by Ed McBain
Moving along the sidewalk now, her long white cane extended and undulating as though blown by a gentle breeze, right to left, back again, touching the sidewalk, touching the air, she turned the corner onto Pierce and began walking toward her building in the middle of the block. The tailor shop was closed; it closed at 6:00 and it was now 7:30. She ran her cane along the wrought-iron railing that defined the basement area of the brownstone north of the tailor shop, here now came the open space where the steps led down to where the garbage cans were stacked, she could smell them on the cold November air, there the post on the other side of the steps, and now the front stoop of the building, and the railing on the other side, abruptly turning back in a right angle toward the brick face of the big apartment building two doors down from her own building.
She wondered how much money she had earned today. It was difficult to play once the cold weather set in. She wore woolen gloves with the fingers cut off at the knuckle joints, and though she tried to keep her fingers moving constantly, they invariably got stiff and she was forced to stop playing and put them into the pockets of her black cloth coat until they were warm again. She wore a long muffler, purple the shopgirl had told her, people were so kind. Here now the garbage cans outside 1142 Pierce, super of the building never took them in till midnight, probably sitting in his basement room drunk as a coot, remembered to take in the cans only when it was almost time to put them out again, stunk up the whole neighborhood.
She wouldn’t mind a little nip herself just now, nothing like a little nip when there was a little nip in the air. Smiling at her own pun, she entered her building and felt along the wall for the third mailbox in the row, which was her box and which she always checked, even though the last time she’d received a letter from anyone but her niece was from the city advising her that she was being called for jury duty. The tailor had read it to her, and she had burst out laughing when he finished. She wrote back on her typewriter, telling the commissioner of jurors that she would be delighted to serve since she was as blind as justice, but that unfortunately she had to get out on the street every day to earn a living. The commissioner of jurors did not answer her letter, but neither did she report for duty, and nobody ever bothered her again.
She took the small mailbox key from her handbag now, and felt for the keyway on the box, and inserted the key—the lock had been broken and fixed again seventeen times since she lived in this building, and was now, thank God, in a state of good repair—and unlocked the box and felt inside it. Nothing. No surprises anymore. She could hardly remember the last time she’d been surprised. Well, yes, she could remember; it had been on her sixtieth birthday when Jerry Epstein across the hall gave her a party. Invited everybody in the building and also the tailor up the street, whose name she learned was Athanasios Parasekvopoulos, but she still referred to him as the tailor because she simply could not pronounce his name, not even in her mind. That had been a marvelous surprise, that party, with plenty of good food and whiskey—she really did need a little nip, she was chilled to the bone. But that was the last surprise she could remember. It was sort of sad, she guessed. She guessed there wasn’t much joy in life if there weren’t any surprises.
She put the mailbox key back into her purse, and the purse back into her handbag, and then she opened the lobby door and walked without needing the cane to where the inside steps began, taking the banister in her left hand, holding the cane in her right, the accordion heavy around her neck. She would be glad to take it off, pour herself a glass of whiskey, sit down to count the money. Someone had put a folded bill into the cup, she didn’t know what denomination it was, she’d have to ask Jerry later tonight, if he was home. Or else ask at the tailor shop in the morning. No, he’d be closed on Sunday. Her hand glided along the banister.
She was crossing the first-floor landing when she heard the inner-lobby door opening and closing below. She listened. The stairs creaked; someone was climbing to the first floor. The banister enclosed the stairwell here, running level for the length of the landing, and then beginning to angle upward again toward the floor above. The footsteps were closer now. She reached the post where the stairs began again, felt the polished wooden ball defining the top of it. Hand on the banister, she was climbing again when someone grabbed her from behind. There was not even time to scream. The last surprise of her life was the blade that viciously sliced across her throat, opening it from ear to ear.
The city for which Carella worked was divided into five separate and distinct sections, but only the island of Isola was referred to as “the city.” If you lived out in Calm’s Point or up in Riverhead, if you lived across the bridge in Majesta or out in the middle of the river on Bethtown, whenever you went into Isola, you were “going to the city.” Once you were in the city, you were either uptown, downtown, or midtown. If you were all the way uptown and about to cross one of the bridges into Riverhead, you would never say you were going farther uptown; you were, instead, going to Riverhead. If you were in Riverhead and heading downtown, you were going to the city. If you were in the midtown area of the city and heading for the financial area and finally the Old Port, you were still going downtown. And if you were standing in the middle of Van Buren Circle and about to head for the midtown area, you were likewise going downtown.
Crosstown was quite another matter.
