by Ed McBain
“I like to see a man eat,” McReady said.
“Yes,” Mullaney agreed, eating.
“Would you perhaps know what happened to the jacket?” McReady asked.
“Yes.”
“What happened to it?”
Mullaney swallowed more of the whiskey, washing down his food. “There was only The New York Times in it,” he said.
“Ahhh,” McReady said.
“Which I’m sure you knew, anyway,” Mullaney said.
“Ahhh?”
“Yes.”
“Paper scraps, do you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Cut into the size of bills?”
“Yes.”
“Sewn into the jacket?”
“Yes.”
“I knew nothing about it,” McReady said.
“You were the one who gave the jacket to me.”
“That’s true.”
“There was supposed to be half a million dollars in it,” Mullaney said.
“You’ve learned a lot since the accident,” McReady said, and his eyes narrowed. He had, until that moment, seemed like only a pleasant-looking old pipe smoker, his head partially bald, a fringe of white hair curling about each ear, his nose exhibiting the rosy tint of the habitual drinker, leisurely puffing on his pipe, puff, puff, and gulping his whiskey, a nice pleasant stonecutter of a man feeding a starving horseplayer and making pleasant chitchat in the night while the wind howled outside and the cemetery horrors moaned. Until he narrowed his eyes. When he narrowed his eyes, Mullaney suddenly wondered what a nice guy like McReady was doing in a place like this, cutting stones for corpses and substituting paper scraps for money. I’ll bet this whiskey has been poisoned, he thought, or drugged, but he took another swallow of it nonetheless.
“Half a million dollars,” he repeated.
“Give or take a few thousand,” McReady said, and puffed on his pipe with his eyes still narrowed. “Who told you all this?”
“Kruger.”
“Ahhh,” McReady said.
“You still haven’t said whether or not you know him,” Mullaney said.
“I know him.”
“He wants that money,” Mullaney said. “So do I.”
“What gives you any claim to it?” McReady asked reasonably.
“I almost became a corpse for it.”
“You may still become one,” McReady said, again reasonably. He seemed like a very reasonable fellow, except for the way he kept his eyes squinched up so narrow, never taking his gaze from Mullaney’s face. The cottage was still. Outside, the cemetery ghouls groaned into the wind. Mullaney took another swallow of whiskey.
“Would you like to hear my theory?” he asked.
“Yes, certainly,” McReady said.
“It’s my theory that you substituted the paper scraps for the money.”
“Me?”
“You.”
“No,” McReady said.
“It’s my theory that you have that five hundred thousand dollars.”
“No,” McReady said, and shook his head for emphasis, and puffed on his pipe again, and again said, “No.”
“I went to a lot of trouble finding you,” Mullaney said, and swallowed more whiskey, emptying the glass. McReady poured it full to the brim again. Mullaney lifted it, and said, “By the way, that was a nice job of chiseling on Martin Callahan’s stone.”
“Thank you,” McReady said.
Mullaney drank. “So?” he said.
“So what?”
“If you didn’t put those paper scraps in the jacket, who did?”
“Let us say that where there is cheese, there is also sometimes a rat,” McReady said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s supposed to mean that half a million dollars can be a very tempting sum.”
“Very tempting indeed,” Mullaney said. “If I had it, I would take it to Monte Carlo and play seventeen red.”
“Black,” McReady said.
“What?”
“Seventeen is black.”
“Then that’s what I would play,” Mullaney said. “If I had the money.”
“Unfortunately, you don’t have it.”
“Do you?”
“Not yet,” McReady said.
“What does that mean?”
“Ahhh,” McReady said, and puffed on his pipe.
“Why were you sending it to Rome?” Mullaney asked.
“Ahhh,” McReady said.
“This is a big international gang, isn’t it?” Mullaney said shrewdly. “This is an enormous criminal cartel, isn’t it? This is a big heroin operation, right? Or white slavery, right, am I right, McReady?”
