87P14-Lady, Lady, I Did It!

by Ed McBain

  “I just thought—”

  “I want to work on it, Steve.”

  “All right.”

  “Actually, I…I was here when the squeal came in, so…so officially I…”

  “It’s all right with me, Bert. I was only thinking of you.”

  “I’ll be all right when we find him,” Kling said.

  Carella and Meyer exchanged a silent glance.

  “Well…well, then, sure. Sure. You…you want to see this Ballistics report?”

  Kling took the manila envelope silently, and silently he opened it. There were two reports in the envelope. One described a .45-caliber automatic. The other described a .22. Kling studied each of the reports separately.

  There is nothing very mysterious about determining the make of an unknown firearm when one possesses a sample bullet fired from it. Kling, as a working cop, knew this. At the same time, he found the process a little confusing, and he tried not to think about it too much or too often.

  He knew that there was a vast working file of revolvers, pistols, and bullets in the Ballistics Bureau, and that all these were classified by caliber, by number of lands and grooves, and by direction of the rifling twist. In addition, he knew that all handguns in current use had rifled bores that put a fired bullet in rotation as it passed through the barrel. Lands, he had learned by rote, were the smooth surfaces between the spiral grooves in the barrel. Lands and grooves left marks upon a bullet.

  When a spent bullet was recovered and sent to Ballistics, it was rolled on a sheet of carbon paper and then compared against the specimen cards in the file. If Ballistics tentatively made a bullet from the file cards, the suspect bullet was put under a microscope with a test bullet from another part of the file and both were accurately compared. Along about then, when twist and angle of twist entered the picture, Kling got a little confused.

  That’s why he never thought much about it. He knew simply that the same make of pistol or revolver would always fire a bullet with the same number and width of grooves and the same spiral direction and twist. So he accepted the Ballistics reports unquestioningly.

  “He used two different guns, huh?” Kling said.

  “Yes,” Carella answered. “That explains the conflicting reports from our eyewitnesses. You didn’t see those, Bert. They’re in the file.”

  “Under what?”

  “Under…” Carella hesitated. “Under K…for Kling.”

  Kling nodded briefly. It was difficult to tell what he was thinking in that moment.

  “We figured he was after one of the four he got, Bert,” Meyer said. He spoke cautiously and slowly. One of the four had been Claire Townsend.

  Kling nodded.

  “We don’t know which one,” Carella said.

  “We questioned Mrs. Land this morning, and she gave us what looked like a lead, but it fizzled. We want to hit the others today and tomorrow.”

  “I’ll take one,” Kling said. He paused. “I’d rather not question Claire’s father, but any of the others…”

  “Sure,” Carella said.

  The men were silent. Both Meyer and Carella knew that something had to be said, and it had to be said now. Meyer was the senior of the two men—in age and in years with the squad—but he looked to Carella pleadingly, and Carella took the cue, cleared his throat, and said, “Bert, I think…I think we ought to get something straight.”

  Kling looked up.

  “We want this guy. We want him very bad.”

  “I know that.”

  “We’ve got almost nothing to go on, and that doesn’t make it easy. It’ll make it harder if—”

  “If what?”

  “If we don’t work this as a team.”

  “We’re working as a team,” Kling said.

  “Bert, are you sure you want in on this?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Are you sure you can question somebody and listen to the facts of Claire’s death and be able to think of—”

  “I can do it,” Kling said immediately.

  “Don’t cut me off, Bert. I’m talking about a multiple murder in a bookstore, and one of the victims was—”

  “I said I can do it.”

  “—one of the victims was Claire Townsend. Now can you?”

  “Don’t be a son of a bitch, Steve. I can do it, and I want to do it, and—”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, I think so!” Kling said heatedly.

  “You won’t even let me mention her name here in the squadroom, for Christ’s sake! What are you going to do when someone describes the way she was killed?”

  “I know she was killed,” Kling said softly.

  “Bert…”

  “I know she’s dead.”

  “Look, stay off it. Do me a favor and—”

  “Friday the thirteenth,” Kling said. “My mother used to call it a hoodoo jinx of a day. I know she’s dead, Steve. I’ll be able to… to…I’ll work with you, and I’ll be thinking straight, don’t worry. You don’t know how much I want to catch this guy. You just don’t know how much I won’t be good for anything else until we get him, believe me. I won’t be good for another goddamn thing.”

  “There’s the possibility,” Carella said evenly, “that the killer was after Claire.”

  “I know.”

  “There’s the possibility we may find out things about Claire you wouldn’t particularly like to know.”

  “There’s nothing new I can find out about Claire.”

  “Homicide opens a lot of closets, Bert.”

  “Where do you want me to go?” Kling asked. “What do you want me to do?”

  Carella and Meyer exchanged another long glance. “Okay,” Carella said at last. “Go home and shave and change your clothes. Here’s the address of Mrs. Joseph Wechsler. We’re trying to find out if any of the victims had any warnings or threats or—we want to find exactly who he was after, Bert.”

  “All right.” Kling picked up the sheet of paper, folded it in two, and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He was starting out of the squadroom when Carella called to him.

  “Bert?”

