The Big Bad City

by McBain, Ed

“She said she wanted to borrow two thousand dollars.”

  Blackmail, Carella thought. This has to be blackmail.

  “Same story as four years ago,” Cochran said. “She called me soon as she got out of the convent, said she was here in the East, could she please see me. I asked her was she finished with the fucking nuns, and she told me she was. So she came to Philly and first thing she did was ask me for a loan of four thousand dollars. So she could get started, she said. Like a jackass, I gave it to her. Six months later, she’s back inside again, doing penance, I suppose. Two weeks ago, she calls again. Not a word from her in four years, but here she is again. Hello, Vince, darling, may I please borrow two grand this time? Never mind she never paid back the four grand! This has got to be the ballsiest nun in the world, am I right?”

  “She say why she needed the money?”

  “I didn’t ask. I hung up.”

  “But she called back again.”

  “Yeah. A few days later. Please, Vince, I desperately need the money, I’m in serious trouble, Vince, please, please, please.” Cochran sighed heavily. “I told her no. I asked her why the hell she hadn’t come to the funeral. Our parents got killed in a car crash, she can’t find her way to Pennsylvania?”

  “Maybe she didn’t know, Mr. Cochran.”

  “Then God should have sent down a messenger.”

  “So you refused to give her the money.”

  “I refused.”

  “Did she say what kind of trouble she was in?”

  “Are you trying to make me feel guilty?”

  “No, sir, we’re trying to find out who killed her.”

  “Are you saying she got killed because I wouldn’t give her the two thousand?”

  “We don’t know why she got killed, sir. You just told us she was in serious trouble. If we can learn what kind of trouble …”

  “She sounded … I don’t know. She kept going on about past and present, the past affecting the present, it all sounded like religious bullshit. She said she would pray for me, and I told her to pray that I get the four thousand back I loaned her four years ago. Then she said …” He shook his head. “She said, ‘I love you, Vince,’ and hung up.”

  They allowed him the moment, both detectives standing by silently, feeling somewhat foolishly intrusive in what was essentially a private reflection.

  “Did she mention having received a letter?” Carella asked.

  “No.”

  “Did she mention any recent decisions she’d made?”

  “No. Just said she was in serious trouble and needed two thousand dollars.”

  “Didn’t say for what?”

  “No.” He shook his head again. “What kind of trouble could a nun be in, will you please tell me? The trouble was her being a nun in the first place, that was the goddamn trouble.”

  There was another awkward silence.

  “I used to tell a lot of nun jokes in my act,” he said. “It was my way of getting back at her for having left. Every night, another nun joke. There has to be a thousand nun jokes out there. Even when she left the convent, I kept doing nun jokes. It was as if I knew she’d go back in one day. I kept hoping she was really out for good, I kept hoping she’d come home again soon, but I guess I knew, I guess I knew she wasn’t really finished with it. The day I heard she went back in again, I thought, What’s the use? I stopped telling nun jokes that very night. I haven’t told a nun joke since. Because, you see, my sister was the biggest nun joke of them all.”

  That afternoon, everything broke at once.

  First, the rain came.

  It had not rained for almost two weeks now, and the storm that broke over the city at a quarter past three seemed determined to make up for lost time. Lightning crashed and thunder bellowed. Raindrops the size of melons—or so some long-time residents claimed—came pouring down from the black sky overhead, drilling the dimmed afternoon, pelting the sidewalks, splashing and plashing and plopping and sloshing until the gutters and drains overflowed like the tub in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, poor Mickey overwhelmed. The rain was relentless. It made everyone happy to be indoors, even cops.

  Particularly happy on that rainy afternoon were Carella and Brown, who got back to the squadroom to find a fax from a doctor named George Lowenthal, who said he had indeed performed a surgical procedure on a woman named Katherine Cochran, in the month of April, four years ago.

