by Ed McBain
“Detective Third Grade Harold Will—”
“Detective?” Miss Klein shouted. “Detective? Get him out of here!” she yelled at the nurse. “You’re the ones who sent me here!”
“No, ma’am, I just—”
“Is there a crime against passing out?”
“No, but—”
“I told them I was all right. I told them.”
“Well, ma’am, I—”
“Instead they stick me in an ambulance. Unconscious, when I can’t defend myself.”
“But, ma’am, if you were unconscious, then how—”
“Don’t tell me what I was,” Miss Klein shouted. “I can take care of myself. I told them I was all right. They had no right sticking me in an ambulance, unconscious.”
“Who’d you tell, Mrs. Klein?”
“It’s Miss Klein—and what do you care who I told?”
“Well, Miss Klein, the point is—”
“Get him out of here. I don’t want to talk to any cops.”
“—if you were unconscious—”
“I said get him out of here!”
“—how could you have possibly told anyone you were all right?”
Myra Klein stared at Willis in total silence for the space of two minutes. Then she said, “What are you, one of these smartassed cops?”
“Well—”
“I’m laying here prostrate in shock,” Miss Klein said, “and they send me Sherlock Holmes.”
“Will you take this pill now, Miss Klein?” the nurse asked.
“Get out of here, you miserable panhandler, before I—”
“It’ll calm you!” the nurse protested.
“Calm me? Calm me? What makes you think I need calming?”
“Leave the pill, nurse,” Willis said gently. “Maybe Miss Klein will feel more like taking it later.”
“Yeah, leave the pill and get out, and take Mr. Holmes with you.”
“No, I’m staying,” Willis said softly.
“Who sent for you? Who needs you?”
“I want to ask you some questions, Miss Klein,” Willis said.
“I don’t want to answer any questions. I’m a sick woman. I’m in shock. Now get the hell out of here.”
“Miss Klein,” Willis said evenly, “four people were killed.”
Myra Klein stared at him. Then she nodded her head. “Leave the pill, nurse,” she said. “I’ll talk to Mr.—what was your name?”
“Willis.”
“Yes. Leave the pill, nurse.” She waited until the door closed behind the nurse. Then she said, “All I could think of was my brother’s dinner. He gets home from work at seven o’clock, and it’s past that now, and he’s very fussy about his dinner being on the table when he gets home. So here I am laying in a hospital. That’s all I could think of.” She paused. “Then you said, ‘Four people were killed,’ and all at once I’m one of the lucky ones.” She nodded expressively. “What do you want to know, Mr. Willis?”
“Can you tell me what happened in that bookshop, Miss Klein?”
“Sure. I put up the roast about four-thirty—it’s a shame to make roast when there’s only myself and my brother, so much goes to waste, you know, but he likes roast beef, so every now and then I make it. I put it up at four-thirty—I have one of these automatic ranges, you can set it to go off when the thing is done. I had the potatoes up, too, and the string beans wouldn’t take a minute once I got home. There was a book I wanted to get. They have a lending library at that bookstore, you see, over on the left—where I was standing when the man started shooting.”
“It was a man, Miss Klein?”
“Yes. I think so. I only got a quick look. I was standing at the place where Mr. Fennerman has the lending library when all of a sudden I heard this loud noise. So I turned around, and I saw this man with two guns in his hands, shooting. At first, I didn’t know what it was, I don’t know what I thought—a stunt, I guess I thought—I don’t know what. Then I saw a nice young man, he was wearing a seersucker suit, he suddenly collapsed on the counter, and he’s covered all over with blood, and then I knew it wasn’t a stunt, it couldn’t be a stunt.”
“What happened then, Miss Klein?”
“I guess I passed out. I could never stand the sight of blood.”
“But you saw the man shooting before you passed out?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Can you tell me what he looked like?”
“Yes, I think so.” She paused. “Where do you want me to start?”
“Well, was he a tall man? Short? Average height?”
“Average, I think.” She paused again. “What do you mean by average?”
“Five-nine, five-ten.”
“Yes, about that.”
“He wasn’t what you’d call a tall man?”
“No, I mean, he wasn’t as short as…” She stopped.
“He wasn’t as short as me?” Willis said, smiling.
“No. He was taller than you.”
“But not a really tall man. All right, Miss Klein, what was he wearing?”
“A raincoat,” Miss Klein said.
“What color?”
“Black.”
“Belted or loose?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Any hat?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of hat?”
“A cap,” Miss Klein said.
“The color?”
“Black. Like the raincoat.”
“Was he wearing gloves?”
“No.”
“Anything else you noticed about him?”
“Yes. He was wearing sunglasses.”
“From where you were standing, could you see any identifying scars or marks?”
“No.”
“Any deformities?”
“No.”
“Was this a white man or a colored man, Miss Klein?”
“White.”
“Do you know anything about guns?”
“No.”
“Then you couldn’t guess what kind of guns he was holding.”
“Kind?”
“Well, yes. The caliber, or whether they were revolvers or automatics or…well, were they small guns, Miss Klein?”
“They looked very big to me.”
