. The first murder, of course, was drowning black Richard in the tub, a necessity. The girl had not been murdered; you couldn’t count her as a murder victim. All of them firmly believed the girl had died by accident. However, both the second Richard and the third Richard knew damn well that neither of them had slit the black stranger’s throat, whoever he may have been and no longer was. Richard the First was solely responsible for that little bit of mayhem. So whereas they dutifully turned that apartment upside down, trying to find that elusive handbag, they did so only because they didn’t want the dead girl to come back to haunt them. And though neither of them would dare speak such a blasphemy aloud, if push ever came to shove they were quite willing to throw old Lion-Heart here to the lions.

  At the end of a half hour’s search, they still had not found the bag.

  It was now twenty minutes to two.

  “Where would you be if you were a red patent-leather handbag?” Richard the First asked.

  “Where indeed?” Richard the Second asked.

  Richard the Third stood in the center of the room, scratching his ass and thinking. “Let’s reconstruct it minute by minute,” he said. “From when we first met her on the street to when we carried her out of here.”

  “Oh yes, let’s do that,” Richard the Second said sarcastically. “Two dead Negroes in the bathroom, with more of their friends possibly coming to visit, we have all the time in the world.”

  Richard the First hadn’t heard anyone using the word “Negroes” in a very long time.

  “She definitely had that bag in her hand when she stepped out of the taxi,” he said.”

  “She had it here in this apartment, too,” Richard the Third said. “She put the traveler’s checks and the jumbos in it. I saw her do that with my own eyes.”

  “Okay, so where did she put it when we started making love?”

  Richard the Second’s use of this euphemism startled the other two. He saw their surprised looks and shrugged.

  “Does anyone remember?”

  No one remembered.

  So they started searching the apartment yet another time.

  Meyer and Kling were experienced at searching apartments. They knew where people hid money and jewelry. Lots of old people, they didn’t trust banks. Suppose you fell down in the bathtub and hurt yourself and nobody found you till you starved to death and were all skin and bones, how could you go to the bank to take your money out? You couldn’t, was the answer. Also, if you were an old person and you were squirreling away the bucks to give to your grandchildren, you didn’t want a bank account because then there was a record, and Uncle Sam would come in and take almost all of it in inheritance taxes. So what lots of old people did, they kept their money or their jewelry in various hiding places.

  Ice cube trays were a favorite. Everybody figured no thief would ever dream of looking for gems in a tray of frozen ice cubes. Except that some cheap writer of detective stories had written a book some time back in which a cheap thief froze diamonds inside ice cubes and now everybody in the world knew about it, including other cheap thieves. Meyer and Kling were not thieves, cheap or otherwise, but they did know about the ice cube ploy. So hiding your diamonds in an ice cube tray was a ridiculous thing to do since this was where most burglars looked first thing. Open the fridge door, check out the freezer compartment, there you are, you little darlings!

  Another favorite hiding place was inside the bottom rail of a venetian blind, which was weighted, and which had caps on either end of it. You could remove these end caps and slide wristwatches or folded bills into the hollow rail. This worked very nicely, except that every thief in the world knew about it. They also knew that people hid jewelry or money inside the bag on a vacuum cleaner, or at the bottom of a toilet tank, or inside the globe of a ceiling light fixture from which the bulbs had been removed so if anybody threw the switch you wouldn’t see the outline of a necklace up there under the glass.

  Meyer and Kling tried all of these favorite hiding places.

  And found nothing.

  So they looked under the mattress.

  There was nothing there, either.

  The envelope looked as if it had been through the Crimean War. Perhaps Georgie and Tony shouldn’t have opened the envelope, but then again they had been entrusted with the key to locker number 136 at the Rendell Road Bus Terminal, and if Priscilla hadn’t wanted them to examine whatever they found in that locker, she should have specifically said so. Besides, the envelope hadn’t been sealed. It was just a thick yellowing envelope with the word Priscilla written across the front of it, a bulging envelope with a rubber band around it, holding the flap closed.

  There was money in the envelope.

  Hundred-dollar bills.

  Exactly a thousand of them.

  Georgie and Tony knew because they took the envelope into the men’s room to count the bills.

  A thousand hundred-dollar bills.

  Which on their block came to a hundred thousand dollars in cold hard cash.

  There was also a letter in the envelope.

  This didn’t interest them as much as the money did, but they read it, anyway, though not in the men’s room.

  It was Richard the Third who found the bag.

  “Bingo!” he yelled.

  Where he found the bag was under black Richard’s mattress, the dope. Did he think they were so dumb they wouldn’t look under the mattress, where for Christ’s sake everybody in the entire world hid things? What he must have done, they figured, was slide it in between the mattress and the bedsprings while they were ripping off the sheets to wrap her in.

  Nobody had yet touched the bag.

