by Ed McBain
She shrugged, and her breasts bobbed beneath the tight sweater. “Son, if you don’t like this brand of jive, you know where you can go, don’t you?”
I stood up. “Listen…” I started to say, but I couldn’t stop her.
“Nobody told you to marry a slut. You picked a dud, and you…”
I slapped her with my open hand, catching her on the side of her jaw. Her head reeled back, and she scrambled off the couch, her eyes slitted. “Get the hell out of here,” she said.
“Not until I ask a few questions.”
“You got no right to ask questions. The cops took your license, pal.”
“What did you and Betty talk about?” I asked.
Abruptly, she started to walk toward the phone. I grabbed her wrist and swung her around, and she came up against me, hard, her face inches from mine. She was rearing her head back to spit when I clamped my hand over her mouth. She wriggled, freed her mouth, and then bit down on my hand, her upper and lower teeth almost meeting in my flesh. I shoved her away from me, and she ran back at me, throwing herself at me like a wildcat. But there was something more than anger in her eyes this time, something I recognized instantly.
This time I grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her, and when she brought her head back, my lips came down against hers. She struggled for a moment, and then went limp in my arms. I lifted her and carried her to the sofa, her lips buried in my neck, her hands running over my back. I smelled coffee from the kitchen, and then there was only the smell of her hair and her body in my nostrils, and the sound of her ragged breathing in the cool, dim living room.
* * *
She was curled up like a contented cat, a cigarette glowing in her hand, relaxed against the cushions of the sofa. There was a pleased smile on her face, and some of the hardness had rubbed off to leave features that were young and nicely boned.
“You need a shave,” she said.
“I know.” I lit a cigarette, blew out a stream of smoke and asked, “Do we talk now?”
She closed her eyes briefly, still smiling. “Must we?”
“We must.”
“Then talk, Matt.”
“What did Betty have to say to you?”
“Why?”
“Because she’s dead. Because someone was careless enough to strangle her.”
“Oh,” she said. That was all. Just a small “oh” but her face had grown pale beneath its tan, and she was breathing harder.
“You did talk? You and Betty?”
“Yes. Yes, we talked sometimes.”
“What about?”
“Dead,” she said. She tasted the word, and then repeated it. “Dead. A nice kid, too. Mixed up, but nice.”
“Mixed up about what?”
“What are most seventeen-year-old kids mixed up about? Love. Sex.” She shrugged. “The same thing.”
“Not always. How was she mixed up?”
“This guy…”
“What guy?” I asked quickly.
“A guy she was going with. She’d sit and talk about him when she came to the shop. She had it bad, all right.”
“What was his name?”
“Freddie. That’s what she called him. Freddie.”
“Freddie what?”
“She never said. Just Freddie.”
“Great. What did she say about him?”
“The usual. You know.”
“I don’t know.”
Donna eyed me levelly. “You can be an irritating louse, you know?”
“Sure,” I said. “Tell me what she told you about him.”
“Well, she didn’t want her family to know about him, for some reason. She used to meet him on the sneak. She’d come in to the Dewdrop as a blind, stay there a while, and then take off. She usually met him at about ten or so, I think.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“Well, no. But she always left the place at about that time. I figured…”
“Where’d she go when she left?”
“I never went with her.”
“Did she tell you how she first happened to meet this guy? Where? When?”
“No.”
“Did she ever mention his age?”
“No.”
“What he did for a living?”
“No.”
I ran a hand over my face. “That helps a lot.” I sat there for a few seconds and then asked, “Anything to drink besides coffee here?”
“Coffee! Holy Jesus!” She untangled her tanned legs and ran across the room, and I watched, knowing there was nothing but her under that sweater. I watched her go, noticing the curve of her legs, and the firmness of her body, and then she was in the kitchen turning down the gas under the pot.
“Beer all right?” she asked.
“It’ll do.”
