by Ed McBain
Clara Hoskins spoke the language just fine.
She would not open the door until Ollie had flashed both his ID card and his gold detective’s shield, and then she unlocked two locks and took off a security chain before letting him in. She was a blonde in her early forties, Ollie guessed, dressed in tailored gray slacks and a tight red sweater with a little Santa Claus pin over the left breast. Five-seven, five-eight, he supposed, good-looking woman except for the suspicious blue eyes and the frown. She led him into the living room, where a Christmas tree was ablaze with light in one corner of the room. There was the scent of greenery all over the apartment, in fact. All the place needed was a log burning on the hearth, but this was the city, and only cannel coal was allowed, and not even that was in evidence.
“Mrs. Hoskins,” he said, figuring he’d get straight to the point, “I’m afraid I have bad news for you.”
“Oh Jesus,” she said.
“Your husband is dead, ma’am, I’m sorry to have to tell you this way.”
“Oh Jesus,” she said again.
They all reacted in different ways. Some of them burst into tears, some of them staggered around the room like drunks, some of them looked as if they’d been hit by a locomotive, some of them couldn’t speak for ten, fifteen minutes, some of them denied it, told you you’d made a mistake, or this was all a horrible joke, anything to get away from the fact that the Grim Reaper had come to the door and knocked on it and found somebody home. Clara Hoskins just stood there staring at him.
“Tell me what happened,” she said.
“He was murdered,” Ollie said.
“Are you a homicide detective?” she asked.
“No, ma’am, that’s not the way we work it here. The precinct detective who catches the squeal …”
He caught himself.
“The responding detective follows the case through to its conclusion, ma’am, is the way we work it here in this city.”
“Where was this?” she asked.
“In a section of the city called Diamondback, ma’am.”
“That’s black, isn’t it?” she said.
“Largely, ma’am. And Hispanic.”
“What was Jerry doing up there?”
“I thought maybe you could help me with that.”
“Diamondback,” she said, and shook her head.
“Do I smell something baking, ma’am?” Ollie asked.
“Oh my God,” she said, “thank you,” and turned away from him and rushed into the kitchen. He watched as she yanked open the oven door and took from it a steaming cake. “Caught it just in time,” she said, and put it down on the counter top. “I bake one every Christmas,” she said.
“What is it, ma’am?”
“An apple upside down cake.”
“I’ll bet it’s delicious,” Ollie said.
But she didn’t offer him any.
Instead, she suddenly burst into tears. Sometimes apple upside down cakes did that to people. Or maybe she had just realized her husband was dead. Either way, if she wasn’t going to offer him anything to eat, he had no sympathy at all for the woman.
“Ma’am,” he said, “weren’t you concerned when your husband didn’t come home last night?”
“He’s often gone a lot,” Clara said.
“Were you expecting him home?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Well, did he call to say hewouldn’t be home?”
“No, he didn’t. But that’s usual. I don’t worry about him. He comes and goes.”
“What does he do for a living, ma’am?”
“He sells books.”
“He works in a bookstore?”
“No, he’s a booksalesman. For Wadsworth and Dodds. The publishing house. His territory is the entire northeast corridor. He goes all the way up to Maine and down to Washington, D.C. He’s gone a lot.”
Ollie tried to think if there were any bookstores in Diamondback. He couldn’t recall a single one.
“Does he make stops in Diamondback?” he asked.
“I don’t know where he makes stops,” Clara said, and yanked a Kleenex from a box on the counter. “Can’t you see I’m crying here?” she said. “Don’t you have any sensitivity at all?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m trying to learn who might have killed him. Your husband wasn’t doing drugs, was he?”
“What!”
“I said …”
“I heard what you said. Howdare you?”
“Mrs. Hoskins, I was simply asking a question. Your husband was found in a garbage can in Diamon …”
“A garbage can!”
“Yes, ma’am, with a bullet hole in the back of …”
“A bullet hole!”
“Yes, ma’am, which all sounds very strange for a man who sells books for a living, wouldn’t you say? Did you know that he carried a gun?”
“A gun!”
“Yes, ma’am, a P-38 Walther was the make. In a holster on his right side. Was he left-handed, ma’am?”
“Yes. I have to tell you, Detective Weeks, I find all of this extremely upsetting.” She pulled another tissue from the box, and blew her nose. Ollie hoped she wouldn’t get snot all over the cake. She still hadn’t offered him a piece. “I can’t imaginewhat my husband was doing up there in Diamondback, or why he was carrying a gun, or why anyone would want to kill him. This is all simply beyond belief,” she said, and blew her nose again.
