by Ed McBain
“Me? Of what?”
“Of telling us all this? Of possible reprisal?”
“Reprisal? What’s that?”
“Vendetta,” Carella said in Italian.
“Ma che cosa?” the old man said. “Vendetta? Che importa? I’m an old man. What are they going to do with their vendetta? Kill me? If this is the worst that can happen to me, I welcome it.”
“We appreciate your help, Mr. Coluzzi.”
“The way I figure it, a man is entitled in this country to come to the park and sit on a bench if he wants to. No one has the right to murder him while he is sitting on a bench minding his own business.”
“Thanks again,” Carella said.
“Prego,” the old man answered, and went back to sketching the rowboat, on the lake.
* * * *
The old man’s eyesight was good, even though he was sixty-seven years old. A call to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles confirmed that a blue 1960 Cadillac convertible bearing the license plate IS-7146 was registered to a Mr. Frank Dumas at 1137 Fairview in, of course, Isola. The “IS” on the plate made the Isola address mandatory. Carella thanked the clerk at the bureau, turned to Hawes, and said, “Too easy. It’s too damn easy.”
Hawes shrugged and answered, “We haven’t got him yet.”
They checked out a sedan and drove downtown to Fairview Street. Carella was thinking that he had drawn Lineup the next day, and that would mean getting up an hour earlier in order to be all the way downtown on time. Hawes was thinking that he was due in court on Monday to testify in a burglary case. They drove with the windows in the car open. The car was an old Buick, fitted with a police radio and new tires. It had been a good car in its day, but Carella wondered what it would do in a chase with one of this year’s souped-up models. Fairview Street was thronged with people who had come outdoors simply to talk to each other or to catch a breath of spring Mr. They parked the car at the curb in front of 1137, and began walking toward the building. The people on the front stoop knew immediately that they were cops. The sedan was unmarked, and both Carella and Hawes were wearing business suits, and shirts and ties, but the people sitting on the front stoop of the tenement knew they were cops and would have known it even if they’d walked up those steps wearing Bermuda shorts and sneakers. A cop has a smell. If you live long enough in an area infested with cops, you get to know the smell. You get to fear it, too, because cops are one thing you can never figure. They will help you one moment and turn on you the next. The people sitting on the front stoop watched Carella and Hawes, two strangers, mount the front steps and walk into the vestibule. The stoop cleared immediately. The two young men standing there immediately decided to go to the candy store for an egg cream. The old man from the building next door decided to go up on the roof and look at his pigeons. The old lady who lived on the ground floor packed up her knitting, picked up her folding chair, and went inside to watch daytime television. Cops almost always spelled trouble, and detectives spelled the biggest kind of trouble.
Carella and Hawes, not unaware of the subtle discrimination taking place behind them, studied the mailboxes and found a listing for Mr. Frank Dumas in apartment 44. They went through the vestibule and up the steps. On the second floor, they passed a little girl who was sitting on the steps tightening her skates with a skate key.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” Carella answered.
“Are you coming to my house?” she asked.
“Where’s your house?”
“A pommin twenny-one.”
“No, sorry,” Carella said, smiling.
“I thought you was the insurance,” the little girl said, and went back to tightening her skates.
On the fourth-floor landing, they drew their guns. Apartment 44 was in the middle of the hall. They walked silently to the door, listened outside for a moment, and then flanked it. Carella nodded at Hawes who braced himself for a flat-footed kick at the lock.
He was bringing back his knee when the shots came from within the apartment, shockingly loud, splintering the door.
* * * *
15
Hawes dropped at the sound of the first shot, just as the splintered hole appeared in the wooden door. The slug whistled past his head as he fell flat to the floor, and then ricocheted off the wall behind him and went caroming at a crazy angle down the hallway just as the second shot erupted. The wood splintered again., and Carella winced as the slug tore its way across the narrow corridor, inches from his face where he stood to the left of the door, his gun pulled in tight against his chest, his head pulled down into his shoulders. On the floor, Hawes was scrambling away to the right of the door as the third shot came. The next four shots followed almost immediately, ripping wood from the door, ricocheting, into the cracked ceiling overhead. He had counted seven shots, an empty automatic if the person inside was firing a certain type of .45. There was a pause. The man could be reloading. Or he could be firing another type of .45 with a magazine capacity of nine cartridges, or a Harrington & Richardson .22 with the same capacity, or… there was no time to run through a gun catalogue. He could be reloading, or simply waiting, or even carrying two guns-or he could at this moment be climbing out the window. Carella took a deep breath. He backed off across the hallway, braced himself against the opposite wall, and unleashed the sole of his foot at the lock on the door.