  Equally happy were Meyer and Kling. The address and phone number Marilyn Monroe had given the pawnbroker were—big surprise—non-existent. But now—after also striking out on the six M. Monroes listed in the city’s phone directories, none of whom were Marilyns—they came up with the brilliant idea that perhaps the woman who’d visited Manny’s pawnshop was either a Munro or a Munroe, the variant spellings of Monroe. In all five directories, there were three listings for M. Munro, and four listings for M. Munroe. There was only one listing for an M. L. Munro, in Calm’s Point, over the bridge.

  Meyer called the telephone company, who supplied him with the full names of their initialed subscribers. Not surprisingly, four of the M’s stood for Mary. Two of them were abbreviations of Margaret, and one of them was short for Michael—odd in that men usually did not list themselves under an initial. There was not a Marilyn among them.

  But the M. L. Munro in Calm’s Point was a woman named Mary Lynne.

  “Son of a bitch!” Meyer said.

  This was a city of bridges.

  Isola was an island—the very name meant “island” in Italian—linked on one flank by bridges to the rest of the city, and on the other flank to the next state. Of all the bridges spanning the city’s rivers, the Calm’s Point Bridge was the most beautiful. People wrote songs about the Calm’s Point Bridge. People wrote about the sheer joys to be found over the Calm’s Point Bridge. The sky behind the bridge at four that afternoon was a golden wash, the city clean and new after the sudden storm. They drove with the windows rolled down, breathing in sweet draughts of fresh-smelling air. The cables still dripped rainwater. The River Dix glistened below in the late afternoon sun. There were sometimes days like this in the summertime city.

  The telephone company had supplied an address for Mary Lynne Munro, but they did not call ahead because she had hocked stolen property and perhaps would not be overly delighted to see them. They didn’t know what to expect behind the door to apartment 4C. The Syrian signet ring had not been stolen from the Cooper apartment where The Cookie Boy—or at least someone who’d dropped chocolate chip crumbs—had possibly slain a forty-eight-year-old housewife and a sixteen-year-old delivery boy. But it had been taken from an apartment where the burglar had left behind, on a bedroom pillow, a small white box of chocolate chip cookies. So if the woman who’d hocked the ring knew the man who’d stolen the ring, and if the man who’d stolen the ring was, in fact, The Cookie Boy, and if The Cookie Boy was, in feet, the person who’d killed two people in yet another apartment he’d burglarized, then there was need for caution here. Admittedly a great many ifs, but as they approached the door, they drew their pistols nonetheless, prepared for the worst.

  The worst turned out to be the woman Manny Schwartz had described yesterday, five feet four inches tall, weighing around a hundred and ten, with brown hair and brown eyes, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, no shoes. The detectives were still holding regulation nines in their hands when she opened the door. They had announced themselves as policemen, but she wasn’t expecting drawn guns. She almost slammed the door on them.

  “That’s okay, lady,” Meyer said, and glanced swiftly into the room. The gun was still in his hand. He would not put it away until he made sure she was alone. “Anybody here with you?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “What the hell’s the gun for?”

  “Okay to come in?” Kling asked.

  “Let me see some ID,” she said.

  Both men were scanning the room. Eyes darting. Searching. Listening. They saw nothing, heard nothing. Meyer was holding up his shield and his ID card.
Mary Lynne was studying it. Both detectives were still standing in the hallway outside the door. This was a garden apartment in Calm’s Point, a nice quiet neighborhood. Nobody expected cops in the hallway with guns in their fists.

  “Who are you looking for?” she asked.

  “Okay to come in?” Kling said again.

  “No. Not till you tell me what this is about.”

  “You hocked a stolen ring, lady,” Meyer said. “We want to know where you got it.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That. Come on in, I’m alone.”

  She stepped aside to let them into the apartment. They fanned out, guns up and ready, no search warrant here, they had to be careful. To the woman this must have looked absurd, two grown men playing cops and robbers as if they were on television. They didn’t care how foolish they looked. They cared only about taking two in the head.

  “Okay to look around?” Meyer asked.