“This isn’t Joe’s Grill, pal,” she said. I heard the refrigerator door open, and then heard the sound of a bottle being placed on the kitchen table. There were a few more kitchen sounds, and then the fizz of the beer as she took off the cap. When she came into the living room, she was carrying the bottle in one hand and a steaming cup of coffee balanced in the other hand.
She gave me the bottle and said, “If you want a glass, go get it. I’ve only got three hands.”
“This’ll be fine.”
She curled up again, and I took a deep drag of the bottle while she sipped at the hot coffee, peering at me over the edge of the cup.
“Did she ever describe this Freddie?” I asked. I wiped my lips and held the bottle in my lap.
“Nope. I gathered he was from Squaresville, though.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The questions she asked. A hip character wouldn’t leave questions like that in a kid’s head.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Well, personal things.”
“Like what? Honey, I’m not a dentist. Let’s have less teeth-pulling.”
“Don’t get it in an uproar, buster,” she told me. She took an angry gulp of coffee, burning her tongue and shooting me a hot glare.
“She asked me how to…well, you know.” She paused, waiting for my comment. When I made none, she added, “You know.”
“In short,” I said, “you think she was pretty innocent?”
“Innocent? Brother, she was the original fiddler who didn’t know his bass from his oboe.”
“Well,” I said, “somebody taught her damned fast.”
“How do you mean?”
“She was pregnant when she was killed.”
“Ouch!” Donna Crane winced and then shook her head slowly. She uncrossed her legs. “You think this Freddie…”
“Could be.”
She put her coffee cup down and said, “I wish you luck. If he did it, I hope you get him.”
I walked into the foyer and paused with my hand on the doorknob. She reached up to touch my face and asked, “Do you ever shave?”
“Sometimes. Why?”
She shrugged, and her chest did things again. Then her lips were on mine, gently this time. My hands found the small of her back, and she pressed closer to me for an instant, drawing away almost immediately. “Take a shave sometime, Matt. And then come back.”
I opened the door and stepped into the comparatively bright hallway, grinning back at her. “Maybe I will, Donna. Maybe I will.”
* * *
Freddie.
Just a name. Just one Freddie out of thousands of Freddies in the city, the millions of Freddies in the world. Gather them all together, and then pick a Freddie out of the bunch.
There was a mild breeze on the air, and it searched my face and the open throat of my shirt. The streets were crowded with people seduced by spring. They breathed deeply of her fragrance, flirted back at her, treated her as the mistress she was, the wanton who would grow old with summer’s heat and die with autumn’s first chill blast. The man with his hot-dog cart stood in the gutter, and the sun-seekers crowded the sauerkraut pot, thronged the umbrella-topp
ed stand. The high-school girls ambled home with all the time in the world, with all their lives ahead of them. The men stood around the candy stores and the delicatessens talking about the fights or the coming baseball season, and they looked at silk-stockinged legs and wished for a stronger breeze.
Or they went about their jobs, delivering mail, washing windows, fixing cars, and they drew in deeply of the warm air and sighed a little. It was spring, at last. And one of them was Freddie.
I walked along Burke Avenue, wondering how long it had been since I’d eaten a hot dog, since I’d seen a baseball game. A long time. A long, long time. And how long ago to seventeen? How many years, how many centuries?
What’s a seventeen-year-old kid like? No longer the girl, not yet the woman—Why does a seventeen-year-old hide a lover? Love at seventeen is a wonderland of dreamy records and beach parties and tender kisses and silent handclasps. It is not a thing to hide.
But Betty Richards hid her love, and her love was hidden behind the name of Freddie, and New York City is a big place.
I needed a drink. I needed one because I couldn’t think straight anymore. I was ready to go to Rudy and say, “Pal, I’m lost. Me and eight million others all have spring fever, only it shows more on me because I’m still in love with a bitch who done me wrong, like the song says, Rudy. So let’s just drop it and forget it and let the cops do the work. Okay, Rudy? Okay, pal?”
