Like Love

by Ed McBain

  “Please try to remember, Mr. Patterson.”

  “What?”

  “When she was planning to leave for Reno.”

  “Oh, I’m not sure. The fifteenth, the twentieth, something like that.”

  “Was it the fifteenth?”

  “It could have been. Is the fifteenth a Tuesday? I remember she said it would be Tuesday.”

  Carella took a small celluloid calendar from his wallet. “No,” he said, “the fifteenth is a Monday.”

  “Well, there was something about the weekend interfering, I don’t remember exactly what it was. But she said Tuesday, that I remember for certain. Is the twentieth a Tuesday?”

  “No, the twentieth is a Saturday. Would she have said Tuesday, the sixteenth?”

  “Yes, she might have.”

  “Would there have been any reason for this? Was she waiting for you to prepare papers or anything?”

  “No, that would all be handled by her counsel in Reno.”

  “Then leaving on the sixteenth was her idea?”

  “Yes. But you know, local lawyers don’t usually prepare the papers in an out-of-state divorce case. So this wasn’t…”

  “What?”

  “I did a lot of work even if it didn’t involve the preparation of any legal papers.”

  “What did you mean about a weekend interfering, Mr. Patterson?” Hawes asked.

  “Oh, she said something about having to wait until Monday.”

  “I thought you said Tuesday.”

  “Yes, she was leaving on Tuesday, but apparently there was something to be done on Monday before she left. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific, but it was only a passing reference, and rather vague, as if she were thinking aloud. But she was leaving on the sixteenth, I’m fairly certain about that. And naturally, I put all of my time at her disposal.”

  “Mr. Patterson,” Carella said, “you don’t have to convince us.”

  “Huh?”

  “That you put in a lot of hard work.”

  Patterson immediately stroked his upper lip, certain that no one in the world would have dared to talk to him that way if he were still wearing his mustache. “I wasn’t trying to convince anyone,” he said, miffed but trying hard not to show it. “I did do the work, and I will submit a bill.” He nodded vigorously, in agreement with himself. “I hardly think it should upset Mr. Thayer. The facts of his wife’s indiscretion were all over the newspapers, anyway.”

  “Mr. Patterson, what do you think of that suicide note?” Hawes asked.

  Patterson shrugged. “The one they ran in the newspapers? Sensationalism.”

  “Yes, but did it seem consistent with what Mrs. Thayer was planning?”

  “That’s a leading question,” Patterson said. “Of course not. Why would she kill herself after going through the trouble of arranging for a divorce? Assuming Barlow was the man she planned to marry…”

  “You still seem in doubt,” Carella said.

  “I’m merely exploring the possibilities. If there were yet another man…”

  “Mr. Patterson,” Carella said, “the existing possibilities are confusing enough. I don’t think we have to go looking for more trouble than we already have.”

  Patterson smiled thinly and said, “I thought the police were concerned with investigating every possibility. Especially in an apparent suicide that stinks of homicide.”

  “You do believe it was a homicide?”

  “Don’t you?” Patterson said.

  Carella smiled and answered, “We’re investigating every possibility, Mr. Patterson.”

  * * * *

  There are many many possibilities to investigate when you happen to run the police lab in a large city. Detective Lieutenant Sam Grossman ran the laboratory at Headquarters downtown on High Street, and he would have been a very busy fellow even if the 87th didn’t occasionally drop in with a case or two. Grossman didn’t mind being busy. He was fond of repeating an old Gypsy proverb that said something about idle hands being the devil’s something-or-other, and he certainly didn’t want his hands to become idle and the devil’s something-or-other. There were times, however, when he wished he had six or seven hands rather than the customary allotment. It would have been different, perhaps, if Grossman were a slob. Slobs can handle any number of jobs at the same time, dispatching each and every one with equal facility, letting the chips fall where they may, as another old Gypsy proverb states. But Grossman was a conscientious cop and a fastidious scientist, and he was firmly rooted in the belief that the police laboratory had been devised to help the working stiffs who were out there trying to solve crimes. He took a salary from the city, and he believed that the only way to earn that salary was to do his job as efficiently and effectively as he knew how.

  Grossman was a rare man to head a laboratory because in addition to being a trained detective, he was also a damned good chemist. Most police laboratories were headed by a detective without any real scientific training but with a staff of qualified experts in chemistry, physics, and biology. Grossman had his staff, but he also had his own scientific background, and the mind of a man who had long ago wrestled with burglaries, muggings, robberies and anything a precinct detective could possibly encounter in his working day. There were times, in fact, when Grossman wished he were back in a cozy squadroom somewhere, exchanging crumby jokes with weary colleagues. There were times, like today, when Grossman wished he had stayed in bed.