  “Just don’t touch anything,” she said.

  “You Mary Lynne Munro?”

  “I am.”

  Roaming the apartment …

  “Okay to open this door?”

  … making sure they were, in fact, alone, and only then holstering their weapons and turning their attention to the woman who’d been in Schwartz’s pawnshop.

  “That ring was a gift,” she said at once. “If that’s what’s concerning you.”

  “Who gave it to you?”

  “A man I met. Why? Is he some kind of thief?”

  “He is some kind of thief, lady,” Meyer said. “What’s his name?”

  “Arthur Dewey.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He gave you a ring worth twelve thousand dollars and you don’t …”

  “Twelve? That son of a bitch Jew only gave me three!”

  This did not endear her to Meyer. When he was a boy growing up, the Irish kids who chased him through the streets used to chant “Meyer Meyer, Jew on fire.” Kling didn’t much like it, either.

  “My partner’s Jewish,” he said.

  “So?” she said.

  “So watch your mouth,” he said.

  “Oh, you mean that son of a bitch in the pawnshop wasn’t Jewish?”

  “Lady, don’t press your luck,” Meyer said. “How come you don’t know where this guy lives?”

  “Cause I met him in a bar, that’s how come.”

  “When?”

  “Couple of weeks ago.”

  “Met him in a bar and he gave you a twelve-thousand-dollar ring?”

  “Not in the bar.”

  “Where then?”

  “Right here.”

  “Gave you the ring you hocked the other day?”

  “I had no use for it. It was too big for my finger.”

  “How come he gave it to you?”

  “I guess he was stunned by my beauty,” she said.

  “Oh, was that it?”

  “He offered it, I took it.”

  “What do you do for a living, Miss Munro?”

  “I’m presently unemployed.”

  “When you’re not unemployed, what do you do?”

  “Various jobs.”

  “What was your last job?”

  “It was a while ago.”

  “When?”

  “Two years or so.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I worked at a Burger King.”

  “And since then?”

  “What is this?”

  “We’re trying to figure out why a total stranger handed you a ring worth twelve thousand dollars.”

  “I guess he didn’t know it was worth that much. I’ll tell you the truth, I was surprised when the Jew offered me three. I thought it was worth tops five hundred, like he said.”

  “Like who said?”

  “Arthur. If that was his name.”

  “What makes you think it wasn’t?”

  “I don’t know what it was. I don’t meet many men who give me their real names.”

  “You a working girl, Miss Munro?”

  “Gee, you blew my cover.”

  “And he offered you the ring in payment for your services, is that it?”

  “Supersleuth,” she said.

  “Ever been arrested?”

  “Never. You arresting me now?”

  “Did Arthur—if that was his name—mention the ring was stolen?”

  “Would you?”

  “I’m asking what he did.”

  “No, he did not.”

  “Mention how he came into possession of it?”

  “Really now.”

  “Did he?”

  “Of course not.”

  “When you hocked the ring …”

  “Yeah, I know all about it.”

  “You told Mr. Schwartz it was an heirloom you had to sell because you’d lost your wallet with all your money and credit cards in it. Is that right?”

  “Lost it in a taxi, I told him.”

  “Why?”

  “What was I supposed to tell him? Some guy gave me the ring in exchange for a superior blow job?”

  “Is that why he gave it to you?”

  “I don’t know about superior, though they say I’m pretty good. I told him the price was two hundred. He said he’d give me a gold ring worth five hundred. I looked at it, I thought maybe it was worth three, four. So we traded.”

  “Ever think it might be stolen?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Guy carrying an antique ring in his pocket …”

  “It wasn’t in his pocket. It was on his finger.”

  “Took it off his finger, did he?”

  “Before we started.”

  “Then what?”

  “Tipped his hat and left.”

  “He was wearing a hat?”

  “That’s just an expression.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “Who remembers?”

  “Notice any scars, tattoos, birthmarks? …”

  “What is this? Clinton’s cock?”

