by Ed McBain
“I’ll ask Teddy,” Carella said, and he smiled thinly.
“Think about it,” Hawes said. “Meanwhile, I’ll call the squad.”
He left the table and went to the phone booth at the far end of the diner. When he returned, he said, “Good news.”
“What?” Carella asked.
“They just picked up Fred Hassler.”
* * * *
4
Fred Hassler was enjoying himself immensely. He was a rotund little man wearing a plaid jacket and a bright blue Italian sports shirt. His eyes were bright and blue, too, and they flashed around the squadroom in obvious enjoyment, his feet jiggling in excitement.
“This is the first time in my life I’ve ever been in a police station,” he said. “Jesus, what color! What atmosphere!”
The color and atmosphere at the moment consisted of a man who was bleeding profusely from a knife wound on his left arm which Detective Meyer Meyer was patiently trying to dress while Detective Bert Kling was calling for an ambulance. In addition, the color and atmosphere included a sixty-year-old man who was gripping the meshed wire of the cage-a small locked enclosure in one corner of the squadroom-and shouting, “Let me kill the bastard! Let me kill him!” while alternately spitting at anyone who came anywhere near the compact mesh prison. And the color and atmosphere included, too, a fat woman in a flowered house dress who was complaining to Hal Willis about a stickball game outside her ground-floor apartment, and it included several ringing telephones, and several clattering typewriters, and the contained smell of the squadroom, a delicate aroma compounded of seven-tenths essence of human sweat, one-tenth percolating coffee, one-tenth stench of urine from the old man in the cage, and one-tenth cheap perfume from the fat lady in the flowered house dress.
Carella and Hawes walked into all this atmosphere and color by negotiating the iron-runged steps that led from the ground floor of the old building, coming down the corridor past the Interrogation Room, the Men’s Room, and the Clerical Office, pushing through the gate in the slatted rail divider, spotting Andy Parker talking to a rotund little man in a straight-backed chair, assuming the man was Fred Hassler, and going directly to him.
“It stinks in here,” Carella said immediately. “Can’t someone open a window?”
“The windows are open,” Meyer said. His hands were covered with blood. He turned to Kling and asked, “Are they on the way?”
“Yeah,” Kling answered. “Why didn’t a patrolman handle this, Meyer? He should have got a meat wagon right on the beat. What the hell does he think this is? An emergency ward?”
“Don’t ask me about patrolmen,” Meyer said. “I’ll never understand patrolmen as long as I live.”
“He brings a guy up here with his arm all cut to ribbons,” Kling said to Carella. “Somebody ought to talk to the captain about that. We got enough headaches without blood all over the floor.”
“What happened?” Carella asked
“The old cockuh in the cage stabbed him,” Meyer said.
“Why?”
“They were playing cards. The old man says he was cheating.”
“Let me out of here!” the old man screamed suddenly from the cage. “Let me kill the bastard!”
“They got to stop playing ball outside my window,” the fat lady said to Willis.
“You’re absolutely right,” Willis told her. “I’ll send a patrolman over right away. He’ll get them to go to a playground.”
“There ain’t no playground!” the fat lady protested.
“He’ll send them to the park. Don’t worry, lady, we’ll take care of it.”
“You said you’d take care of it last time. So they’re still playing stickball right outside my window. And using dirty language!”
“Where the hell’s that ambulance?” Meyer asked.
“They said they’d be right over,” Kling told him.
“Turn on that fan, will you, Cotton?” Carella said.
“It smells like a Chinese whorehouse, don’t it?” Parker said. “The old man peed his pants when Genero made the collar. He’s sixty years old, you know that? But he sure done a job on that arm.”
“Who’s going to question him, that’s what I’d like to know,” Hawes said. “That cage smells like the zoo.”
“Genero brought him in,” Parker said, “we’ll get Genero to do the questioning.” He laughed heartily at his own outrageous suggestion, and then abruptly said, “This is Fred Hassler. Mr. Hassler, Detectives Carella and Hawes. They’re working on that suicide.”
“How do you do?” Hassler said, rising immediately and grasping Carella’s hand. This is mar-velous,” he said, “just mar-velous!”
“Yeah, it’s marvelous,” Parker said, “I’m getting out of this madhouse. If the boss asks for me, tell him I’m in the candy store on Culver and Sixth.”
“Doing what?” Carella asked.
“Having an egg cream,” Parker answered.
“Why don’t you stick around until the ambulance gets here,” Kling suggests “We’ve got our hands full.”