“Do you know what a .45 looks like?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right, Miss Klein; you’re being very helpful. Can you tell me how old this man was?”
“About thirty-eight.”
“How old would you say I am, Miss Klein?”
“Thirty-six. Am I close?”
“I’ll be thirty-four next month.”
“Well, that’s pretty close.”
“Yes, you’re a very observant witness, Miss Klein. I wonder if I could sum this up for us. You say you saw a white man of about thirty-eight, average height, and he was wearing a black raincoat, a black cap, and sunglasses. He wore no gloves, he was holding a big gun in each hand, and you noticed no scars or deformities. Is that about it?”
“That’s it exactly,” Miss Klein said.
Now, obviously, Miss Klein’s “exactly” and Mr. Fennerman’s “exactly” did not exactly add up to a picture of exactness. Willis had not yet read the report typed up by Lieutenant Byrnes and therefore had no way of knowing that the two descriptions of the same man—while agreeing on certain points—varied on a few essentials. For example, Mr. Fennerman had said the killer was a tall man, perhaps six feet, perhaps more. Miss Klein, on the other hand, described the killer as being of average height, five-nine or five-ten. Fennerman had said that the killer was wearing a tweed overcoat and that the overcoat may have been blue. Miss Klein said he was wearing a black raincoat. Fennerman: gray fedora. Klein: black cap. Fennerman: black gloves. Klein: no gloves,
Willis knew nothing as yet of the discrepancies, but had he known he would have been overly surprised. He had been questioning people about the details of committed crimes for a long time now and had
discovered rather early in the game that most eyewitnesses had only the faintest notion of what had really taken place. Whatever the reason—the excitement of the moment, the speed of the action, the theory that participation blurred objectivity—whatever the reason an eye-witness description of any chosen event had a peculiar way of leaping into that rarefied atmosphere bordering on fantasy. He had heard the most bizarre contradictions during his years on the police force. He had heard housewives describing in total inaccuracy the clothing their husbands had worn when leaving the house that morning. He had heard pistols described as shotguns, razor blades described as knives, blondes described as brunettes, tall men as short men, fat men as thin men, and, in at least one case, a voluptuous eighteen-year-old red-headed girl described as a dark-haired man in his early twenties.
Willis still asked the questions because it was all part of the game. The game was something like parlor analysis, where the cops listened to each fantastic report and tried to piece together from the subjective dreamlike accounts a picture of objective reality. This picture was often impossible to obtain from the fragmentary distortions. Even when the criminal was finally apprehended, his account of the actual crime was tainted by the same subjective distortion. It made things a little difficult. It sometimes made a thoughtful cop like Willis wonder about the reality of a bullet-riddled body on a bookshop floor.
He thanked Miss Klein for her courtesy and her time and left her alone to take her pill and worry about her brother’s dinner.
By the end of that day, Friday, October 13, all four survivors of the bookshop massacre had been questioned concerning the event itself and the identity of the killer. In the unaccustomed silence of the squadroom, Detective Steve Carella sat down with the four typewritten reports and tried to make some sort of sensible correlation. He worked in pencil on the back of a DD report, listing first the names of the witnesses and then their descriptions of the killer. When he finished his list, he looked at it sourly, scratched his head, and then read it over again.
The witnesses seemed to agree, wholeheartedly on only three points: the killer was male, and white, and wearing sunglasses. From their varying estimates of the man’s age, Carella found it impossible to make an intelligent guess. Two of the witnesses thought the killer was tall, and two thought he was of average height—so Carella safely reasoned that, at least, the man was not short. Only one of the witnesses, Miss Klein, thought he was wearing a raincoat, whereas the other three agreed it was an overcoat. They could not get together on the color of the coat, but two of them were certain it was brown. In any case, it was reasonable to assume the coat was dark. Carella was willing to buy the gray fedora since three of the four witnesses claimed this was what they had seen. The gloves were a toss-up. The scar seemed to have been invented by Miss Deering; two of the other witnesses said there had been no scars, and Mr. Fennerman hadn’t commented at all, a curious circumstance if there had been any scars. No, Carella was willing to rule out the possibility of the man’s carrying a scar. Concerning the number of guns he’d carried, the majority of the witnesses seemed to agree it was two. Again, Miss Deering’s imagination had taken hold, this time in understatement. Miss Klein said the guns were big, and Mr. Woody—who himself owned a .22, for which he had a premises permit—claimed both guns were .22s.
Carella put a clean sheet of paper into his typewriter and began typing from his penciled notes.
SUSPECT
Male
White
Not short
Sunglasses
Dark overcoat
Gray fedora
Gloves (?)
No scars, marks, deformities
Two guns
That was a lot to go on.
Sure.
That was a whole hell of a lot to go on.
He could remember the day they met...
He was waiting in the hallway outside apartment 47, after having pressed the bell button. The door opened suddenly. He had heard no approaching footsteps, and the sudden opening of the door surprised him. Unconsciously, he looked first to the girl’s feet. She was barefoot.
“My name is Bert Kling,” he said. “I’m a cop.”