  He never knew what governing law of probabilities caused the laboratory to be swamped with work at times and comparatively idle at other times. He never knew whether a phase of the moon or the latest nuclear test caused a sudden increase in crimes or accidents, whether people declared a holiday for violence at a specific time of the year or month, or whether some Martian mastermind had decided that such and such a day would be a good time to bug Grossman and his hard-pressed technicians. He only knew that there were days, like today, when there was simply too much to do and not enough people to do it.

  An amateur burglar had broken into a store on South Fifteenth by forcing the lock on the rear door. Grossman’s staff was now involved in comparing the marks found on the lock with specimen marks made with a crude chisel which the investigating detectives had discovered in the room of a suspect.

  A woman had been strangled to death in a bedroom on Culver Avenue. Grossman’s technicians had found traces of hair on the pillow, and would first have to compare it with the woman’s own hair and, in the likelihood that it was not hers, run tests that would tell them whether the hair had been left by an animal or a human, and-if human-which part of the body the hair had come from, whether it had belonged to a man or a woman, whether it had been dyed, bleached, or cut recently, the age of the person who had carelessly left it behind, and whether or not it had been deformed by shooting, burning or scalding.

  A holdup man, retreating in panic when he’d heard the siren of an approaching squad car, had fired three bullets into the wall of a gasoline station and then escaped. Grossman’s technicians were now involved in comparing the retrieved bullets with specimen bullets fired from guns in their extensive file, attempting to determine the make of firearm the criminal had used so that the cops of the 71st could dig into their M.O. file for a possible clue.

  A ten-year-old girl had accused the janitor of her building of having lured her into his basement room, and then having forced her to yield to his sexual advances. The child’s garments were now being examined for stains of semen and blood.

  A forty-five-year-old man was found dead on a highway, obviously the victim of a hit and run. The glass splinters embedded in his clothing were now being compared against specimens from the shattered left front headlight of an abandoned stolen car in an effort to identify the automobile as the one which had struck the man down.

  Fingerprints, palm prints, fragmentary impressions of sweat pores, footprints, sole prints, sock prints, broken windows, broken locks, animal tracks and tire tracks, dust and rust and feathers and film,
rope burns and powder burns, stains of paint or urine or oil-all were there on that day, all waiting to be examined and compared, identified and catalogued.

  And, in addition, there was the apparent suicide the boys of the 87th had dropped into his lap.

  Grossman sighed heavily and once again consulted the drawing his laboratory artist had made from an on-the-spot sketch of the death chamber:

  In suicide, as in baseball, it is sometimes difficult to tell who is who or what is what without a scorecard. Grossman turned over the lucite-encased sketch and studied the typewritten key rubber-cemented to its back:

  The little circles containing the letters A, B, C, D, and E, Grossman knew, indicated the camera angles of the photographs taken in the bedroom and enclosed in the folder he now held in his hands. The police photographer had taken, in order:

  A. A close shot of the suicide note and the wrist watch holding it down on the dresser top.

  B. A medium shot of Tommy Barlow’s clothing on the easy chair and his shoes resting beside the chair.

  C. A full shot of the bed with the bodies of Irene Thayer and Tommy Barlow lying on it.

  D. A medium shot showing the scatter rug and the two whisky bottles, as well as the chair upon and over which were Irene Thayer’s clothes, and beside which were her shoes.

  E. A close shot of the typewriter resting on an end table beside the bed.

  Grossman studied the sketch and the photographs several times more, reread the report one of his technicians had prepared, and then sat down at a long white counter in the lab, took a telephone receiver from its wall bracket, and dialed Frederick 7-8024. The desk sergeant who answered the telephone connected him immediately with Steve Carella in the squadroom upstairs.

  “I’ve got all this junk on your suicide,” Grossman said. “You want to hear about it?”

  “I do,” Carella said.

  ‘Are you guys busy?”

  ‘Moderately so.”

  “Boy, this has been a day,” Grossman said. He sighed wearily. “What’d they give you as cause of death on this one?” he asked.

  “Acute carbon monoxide poisoning.”

  “Mmm,” Grossman said.

  “Why? Did you land some spent discharge shells or something?”

  “No such luck. It sure looks like a suicide, from what we’ve got here, but at the same time… I don’t know. There’s something not too kosher about this.”

  “Like what?”

  “You’d figure a suicide, wouldn’t you?” Grossman said cautiously. “Whisky bottles, open gas jets, an explosion. It all adds up, right? It verifies the figures.”