“Yes, well, I’m terribly sorry it happened, too, ma’am, or even that I had to report it to you.”
He was thinking he would like a piece of her apple upside down cake.
He was also thinking he would like to grab her ass.
“Your husband had a permit for the gun,” he said.
“A permit!”
She had a very bad habit of repeating the key words in everything he said and shouting them back at him, very loudly, as if he were deaf. Each time she did that, he winced. The kitchen was redolent with baking smells. He felt like grabbing that cake in both his hands and gobbling it down.
“You sure he wasn’t doing drugs?” he asked.
“No, I’mnot sure, how would Iknow if he was doing drugs or not? He was on the road two, three weeks at a time, for all I know he was robbing banks with his goddamn P-thirty-six …”
“Eight, ma’am.”
“Whatever, and shooting heroin in his veins, how the hell wouldI know what he was doing when he wasn’t here? He ends up in a garbage can, how the hell doI know what he was or evenwho he was?”
“That’s just my point, ma’am.”
“I fail to see your point.”
“Just that it seems so strange.”
“It does,” she agreed, and burst into tears again.
He wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her. He wanted to reach up under that tight red sweater.
“I wish I could play piano for you sometime,” he said.
She looked at him.
She had very blue sad wet eyes.
“To ease your pain,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said, “that’s very kind of you.”
“I play piano,” he said.
“I wouldn’t have suspected it,” she said.
“I’m sorry for your trouble,” he said. “Here’s my card. Call me if you think of anything.”
“What would I think of?” she asked.
“Anything that might help us find your husband’s murderer.”
She burst into tears again.
“Where do I go to … to claim … to … to … where is he now? His body?”
“At the St. Mary Boniface morgue,” Ollie said. “You can identify the remains …”
“Remains!” she said.
“Yes, ma’am, his body, ma’am. You don’t think he had a black girlfriend up there, do you?”
“A what!”
“I guess not,” he said. “Call me, okay? I know ‘Night and Day,’ if you happen to like that song.”
She was sittin
g by the Christmas tree in the living room, weeping, when he left the apartment. He could smell the goddamn apple upside down cake all the way down to the street.
THE HALLS OF JUSTICE were somewhat less than thronged with judges eager to hand down rulings at three o’clock on this Christmas Eve, which also happened to be a Sunday. Most pickpockets, shoplifters, and daytime burglars had called it a day yesterday, packing it in at six o’clock, when all the stores closed. Most of the judges had done the two-step at around the same time, the Christian judges eager to get back to their homes and hearths so they could start the Yuletide festivities, the judges of other faiths heading to vacation spots where they could escape a holiday that excluded them so completely. Only skeleton crews manned the courtrooms. The entire Criminal Courts building resembled nothing so much as a marble mausoleum.
Abe Feinstein was the judge who read Carella’s petition for a search warrant. He was sixty-three years old, and he’d been a criminal court judge for twenty-three years now, having been appointed at the age of forty, which was relatively young for such a judgeship. He read the signed affidavit and then peered over the rims of his eyeglasses and the top of his bench, and said in a rather astonished voice, “You want a warrant to search the offices of the U.S.Treasury Department?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Because—if I’m reading this correctly—you wish to examine a list ofserial numbers …”
“Yes, sir.”
“… for hundred-dollar bills that you believe may have been used asransommoney in a kidnapping?”
He still sounded astonished.
“Yes, Your Honor,” Carella said.
“Which kidnapping would that have been, Detective?”
“I don’t know, sir. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“I must be missing something,” Feinstein said, and shook his head.
“Your Honor, a special agent named David A. Horne confiscated eight thousand dollars in hundred-dollar …”
“Hold it, hold it, where’s that on the affidavit?”
“Paragraph number three, Your Honor.”
“ ‘Upon personal knowledge and belief,’ ” Feinstein quoted, “ ‘and facts supplied to me by …’”
“Yes, Your Honor, by an ex-con named Wilbur Struthers, who burglarized the suspect money from the apartment of a woman now deceased, the victim of a homicide. That’s all in paragraph three, Your Honor.”
“Eaten bylions, does this say?”
“Yes, sir. At the Grover Park Zoo yesterday. But that wasn’t the cause of death. The woman was first stabbed with an ice pick.”
“I see that, yes.”
“In the head, Your Honor.”
“Yes. And you think her murder may be related to this kidnapping you mention?”
“Yes, Your Honor, I do.”
“But you don’t know anything about this kidnapping?”
“Only what Struthers reported to me.”