“You sound like the opening to a television show,” she answered.
She stared at Kling levelly. She was a tall girl. Even barefoot she reached to Kling’s shoulder. In high heels she would give the average American male trouble. Her hair was black. Not brunette, not brownette, but black, a total black, the black of a starless, moonless night. Her eyes were a deep brown, arched with black brows. Her nose was straight and her cheeks were high, and there wasn’t a trace of makeup on her face, not a tint of lipstick on her wide mouth. She wore a white blouse and black toreador pants, which tapered down to her naked ankles and feet. Her toenails were painted a bright red.
She kept staring at him. At last, she said, “Why’d they send you here?”
“They said you knew Jeannie Paige.”
That was the beginning of Claire Townsend, or at least the beginning of her for him. He was still a patrolman at the time, and he had gone to her in plain clothes and on his own time to ask questions about a dead girl named Jeannie Paige, the sister-in-law of an old friend. She answered all his questions graciously and easily, and at last, when there were no more questions to ask, he rose and said, “I’d better be going. That is dinner I smell, isn’t it?”
“My father’ll be home soon,” Claire said. “Mom is dead. I whip something up when I get home from school.”
“Every night?” Kling asked.
“What? I’m sorry…”
He didn’t know whether to press it or not. She hadn’t heard him, and he could easily have shrugged his comment aside. But he chose not to.
“I said, ‘Every night?’ ”
“Every night what?”
She certainly was not making it easy for him. “Do you prepare supper every night? Or do you occasionally get a night off?”
“Oh, I get nights off,” Claire said.
“Maybe you’d enjoy dinner out some night?”
“With you, do you mean?”
“Well, yes. Yes, that’s what I had in mind.”
Claire Townsend looked at him long and hard. At last, she said, “No, I don’t think so. I’m sorry. Thanks. I couldn’t.”
“Well…uh…” Quite suddenly, Kling felt like a horse’s ass. “I…uh…guess I’ll be going then. Thanks for the cognac. It was very nice.”
“Yes,” she said, and he remembered her discussing people who were there and yet not there, and he knew exactly what she meant, because she was not there at all. She was somewhere far away, and he wished he knew where. With sudden, desperate longing, he wished he knew where she was because, curiously, he wanted to be there with her.
“Goodbye,” he said.
She smiled in answer and closed the door behind him….
He could remember.
He sat alone now in the furnished room that was his home. The windows were open. October lay just outside, alive with the sounds of the nighttime city. He sat in a hard straight-backed chair and looked out past the curtains, gently stirring in a breeze far too mild for October. He looked beyond the curtains, and through the window, and into the city itself, into the lighted window slashes in the distance, and a klieg light going against the velvet sky, and an airplane blinking red and green, all the light of the city streets and the city buildings and the air above the city, all the lights, alive.
He could remember the SPRY sign…
Their first date was going badly. They had spent the afternoon together, and now they sat in a restaurant high atop one of the city’s better-known hotels, and they looked through the huge windows that faced the river—and across the river there was a sign.
The sign first said: SPRY.
Then it said: SPRY FOR FRYING.
Then it said: SPRY FOR BAKING.
Then it said again: SPRY.
“What’ll you drink?” Kling asked.
“A w
hiskey sour, I think,” Claire said.
“No cognac?”
“Later maybe.”
The waiter came over to the table. “Something to drink, sir?” he asked.
“A whiskey sour and a martini.”
“Lemon peel, sir?”
“Olive,” Kling said.
“Thank you, sir. Would you care to see a menu now?”
“We’ll wait until after we’ve had our drinks, thank you. All right, Claire?”
“Yes, fine,” she said.
They sat in silence. Kling looked through the windows.
SPRY FOR FRYING.
“Claire?”
“Yes?”
SPRY FOR BAKING.
“It’s been a bust, hasn’t it?”
“Please, Bert.”
“The rain…and that lousy movie. I didn’t want it to be this way. I wanted—”
“I knew this would happen, Bert. I tried to tell you, didn’t I? Didn’t I try to warn you off? Didn’t I tell you I was the dullest girl in the world? Why did you insist, Bert? Now you make me feel like a…like a—”
“I don’t want you to feel any way,” he said. “I was only going to suggest that we…we start afresh. From now. Forgetting everything that’s…that’s happened.”
“Oh, what’s the use?”
“Claire,” he said evenly, “what the hell’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Where do you go when you retreat?”
“What?”
“Where do you—”
“I didn’t think it showed. I’m sorry.”
“It shows,” Kling said. “Who was he?”
Claire looked up sharply. “You’re a better detective than I realized.”
“It doesn’t take much detection,” he said. There was a sad undertone to his voice, as if her confirmation of his suspicions had suddenly taken all the fight out of him. “I don’t mind your carrying a torch. Lots of girls—”
“It’s not that,” she interrupted.
“Lots of girls do,” he continued. “A guy drops them cold, or else it just peters out the way romances sometimes—”
“It’s not that!” she said sharply, and when he looked across the table at her, her eyes were filmed with tears.
“Hey, listen, I—”