“You’ve got more cops in this room than they got at the Academy,” Parker said, and he left. The fat lady followed him down the corridor, muttering under her breath about the “lousy police in this lousy city.” A patrolman came upstairs to take the old man from the cage to the detention cells on the ground floor. The old man swung at him the moment they unlocked the cage door, and the patrolman instantly clubbed him with his billet and dragged him limp and un-protesting from the squadroom. The ambulance arrived not five minutes later. The man with the slashed arm told the ambulance attendants that he could walk down the steps and out to the waiting ambulance, but they insisted on putting him onto a stretcher. Meyer washed his hands at the corner sink and sat down wearily at his desk. Kling poured himself a cup of coffee. Carella took off his holster, put it into the top drawer of his desk, and sat down beside Fred Kassler. Hawes sat on the edge of the desk.
“Is it like this all the time?” Hassler asked, his eyes bright.
“Not all the time,” Carella said.
“Boy, what excitement!”
“Mmm,” Carella said. “Where have you been, Mr. Hassler?”
“I was out of town. I had no idea you guys were looking for me. When I got back to the apartment this morning-brother! What a mess! The landlady told me I’d better call you guys. So I did.”
“Have you got any idea what happened in your apartment while you were gone?” Hawes asked.
“Well, it blew up, that much I know.”
“Do you know who was in it when it blew up?”
“The guy, yeah. The broad, no.”
“Who was the guy?”
“Tommy Barlow.”
“That his full name?” Hawes asked, beginning to write.
“Thomas Barlow, yeah.”
“Address?”
“He lives with his brother someplace in Riverhead, I’m not sure of the address.”
“Do you know the street?”
“No, I don’t know that, either, I’ve never been there.”
“How do you know Tommy, Mr. Hassler?”
“We work together in the same place.”
“Where’s that?”
“Lone Star Photo-Finishing.”
“In this city?”
“Yeah. 417 North Eighty-eighth.” Hassler paused. “You wondering about the ‘Lone Star’? A guy from Texas started the outfit.”
“I see. How long have you been working there, Mr. Hassler?”
“Six years.”
“You know Tommy Barlow all that time?”
“No, sir. Tommy’s been with the company no more’n two years.”
“Were you good friends?”
“Pretty good.”
“Is he married?”
“Nope. I told you. He lives with his brother. He’s a crippled guy, his brother. I met him once down the place. He walks with a cane.”
“Do you know his name?”
“Yeah, wa
it a minute. Andy… ? no, wait a minute… Angelo… ? something like that, just a minute. Amos! Amos, that’s it. Amos Barlow. Yeah.”
“All right, Mr. Hassler, what was Tommy Barlow doing in your apartment?”
Hassler grinned lewdly. “Well, like what do you think he was doing?”
“I meant…”
“They found him with a naked broad, what do you think he was doing?”
“I meant how’d he happen to be there, Mr. Hassler?”
“Oh. He asked me for the key. He knew I was going out of town, so he asked me if he could use the place. So I said sure. Why not? Nothing wrong with that.”
“Did you know he was going there with a married woman?”
“Nope.”
“Did you know he was going there with a woman?”
“I figured.”
“Did he tell you as much?”
“Nope. But why else would he want the key?”
“Would you say he was a good friend of yours, Mr, Hassler?”
“Yeah, pretty good. We been bowling together a couple of times. And also, he helps me with my movies.”
“Your movies?”
“Yeah, I’m a movie nut. You know, where I work, we don’t process movie film. That’s all done by Kodak and Technicolor and like that. We just develop and print stills, you know. Black and white, color, but no movies.
Anyway, I got this urge to make movies, you see? So I’m always shooting pictures and then I edit them and splice them and Tommy used to help me sometimes. I got this Japanese camera, you see…”
“Help you with what? The picture-taking or the editing?”
“That, and the acting, too. I’ve got a reel almost three hundred feet long that’s practically all Tommy. You should see some of my stuff. I’m pretty good. That’s why this place knocked me on my ass when I walked in here. What color! What atmosphere! Mar-velous! Just mar-velous!” Hassler paused. “You think I could come in here and take some pictures sometime?”
“I doubt it,” Carella said.
“Yeah, what a shame,” Hassler said. “Can you picture that guy’s arm bleeding in color? Boy!”
“Can we get back to Tommy for a minute, Mr. Barlow?”
“Oh, sure. Sure. Listen, I’m sorry if I got off the track. But I’m a nut on movies, you know? I got the bug, you know?”
“Sure, we know,” Hawes said. “Tell us, Mr. Hassler, did Tommy seem despondent or depressed or… ?”
“Tommy? Who, Tommy?” Hassler burst out laughing. “This is the original good-time kid. Always laughing, always happy.”
“When he asked you for the key, did he seem sad?”
“I just told you. He was always laughing.”
