by Ed McBain
“Matt, you’re the only one I know. I came because you’re the only one I know.”
“Don’t you read the papers, you stupid bastard?” I said. “I don’t own a license anymore. The cops took it away when I beat up the guy I found with my wife. Now get the hell out and…”
“It’s my wife’s sister, Matt,” he said, ignoring me. “The reason I came is she’s pregnant.”
“Good for her,” I said.
“You don’t follow, Matt. She’s a seventeen-year-old kid. Been living with us since my father-in-law passed away. She ain’t married, Matt.”
“So? For Christ’s sake, Rudy, what the hell do you want me to do about it?”
“My wife wants to find the guy who done it. Matt, she’s been driving me nuts. The kid won’t tell her, and she’s beginning to swell up like a balloon. My wife wants to find him to make him do the right thing.”
“What’s her name?”
“My sister-in-law’s?”
“Yeah.”
“Betty.”
“And she won’t tell you the guy’s name?”
“No, Matt. She’s got a funny sense of loyalty or something, I guess. My wife’s been after her ever since she found out about it, but she won’t peep.”
“What makes you think I can find the guy?”
“If anyone can, you can, Matt.”
I shook my head. “Rudy, do me a favor. Go to a certified agency, will you? Get yourself a detective who can stand up straight.”
“I’ll tell you the truth, Matt. I can’t afford it. I got a kid of my own, a lot of mouths to feed. Help me, Matt, will you?”
“No! God damn it, I don’t practice anymore. Go back home, Rudy. Forget you found me. Do that, will you?”
“It ain’t so much for me, Matt. It’s the wife. This thing is making a wreck of her. Matt, I never asked you for anything before, but this is something else. Believe me, if I didn’t have to ask you…”
“All right, all right!” I shouted. I cursed and swung my legs over the side of the cot, reaching for my shoes on the floor. They were cold, and I cursed a little more. When I finally had them laced, I asked, “You still a night watchman?”
“Yes,” Rudy said.
“You got a car with you?”
“Yes, Matt.” He looked at me hopefully. “Are you going to help me?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m going to help. I’m the craziest bastard alive, but I’ll help you. Let’s go,” I said.
His car was parked downstairs. He drove quickly and he filled me in on a few more details as we headed for the Bronx. His wife Madeline had found out Betty was pregnant about a month ago. The kid was already four months gone by that time, and Madeline was frantic. Both she and Rudy talked to the girl, but they couldn’t get anything out of her. They asked discreet questions around the neighborhood, but since they didn’t want the secret to get out, they had to be very careful—and their questioning had netted a big fat zero. They’d asked the kid to get rid of the baby, and she’d refused. And then they’d asked her to have it at a home where they’d take the baby off her hands as soon as it was born, and that drew a blank also. All the while, Betty refused to name the guy.
“That’s a little strange, isn’t it?” I asked Rudy.
“Sure,” Rudy agreed. “But you know how these teenagers are. Crazier’n hell.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Beautiful,” Rudy said. “Blue eyes, black hair. Looks just the way my wife did when she was that age. You ever meet Madeline, Matt?”
“No.”
“Well, she’s changed a lot since I first married her. But the kid is a dead ringer for what she used to look like. You’ll see.”
“Does she have a lot of boy friends?”
“The usual. Neighborhood kids mostly.”
“Did you talk to any of them?”
“A few. I couldn’t tell them what I was after, though, so it was kind of tough.”
“Whal kind of a crowd was she in? Fast?”
“I really don’t know, Matt. She didn’t talk about it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You think you’ll find the guy?”
“You haven’t given me a hell of a lot to go on.”
“That’s all there is, Matt. Maybe Madeline can give you a little more. She talked to her more than I did.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
He pulled the car up in front of an apartment house in the East Bronx. A few women were sitting on chairs in front of the house, and when Rudy got out of the car, they nodded at him. When I got out, they stared at me distastefully, and then went back to their gossip.
We climbed four flights and then Rudy knocked on a painted brown door. The door opened wide, and a woman’s voice reached us.
“What took you so long?” it said. The voice belonged to a woman of about twenty-eight, a few years younger than both Rudy and me. Her black hair was pulled to the back of her neck, tied there with a white ribbon. Her eyes were tired, very tired.
“Gee, honey,” Rudy said, “I made it as fast as I could.”
“You didn’t make it fast enough,” Madeline said tonelessly. “Betty’s dead.”
* * *
I was standing behind Rudy, so I couldn’t see his face. He backed up a few paces, though, and I could imagine what was on his face.
“D-d-dead?” he stammered. “Betty? Dead?”
It was silent in the hall for the space of a heart tick, and then I followed him into the apartment. The furniture was old, but the place was neat and well kept.
Rudy buried his face in his hands. Madeline sat in a chair opposite him; there were no tears on her face.
“Was it a suicide?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “The police called about ten minutes ago. They found her in Yonkers. She…she was strangled, they said.”
Rudy suddenly raised his head.
“This is Matt Cordell, Madeline. Matt, this is my wife.”