  Kling turned. “Yeah?”

  “You…you know how we feel about this, don’t you?”

  Kling nodded. “I think I do.”

  “Okay.”

  The two men stared at each other for a moment. Then Kling turned and walked rapidly out of the room.

  The city is a crazy thing of many parts that don’t quite fit together. You would think all the pieces would join, like the interlocking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but somehow the rivers and streams and bridges and tunnels separate and join areas that, in character and geography, could be foreign countries miles apart and not segments of the same sprawling metropolis.

  Isola, of course, was the hub of the city, and the 87th Precinct was smack in the center of that hub, like a wheel within a wheel, turning. Isola was an island, aptly and literally named by an unimaginative Italian explorer who had stumbled upon America, long after his compatriot had found it and claimed it for Queen Isabella. Columbus notwithstanding, the latter-day adventurer had come upon this lovely island, had been struck speechless by its beauty, and had muttered simply, “Isola.” Not “Isola Bella” or “Isola Bellissima” or “Isola la piu bella d’Italia,” but merely “Isola.”

  Island.

  He had, since he had been a native Italian, born and raised in the tiny town of San Luigi, pronounced the name in perfect Italian. The name, if not the island itself, had been bastardized over the ensuing centuries, so that it was now pronounced “Ice-a-luh,” or sometimes even “Ice-luh.” This mispronunciation might have disturbed the island’s godfather had he been alive and kicking in the twentieth century, but chances are he wouldn’t even have recognized the place. Isola was thronged with skyscrapers above ground, tunnels below the surface. She roared with the thunderous pace of big business. Her ports overflowed with goods from everywhere in the world. Her shores were laced with countless bridge
s connecting her to the rest of the less frenetic city. Isola had come a long way from San Luigi.

  Majesta and Bethtown reflected the English influence on the New World, at least insofar as their names honored British royalty. Bethtown had been named after the Virgin Queen in a burst of familiarity, the queen’s ministers having decided to call the place “Besstown.” But the man who delivered the new name to the crown colony was a man who’d lisped ever since he learned to talk, and he told the then-governor that it was the queen’s desire to call this place “Bethtown.” That’s the way it went into the official records. By the time Bess discovered the monumental goof, the name had already gone into familiar usage, and she realized she couldn’t very well reeducate the colonists, so she let it stand. Instead, she cut off the lisping messenger’s head—but that’s show biz.

  Majesta had been named after George III, whose advisers at first thought it would be fitting to name the place Georgetown but who then decided there were too many Georgetowns around already. They dug into their Latin texts and came up with the word majestas, which meant, “grandeur” or “greatness” or “majesty,” and this seemed a proper tribute to their monarch. George later had a little trouble in Boston with some tea-drinkers, his majesty having diminished somewhat, by the name Majesta remained as a reminder of better days.

  Calm’s Point hadn’t been named after anybody. In fact, for a very long time, hardly anyone at all lived on this small island bordering the larger island of Isola. In those days, wild animals foraged through the woods engaging each other in bloody battles—but the rest of the city nonetheless referred to the island across the River Harb as Calm’s Point. A few hardy adventurers cleared the woods of beasts, pitched a couple of tents, and began propagating. That’s the way to start a suburb, all right. After a while, when the tribe increases, you can petition the city for ferry service. In the event of a real population explosion, you can even hope for a bridge to the mainland.

  Bert Kling was heading for Riverhead, where Mrs. Joseph Wechsler made her residence. There was, in actuality, no river that had its head—or even its tail—in that part of the city. In the days of the old Dutch settlers the entire part of the city above Isola was owned by a patroon named Ryerhert. Ryerhert’s Farms was good land interspersed with igneous and metamorphic rock. As the city grew, Ryerhert sold part of his land and donated the rest of it until eventually all of it was owned by the city. Ryerhert was hard to say. Even before 1917, when it became unfashionable for anything to sound even mildly Teutonic, Ryerhert had become Riverhead. There was, to be sure, water in Riverhead. But the water was a brook, really, and it wasn’t even called a brook. It was called Five Mile Pond. It was not five miles wide, nor was it five miles long, nor was it five miles from any noticeable landmark. It was simply a brook that was called Five Mile Pond in a community called Riverhead that had no river’s head in it.

  The city was a crazy thing sometimes.

  Mrs. Wechsler lived in Riverhead in an apartment building that had a large entrance court flanked by two enormous stone flowerpots without any flowers in them. Kling walked between the pots, and through the entrance court, and into the vestibule. He found a name plate for Joseph Wechsler, apartment 4-A, and pressed the bell. There was an answering click on the locked inner vestibule door. He opened the door and walked upstairs to the fourth floor.

  He took a deep breath in the hallway outside the Wechsler apartment. Then he knocked.

  A woman answered the knock.

  She looked at Kling curiously and said, “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Wechsler?”

  “No?” It was still a question. “Are you the new rabbi?” the woman asked.

  “What?”

  “The new—”

  “No. I’m from the police.”

  “Oh.” The woman paused. “Oh, did you want to see Ruth?”

  “Is that Mrs. Wechsler?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s who I’d like to see,” Kling said.

