by Ed McBain
“The lady who lives next door to her.”
“Danny…are you sure?”
“I always check at the source, Steve. I called Saint Juke’s the minute I left the building. She’s dead, all right. They’re still waiting for somebody to come claim the body. Has she got any relatives?”
“A cousin,” Carella said blankly.
“Yeah,” Danny said, and paused. “Steve…you still want me to look for a .38? I mean…the lady was cut, Steve.”
“Yes, please keep looking, Danny,” Carella said. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
“See you,” Danny said, and hung up. Carella held the receiver a moment before replacing it on the cradle.
“What?” Meyer said.
Carella took a deep breath. He shook his head. Still wearing his overcoat, he walked to the lieutenant’s door and knocked on it.
“Come!” Byrnes shouted.
Carella took another deep breath.
The ceiling of A View from the Bridge was adorned with wineglasses, the foot of each glass captured between narrow wooden slats, the stem and bowl hanging downward to create an overall impression of a vast, wall-to-wall chandelier glistening with reflected light from the fireplace on one wall of the room. The fireplace wall was made of brick, and the surrounding walls were wood-paneled except for the one facing the river, a wide expanse of glass through which Kling could see the water beyond and the tugboats moving slowly through the rapidly gathering dusk. It was 5:30 P.M. by the clock over the bar facing the entrance doorway. He had made it downtown as quickly as possible, leaving Brown to contact the lieutenant with the startling news that Edelman’s safe had contained three hundred thousand smackeroos.
The wine bar, at this hour, was crowded with men and women who, presumably, worked in the myriad courthouses, municipal buildings, law offices, and brokerage firms that housed the judicial, economic, legal, and governmental power structure in this oldest part of the city. There was a pleasant conversational hum in the place, punctuated by relaxed laughter, a coziness encouraged by the blazing fire and the flickering glow of candles in ruby red holders on each of the round tables. Kling had never been to England, but he suspected that a pub in London might have looked and sounded exactly like this at the end of a long working day. He recognized an assistant DA he knew, said hello to him, and then looked for Eileen.
She was sitting at a table by the window, staring out over the river. The candle in its ruby holder cast flickering highlights into her hair, red reflecting red. Her chin was resting on the cupped palm of her hand. She looked pensive and contained, and for a moment he debated intruding on whatever mood she was sharing with the dark waters of the river beyond. He took off his coat, hung it on a wall rack just inside the door, and then moved across the room to where she was sitting. She turned away from the river as he moved toward her, as though sensing his approach.
“Hi,” he said, “I’m sorry I’m late, we ran into something.”
“I just got here myself,” she said.
He pulled out the chair opposite her.
“So,” she said. “You found it.”
“Right where you said it’d be.” He reached into his jacket pocket. “Let me give it to you before it gets lost again,” he said, and placed the shining circle of gold on the table between them. He noticed all at once that she was wearing the mate to it on her right ear. He watched as she lifted the earring from the table, reached up with her left hand to pull down the lobe of her left ear, and crossed her right hand over her body to fasten the earring. The gesture reminded him suddenly and painfully of the numberless times he had watched Augusta putting on or taking off earrings, the peculiarly female tilt of her head, her hair falling in an auburn cascade. Augusta had pierced ears; Eileen’s earrings were clip-ons.
“So,” she said, and smiled, and then suddenly looked at him with something like embarrassment on her face, as though she’d been caught in an intimate act when she thought she’d been unobserved. The smile faltered for an instant. She looked quickly across the room to where the waiter was taking an order at another table. “What do you prefer?” she asked. “White or red?”
“White’ll be fine,” he said. “But listen, I want to pay for this. There’s no need—”
“Absolutely out of the question,” she said. “After all the trouble I put you to?”
“It was no trouble at—”
“No way,” she said, and signaled to the waiter.
Kling fell silent. She looked across at him, studying his face, a policewoman suddenly alerted to something odd.
“This really does bother you, doesn’t it?” she said.
“No, no.”
“My paying, I mean.”
“Well…no,” he said, but he meant yes. One of the things that had been most troubling about his marriage was the fact that Augusta’s exorbitant salary had paid for most of the luxuries they’d enjoyed.
The waiter was standing by the table now, the wine list in his hand. Clued by the fact that she was the one who’d signaled him, and no longer surprised by women who did the ordering and picked up the tab, he extended the leather-covered folder to her. “Yes, miss?” he said.
“I believe the gentleman would like to do the ordering,” Eileen said. Kling looked at her. “He’ll want the check, too,” she added.
“Whatever turns you on,” the waiter said, and handed the list to Kling.
“I’m not so good at this,” he said.
“Neither am I,” she said.
“Were you thinking of a white or a red?” the waiter asked.
“A white,” Kling said.
“A dry white?”
“Well…sure.”
“May I suggest the Pouilly Fume, sir? It’s a nice dry white with a somewhat smoky taste.”
“Eileen?”
“Yes, that sounds fine,” she said.
“Yes, the…uh…Pooey Foo May, please,” Kling said, and handed the wine list back as if it had caught fire in his hands. “Sounds like a Chinese dish,” he said to Eileen as the waiter walked off.