  Richard the Third was still standing beside the bed with his parka on because it was freezing cold in this part of the city unless you turned on a kerosene heater or a coal stove, grinning from ear to freckle-faced ear, holding up the corner of the mattress to reveal the red patent-leather bag nestled there all shiny and flat.

  Richard the Second took a pair of gloves from the pocket of his parka and pulled them on with all the aplomb of a surgeon about to perform brain surgery. Gingerly, he lifted the bag from where it rested on the bedsprings. He unsnapped the flap, opened the bag, and reached into it.

  There was nineteen hundred dollars in cash in the bag.

  Plus the ten jumbo vials black Richard had paid the girl for his piece of the action.

  Plus nine hundred dollars in traveler’s checks respectively signed Richard Hopper, Richard Weinstock, and Richard O’Connor. They each and separately pocketed the checks at once, and then debated whether or not to leave all the money and crack in the bag, or to take some of it for all the trouble they’d gone through. It was Richard the First who suggested that a good way to extricate themselves entirely was to link the dead girl to the two dead men. If they left her handbag in the bathroom, the presence of such a large amount of cash, not to mention the sizable stash of crack, would lend credibility to the police theory that the
hooker had been killed in a robbery. Or what he hoped would be the police theory.

  All three of them went into the bathroom.

  Jamal, whose name they didn’t yet know, was still lying on his back on the floor with his throat slit. He had stopped bleeding. Black Richard was lying on the bottom of the tub. Richard the Second suggested that they leave the bag open on the floor, with a lot of hundred-dollar bills and a few jumbo vials spread on the tiles, as if the two of them had been fighting over it before they killed each other.

  Richard the Third looked puzzled.

  “What is it?” Richard the First asked.

  “What’s the scenario here?”

  “Scenario?”

  “Yes, how did this happen?”

  “I see his point,” Richard the Second said.

  “What point? They were fighting over the bag. They killed each other.”

  “How can a person stab another person while that person is drowning him?”

  “That’s not how it happened.”

  “Then how did it happen?”

  Richard the First thought this over for a moment.

  “They were fighting over the bag,” he said again.

  The other two waited.

  “Richard stabbed him, whoever he is.”

  They still waited.

  “Then he got in the tub so he could wash off the blood.”

  “With his clothes on?”

  “He was drunk,” Richard the First said. “That’s why he got in the tub with all his clothes on. In fact, that’s how he drowned. He was trying to wash himself, but he fell in the tub. He was drunk!”

  He looked at the other two expectantly.

  “Sounds good to me,” Richard the Second said.

  “Just might fly,” Richard the Third said.

  Grinning, Richard the First winked at himself in the mirror over the bathroom sink.

  It was snowing when they left the apartment for the bus terminal.

  The time was ten minutes past two.

  8

  Detective/First Grade Oliver Weeks—known far and wide, but particularly wide, as Fat Ollie Weeks, though never to his face—got into the act because the two dead bodies were found in an apartment in the Eighty-eighth Precinct, which happened to be his bailiwick.

  The discovery was made by a woman who lived on Richard Cooper’s floor, who happened to be passing by his door when she saw it standing wide open. She called in to him, and then stepped inside the apartment and saw a mess there, clothes thrown all over every which way, drawers pulled out, and figured somebody’s been in there and ripped him off, so she went downstairs to tell the super. This was at seventeen minutes past five, about a half hour after Ollie and his team had relieved the day watch. The super went upstairs with her and found the two bodies in the bathroom and ran right down again to dial Nine-One-One. The responding blues radioed the precinct with a double DOA and Ollie and an Eight-Eight detective named Wilbur Sloat, who sounded black but who was actually a tall, thin blond man with a scraggly blond mustache, rode over there to Ainsley and North Eleventh. They got there at a quarter to six.

  Since Ollie was a bigot in the truest sense of the word—that is to say, he hated everyone—he was naturally tickled to death to see two of the precinct’s more contemptible black specimens dead by their own hands. For such was what it appeared to be at first glance.

  “Make either one of them?” Sloat asked.

  He was a new detective, and he affected mannerisms and speech he heard on cop television shows. Ollie would have liked it better if Sloat had stayed back in the squadroom, answering telephones and picking his nose. Ollie was a loner. He preferred being a loner. That way, you didn’t have to deal with assholes all the time.

  The one with his throat slit, he recognized at once as a small-time pimp named Jamal “The Jackal” Stone, formerly known as Jackson Stone before he picked himself a name he thought sounded African. Jamal, my ass. Ollie had recently read in Newsweek magazine that forty-four percent of all persons of color in America preferred being called “black,” whereas only twenty-eight percent liked to be called “African-American.” So why did all these niggers (Ollie’s own choice of appellation by a personal margin of one hundred percent) give themselves African names and run around celebrating African holidays and wearing fezzes and robes, what the hell was it?