“You are wrong,” McReady said.
“Then what is it?” he asked, and suddenly realized he was drunk.
“It is none of your business,” McReady said, “that is what it is.”
“It’s my business because you made it my business.”
McReady put down his pipe. Mullaney saw that his hand was very close to the knife on the table, which was a very large and sharp-looking kitchen knife, something he had not noticed while he was slicing the salami. McReady’s eyes were still narrowed. Mullaney was beginning to think he was simply nearsighted.
“I would like to ask you some questions,” McReady said.
“Oh, would you now?” Mullaney said, feeling suddenly very exuberant, feeling again the way he had felt when he’d stood up to Kruger back on Sixty-first Street, somewhat like a hero, albeit a drunken one.
“Yes, and I would like you to answer them.”
“Well now, maybe I’ll answer them, and maybe I won’t,” Mullaney said.
“We shall see,” McReady said, and Mullaney was positive now that he was a member of an international crime cartel because all the members thus far had the same corny way of sounding terribly menacing when they talked to you, as if they had all learned to threaten in the same exclusive school run by Fagin or somebody, Three six nine a bottle of wine, Mullaney thought, I can lick you any old time. But McReady’s hand was on the knife.
“Did you open the jacket?” McReady asked.
“I did.”
“And found the paper scraps?”
“I did.”
“Where?”
“Inside the jacket. Sewn into the jacket.”
“I meant … where did you make this discovery?”
“Oh, I get it,” Mullaney said. “I get it now, pal. Go ahead, torture me, I’ll never tell you where I left those heroin-impregnated scraps of paper. Or is it LSD? Huh? Is that what The New York Times was soaked in? LSD? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”
“You have a vivid imagination,” McReady said.
“Where’d you learn to talk that way?” Mullaney said. “Did Fagin teach you to talk that way at his international crime school, all menacing like that?”
“Mr. Mullaney …”
“Oh, so you know my name, huh?”
“Yes, we got it from your driver’s license.”
“We is it, huh? Big criminal organization, huh? Go ahead, torture me, I can take torture of any kind, Irene and I once lived in an apartment that had ten thousand cockroaches, you think I’m afraid of torture? I’ll never tell you where I left those paper scraps!”
“I don’t care where you left the paper scraps,” McReady said. “All I want to know is where you left the jacket.”
“So that’s it, huh?” Mullahey said. “It’s the jacket that’s important, huh? Go ahead, torture me.”
“Have some more schnapps,” McReady said quickly.
“Oh no you don’t!” Mullaney snapped. “Trying to get me drunk, huh, so I’ll spill everything I know, huh? No you don’t,” but he poured himself another drink and raised his glass and said, “Skoal, buddy, I could have won a fortune at Aqueduct today if you louses hadn’t come along and spoiled it. You happen to know who won the fourth race?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Jawbone, right?”
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“I have no idea.”
“I thought so,” Mullaney said. “Jawbone, huh? I knew it.”
“Where did you leave the jacket?”
“Ha ha,” Mullaney said, and shoved back his chair defiantly and exuberantly, and then almost fell flat on his face. He staggered back from the table, suddenly ashamed of himself, not because he was drunk but only because he had become drunk in the presence of someone he did not like. There are many many ways to get drunk, he thought, and one way is as good as any other way; the only thing that can be bad about getting drunk is the company you’re in while you’re doing it. He did not like McReady any more than he had liked K or Gouda or Kruger or any of the other members of this vast cartel, perhaps two cartels (so the jacket is important, huh? he thought, never tell a book by its jacket), and yet he had allowed himself to get drunk in the man’s presence, which was a mean and despicable thing to do.