But would a cop understand a kid with her first love? Would a cop give one good goddam?
I cursed myself, and I had my drink, and then I started from the beginning again, and the beginning was The Dewdrop.
I didn’t go inside this time.
I stopped at the door, and then began retracing my steps. Betty Richards had walked out of this shop on many a night. Ten o’clock, and Freddie waiting. Where? I started up the street.
A car? Would he pick her up in a car? Maybe. But not here. If Betty had gone to all this trouble to hide the guy, he certainly wouldn’t pick her up outside the ice-cream parlor. Not with a bunch of curious teenagers inside. A few blocks away then? Even that seemed like an unnecessary risk. A few miles away? A dozen miles away? Why not? But where?
I turned left and started walking toward Burke Avenue. The side street was lined with private houses. The front stoops sported fat women in housedresses who looked up when I passed and muttered about what the neighborhood was coming to. When I got to Burke Avenue, I looked right and left. A block down on my left, looking like a blackened monster against the sky, was the elevated structure. I turned and headed for it, walking past the dry-cleaning shop, the delicatessen, the bakery, pausing at the newsstand on the corner, and then noticing the hack stand. It was a hack stand for three cabs, right behind the newsstand which crouched under the steps leading to the elevated structure.
A cab was at the curb. A driver sat behind the wheel reading a comic book and picking at his teeth with a matchbook cover. I poked my head into the taxi.
“Hop in, mister,” he said. “Where you going?” Then he got a good look at me. “Sure you can afford the ride, Mac?” he said.
“I’m not riding,” I told him.
“I don’t believe in staking strangers to drinks,” he said. “So shove off.”
“I’m not looking for a stake, either,” I said.
“No? What then? You passing the time of day?”
“This your regular hack stand?”
“Sure.”
“Ever been here around ten at night?”
“Lots of times. Why?”
“Ever carry a young girl, blue eyes, black hair. A very pretty young girl—about seventeen?”
“How the hell should I know? I carry lots of pretty…”
“This one might have taken a cab regularly. Or maybe she went up to the elevated. Remember seeing her?” I was guessing now, of course, and the guess might be a bit wide, but I figured any rendezvous Betty may have had was probably a thing with a set time and a set place. And Donna Crane had told me that Betty usually left the ice-cream parlor at ten.
“Why do you want to know, Mac?” the cabby said.
“I’m interested.”
“You better take off before I call a cop.”
“Look,” I said, “this girl was killed. Her sister hired me to…”
“Jesus,” he said. He squinched his eyes down tight, swallowed his Adam’s apple and allowed it to bob up into his throat again. “Jesus.”
“Do you remember her?”
“Blue eyes,” he said. “Black hair. Seventeen.”
“Yeah. If she took a cab, it would be at about ten. Did you ever carry her?”
The cabby shook his head. “Nope. I’d remember if I did. Why don’t you ask some of the other guys? They pull in from time to time, whenever they ain’t got a fare. Ask them. Maybe they’ll remember.”
“Thanks,” I said. His was the only cab in the hack stand at the moment. I went upstairs to the train station and talked to the man in the change booth. He didn’t remember Betty Richards, either. I sighed, went down to the street, and headed for Rudy’s place.
* * *
It wasn’t far from Burke Avenue, and I didn’t mind the walk because it was such a nice day. I climbed the four flights and knocked on the painted brown door, and waited.
Rudy answered the door.
“Matt, come in, come in.”
I walked into the apartment, looked around for Madeline, wondering if she’d gotten over the first shock of knowing her sister was dead. Rudy followed my glance and said, “She’s in the bedroom. She’s taking it kind of hard, Matt.”
“You know any Freddie?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Freddie.”
Rudy seemed to consider this for a moment. “No,” he said slowly, “I don’t think so. What’s his last name?”
“All I’ve got is Freddie.”
“Is it a lead, Matt? I mean, do you think this Freddie is the one who did it?”