“Does he seem reliable?”
“As reliable as any thief can be, Your Honor.”
“Have you contacted the Secret Service?”
“I spoke personally to Special Agent Horne, yes, Your Honor.”
“And what did he have to say?”
“He advised me to leave it alone.”
“Any idea why he would have made such a suggestion?”
“He told me the case was classified, sir.”
“I see. And you’re asking for a search warrant that would invade this confidentiality, is that it?”
“A woman was murdered, Your Honor. An ice pick …”
“I have no idea what this kidnapping case is about—and neither do you, I might add. Which means you don’t have probable cause, Detective. If the Secret Service has deemed its case classified, I’m not going to allow you to poke around confidential documents. Take Horne’s advice, Detective. Leave it alone. Petition denied.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” Carella said.
“Merry Christmas,” Feinstein said.
OLLIE WEEKS CALLED the offices of Wadsworth and Dodds at four that afternoon. He got a message telling him the firm was closed for the holidays and would not reopen until Tuesday morning, December 26.
He figured he was the only person working in this fucking city, so he went home.
5 .
SO THIS IS WHAT the family has turned out to be, Carella thought.
This is what this family has become on this Christmas Day in the new millennium.
There’s still me and Teddy, thank God, and the twins, thank God again, although he didn’t appreciate the fact that they were slowly inching their way toward puberty. Before he knew it, Mark would be readingPenthouse and April would be dating seniors, and he and Teddy would be in wheelchairs in a nursing home. Forty years old, he thought. Jesus. Where did it all go so soon?
There was his sister Angela, too, of course, with her own twins— they ran in the family—and their older sister. Tess was eight, the twins four, all three far distant from puberty. Angela had named the twins Cynthia and Melinda, and then had begun calling them Cindy and Mindy, as if they were a tap-dancing team in Vegas, shame on you, Sis, even though their father had insisted they be called Cynthia and Melinda as originally planned, a noble thought.
Tommy wasn’t here this Christmas, the little girls’ father was God-knew-where on this bright cold afternoon as everyone was called to dinner, or lunch, or whatever it was at two in the afternoon. Tommy Giordano wasn’t here today because he and Angela were divorced now—but not because he’d insisted on calling his daughters by their true and proper names. Tommy Giordano had been caught having a love affair, was still having a love affair, but the lady in question wasn’t a lady at all, although she was often called that. Tommy Giordano was having a love affair with cocaine. He had tried psychiatric help, had tried rehabilitation, had tried every damn thing he and the family could think of, but he was hooked through the bag and back again, and nothing had worked. The marriage had fallen apart when Angela just couldn’t take it any longer. Tommy was still snorting the Devil’s Dandruff,wherever he was— the last time they’d heard it was Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In Tommy’s place today was an assistant district attorney named Henry Lowell, who had received his undergraduate degree from Duke, his law degree from Harvard, and a smattering of lesser education from Oxford University, or so the precinct locker-room jive maintained. Lowell had been with the D.A.’s Office for almost five years now. In that time, he had racked up thirty-eight convictions, an impressive record, four of them on murder cases. The only murder case he’d ever lost, in fact, was the one he’d prosecuted against the man who’d killed Carella’s father.
Maybe this was why Carella didn’t like him too much.
Gee.
What Carella couldn’t understand was why hissister was sleeping with the son of a bitch, and bringing him around to his mother’s house on every goddamn holiday that came along. That was what Carella couldn’t understand, but maybe he was just old-fashioned. Maybe he thought real life here in the big bad city wasn’t the same thing as Greek tragedy where you slept with your father’s murderer or ate your own children. Given that the murderer had finally been gunned down by Carella himself or maybe Brown, who’d been standing by his side and firing at the same time …
Or maybe both of them …
Given that bygones should be bygones …
Justice had been served …
An eye for an eye and all that …
Givenall that …
Should Angelareally be considering marriage to the man?
But even worse thanher defection …
How could hismother have forgotten so soon?
THE SECOND INTERLOPER at the table today was a man named Luigi Fontero from Milan, Italy. Henry Lowell was sitting on Angela’s right, and Luigi Fontero was sitting on Louise Carella’s right—Carella’smother’s right, right! Nor was this the “Luigi” of ancient television fame, a fruit peddler or whatever the hell
he’d been, a man who spoke broken English the way the immigrants at the turn of the century had, although the show took place in the Fifties, Carella guessed, he’d only seen a single rerun on theNick at Nite channel or one of the other hundred and ninety-nine channels proliferating like fleas on a dog.