For the convenience of out-of-towners, the founding fathers being considerate as well as foresighted, the city was constructed on a simple grid pattern, Hall Avenue skewering it from east to west and dividing Isola into almost equal halves. Bounding the island on the north was the River Harb, the Hamilton Bridge crossing it uptown, Castleview Prison sitting on its shoreline upstate. The Harb was long and wide and dirty, and nowhere was it wider and dirtier than where the Taslough Straits Bridge was built across it farther upstate, a contracting-cum-graft coup in the years immediately following the Second World War. The district attorney investigating the scandal was himself later indicted—but that’s another story, kids. On the southern side of Isola was the River Dix, a favorite spot in the thirties for the dumping of corpses wearing cement slippers. Such activity had since been removed to Spindrift Airport out on Sand’s Point, where the bodies of gangsters were all too often found moldering in the locked trunks of late-model automobiles. The streets running parallel to Hall Avenue on either side of it all joined together and turned upon themselves at the Old Port, where you could board a ferry to Bethtown or take a tunnel to Majesta or Calm’s Point, or simply ride back around the island again till you got to the Devil’s Break uptown and crossed over into Riverhead. It was a confusing city, but better than Tokyo. Better even than Biloxi, no offense.
The lady had been killed in the midtown area.
For simplicity’s sake, and having nothing whatever to do with territorial imperative or departmental seniority, the midtown area was divided by the police into two geographical sections called Midtown East and Midtown West, which chopped the island in half across its waist rather than severing it bilaterally from the top of its skull to the tips of its toes. Once upon a time the midtown area used to be divided lengthwise rather than belly button–wise, and the police called those two sections Midtown North and Midtown South. But that was when chariots were running in the cobbled streets. The city was confusing, yes, but the police department was even more confusing. The British monetary system used to be confusing, too, but all things change for the better eventually.
Things were never going to change for the better as concerned the dead woman lying at the foot of the steps leading up to the second floor. The detective who caught the squeal in Midtown East was a man named Bruno Tauber. When Tauber’s grandparents first came to America, there was an umlaut over the “a.” The name was spelled Täuber then. The umlaut indicated that the “äu” was to be sounded as “oy.” As part of the naturalization process, the umlaut was eventually dropped, the name was spelled Tauber and pronounced to rhyme with “tower.” Not even Tauber himself knew the difference. That�
�s the way his father pronounced it. That’s the way his mother and brothers pronounced it. And that’s the way he pronounced it. Tauber. To rhyme with tower. Only his grandparents would have known the difference, but they were dead, and maybe they might have agreed that all things changed for the better eventually.
Tauber looked down at the dead woman. There was blood all over the landing, blood on the keys of the accordion—shit, was there ever a Saturday night that went by in this city without a fuckin’ homicide?
“Where’s the man called it in?” Tauber asked the patrolman at his elbow.
“Down the hall there,” the patrolman said. “Guy in the gray sweater there.”
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, thanks,” Tauber said. “Don’t touch nothin’, you hear?”
“Why would I touch anything?” the patrolman asked.
“That’s exactly what I’m sayin’,” Tauber said, and walked toward the other end of the landing, where a man stood just outside the door to apartment 1A.
The man appeared to be in his late fifties, thin and balding, with gray hair spraying out from behind each ear and combed sideways across his flaking pate. He was wearing rumpled black trousers and a gray sweater over an undershirt. The sweater had burn holes in it; Tauber automatically concluded that the man was a pipe smoker. Either that, or he had tried repeatedly to set fire to himself. Black-rimmed spectacles were perched on the man’s nose. Behind the glasses, his brown eyes darted nervously. As Tauber approached, the man scratched his chin. He needed a shave. Tauber figured he hadn’t been out tonight. Saturday night, and he’d been home. He made a mental note.
“You the man found the body?” he asked.
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“What’s your name?”
“Gerald Epstein.”
“Who is she, do you know her?” Tauber asked, gesturing with his head toward the body at the other end of the hall.
“She’s a very good friend of mine. Her name is Hester Mathieson, she lives upstairs on the second floor.”
“How’d you come across the body?”
“What do you mean?”
“How’d you happen to be out here in the hall? Were you coming home from someplace?”
“No, I was going downstairs for some milk. I ran out of milk.”
“What time was this?”
“About a quarter to eight.”
“How’d you happen to see her there at the other end of the hall?”
“I just saw her, that’s all.”
“Went over to her, did you?”
“Yes.”
“Recognize her right away?”
“Yes.”
“What’d you do then?”
“I went back to my apartment and called the police.”
“What time was that?”
“A few minutes later. Right after I found her.”
“Hear anything out here before then?”
“No.”
“Nothing at all, huh? No screams, no sounds of a struggle, nothing like that.”
“Nothing. I had the television on.”
“You were home all night, huh?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t hear anything, though.”
“No.”
“What’d you say her name was?”
“Hester Mathieson.”
“Spell the last name for me, would you?”
“M-a-t-h-i-e-s-o-n.”
“How old is she, would you know?”
“Sixty-three.”
“Got any relatives that you know of?”
“She had a niece who used to come around, but she moved to Chicago.”
“When was that?”
“About six months ago.”
“What’s her name?”
“Stephanie Welles.”
“Would you know where she lives in Chicago?”
“On Warrington Avenue someplace. I’m not sure of the address. Whenever Hester got a letter from her, she’d ask me to read it out loud.”
“Didn’t she know how to read?”