The door sprang inward, and Carella followed it into a hail of bullets that came from the window. Hawes was immediately behind him. They both dropped flat to the worn linoleum inside the apartment, firing at the window where the figure of a man appeared in silhouette for just a moment, and then vanished. They got to their feet, and rushed across the room. Carella put his head outside the window, and then pulled it back at once as a shot sounded somewhere above him, and a piece of red brick spattered against his cheek.
“He’s heading for the roof!” he shouted to Hawes, not turning to look, knowing that Hawes would take the steps up, and knowing that he himself would climb onto the fire escape in pursuit within the next few moments. He reloaded his gun from the cartridge belt at his waist, and then stepped out onto the fire escape. He fired a quick shot at the figure two stories above him, and then began clambering up the iron-runged steps. The man above did not fire again. Instead, as he climbed, he began dropping a barrage of junk collected from the fire escapes he passed: flower pots, an iron, a child’s toy truck, an old and battered suitcase, all of which crashed around Carella as he made his way steadily up each successive ladder. The barrage stopped when the man gained the roof. Three shots echoed on the still spring Mr. Hawes had reached the roof.
By the time Carella joined him, the man had leaped the area-way between the two buildings and was out of sight.
“He got away while I was reloading,” Hawes said.
Carella nodded, and then holstered his .38.
When they got back to the squad room, Meyer was waiting with a report on Frank Dumas.
“No record,” he said, “not in this city, at least. I’m waiting for word from the Feds.”
“That’s too bad,” Carella said. “It looked like a professional job.”
“Maybe he is a pro.”
“You just said he had no record.”
“How do we know Dumas is his right name?”
“The car was registered…”
“I talked to MVB a little more,” Meyer said. “The car was registered only last month. He could have used an alias.”
“That wouldn’t have tied with his driver’s license.”
“Since when do thieves worry about driver’s licenses?”
“Thieves are the most careful drivers in the world,” Carella said.
“I also checked the phone book. There are six listings for Frank Dumas. I’ll bet you next month’s salary against a bagel that Dumas is an alias he picked right out of the directory.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s worth checking,” Meyer told them.
He also told Carella and Hawes that Detec
tive Andy Parker’s surveillance of a suspected shooting gallery would be paid off this evening at 7:00 p.m. The lieutenant needed five men for the raid, and the names of Carella and Hawes were on the list. “We’re mustering here at six-thirty,” Meyer said.
“I’d planned to go home at six,” Carella answered.
“The best laid plans,” Meyer said, “aft get screwed up.”
“Yeah.” Carella scratched his head. “What do you want to do, Cotton? Go back to Fairview and talk to the landlady or somebody?”
“She ought to know who rented that apartment,” Hawes said.
“You had lunch yet?” Meyer asked.
“No.”
“Get something to eat first. The landlady’ll wait.”
They had lunch in a diner near the precinct. Carella was wondering whether the lab would come up with anything positive on that switchblade knife. He was also wondering why the killer had chosen to use a knife in the park when he obviously owned at least one gun.
“Do you think he saw us pulling up downstairs?” Carella asked.
“He must have. The way that stoop cleared, he’d have had to be an idiot not to know we were cops.”
“This doughnut is stale,” Carella said. “How’s yours?”
“It’s all right. Here, take half of it.”
“No, go ahead.”
“I won’t be able to finish it, anyway.”
“Thanks,” Carella said. He sliced Hawes’ doughnut in half and began munching on it. “That’s better,” he said. He looked at his watch. “We’d better get moving. He’s got a head start on us already. If we can at least find out whether Dumas is his real name…”
“Just let me finish my tea,” Hawes said.
The landlady at 1137 Fairview Street wasn’t happy to see cops, and she told them so immediately.
“There’s always cops here,” she said, “I’m fed up to here with cops.”
“That’s too bad, lady,” Hawes said, “but we’ve got to ask you some questions, anyway.”
“You always come around shooting, and then you ask the questions later,” the landlady said angrily.
“Lady, the man in apartment 44 began shooting first,” Hawes said.
“That’s your story.”
“Who was he, do you know?”
“Who’s going to pay for all that damage to the hallway, can you tell me that?”
“Not us,” Hawes said flatly. “What’s the man’s name?”
“John Doe.”
“Come on, lady.”
“‘That’s his name. That’s the name he took the apartment under.”
“How long has he been living here?”