“Did you see the French movie, it’s a classic,” she said. “I forget the title. With Gerard Philippe and…Michelle Morgan, I think. She’s an older woman and he’s a very young man, and he takes her to a fancy French restaurant—”
“No, I don’t think so,” Kling said.
“Anyway, he’s trying to impress her, you know, and when the wine steward brings the wine he ordered, and pours a little into his glass to taste it, he takes a little sip—she’s watching him all the while, and the steward is watching him, too—and he rolls it around on his tongue, and says, ‘This wine tastes of cork.’ The wine steward looks at him—they’re all supposed to be such bastards, you know, French waiters—and he pours a little of the wine into his little silver tasting cup, whatever they call it, and he takes a sip, and rolls it around in his mouth, and everybody in the place is watching them because they know they’re lovers, and there’s nothing in the world a Frenchman likes better than a lover. And finally, the steward nods very solemnly, and says, ‘Monsieur is correct, this wine does taste of cork,’ and he goes away to get a fresh bottle, and Gerard Philippe smiles, and Michelle Morgan smiles, and everybody in the entire place smiles.”
Eileen was smiling now.
“It was a very lovely scene,” she said.
“I don’t much care for foreign movies,” Kling said. “I mean, the ones with subtitles.”
“This one had subtitles,” Eileen said. “But it was beautiful.”
“That scene did sound very good,” Kling said.
“Le Diable au Corps, that was it.”
Kling looked at her, puzzled.
“The title,” she said. “It means ‘Devil in the Flesh.’ “
“That’s a good title,” Kling said.
“Yes,” Eileen said.
“The Pouilly Fume,” the waiter said, and pulled the cork. He wiped the lip of the bottle with his towel, and then poured a little wine into Kling’s
glass. Kling looked at Eileen, lifted the glass, brought it to his lips, sipped at the wine, rolled the wine around in his mouth, raised his eyebrows and said, “This wine tastes of cork.”
Eileen burst out laughing.
“Cork?” the waiter said.
“I’m joking,” Kling said, “it’s really fine.”
“Because, really, if it’s—”
“No, no, it’s fine, really.”
Eileen was still laughing. The waiter frowned at her as he poured the wine into her glass, and then filled Kling’s. He was still frowning when he walked away from the table. They raised their glasses.
“Here’s to golden days and purple nights,” Eileen said, and clinked her glass against his.
“Cheers,” he said.
“My Uncle Matt always used to say that,” Eileen said. “He drank like a fish.” She brought the glass to her lips. “Be funny if it really tasted of cork, wouldn’t it?” she said, and then sipped at the wine.
“Does it?” Kling asked.
“No, no, it’s very good. Try it,” she said. “For real this time.”
He drank.
“Good?” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“Actually, it was Micheline Presle, I think,” she said. “The heroine.”
They sat silently for several moments. Out on the river, a tugboat hooted into the night.
“So,” she said, “what are you working on?”
“That homicide we caught when you were up there Saturday night.”
“How does it look?”
“Puzzling,” Kling said.
“That’s what makes them interesting,” Eileen said.
“I suppose.”
“My stuff is hardly ever puzzling. I’m always the bait for some lunatic out there, hoping he’ll take the hook.”
“I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes,” Kling said.
“It does get scary every now and then.”
“I’ll bet.”
“So listen, who asked me to become a cop, right?”
“How’d you happen to get into it?”
“Uncle Matt. He of the golden days and purple nights, the big drinker. He was a cop. I loved him to death, so I figured I’d become a cop, too. He worked out of the old 110th in Riverhead. That is, till he caught it one night in a bar brawl. He wasn’t even on duty. Just sitting there drinking his sour mash bourbon when some guy came in with a sawed-off shotgun and a red plaid kerchief over his face. Uncle Matt went for his service revolver and the guy shot him dead.” Eileen paused. “The guy got fifty-two dollars and thirty-six cents from the cash register. He also got away clean. I keep hoping I’ll run into him one day. Sawed-off shotgun and red plaid kerchief. I’ll blow him away without batting an eyelash.”
She batted both eyelashes now.
“Tough talk on the lady, huh?” she said, and smiled. “So how about you?” she said. “How’d you get into it?”
“Seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” he said, and shrugged.
“How about now? Does it still seem like the right thing?”
“I guess so.” He shrugged again. “You get sort of…it wears you down, you know.”
“Mm,” she said.
“Everything out there,” he said, and fell silent.
They sipped some more wine.
“What are you working on?” he asked.
“Thursday,” she said. “I won’t start till Thursday night.”
“And what’s that?”
“Some guy’s been raping nurses outside Worth Memorial. On their way to the subway, when they’re crossing that park outside the hospital, do you know the park? In Chinatown?”
“Yes,” Kling said, and nodded.
“Pretty big park for that part of the city. He hits the ones coming off the four-to-midnight, three of them in the past three months, always when there’s no moon.”
“I gather there’ll be no moon this Thursday night.”
“No moon at all,” she said. “Don’t you just love that song?”
“What song?”
” ‘No Moon at All.’ “
“I don’t know it,” Kling said. “I’m sorry.”