The most fabulous drunk in his life, the only one he could really distinguish from every other drunk in his life, small or large, was the one he had thrown with Irene in their apartment the day she discovered the Cache. She only discovered the Cache because they were at that time waging war against the ten thousand cockroaches who shared their place on East Sixteenth Street, which meant they were opening cabinet doors and dispensing roach powder, lifting dishes and pots and pans, and spraying sharp poofing puffs of poison into dark corners and niches, watching the cockroaches flee in disorganized retreat. The Cache consisted of four ten-dollar bills which she had hidden in a casserole against a rainy day, and then completely forgotten. She had tilted the casserole so that he could get a better shot at the nest of little scurrying bastards hidden in the corner, and suddenly the money had fallen out of it, payment for mercenaries, and it began raining. They had by now sprayed everything in sight or out of it, and since it had begun raining, and since the money had been put aside for a rainy day, Mullaney suggested that they spend the afternoon (it was Saturday) getting delightfully crocked, which suggestion Irene thought was capital, repulsed as she was by the hordes of insects breeding in their closets. They had taken a taxicab up to Zabar’s on Eightieth and Broadway, where they bought a tin of Beluga caviar, and then had come back downtown and bought two fifths of Polish vodka and a box of crackers, and had spent the rest of the afternoon and evening eating caviar and drinking the vodka neat. It had been a marvelous drunk. They tried to make love several times during the afternoon and evening, but neither could manage it because they were positively squiffed, laughing and reeling all over the apartment, drinking to the cockroaches and also to the Beatles (who were fairly new at the time) and drinking to Queen Elizabeth (“Up the Irish!” Irene shouted) and also to Khrushchev (Mullaney took off his shoe and banged it on the counter top, less in imitation of the Russian premier than in an attempt to squash a poison-drunk cockroach who was making his dizzy way toward the sink—and missing) and they drank to J. D. Salinger for having listed all the ingredients in Zooey’s or Franny’s or somebody’s medicine cabinet, without which literary feat American fiction that past year might have been barren and bleak, and oh, it had been a marvelous drunk.
This drunk was a lousy one because it was taking place in the presence of McReady, a joyless staggering dumb intoxication. Its only saving grace was that in talking to the hopeless drunk who was Mullaney, the pipe-smoking McReady had inadvertently revealed the fact that the jacket was important, the jacket, though Mullaney could not for the life of him see how.
“I need air!” he shouted, suddenly desiring to be sober, and staggered across the room to the window and threw it open. A gust of cemetery wind rushed into the room, a blast of chilling tombtop air that smelled of rot and decomposition. Behind him, the front door of the cottage was suddenly blown open by the gust of air that rushed through the window, though it seemed to Mullaney that such a gust would have blown the door closed rather than open. Drunkenly, he turned to see how such a remarkable thing could have occurred contrary to all the laws of physics, and realized at once that the door had been thrown not blown open and realized in the next drunken shuddering horrible moment it had been thrown open by a ghost.
6. K
K was pale and covered with dust, K was wrapped in tattered, torn and trailing rags, K wore upon his face a haggard look of weariness, evidence of a journey from some distant purgatory, K was a spectral image standing just inside the cottage door, a terrifying poltergeist that raised its arm and pointed a long bony blue finger at Mullaney in mute accusation. Beyond the open window, Mullaney could hear the fearsome wailing of a thousand other ghosts, the clatter of bones, the clanking of chains, all the promised horrors his grandmother had conjured for him when he was but a wee turnip sitting on her knee. The stench of them rushed through that open window, stale and fetid from the grave, while standing just inside the door was another of their gruesome lot, closer, more frightening, pale and ragged and dead, oh my good sweet Jesus save me, killed in a terrible highway accident, dead, and closing the door gently now, the door squeaking on its hinges, closing the door and taking a step into the room, and raising its arm once again, the blue bony finger extended, and pointing directly at Mullaney who swayed in drunken terror near the open window where, beyond, the thousand other keening members of the union shrieked their dirges to the night.
