by Ed McBain
He grabbed her from behind, his left arm looping around her neck and yanking her off her feet. She fell back against him, her right hand already yanking the pistol out of her bag. The cat shrieked and leaped off the garbage can, skittering underfoot as it streaked out into the rain.
“Hello, Mary,” he whispered, and she pulled the gun free.
“This is a knife, Mary,” he said, and his right hand came up suddenly, and she felt the sharp tip of the blade against her ribs, just below her heart.
“Just drop the gun, Mary,” he said. “You still have the gun, huh, Mary? Same as last time. Well, just drop it, nice and easy, drop it on the ground, Mary.”
He prodded her with the knife. The tip poked at the lightweight raincoat, poked at the thin fabric of her blouse beneath it, poked at her ribs. His left arm was still looped around her neck, holding her tight in the crook of his elbow. The pistol was in her hand, but he was behind her, and powerless in his grip, and the pressure of the knife blade was more insistent now.
“Do it!” he said urgently, and she dropped the pistol.
It clattered to the alleyway floor. Lightning shattered the night. There was an enormous boom of thunder. He dragged her deeper into the alley, into the darkness, past the garbage cans to where a loading platform was set in the wall some three feet above the floor. A pair of rusted iron doors were behind the platform. He threw her onto the platform, and her hand went immediately into the top of her floppy rubber boot, groping for the butt of the Browning.
“Don’t force me to cut you,” he said.
She yanked the pistol out of its holster.
She was bringing it up into firing position, when he slashed her.
She dropped the gun at once, her hand going up to her face where sudden fire blazed a trail across her cheek. Her hand came away wet, she thought it was the rain at first, but the wet was sticky and thick, and she knew it was blood—he had cut her cheek, she was bleeding from the cheek! And suddenly she was overcome by a fear she had never before known in her life.
“Good girl,” he said.
There was another flash of lightning, more thunder. The knife was under her dress now, she dared not move, he was picking at the nylon of the pantyhose with the knife, catching at it, plucking at it; she winced below, tightened there in horrified reaction, afraid of the knife, fearful he would use it again where she was infinitely more vulnerable. The tip of the blade caught the fabric, held. There was the sound of the nylon ripping, the whisper of the knife as it opened the pantyhose over her crotch and the panties underneath. He laughed when he realized she was also wearing panties.
“Expecting a rape?” he asked, still laughing, and then slashed the panties, too, and now she was open to the cold of the night, her legs spread and trembling, the rain beating down on her face and mingling there with the blood, washing the blood from her cheek burning hot where the gash crossed it, her eyes widening in terror when he placed the cold flat of the knife against her vagina and said, “Want me to cut you here, too, Mary?”
She shook her head, No, please. Mumbled the words incoherently. Said them aloud at last, “No, please,” trembling beneath him as he moved between her legs and put the knife to her throat again. “Please,” she said. “Don’t…cut me again. Please.”
“Want me to fuck you instead?” he asked.
She shook her head again. No! she thought. But she said instead, “Don’t cut me again.”
“You want to get fucked instead, isn’t that right, Mary?”
No! she thought. “Yes,” she said. Don’t cut me, she thought. Please.
“Say it, Mary.”
“Don’t cut me,” she said.
“Say it, Mary!”
“Fuck me in…instead,” she said.
“You want my baby, don’t you, Mary?”
Oh, God, no, she thought, oh, God, that’s it! “Yes,” she said, “I want your baby.”
“The hell you do,” he said, and laughed.
Lightning tore the night close by. Thunder boomed into the alleyway, immediately overhead, echoing.
She knew all the things to do, knew all about going for the eyes, clawing at the jelly of the eyes, blinding the bastard, she knew all about that. She knew what to do if he forced you to blow him, knew all about fondling his balls and taking him in your mouth, and then biting down hard on his cock and squeezing his balls tight at the same time, knew all about how to send a rapist shrieking into the night in pain. But a knife was at her throat.
The tip of the sharp blade was in the hollow of her throat where a tiny pulse beat wildly. He had slashed her face, she could still feel the slow steady ooze of blood from the cut, fire blazing along the length of the cut from one end to the other. The rain pelted her face and her legs, her skirt up around her thighs, the cold, wet concrete of the platform beneath her, the rusted iron doors behind her. And then—suddenly—she felt the rigid thrust of him below, against her unreceptive lips, and thought he would tear her with the force of his penetration, rip her as if with the knife itself, still at her throat, poised to cut.
She trembled in fear, and in shame, and in helpless desperation, suffering his pounding below, sobbing now, repeatedly begging him to stop, afraid of screaming lest the knife pierce the flesh of her throat as surely as he himself was piercing her flesh below. And when he shuddered convulsively—the knife tip trembling against her throat—and then lay motionless upon her for several moments, she could only think It’s over, he’s done, and the shame washed over her again, the utter sense of degradation caused by his invasion, and she sobbed more scathingly. And realized in that instant that this was not a working cop here in a dark alley, her underwear torn, her legs spread, a stranger’s sperm inside her. No. This was a frightened victim, a helpless violated woman. And she closed her eyes against the rain and the tears and the pain.