“Two months.”
“Did he pay his rent in cash or by check?”
“Cash.”
“Didn’t you suspect John Doe might not be his real name? Especially since the name Frank Dumas is on his mailbox?”
“I’m not a cop,” the landlady said. “It’s not my job to suspect somebody who comes here to rent an apartment. He paid me a month in advance, and he didn’t holler about the increase over the last tenant, or the four dollars for the television aerial, so why should I suspect him? I don’t care if his name’s John Doe or John D. Rockefeller, so long as he pays the rent and doesn’t cause trouble.”
“But he’s caused a little trouble, hasn’t he?”
“You’re the ones caused the trouble,” the landlady said, “Coming here with your guns and shooting up the hallway. Do you know there was a little girl sitting on the steps while you were shooting? Do you know that?”
“The little girl was on the second floor, ma’am,” Carella said. “And besides, we didn’t expect shooting.”
“Then you don’t know cops the way I do. The minute a cop arrives, there’s shooting.”
“We’d like to go through Mr. Doe’s apartment,” Carella said.
“Then you’d better go get yourself a search warrant.”
“Come on, lady, break your heart.”
Hawes said. “You don’t want us to go all the way downtown, do you?”
“I don’t care where you go. If you want to search that apartment, you need a warrant. That’s the law.”
“You know, of course, that your garbage cans are still outside on the sidewalk, don’t you?” Carella said.
“Huh?”
“Your garbage cans. They’re supposed to be taken in by noon. It’s one-thirty now.”
“I’ll take them in right away,” the landlady said. “The damn trucks didn’t get here until noon.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Carella said, “but taking them in now won’t change the nature of the misdemeanor. There’s a stiff fine involved, you know.”
“What is this? A shakedown?”
“That’s exactly what it is, lady,” Hawes said. “You don’t really want us to go all the way downtown for a search warrant, do you?”
“Cops,” the landlady muttered, and she turned her back. “Go ahead, look through the apartment. Try not to steal anything while you’re up there.”
“We’ll try,” Carella said, “but it won’t be easy.”
They began climbing the steps to the fourth floor. The same little girl was sitting on the second floor landing, still adjusting her skates with the skate key.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” Carella answered.
“Are you coming to my house?”
“Apartment twenty-one?” Carella asked.
“That’s right.”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“I thought you was the insurance,” the little girl said, and went back to work on the skate.
The door to apartment 44 was open when they reached the fourth floor landing. Carella’s kick had sprung the lock and the door stood ajar, knifing a wedge of sunlight into the otherwise dark hallway. They walked to the door and casually shoved it open.
A young woman turned swiftly from the dresser where she was going through the drawers. She was perhaps eighteen years old, her hair in curlers, wearing neither make-up nor lipstick, a faded pink robe thrown over her pajamas.
“Well, hello,” Carella said.
The girl pulled a face, as if she were four years old and had been caught doing some-thing that was strictly forbidden by her parents.
“You’re cops, huh?” she said.
“That’s right,” Hawes answered. “What are you doing here, miss?”
“Looking around, that’s all.”
“Just browsing, huh?” Carella said.
“Well, sort of, yes.”
“What’s your name?”
“Cynthia.”
“Cynthia what?”
“I didn’t take anything, mister,” Cynthia said. “I just came in to look around, that’s all. I live right down the hall. You can ask anybody.”
“What do you want us to ask them?”
“If I don’t live right down the hall.”
Cynthia shrugged. Her face was getting more and more discouraged, crumbling slowly, the way a very little girl’s face will steadily dissolve under the questioning of adults.
“What’s your last name, Cynthia?”
“Reilly,” she said.
“What are you doing in here, Cynthia?”
Cynthia shrugged.
“Stealing?”
“No!” she said. “Hey, no! No, I swear to God.”
“Then what?”
“Just looking around.”
“Do you know the man who lives in this apartment?”
“No. I only saw him in the hall once or twice.”
“Do you know his name?”
“No.” Cynthia paused. “I’m sick,” she said. “I’ve got a bad cold. That’s why I’m in my bathrobe. I couldn’t go to work because I had a fever of a hundred and one point six.”
“So you decided to take a little walk, is that it?”
“Yes, that’s it,” Cynthia said. She smiled because she thought at last the detectives were beginning to underst
and what she was doing in this apartment, but the detectives didn’t smile back, and her face returned to its slow crumbling, as if she were ready to burst into tears at any moment.
“And you walked right in here, huh?”
“Only because I was curious.”