  “We…” The woman looked confused. “She…You see, we’re sitting shivah. That’s—are you Jewish?”

  “No.”

  “We’re in mourning. For Joseph. I’m his sister. I think it would be better if you came back another—”

  “Ma’am, I’d appreciate it if I could talk to Mrs. Wechsler now. I…I can understand…but…”

  He suddenly wanted to leave. He did not want to intrude on mourners. And then he thought, Leave, and the killer gets an edge.

  “Could I please see her now?” he asked. “Would you please ask her?”

  “I’ll ask her,” the woman said, and she closed the door.

  Kling waited in the hallway. He could hear the sounds of an apartment building everywhere around him, the sounds of life. And, beyond the closed door to apartment 4-A, the stillness of death.

  A young man came up the steps, carrying a book under his arm. He nodded solemnly at Kling, stopped just beside him, and asked, “This is Wechsler?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  He knocked on the door. While he waited for someone to answer his knock, he touched his fingers to the mezuzah fastened to the jamb. They waited together silently in the hallway. From somewhere upstairs a woman shouted to her son in the street. “Martin! Come upstairs and put on a sweater!” Inside the apartment, there was silence. The young man knocked again. They could hear footsteps beyond the door. Joseph Wechsler’s sister opened the door, looked first at Kling and then at the newcomer. “Are you the rabbi?” she asked.

  “Yes,” the man answered.

  “Will you come in, please, rov?” she said. She turned to Kling. “Ruth says she will talk to you, Mr.—what is your name?”

  “Kling.”

  “Yes, Mr. Kling. Mr. Kling, she’s just lost her husband. Would you please…could you kindly…?”

  “I understand,” Kling said.

  “Come in then. Please.”

  They were sitting in the living room. There was a basket of fruit on the coffee table. The pictures, the mirrors were draped in black. The mourners sat on wooden crates. The men wore black yarmulkes, the women wore shawls. The young rabbi had entered the room and was beginning to lead a prayer. Ruth Wechsler broke away from the mourners and came to Kling.

  “How do you do?” she said. “I am glad to know you.” She spoke with a thick Yiddish accent, which surprised Kling at first because she seemed like such a young woman and an unfamiliarity with English did not seem to go with youth. And then, looking at her more closely in the dimness of the room, he realized that she was well into her forties, perhaps even in her early fifties, one of those rare Semitic types who never truly age, with jet-black hair and luminous brown eyes, more luminous because they were wet with tears. She took his hand briefly, and he fumblingly shook hands, not knowing what to say, his own grief suddenly swallowed in the eyes of this beautiful pale woman who was ageless.

  “Would you come with me, please?” she said. Her accent was really atrocious, almost a burlesque of the Sammy and Abie vaudeville routines, stripped of all amusement by the woman’s utter sadness. Kling automatically made an aural adjustment, discounting the thick dialect, translating mentally, hearing still the curious structure of her sentences but cutting through the accent to arrive at the meaning of her words.

  She led him to a small room behind the living room. There was a couch and a television set in the room. The screen was blank. Two windows faced the street and the sounds of a city in turbulence. From the living room came the sound of the rabbi’s voice raised in the ancient Herbraic mourning prayers. In the small room with the television set, Kling sat beside Ruth Wechsler and felt a oneness with the woman. He wanted to take her hands in his own. He wanted to weep with her.

  “Mrs. Wechsler, I know this is difficult—”

  “No, I would like to talk to you,” she said. She pronounced the word “vould.” She nodded and said, “I want to help the police. We can’t catch the killer unless I help the police.” He looked int
o the luminous brown eyes and heard the words exactly that way, even though she had actually said, “Ve ken’t ketch d’killuh onless I halp d’police.”

  “Then…that’s very kind of you, Mrs. Wechsler. I’ll try not to ask too many questions. I’ll try to be as brief as possible.”

  “Take what time you need,” she said.

  “Mrs. Wechsler, would you happen to know what your husband was doing in Isola at that particular bookshop?”

  “Nearby there, he has a store.”

  “Where is that, Mrs. Wechsler?”

  “On the Stem and North Forty-seventh.”

  “What kind of a store?”

  “Hardware.”

  “I see, and his store is close to the bookshop. Did he go to the bookshop often?”

  “Yes. He was a big reader, Joseph. He doesn’t speak too well, Joseph. He has, like me, a terrible accent. But he enjoyed reading. He said this helped him with words, to read it out loud. He would read to me out loud in bed. I think…I think he went there to get a book I mentioned last week—that I said it would be nice if we read it.”

  “What book was that, Mrs. Wechsler?”

  “By Herman Wouk, he’s a fine man. Joseph read to me out loud The Caine Mutiny and This Is My God, and I said to him we should get this book, Marjorie Morningstar, because when it came out there was some fuss, some Jewish people took offense. I said to Joseph, how could such a fine man like Herman Wouk write a book would offend Jews? I said to Joseph there must be a mistake. There must be too many people, they’re too sensitive. I said it must be that Mr. Wouk is the offended party, that this man is being misunderstood, that his love is being misunderstood for something else. That’s what I said to Joseph. So I asked him to get the book, we should find out for ourselves.”