“Maybe. You think Madeline would know him?”
“I don’t know, Matt.” He glanced at his watch hastily. “Gee, kid,” he said, “I have to run. The day watchman goes off at five. I relieve him then, and I ain’t relieved, myself, until one in the morning.”
I looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. It was nearing four-thirty. “Will you get Madeline for me before you leave?”
“Sure. Just a minute.”
He went into the bedroom, and I heard their muffled voices behind the closed door. It was very still in the living room. The sounds from the street climbed the brick facing of the building and sifted through the open windows. The breeze lifted the curtains silently. They hung on the air like restless specters, falling and rising again. The bedroom door opened, and Madeline came out with Rudy’s arm around her shoulders. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her nose was raw from constant blowing.
“I have to run,” Rudy said again. “I’ll see you, Matt.”
“Sure,” I said.
He pecked Madeline on the cheek and then walked to the door and left.
Madeline moved to the window, stood there motionless looking down at the street below.
“Do you know a guy named Freddie?” I asked.
She didn’t answer for a long time, and then she said, “What? I’m sorry, I didn’t…”
“Freddie. Do you know anyone named Freddie? Did Betty have any friends by that name? Anybody?”
Madeline shook her head wearily. “No. No, I don’t know anyone by that name. Why?”
I shrugged. “Nothing yet. Have you got a picture of Betty?”
“Yes. Someplace there’s a picture.”
“May I have it?”
“All right,” she said dully. She left the room again, and I heard her rummaging around in the bedroom closet. The springs on the bed squeaked when she sat down. There were other sounds, leaves being turned, and then a gentle sobbing again. I heard her blow her nose, and I waited, and the clock on the kitchen wall threw minutes into the room. She came out at
last, drying her eyes again, and handed me a small snapshot.
Rudy had been right. His sister-in-law was a beautiful kid with a clean-scrubbed look of freshness about her.
“I’ll bring it back,” I said.
“All right.” She nodded, walked over to the window again and stared out. She was still looking down at the street when I left, closing the door gently behind me.
* * *
The cop was waiting for me just outside the building. I saw him there, started to step around him, almost bumped into him as he moved into my path.
I lifted my head, and our eyes locked. I didn’t like what I saw.
“Excuse me,” I said.
I started to go around him again when he clamped a big paw on my shoulder. “Just a second,” he said.
I stopped, my eyes studying his face. He was a big guy, with a thin nose and pleasant blue eyes. He was smiling, and the smile wasn’t pleasant. “What’s the trouble, officer?” I asked.
“No trouble,” he answered. “You Matt Cordell?”
A frown edged onto my forehead. “Yes. What…”
“Want to come along with me?” he asked pleasantly.
I kept staring at him. “Why? What do you want with me?”
“We’ve had a complaint, Cordell.”
“What kind of a complaint?”
“They’ll explain it to you.”
“Suppose you explain it,” I said.
“Suppose I don’t,” the cop answered.
“Look,” I said, “don’t blind me with your badge. I’ve had enough cops in my hair to last me…”
He grabbed the cuff of my jacket and twisted it in his fist, bringing my arm up behind me at the same time. I winced in pain, and the cop said, “Let’s do it the easy way, Cordell. This is a nice quiet neighborhood.”
“Sure,” I said. “Just let go my goddamned arm.”
He stopped twisting it, but he kept holding to the cuff, edging me toward the curb and the squad car I hadn’t noticed until just then.
“Hop in,” he said, holding open the door. “This one is on the city.”
I got in and he climbed in behind me, wedging me between himself and the driver. He closed the door and said, “Okay, Sam.” The cop behind the wheel threw the car into gear and shoved off.
* * *
We pulled up alongside a gray stone building with green lights hanging on either side of the door. The cop held the car door open for me, and then the driver stood on the sidewalk with his hand on the butt of his holstered .38 Police Special while the first cop and I climbed the steps to the precinct station.