  “Any identifying…?”

  “There was a finger missing on his right hand. I noticed it when he took the ring off.”

  “Which finger?”

  “The pinkie. It was almost disgusting.”

  “Thanks, Miss Munro.”

  There was a sudden silence. Their brief encounter was finished, there was nothing further to say. It was almost as if she’d entertained a pair of tricks and was now showing them the door.

  “Nice after the rain, ain’t it?” she said almost wistfully.

  Dr. George Lowenthal’s waiting room was full of women when Carella and Brown got there at four that afternoon. The office was on Stoner, just off Jefferson Avenue, a high-rent, low-crime neighborhood in the center of the city. The women glanced up curiously; two men were entering a normally females-only preserve. A woman in a green hat kept staring at them. The others went back to reading Vogue and Cosmopolitan. The detectives told a receptionist who they were. The woman in the green hat kept staring. She was still staring ten minutes later, when they were ushered into Lowenthal’s private office.

  Lowenthal was a man in his early fifties, Carella supposed, with graying hair and pale eyes. He looked tired. As if he had just come out of a difficult surgery, which he hadn’t. The blinds behind him were drawn against the afternoon sun low on the horizon. Kate Cochran’s file was open on his desk.

  “I remember her well,” he said. “There was a waif-like air about her, a sort of otherworldly naiveté. I have to tell you the truth, I don’t often try to talk a woman out of breast augmentation. It’s her body, after all. I assume if she’s uncomfortable with what she has and wants to change it, that’s her business, not mine. My job is to serve a patient’s needs. But Kate …” He tried to find words. “Let me say that her body seemed perfectly suited to her gentle, childlike manner. According to my records, she was twenty-three years old, but she seemed fourteen.”

  “Did she tell you she was a nun?”
>
  “A nun? No.”

  “Did she mention the name Mary Vincent?” Brown asked.

  “No.”

  “Sister Mary Vincent?”

  “No.”

  “That’s who she was,” Brown said.

  “On leave when she came to see you.”

  “I knew nothing of this.”

  “We’re trying to piece together past and present, Dr. Lowenthal. If there’s anything you can tell us that might help …”

  “Like what?”

  “Well … the ME’s Office said this wasn’t reconstructive surgery. Is that correct?”

  “Yes. It was strictly augmentative. After a mastectomy, we insert the shell behind the chest muscle and in front of the ribs. But Kate’s implants were subglandular. That means the shell was placed behind the breast tissue and in front of the pectoral muscle. We make a small incision, usually in the crease under each breast. With saline implants … these were saline, the silicone gel was outlawed in 1992.”

  “So we understand.”

  “With saline implants, we insert the envelope while it’s still empty and fill it when it’s in place. This enables us to adjust the size. Kate didn’t want outrageous breasts … some women do, you know. You have to understand that breast augmentation is the third most common type of cosmetic surgery in the United States. Kate was …”

  “What are the other two?” Brown asked.

  “Liposuction’s number one. Eyelid surgery comes next.”

  “Things women do,” Brown said, and shook his head.

  “For us, usually,” Lowenthal said and smiled somewhat ruefully. “Nationwide, we do some fifty thousand saline implants a year. Before the silicone ban, and the attendant cancer scare, we were doing twice as many, maybe three times as many silicone gel operations. There’s a lot of pressure on American women. They see all the supermodels in the magazines and on television, they think this is what men want. Maybe we do. I don’t question it too closely. My job is to serve a patient’s needs.”

  Second time he’s said that, Carella thought.

  “Kate was doing this for professional reasons, of course. She wanted breasts that looked … well … rather more like a woman’s than a child’s.”

  “How much did this cost her?” Brown asked.

  “I don’t remember what the manufacturers were charging back then. This was four years ago. I believe Mentor and McGhan were the only ones left in the market after the ax fell. It probably was something like three, four hundred dollars for a set of implants. My fee was the same back then as it is now.”