“Yes, but when he asked you for the key…”
“He asked me, wait a minute, it musta been three days ago. Because he knew I had to go out of town, you see. The reason I had to go out of town is I’ve got this old aunt who lives upstate and I’m hoping someday when she drops dead she’ll leave me her house. She hasn’t been feeling too good, and I got a cousin who’s got his eye on that house, too, so I figured I better get up there and hold her hand a little before she leaves it to him, you know? So I went up there yesterday, took the day off. Today’s Saturday, right?”
“That’s right.”
“You guys work on Saturdays?”
“We try to, Mr. Hassler,” Carella said. “Can we get back to Tommy for a minute?”
“Oh, sure. Sure. Listen, I’m sorry if I got off the track. But that house is important to me, you know? Not that I want the old lady to drop dead or anything, but I sure would like to get my hands on that house. It’s a big old place, you know? With lilacs all around…”
“About Tommy,” Carella cut in. “As I understand it, when he asked you for the key, he seemed his usual self, is that right? Happy, laughing?”
“That’s right.”
“When did you see him last?”
“Thursday. At work.”
“Did he take Friday off, too?”
“Gee, I don’t know. Why do you ask?”
“We were just wondering what time he and the girl met. He didn’t mention anything about that, did he?”
“You’d have to check with the boss, I guess. See whether or not Tommy was off on Friday. That’s what I’d do if I was you.”
“Thanks,” Carella said.
“She was married, huh? The broad?”
“Yes.”
“Tough break. Her being married, I mean, I got a rule, you know? I never fool around with married women. The way I figure it, there’s plenty of lonely single girls in this city who’re just ready to…”
“Thanks a lot, Mr. Hassler. Where we reach you if we need you?”
“At the apartment, where do you think?”
“You’re going to be staying there?” Hawes asked incredulously.
“Sure. The bedroom’s in fine shape. You’d never even know anything happened. The living room’s not too bad, either. That’s where I keep all my film. Man, if I’da had it stored in the kitchen, brother!”
“Well, thanks again, Mr. Hassler.”
“Sure, anytime,” Hassler said. He shook hands with both detectives, waved at Meyer Meyer, who acknowledged the wave with a sour nod of his head, and then walked out of the squadroom and down the corridor.
“What’s he doing?” Meyer asked. “Running for mayor?”
“We could use a mayor in this city,” Kling answered.
“What do you think?” Carella asked Hawes.
“One thing,” Hawes said. “If Tommy Barlow was planning to commit suicide, why would he use a friend’s apartment? People don’t go around causing trouble for their friends, especially when they’re ready to take the pipe.”
“Right,” Carella said. “And since when do potential suicides go around happy and laughing?” He shook his head. “It doesn’t sound as if Tommy was planning a funeral.”
“No,” Hawes said. “It sounds as if he was planning a party.”
* * * *
It would have been very simple to call the damn thing a suicide and have done with it. Neither Carella nor Hawes were particularly anxious to whip a dead horse, and there was certainly enough evidence around to indicate that Tommy Barlow and Irene Thayer had done the Endsville bit. There was, after all, a suicide note; there was, after all, the presence of enough illuminating gas to have caused an explosion. In addition, there were two empty whisky bottles in the room, and the nearly naked condition of the bodies seemed to strongly indicate this was a true love pact, the doomed lovers perhaps indulging themselves in a final climactic embrace before the gas rendered them unconscious and then dead. All these things in combination made it very easy to reach a conclusion. And the conclusion, of course, should have been suicide.
Carella and Hawes, though, were fairly conscientious cops who had learned through years of experience that every case has a feel to it. This “feel” is something intuitive, and impervious to either logic or reasoning. It is something close to insight, something close to total identification with victim and killer alike. When it comes, you listen to it. You can find whisky bottles on the floor, and clothing stacked in neat little piles, and a typewritten suicide note, and an apartment full of illuminating gas; you can add up all these pieces of evidence and come up with an obvious suicide, and the feel tells you it ain’t. It’s as simple as that.
It was equally simple for the toxicologist attached to the Chief Medical Examiner’s office to arrive at his conclusions. Milt Anderson, Ph.D., was not a lazy man, nor was he being particularly negligent. He was, in all fairness, a man who had been practicing legal toxicology for more than thirty years, and who was a professor of forensic toxicology at one of the city’s finest universities. He knew his work well, and he performed it with accuracy and dispatch. The detectives wanted to know only three things:
1. The cause of death.
2. Whether or not the couple were intoxicated prior to death.
3. Whether
or not the couple had engaged in sexual intercourse prior to death.
No one had asked him to speculate on whether the deaths were accidental, suicidal, or homicidal. He did exactly what he was asked. He examined the victims and reported, as requested, on the three areas of concern to the detectives. But he had also been filled in on the circumstances surrounding the deaths, and these were firmly in his mind as he performed his tests.