“Now go get your abortion,” he said.
He rolled off her.
She wondered where her gun was. Her guns.
She heard him running out of the alley on the patter of the rain.
She lay there in pain, above and below, her eyes closed tight.
She lay there for a very long while.
Then she stumbled out of the alley, and found the nearest patrol box, and called in the crime.
And fainted as lightning flashed again, and did not hear the following boom of thunder.
Annie went out with a vengeance.
Knowing what had happened to Eileen the night before, visualizing her torn and bleeding in that rain-swept alley, she knew only that the son of a bitch had to be stopped, and she prayed to God that when she caught up with him she simply didn’t shoot him dead before asking his name. She did not know what had happened to Teddy Carella yesterday afternoon in Phillip Logan’s office; she did not, in fact, even know Steve Carella except as the Chinese-looking detective who’d been sitting at one of the desks the first time she’d walked into the 87th Precinct squadroom. But had she known either of them, had she known that Teddy had been submitted to her own baptism of fire yesterday, she would have considered it only a less severe manifestation of what had happened to Eileen.
The call from Sergeant Murchison had come at exactly ten minutes to 8:00, five minutes after a radio motor patrol car from the Eight-Seven responded and found Eileen lying unconscious on the sidewalk under the call box. Annie had listened silently while Murchison gave her the news. She thanked him, put on her raincoat, and went out into the street where the lightning and thunder were gone but the rain persisted. By the time she arrived at the hospital, twelve stitches had already been taken in Eileen’s cheek. The emergency room doctor reported that Eileen had been sedated and was now asleep; they planned to keep her overnight for observation because she’d been in a state of shock when they admitted her. He would not allow Annie to see her, even though she tried to pull rank. Annie went home, called AIM on the off chance someone might be there—it was almost 10:00 by then—got no answer, and then looked up the home number of Po
lly Floyd, the AIM supervisor she’d spoken to on the phone yesterday. She got no answer. She kept trying until midnight. Still no answer. She tossed and turned all night long, waiting for morning.
Again there was no answer when she called the AIM offices at 9:00 a.m. She tried again at 9:15 and once more at 9:30, and then she dialed Polly Floyd’s home number. The phone rang repeatedly. Annie counted a dozen rings and was about to hang up when Polly at last answered the phone. Annie told her that she wanted to come to the office. Polly said the office was closed on Saturdays. Annie told her to open it. Polly said that was impossible. Annie told her to open it and to have the entire staff assembled there by 11:00. Polly said she had no intention of doing anything of the sort. Annie took a deep breath.
“Miss Floyd,” she said, “I have a police officer in the hospital who was brought in last night with a knife wound that required twelve stitches. I can go all the way downtown to ask a judge for a search warrant, but I’ve got to tell you, Miss Floyd, I’ll be mean as hell if I have to go through all that trouble. What I’m suggesting…”
“Is this some sort of coercion?” Polly said.
“Yes,” Annie answered.
“I’ll see if I can round up the staff for you.”
“Thank you,” Annie said, and hung up.
The AIM offices were at 832 Hall Avenue, above a bookstore that was going out of business. The building was six stories high, and the AIM offices were on the third floor. Annie arrived there at a little before 11:00. The small reception area beyond the frosted glass door looked like something a down-at-the-heels private eye might have inhabited were it not for the posters on all four walls. The posters were blown-up photographs showing fetuses in various stages of development. Across the top of each photo were the words “Against Infant Murder,” lettered in red and designed to look like dripping blood. Polly Floyd herself resembled a fetus in an advanced stage of development, a tiny, pink-faced, pink-fisted lady with short blonde hair and a mouth that looked as if it had never been kissed and never wanted to be kissed. Well, maybe Annie was wrong on that score; the woman hadn’t answered her phone at midnight last night, and it had taken her forever to get to it at 9:30 this morning.
Polly Floyd was in high dudgeon when Annie walked in. She immediately began complaining about police states and honest citizens being subjected to—
“I’m sorry,” Annie said, not sounding sorry at all. “But, as I told you on the phone, this is a matter of some urgency.”
“What does your cop have to do with us?” Polly asked. “If someone got himself stabbed—”
“Herself,” Annie said.
“Even so, what…?”
“Where’s your staff?” Annie asked abruptly. They were standing alone in the small reception room with its pictures of fetuses. Polly still hadn’t taken off her coat. Undoubtedly, she expected a brief meeting.
“They’re waiting in my office,” she said.
“How many on the staff?”
“Four.”
“Including you?”
“In addition to me.”
“Any of them men?”
“One.”
“I want to see him,” Annie said.
Seeing him was the first thing she wanted to do.