She mumbled, “How do you do?” and I nodded. Then a silence invaded the room. Madeline looked at me for a long time, and finally said, “I still want you to find him, Mr. Cordell.”
“Well, the police will probably…”
“I want you to find him. I want you to find him and beat him black and blue, and then you can turn him over to the police. I’ll pay you, Mr. Cordell.” She stood up abruptly and walked into the kitchen. I heard her moving things on the pantry shelf. When she came back, she was holding a wad of bills in her hand.
“We were saving this for a new car,” she said. “I’ll give it to you. All of it. Just find the one who did this to Betty. Just find him and make him sorry. Cripple him if you have to. Find him, Mr. Cordell.” She paused and thrust the bills at me. “Here.”
“Keep the money,” I said. “I’ll look for him, but if I find him, he goes straight to the police.”
Her lower lip began to tremble, and then the tears started, the tears she’d been holding in check for a long time now. I walked into the hallway with Rudy, and I whispered, “Where’d she hang out? Who were some of those guys you questioned?”
“There’s an ice-cream parlor off Burke Avenue. Lots of them in that neighborhood. This one is called The Dewdrop. You know the kind of place. Bunch of teenage kids hang out there. She used to go to this one a lot, I think.”
“Rough crowd?”
“I don’t think so. Here, I’ll give you the address.” He fished in his wallet and came up with a scrap of paper. A bunch of numbers and a street name were scrawled on the paper with a ballpoint pen. I read the address, looked at it until I had memorized it. Rudy put it back into his wallet. “They seemed like nice kids, Matt.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It takes a real nice kid to choke a girl.”
“Let me know how you make out, Matt.”
“I will, Rudy. You’d better go back to your wife.”
* * *
I started looking for the address Rudy had given me. It turned out to be a small, narrow shop set bet
ween two buildings in a space which would have made a better tailor shop—where all the work is done backstage—than an ice-cream parlor. But ice-cream parlor it was. There was no question about it. The words The Dewdrop had been painted onto the plate-glass window, and the same artist had painted the picture of an ice-cream scoop dripping a great big blob of ice cream. The art work was amateurish. It gave the place an uncertain look; it was, possibly, that very look which appealed to the teenagers. I opened the door, and a bell tinkled, and then the bell was drowned in the roar from the jukebox, and I wished I had a drink.
There was a counter with stools on the right-hand side of the store, and four booths painted red, blue, yellow and green on the left-hand side. A man with a mustache was working behind the counter. Two teenage boys were sitting in the booth farthest from the door, beating their feet against the floor in time with the music. The jukebox was emitting the high wail of someone in his death throes, the piano and guitar behind him plinkety-plunking in a monotonous funeral-march tempo. I walked to the counter.
“You the owner?” I asked.
The guy with the mustache was scooping nuts from cans into his fancy sundae jars. “Yeah,” he said. “Why?”
“I’m trying to find out about a girl named Betty,” I said.
“Betty who?”
I dug in my memory for the name Rudy had given me on the ride up to the Bronx. “Betty Richards,” I said. “Do you know her?”
“I get a lot of kids in here,” the man said, carefully scooping the nuts and redepositing them. “Ask them kids in the booth. They’ll know better than me.”
“Thanks,” I said. I went over to the booth. The boys didn’t look up at me. They kept tapping their feet and listening to the juke.
At last, one of them raised his head. He was about eighteen, the sure look of adolescence on his face, the knowledgeable look of a man of the world. He turned to his buddy. “Brother, can you spare a dime?” he said.
His buddy stopped stomping his feet for a moment. He glanced at me. “No handouts today, Mac,” he said. “Drift along. The park’s thataway.”
“I’m a friend of Betty’s,” I said.
“Betty who?”
“Richards.”
“So?” the first kid said. “What about her?”
“That’s what I wanted to ask.”
“I don’t know her,” the first kid said.
The second kid got up, went to the juke, made another selection, then came back to the booth. As if he hadn’t already spoken to me, he said to his friend, “Who’s this, Bob?”
“He’s looking for Betty Richards,” Bob said.
“Yeah?” He studied me, as if he were debating whether or not to throw me out of the store. I was half-hoping he’d try it.
“Not exactly looking for her,” I said. “I want to know a few things about her.”
“Yeah? What kind of things?”
“What’s your name, junior?”
“Who wants to know?”
“I do. Matt Cordell.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
We held a staring contest for about two minutes while the boy sized me up and made his decision.
“Jack,” he said at last.
“Do we talk about Betty now?”
“I ain’t her brother,” Jack said.
“What do you know about her?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Who she dated,” I said. “When she came in here. Who she hung around with when she was here. Things like that.”
“Why do you want to know?”
I was getting tired of playing footsie, so I said, “Because someone strangled her a little while ago. She’s dead.”
Bob’s feet stopped jiggling. Jack stared at me.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“We don’t know nothing about it,” he said.
“Nobody said you did. Tell me about Betty.”
“She used to come in here, but she never stayed long. She’d come in, have a Coke, and then take off.”
“You sure, Jack?”
“I’m positive. Ain’t that right, Bob?”
The other kid nodded. “That’s right, mister. She just came and went, that’s all.”