  “What figures?”

  “On deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning in this city every year. I’ve got a chart here. Shall I read you what the chart says?”

  “Read to me,” Carella answered, smiling.

  “Eight hundred and forty deaths a year, four hundred and forty of which are suicides. Four hundred and thirty-five of those are from illuminating gas. So it figures, doesn’t it? And add the whisky bottles. Suicides of this type will often drink themselves into a stupor after turning on the gas. Or sometimes, they’ll take sleeping pills, anything to make the death nice and pleasant, you know?”

  “Yeah, nice and pleasant,” Carella said.

  “Yeah. But there’s something a little screwy about this setup, Steve. I’ll tell you the truth, I wonder about it.”

  “What have you got, Sam?”

  “Number one, this whole business of the whisky bottles on the floor. Not near the head of the bed, but near the foot. And one of them knocked over. Why were the bottles near the foot of the bed, where they couldn’t be reached if this couple had really been drinking?”

  “They weren’t drunk, Sam,” Carella said. “Not according to our toxicologist.”

  “Then where’d all that booze go to?” Grossman said. “And something else, Steve. Where are the glasses?”

  “I don’t know. Where are they?”

  “In the kitchen sink. Washed very nicely. Two glasses sitting in the sink all sparkling clean. Funny?”

  “Very funny,” Carella said. “If you’ve turned on the gas and are trying to get drunk, why get out of bed to wash the glasses?”

  “Well, they had to get out of bed anyway, didn’t they? To put on their clothes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, Steve, the whole thing smells of a love nest, doesn’t it? We checked their garments for seminal stains, and there weren’t any. So they must have been naked if they…”

  “They didn’t,” Carella said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Autopsy report. No signs of intercourse.”

  “Mmmmm,” Grossman said. “Then what were they doing with most of their clothes off?”

  “Do you want an educated guess?”

  “Shoot.”

  “They probably planned to go out in a blaze of romantic glory. They got partially undressed, turned on the gas, and then were overcome before anything could happen. That’s my guess.”

  “It doesn’t sound very educated to me,” Grossman said.

  “All right, then,” Carella said, “they were exhibitionists. They wanted their pictures in the paper without clothes on.”

  “That not only sounds uneducated, it sounds positively ignorant.”

  “Give me a better guess.”

  “A third person in that apartment,” Grossman said. “That’s educated, huh?”

  “That’s highly educated,” Grossman said “Considering the fact that three glasses were used.”

  “What?”

  “Three glasses.”

  “You said two a minute ago.”

  “I said two in the sink. But we went through the cupboard over the sink, and we checked the glassware there, just cause we had nothing else to do, you understand. Most of them were shattered by the blast, but…”

  “Yeah, yeah, go ahead.”

  “Light film of dust on all the glasses but one. This one had been recently washed, and then dried with a dish towel we found on a rack under the sink. The lint on the glass compared positive. What do you think?”

  “They could have used three glasses, Sam.”

  “Sure. Then why did they leave two in the sink and put the third one back in the cupboard?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A third person,” Grossman said. “In fact, when we consider the last, and, I must admit, very very peculiar phenomenon, I’m almost convinced the third person is much more than just an educated guess.”

  “What’s the phenomenon, Sam?”

  “No latent impressions in the room.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No prints.”

  “Of a third person, do you mean?”

  “Of anybody, I mean.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m telling you,” Grossman said. “Not a fingerprint on anything. Not on the glasses, not on the bottles, not on the typewriter, not even on their shoes, Steve. Now how the hell do you type a suicide note and not leave prints all over the keys? How do you take off a pair of shoes-where there’s a good waxy surface that can pick up some beauties-and not leave some kind of an impression? How do you pour yourself a drink, and not leave at least a palm print on the bottle? Uh-uh, Steve, it stinks to high heaven.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “My guess is somebody went around that room and wiped off every surface, every article that anybody-especially himself-had touched.”

  “A man?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You said himself.“

  “Poetic license. It could have been man, woman, or trained chimpanzee, for all I know. I just finished telling you there’s nothing in that apartment, nothing. And that’s why it stinks. Whoever wiped up the place must have read a lot of stories about how we track down dangerous gunmen because they left behind a telltale print.”

  “We won’t tell them the truth, huh?”


  “No, let ‘em guess.” Grossman paused. “What do you think?”

  “Must have been an orgy,” Carella said, smiling.

  “You serious?”

  “Booze, a naked broad-maybe two naked broads, for all we know. What else could it have been?”

  “It could have been somebody who found them in bed together, clobbered them, and then set up the joint to look like a suicide.”