  The way Ollie looked at it, a simple fact of American life was that one out of every three black males was currently enmeshed in the criminal justice system. That meant that thirty-three and a third percent of the black male population was either in jail, on parole, or awaiting trial. So, yeah, if a white guy crossed the street when he saw three black men approaching him, it was because one of them might be Johnnie Cochran, sure, and another might be Chris Darden, okay, but the third one might be O. J. Simpson.

  So here were two dead black men in a bathroom.

  Big surprise.

  The way Ollie saw it, there were two institutions that should be reinstated all over the world. One of them was dictatorship and the other was slavery.

  He told Sloat who the one on the floor was.

  “Got himself juked real good,” Sloat said.

  Juked, Ollie thought. Jesus.

  The one in the tub he didn’t recognize under all that water, which distorted his good looks. But when the M.E. had him pulled out of the tub so he could examine him, Ollie pegged him at once, an ugly two-bit drug dealer named Richard Cooper, who once broke both a man’s legs for calling him Richie. The M.E. wouldn’t even speculate that the cause of death was drowning, having been burned on a similar call years ago where it turned out a man had been shot before someone shoved his head facedown in a toilet bowl. The one on the floor had definitely been slashed, though, so the M.E. had no trouble determining that the cause of death was severance of the carotid artery.

  The two Homicide detectives working the night shift were called Flaherty and Flanagan. Ollie told them he knew both of the victims, one of them by his ugly face, the other by his ugly reputation. Sloat suggested that perhaps they’d got into a fight over the handbag there on the floor, one thing leading to another, and so on and so forth, the same old story.

  Same old story, Ollie thought. Fuckin dope’s been a detective hardly three months, he’s talkin about the same old story.

  “A clutch,” Flaherty said.

  “Well, I don’t know whether they were grabbing each other or not,” Sloat said. “I’m only suggesting they may have done each other.”

  Done each other, Ollie thought.

  “The bag, I mean,” Flaherty said. “A clutch.”

  “It’s called a clutch,” Flanagan said.

  “The type of bag,” Flaherty said.

  “A clutch bag.”

  “A handbag without handles.”

  “What’s that got to do with the price of fish?” Ollie asked impatiently.

  “For the sake of accuracy,” Flaherty said. “In your report. You should call it a clutch bag.”

  “A red patent-leather clutch handbag,” Flanagan said.

  Most Homicide Division detectives favored wearing black, the color of mourning, the color of death. But black suited these two more than it did many of their colleagues. Tall and thin, with pale features and slender waxen hands, the two resembled vampires who had wandered in out of the snowy cold, the shoulders of their black coats damp, their eyes a watery blue, their lips bloodless, their shoes a sodden black. They were both wearing white woolen mufflers, a limp sartorial touch.

  “How much money is that on the floor?” Flanagan asked.

  “Five C-notes,” Sloat said.

  C-notes, Ollie thought.

  “Don’t forget the three jumbo vials,” Flaherty said.

  “Hey, you!” Ollie yelled to one of the technicians. “Okay to look in this bag now? This clutch bag? This red patent-leather clutch handbag?”

  The technician turned off his vacuum cleaner, walked over to where they were standing, and began dusting the bag for
latents. The detectives wandered around the apartment, waiting for him to finish.

  “No sheets on the bed, you notice that?” Flaherty said.

  “What do these people know about sheets?” Ollie said. “You think they have sheets in Africa? In Africa they sleep in huts with mud floors, they have flies in their fuckin eyes day and night, they drink goat’s milk with blood in it, what the fuck do they know about sheets?”

  “This ain’t Africa,” Flanagan said.

  “And there still ain’t no sheets on the bed,” Flaherty said.

  “Looks like somebody really tossed the place,” Flanagan said, observing the clothes strewn everywhere, the open dresser drawers and kitchen cabinets, the overturned trash basket.

  “Maybe it was an interrupted crib job,” Sloat suggested.

  “Jamal’s a fuckin pimp,” Ollie said. “What does he know about burglaries?”

  “Which one is Jamal?”

  “The one with his tonsils showing.”

  “Maybe he was the one being burglarized. Maybe he walked in and found the other guy …”

  “No, the mailbox says Cooper. Who don’t like to be called Richie. You gonna take all day with that fuckin clutch bag?” Ollie yelled to the technician.

  “You can have it now,” the technician said, handing it to him.

  “What’d you get?”

  “Some good ones. Patent’s a good surface.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “Smaller ones may be female. The others, who knows?”

  “When can I have something?”

  “Later today?”

  “How much later? I go home at midnight.”

  “A quarter to midnight,” Sloat amended.

  “Soon as we process them,” the technician said.

  “Run them through Records at the same time, okay?” Ollie said. “See if we come up roses.”

  “Sure.”

  “So what time?”

  “What’s the rush? They’re not going anywhere,” he said, and glanced toward the open bathroom door, where the police photographer was taking his Polaroids.