She had called the hospital again a half-hour ago, before leaving her apartment, to check on Eileen’s condition, and to talk to her if possible. When Eileen answered the phone in her room, she sounded drowsy, but she told Annie she was feeling okay—considering. Her description of the man who’d attacked her jibed exactly with the description the previous victims had given: White, thirty-ish, six feet tall, 180 pounds. Brown hair, blue eyes, no visible scars or tattoos.
The man waiting in Polly Floyd’s office was a scrawny black man in his sixties, about five feet eight inches tall, with brown eyes behind tortoiseshell eyeglasses, and a fringe of white hair circling his otherwise bald head.
There were three other people waiting in the room, all of them women.
Annie asked them to sit down.
Polly stood just inside the door, annoyed by this invasion of AIM’s offices, further annoyed by the easy takeover of her own private office.
Annie asked the gathered staff if any of them were familiar with any of the following names, and then read them off: Lois Carmody, Terry Cooper, Patricia Ryan, Vivienne Chabrun, Angela Ferrari, Cecily Bainbridge, Blanca Diaz, Mary Hollings, and Janet Reilly.
Everyone in the room agreed that the names sounded familiar.
“They’ve all been contributors to AIM at one time or another,” Annie said. “Isn’t that right?”
None of the staff knew if that was why the names sounded familiar to them.
“How many contributors do you have?” Annie asked.
Everyone on the staff looked at Polly Floyd.
“I’m sorry, but that’s our business,” Polly said. She was still standing just inside the doorway. She had not yet taken off her raincoat. Her arms were folded across her chest.
“Do you keep a list of your contributors?” Annie asked her.
“Yes, but the list is confidential.”
“Who has access to that list?” Annie asked.
“All of us. Everyone on the staff.”
“But you say the list is confidential.”
“Limited to staff access,” Polly said.
“Well,” the black man with the fringe of white hair said, “that isn’t quite—”
“In any event,” Polly interrupted, “the list is not available for police scrutiny.”
Annie turned to the man.
“I don’t believe I caught your name, sir,” she said.
“Eleazar Fitch,” he said.
“I like biblical names,” Annie said, and smiled.
“My father’s name was Elijah,” Fitch said, and returned the smile.
“You were saying, Mr. Fitch, about this list—?”
“Whatever it is you’re investigating,” Polly cut in, “we’re not interested in involvement.”
“Involvement?” Annie said.
“Involvement, yes. We don’t want AIM linked in any way to the stabbing of a policewoman.”
“Which happens to be a Class-C felony,” Annie said, “punishable by three to fifteen years in prison. Rape, on the other hand…”
“Rape?” Polly said, and her pink face went white.
“Rape, Miss Floyd, is a Class-B felony, and you can get twenty-five years for that. This police officer was raped last night. Cut and raped, Miss Floyd. We have good reason to believe that her assailant is also responsible for the rapes of nine other women, eight of whom were contributors to AIM. What I want to know—”
“I’m sure their donations to AIM had nothing whatever—”
“How can you know that for sure, Polly?” Fitch asked.
Polly Floyd turned pink again. Fitch stared at her for a moment, and then looked at Annie again.
“We sell our mailing list,” he said.
“To whom?” Annie said at once.
“To any responsible organization that—”
“Polly, you know that isn’t true,” Fitch interrupted, and turned to Annie again. “We’ll let anyone who makes a sizable donation have the list.”
“What do you consider sizable?” Annie asked.
“Anything over a hundred dollars.”
“So if I sent you a hundred dollars and requested your mailing list…”
“You’d get it in a minute.”
“Provided,” Polly said, “you also told us how you planned to use the list.”
“Is that true, Mr. Fitch?”
“We’ll send it to anyone interested in the pro-life movement,” Fitch said. “Express a sincere interest in the movement, request the mailing list, and send us a check for a hundred bucks. That’s it.”
“I see,” Annie said.
“We’re not Right To Life, you know,” Polly said defensively. “We don’t have giant corporations and trust funds making contributions
to us. We’re new, we only started two years ago, we have to support our efforts by whatever means possible and ethical. There’s nothing wrong with supplying mailing lists to interested contributors, you know. You can buy or rent a mailing list for anything!”
“How many mailing lists have you distributed since the beginning of the year?” Annie asked.
“I have no idea,” Polly said.
“No more than ten,” Fitch said.
“All here in the city?”
“Most of them. Some of them were out of town.”
“How many in the city?”
“I don’t know, I’d have to look at the files.”
“You have the names and addresses on file?”
“Oh, yes.”
“I’d like to see them, please.”
“Giving you those names would be tantamount to invading the privacy of people who may not wish their privacy invaded,” Polly said.
Annie looked at her. She did not mention that telling a woman what she could or could not do about her own pregnancy might also be invading the privacy of someone who might not wish to have her privacy invaded.
She said only, “I guess I’ll have to get that court order, after all.”
“Give her the names,” Polly said.
Eileen was sitting up in bed, her hands flat on the sheet, when Kling entered the room. Her head was turned away from him. The window oozed raindrops, framed a gray view of buildings beyond.
“Hi,” he said.