“She date any of the kids who come in here?”
“Nope. Most of the guys have steadies. They wouldn’t ask for trouble.”
“Did she ever come in here with anyone?”
“A guy, you mean?”
“Yes.”
Jack thought this over for a moment. “No. Never. She’d just come in, hang around a while, and then leave. Just like I told you.”
“Did she ever say she had to meet anyone after she left?”
“No, not to me. She wouldn’t tell something like that to a guy. Maybe she told one of the girls, I don’t know.”
“She friendly with any of the girls who come in here?”
“I guess not,” Jack said. “She was pretty much a lone wolf, Betty was.”
“How about Donna?” Bob asked.
“Oh, yeah. Donna,” Jack said.
“Who’s Donna?” I asked.
“The girl who works here nights. A waitress. She’s real sharp. An older girl. She’s real sharp, ain’t she, Bob?”
“Yeah,” Bob said. “She’s the most.”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-three, twenty-four. Yeah, about that. Wouldn’t you say about that, Bob?”
“Yeah, about that,” Bob agreed.
“She was kind of friendly with Betty,” Jack said.
“Where can I reach her?”
“I like Donna,” Jack said. “You can find her for yourself. I don’t know nothing.”
“Look…”
“She’s a nice girl. I don’t want to get her in no trouble.”
“Where do I find her?”
“That’s your problem.”
“Sonny,” I said, “maybe you didn’t understand me. Betty was killed. Murdered. Finding her murderer is a little more important than protecting the pure white innocence of Donna.”
“She ain’t so pure,” Bob said.
“She ain’t so innocent, either,” Jack said.
“She’s sharp,” Bob said.
“The most,” Jack said.
“And she was friendly with Betty, right?” I asked.
“Yeah. Well, they talked. Whenever Betty came in, they’d talk.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said.
“Donna knows,” I told him. “What’s her address?”
We held another short staring contest. I won again. Jack sighed.
“All right, all right,” he said. “She lives right around the corner.” He took a pencil stub from his pocket and then pulled a napkin from the container on the table. “Donna Crane,” he said, writing the name on the napkin. Under that, he wrote the address, and then said, “It’s the yellow apartment house on the corner. Apartment 3-C. You can’t miss it.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’ll have your hands full with her,” Bob warned me. “She’s sharp.”
“I know,” I said. “The most.”
And I left them.
* * *
The card under the buzzer read Donna Crane. I pushed the buzzer and walked to the lobby door, then waited. Nothing happened, so I pushed the buzzer again, waited a few more minutes, and then pressed two buzzers at random, hoping one of them would be home. The door clicked open, and I started up the steps to the third floor. It was a nice apartment house, lower-middle class, with no hallway smells and no broken plaster. The floors were clean, and even the windows on each landing were freshly washed. I pulled up alongside 3-C and twisted the old-fashioned screw-type bell in the door. It rattled loudly, and when I’d waited for three minutes with no results, I twisted it again.
“Shake it, don’t break it,” a girl’s voice said.
I waited until I heard footsteps approaching the do
or, and then I passed my hand over my hair in an abortive attempt to make myself look a little more presentable.
The door swung wide, and the girl looked out at me curiously.
“Christ,” she said, “did you get his number?”
“Whose number?” I asked.
“The guy who ran you over,” she said.
“Very funny,” I said. “You Donna Crane?”
“The same. If you’re selling something, you need a shave.”
“You knew Betty Richards,” I said.
“Sure.” Her eyes narrowed, and she said, “Hey, you’re not… no, you couldn’t be.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. You coming in?” She grinned coyly. “The neighbors will talk.”
She was blonde, blonde the way Toni had been. She wore a green sweater that had been knitted around her and black shorts turned up far enough to exhibit the graceful curve of her thigh. Orchard Beach had provided her with a Bronx tan, but it didn’t hide the sophistication of her face. She was Broadway on Burke Avenue, with all the glitter and all the tinsel—and I guess maybe the neighbors did talk a little about her.
“Are you or aren’t you coming in, pal?” she prompted.
I stepped into the apartment, and she closed the door behind me. The blinds were still drawn, and the place had all the dim coolness of Grant’s Tomb. I smelled coffee brewing in the kitchen as she led me into the living room.
She sat opposite me and folded her long, tanned legs under her with practiced ease. She propped one elbow on the sofa back, tilted her head and asked, “So now, what about Betty?”
“Just like that, huh? Don’t care who I am, or anything.”
“I know who you are.”
“Oh.”
“Sure. I read the papers. I saw the pictures. Matt. Matt…” She searched her memory. “Take off the beard and some of the whiskey flab, and add Cordell to the Matt. The screwed shamus.” I didn’t answer, so she said, “I’m right, aren’t I?”
“You’re right,” I said wearily.
“I thought they threw you in the jug or something.”
“They dropped charges.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” she said, nodding. “I remember now. The babe went to Mexico, didn’t she?”
“Can it,” I said.
Her eyes opened wide, and she thrust out her lower lip. “Didn’t know you were still warm for her form, pal.”
“I said can it!”