He jumped through the open window head first, arms extended, hands together, fingers touching, as though he were going off the high board at Wilson’s Woods swimming pool, where he and Irene used to swim a lot before they were married. He hit the gravel outside hands first, absorbing the shock with his arms, rolling over into an immediate somersault, and then coming up onto his feet and breaking into a run the moment he was erect. He intended to run toward the sidewalk, out of this grisly place, away from the shrieking, melancholy voices in the cemetery, but his drunken state had been intensified by the plunge through the open window and the head-over-heels somersault he had performed with considerable style and grace, and he detected with horror that he was running not for the open gate of McReady’s Monument Works but instead for the open gate of the cemetery. He stopped himself with effort, and was turning in the opposite direction when the door of the cottage opened, and K stepped into the light with his dusty rags trailing, leaping off the doorstep and bounding across the yard toward Mullaney.
There is nothing to be afraid of, Mullaney said to himself, knowing he was lying, and turned toward the open cemetery gate again, reasoning it might be safer to face a thousand caterwauling but possibly benign specters rather than one obviously enraged and accusing demon, which K most certainly was. As he ran into the cemetery, he began to regret his decision. He tried to tell himself that his grandmother’s tales had only been fictions calculated to delight a young and excitable wee turnip like himself (“You’re a wee cowardly turnip,” she would laugh and say, after he had almost wet his pants in her lap), but whereas he was willing to exonerate old Grandma of any malicious intent, he was now beginning to think her stories had contained the unmistakable ring of truth. Yawning pits opened before his feet, gravestones moved into his path, trees extended clutching branches and roots, faces materialized on the air, laughter sounded in his ears and faded, screams permeated the night, dogs howled and bats hovered, skeletons danced and specters drifted on the wind, oh my God, he was scared out of his wits.
This is not what I bargained for when I said I’d take the gamble, he thought, beginning to sober up and becoming more and more frightened the more sober he got. I did not bargain for the mummy’s curse or the witch’s tale or the monkey’s paw. All I bargained for was a life of romantic adventure, and not K loping along behind me there wrapped in ceremonial funeral rags and shouting whatever the hell it is he’s shouting. I did not bargain for things that go bump in the night, or in the daytime either, I did not bargain for terror, I do not want terror in my life, I want peace and happiness and calm, I want it to be dawn, I want all these crawling things to go back into their holes, I want the sun to shine, “or I’l
l shoot!”
He caught the words carried on the wind, words shouted in K’s unmistakable voice, and then heard the full sentence shouted again, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” and wondered why a ghost would have to shoot, and simultaneously became cold sober, and simultaneously realized that K, whatever else he was, was definitely not a ghost. He realized, too, that if anybody shot him, K or Kruger or anybody else, then nobody would ever learn where he had left the jacket, which was undoubtedly very important to all concerned, though he still couldn’t understand why, especially in its torn and tattered shape. The jacket, of course, was back in the stacks of the New York Public Library, resting on the dusty floor where he and Merilee had made love only a short time ago, and that’s where it would stay until tomorrow morning when the library opened. The trick then, he thought, as K shouted again behind him, was not to avoid getting killed by these people because he was certain they weren’t going to kill the only person who knew where the jacket …
Merilee, he thought.
Merilee also knows where the jacket is.
Well, he thought, that’s okay because Kruger only knew the money was supposed to be in the coffin, but not in the jacket. So chances are six to five he doesn’t know what else is important about the jacket, as neither do I. Besides, why shouldn’t he imagine the jacket is still on my back, which is where he saw it last, unless Merilee decides to tell him about our brief, ecstatic (for me, anyway) episode on the library floor? Well, hither thither willy nilly, let’s say he does ask her why the back of her velvet dress is covered with dust, and let’s say she does tell him what happened, which is doubtful, why should she mention the jacket at all, except to say that I had slit it open and found only cut-up newspapers in the lining? Why would she possibly mention I had left it on the floor back there, when she—no more than Kruger—has any knowledge of its importance?