“Well, this certainly isn’t the ‘We-Both-Like-the-Same-Things’ scene, is it?”
“I don’t know what scene that is,” Kling said.
“In the movies. What’s your favorite color? Yellow. Mine, too! What’s your favorite flower? Geraniums. Mine, too! Gee, we both like the same things!” She laughed again.
“Well, at least we both like the wine,” Kling said, and smiled, and poured her glass full again. “Will you be dressed like a nurse?” he asked.
“Oh, sure. Do you think that’s sexy?”
“What?”
“Nurses. Their uniforms, I mean.”
“I’ve never thought about it.”
“Lots of men have things for nurses, you know. I guess it’s because they figure they’ve seen it all, nurses. Guys lying around naked on operating tables and so forth. They figure nurses are experienced.”
“Mm,” Kling said.
“Somebody once told me—this man I used to date, he was an editor at a paperback house—he told me if you put the word nurse in a title, you’re guaranteed a million-copy sale.”
“Is that true?”
“It’s what he told me.”
“I guess he would know.”
“But nurses don’t turn you on, huh?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’ll have to show you what I look like,” Eileen said. Her eyes met his. “In my nurse’s outfit.”
Kling said nothing.
“It must have something to do with white, too,” Eileen said. “The fact that a nurse’s uniform is white. Like a bride’s gown, don’t you think?”
“Maybe,” Kling said.
“The conflicting image, do you know? The experienced virgin. Not that too many brides today are virgins,” she said, and shrugged. “Nobody would even expect that today, would they? A man, I mean. That his bride’s going to be a virgin?”
“I guess not,” Kling said.
“You’ve never been married, have you?” she said.
“I’ve been married,” he said.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yes,” he said.
“And?”
Kling hesitated.
“I was recently divorced,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Well,” he said, and lifted his wineglass, avoiding her steady gaze. “How about you?” he said. He was looking out over the river now.
“Still hoping for Mr. Right,” she said. “I keep having this fantasy…well, I really shouldn’t tell you this.”
“No, go ahead,” he said, turning back to her.
“Well…really, it’s silly,” she said, and he could swear that she was blushing, but perhaps it was only the red glow of the candle in its holder. “I keep fantasizing that one of those rapists out there will succeed one night, do you know? I won’t be able to get my gun on him in time, he’ll do whatever he wants and—surprise—he’ll turn out to be Prince Charming! I’ll fall madly in love with him, and we’ll live happily ever after. Whatever you do, don’t tell that to Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem. I’ll get drummed out of the women’s movement.”
“The old rape fantasy,” Kling said.
“Except that I happen to deal with real rape,” Eileen said. “And I know it isn’t fun and games.”
“Mm,” Kling said.
“So why should I fantasize about it? I mean, I’ve come within a hairsbreadth so many times—”
“Maybe that’s what accounts for the fantasy,” Kling said. “The fantasy makes it seem less frightening. Your work. What you have to do. Maybe,” he said, and shrugged.
“We’ve just had our ‘I-Don’t-Know-Why-I’m-Telling-You-All-This’ scene, haven’t we?”
“I suppose so,” he said, and smiled.
“Somebody ought to writ
e a book about all the different kinds of cliched scenes,” she said. “The one I like best, I think, is when the killer has a gun on the guy who’s been chasing him, and he says something like, ‘It’s safe to tell you this now because in three seconds flat you’ll be dead,’ and then proceeds to brag about all the people he killed and how and why he killed them.”
“I wish it was that easy,” Kling said, still smiling.
“Or what I call the ‘Uh-Oh!’ scene. Where we see a wife in bed with her lover, and then we cut away to the husband putting his key in the door latch, and we’re all supposed to go, ‘Uh-oh, here it comes!’ Don’t you just love that scene?”
The smile dropped from his face.
She looked into his eyes, trying to read them, knowing she’d somehow made a dreadful mistake, and trying to understand what she’d said that had been so terribly wrong. Until that moment, they’d seemed—
“I’d better get the check,” he said.
She knew better than to press it. If there was one thing she’d learned as a decoy, it was patience.
“Sure,” she said, “I’ve got to run, too. Hey, thanks for bringing the earring back, really. I appreciate it.”
“No problem,” Kling said, but he wasn’t looking at her, he was signaling to the waiter instead.
They sat in silence while they waited for the check. When they left the place, they shook hands politely on the sidewalk outside and walked off in opposite directions.
“I hate scenes that are played offstage,” Meyer said.
“So why didn’t you come in there with me?” Carella said.
“It was bad enough listening to him yell from outside,” Meyer said. “You want to tell me what it was all about?”
They were sitting side by side in the front seat of one of the precinct’s newest sedans. Each time they checked out the car, Sergeant Murchison came out back to list any scratches or dents on it. That way he would know who was responsible for any new scratches or dents. The car was cozy and warm. The rear tires were snow tires with studs. Hawes and Willis, who had last used the car, said that it actually ran on ice. Carella and Meyer—heading downtown for Timothy Moore’s apartment—were having no difficulties on the city’s frozen tundra.
“So let me hear it,” Meyer said.