“What do you mean?”
“Hester. The dead woman.”
“She was blind,” Epstein said. “Didn’t you know that?”
“Blind?”
“Didn’t you see the white cane?”
“No,” Tauber said, “I didn’t notice it. Blind, huh?
Carella had just finished dinner when the telephone rang. He was sitting in the living room, looking at the mantel clock and planning to take his wife to bed. It was only 9:00 P.M., the twins were already asleep, Fanny was watching television in the spare room, and the condition inspired by Janet up there at Fort Mercer had metamorphosed into a very real and earnest desire for Teddy, who—judging from the various provocative and insinuating postures she was striking across the room as she read a magazine—seemed to be contemplating the same sort of evening activity Carella had in mind. When the phone rang he looked immediately at the mantel clock, and then sighed and crossed the room to where the phone rested on a low table just off the entry. He lifted the receiver.
“Hello?” he said.
“Yeah, let me talk to Detective Carella, huh?” a man’s voice said.
“Who’s this?”
“Tauber, Midtown East.”
“What is it, Tauber?”
“I got a stiff here at 1144 North Pierce, lady with her throat slit.”
“What about her?”
“She’s blind. We had a stop-sheet here the other day—I checked back with the squad a few minutes ago, got your name as the officer making the request, and called the Eight-Seven. Desk sergeant put me onto you at home. I hope I ain’t interrupting anything.”
“No, no,” Carella said.
“You want to come down here, or what? I think this should be your baby, don’t you? I just checked it out with one of the guys Homicide sent over. He thinks there won’t be no problem transferring the case if it looks like the same thing we’re dealing with here. Whyn’t you come down and have a look? The ME’s just about done with her, I already requested a policewoman to search her. I ain’t trying to avoid work, but if this is the same killer we got here, you really should pick up on it.”
“I’ll leave right now,” Carella said.
“We got plenty to do meanwhile,” Tauber said. “That’s 1144—”
“I’ve got it.”
“See you later,” Tauber said, and hung up.
They all looked the same.
The crime scenes looked the same, identical radio motor patrol cars angled into the curb, dome lights flashing, only the numbers on their sides varying from precinct to precinct. The police barricades looked the same, crosspieces painted in black-and-white diagonal stripes and sitting on sawhorses with cardboard signs tacked to them—CRIME SCENE — DO NOT ENTER. Bold black against white as pale as death, they all looked the same. The cops looked the same, too, winter or summer, spring or fall, nothing changed but the seasons in this city, and sometimes not even those. The uniformed patrolmen always seemed a bit awed by the crime of murder, urging pedestrians to move right along, nothing here to see, folks, let’s keep it moving, but empathizing with them completely when it came to their curiosity, almost as if they were not part of the law-enforcement team but were instead on the civilian fringes, watching agape. It was a cold night. In this city, years ago, the patrolmen wore heavy blue overcoats in the wintertime, but now they simply wore long johns under their trousers and tunics, giving some of them a heftier look than when they were naked in their own showers. They milled about talking in whispers except when they were moving pedestrian traffic. What they whispered about was murder.
The detectives all looked the same, too. Tall men, burly for the most part; Carella often had the feeling that detectives were chosen from the uniformed force on the basis of their size and not their special ability to make reasonable deductions or even wild guesses. Most of them were hatless. Most of them smoked cigarettes
endlessly. Many of them wore short car coats or zippered jackets with sweater cuffs and bottoms. If you didn’t know better, you’d think the detectives at a crime scene were part of a bowling team.
The Homicide cops were immediately identifiable; they all looked and sounded like Monoghan and Monroe, the perfect prototypes, the others being slightly marred castings from the same mold. Black was the color still favored by many of the older Homicide bulls. Black for death. There had once been a famous Homicide cop named Saunders who wore black almost from head to toe. His exploits were legendary, they called him the “Black Plague.” Black pants, black suit, black tie on a stark white shirt, black overcoat in the wintertime, black bowler he’d bought one time in London when he’d gone to visit his grandparents and was treated like a visiting celebrity at Scotland Yard. Black umbrella when it was raining, called it his “brolly,” picked that up from Grandma sitting in her row house along Jubilee Street. Used to crack homicide cases as if they were walnuts. This was in the days when Homicide truly used to investigate a case, not like today when the precinct detective handled it. Other Homicide cops started wearing black, too. It became the mark of their elitism. You saw a plainclothes cop in black, you knew he was a Homicide dick. Even some of the garden-variety precinct detectives took to wearing black in hope they’d be mistaken for men from Homicide.
That was then, Gertie. Today, except for the old-timers, your Homicide cops were identifiable only by the proprietary air they brought to the scene of a murder, rather like comfortable burghers looking out over their vast holdings. The shields pinned to their overcoats were similar in every respect to the shields the precinct detectives wore—blue enamel set in a gold sunburst pattern—except for the single word Homicide stamped into the gold beneath the word Detective. Every detective at the crime scene had his shield pinned to his coat or his jacket. The detectives all looked the same.