Criminal Conversation

by Ed McBain

  “I don’t know,” Heather said.

  “With the bimbo?” Mollie asked.

  “I don’t think he’s seeing her anymore.”

  Sarah wondered if she herself could be considered a bimbo. Could a thirty-four-year-old mother be a bimbo?

  “His lawyer probably advised him to quit the houghmagandy till we reach a settlement.”

  “What’s houghmagandy?” Mollie asked.

  “Hanky-panky,” Heather said.

  Sarah wondered if Mollie knew what hanky-panky meant. Then she wondered what Mollie would think if she knew her mother was engaged in hanky-panky with the man who’d saved her life not a month ago! But it wasn’t really hanky-panky, it was—she didn’t know what it was. She knew only that she couldn’t stop thinking about him, couldn’t stop hungering for him. She had never felt like this in her life. Even when she was head over heels in love with the Duke basketball player who’d taken her to bed—well, the backseat of his Mustang, actually—three weeks after she’d met him. Eighteen years old and thrilled by his every move. She’d told her roommate that Avery on a basket—that was his name, Avery Howell, six feet five inches tall, redheaded and freckle-faced—Avery on a basketball court was “poetry in motion.” Direct quote. Eighteen-year-old Sarah Fitch, giddily in love. Even that was nothing compared to what she felt whenever she was with Andrew. But that wasn’t love, was it? No, she knew exactly what it was. And that made her a bimbo, yes.

  “. . . question, Mom?”

  “What? I’m sorry.”

  “Aunt Heather just asked you a question.”

  “My question was,” Heather said, sounding more exasperated than the situation seemed to warrant, “should we go to that little omelette place on Sixty-First, or should we go further uptown to Coco Pazzo?”

  “I vote Coco Pazzo,” Mollie said.

  “Too expensive,” Sarah said.

  “My treat,” Heather said.

  “Even so.”

  “Omelettes, then,” Heather said, and sighed heavily.

  “How come you always have the last word?” Mollie wanted to know.

  “But I don’t,” Sarah said.

  “Yes, you do, Mom. I want Coco Pazzo, Aunt Heather wants Coco …”

  “They’re always booked solid,” Sarah said, “you have to call weeks ahead. Anyway, do you really want to walk all the way up there in this freezing … ?”

  “Cabs, sweetie,” Heather said, and winked at Mollie. “New invention. Yellow, motorized, all the rage.”

  “Sure, just try to get one in this weather,” Sarah said.

  “But suppose we can get one?” Mollie said.

  “And suppose he’s willing to drive us up to Seventy-Fourth?” Heather said.

  “And suppose we get there without crashing into a telephone pole or anything …”

  “And suppose they can take us for lunch?”

  “Would you then be willing to eat there?”

  “Listen, I don’t give a damn where we eat,” Sarah said, suddenly annoyed. “Just stop ganging up on me, okay?”

  “Wow!” Mollie said. “Where’d that come from?”

  “We’ll eat the fucking omelettes, okay?” Heather said.

  “And watch your mouth when Mollie’s around,” Sarah snapped.

  “Mom, I’ve heard the word before, really,” Mollie said, and rolled her eyes.

  “Fine, you’ve heard it, that doesn’t mean your aunt has to use it every ten seconds.”

  “Use it every …?”

  “And bimbo and hanky-panky and whore gandy or whatever the hell else you …”

  “Hey, listen …”

  “Come on, Mom …”

  “No, you listen! Every time the two of you get together, I become the …”

  “Mom, what the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Let’s drop it, Mollie,” Heather said.

  “Right, let’s drop it!” Sarah said.

  They walked in silence past Saks and then St. Patrick’s, Sarah fumingly aware that Heather and Mollie were exchanging puzzled glances. By the time they reached Tiffany’s, her anger had dissipated, and she was beginning to wonder what had prompted her outburst.

  “Okay, we’ll go to Coco Pazzo,” she said, “If they can take us.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve changed my mind about treating,” Heather said, deadpanned.

  “Then I’ll treat, damn it!” Mollie said.

  They all laughed.

  Sarah guessed everything was all right again.

  The Tech Unit detective Michael had chosen was named Freddie Coulter. He had the long rangy look of an adolescent, with narrow hips, a thin face with high cheekbones and dark brown eyes, unruly black hair, and a black mustache that looked borrowed from a western gunslick. He was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved chambray shirt, and a blue denim vest. A .38 Detectives Special was holstered to his belt on the right-hand side of his waist. Coulter was a Detective/First attached to the District Attorney’s Office Squad. He listened intently as Regan and Lowndes told him what he could expect at the tailor shop tonight.

  “Today’s Sunday, so the shop is closed,” Lowndes said.

  Jackass, Regan thought. Would they be sending him in if the place was open?

  “There’s no alarm,” he said.

  “The Mafia doesn’t need alarms,” Lowndes said.

  “Anybody crazy enough to rob a Mafia joint deserves everything coming to him.”

  “You rob a Mafia joint, the next day you have four broken arms.”

  “That’s if you return what you stole.”

  “No alarm,” Lowndes said, “and a Mickey Mouse lock on the front door.”

  “What’s the catch?” Coulter asked.

  “The catch is there’s only the one door going in and that’s right on Broome Street.”

  “Any cops, patrolling on foot?” Coulter asked.

  “How’s that gonna help you?”

  “Shake a few doorknobs,” Coulter said, and shrugged.

  “Good idea,” Michael said. “Can we suit him up?”

  “You get caught inside in uniform, you’re a dead man,” Lowndes said.

  “I don’t plan to get caught,” Coulter said, and smiled.

  “They find a uniformed cop in there, next thing you know your relatives’ll be sending flowers,” Lowndes said.

  “To a funeral home,” Regan said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Coulter said.

  He had a reputation for fearlessness which Regan personally found foolhardy. In this job, only a jackass took risks. You gave Regan a million bucks he wouldn’t sneak in no fuckin’ Mafia joint wearing a police uniform and carrying bugging equipment. Far as Regan was concerned, Coulter was the dumbest fuck on the squad.

  “This is the layout,” he said, and began drawing a crude floor plan on a sheet of DAO stationery. Coulter watched as the tailor shop took shape. “The curtains going to the back are about here,” Regan said, and drew a series of slash marks on the page. “They’re on like metal rings …”

  “You just shove them aside …”

  “Right or left?” Coulter asked.

  “To the left,” Lowndes said. “In back, there’s a pressing machine on the right and what looks like a table on the other wall.”

  “What kind of table?”

  “We’ve never been back there,” Regan said. “This is just what we were able to catch, the times we been in the shop.”

  “Is there a phone back there?”

  “Telephone company says there are two phones in the shop.”

  “One of them in the back room?”

  “Is what we figure.”

  “What kind of warrant do we have?”

  “Basic bug.”

  “No wiretap?”

  “No. We already
got an access line for you, by the way.”

  The access line was what they would need to activate the bug Coulter installed. As soon as they’d obtained their eavesdropping warrant, Regan had called New York Telephone to say he was with a security company that needed an access line in the terminal box behind the Broome Street address. This was standard operating procedure. A security company, an alarm company, a data communications company, anything of that sort. The billing addresses for the fictitious firms were separate mail drops maintained by the NYPD.

  “Where’s the terminal box?” Coulter asked.

  “Out back on the rear wall of the building.”

  “That’s the way they have them down there in Little Italy and Chinatown,” Lowndes said. “Them old buildings.”

  On any hard-wire installation, Coulter connected his bug to the existing telephone line. The bug took the normal audio signal, raised it to a frequency much higher than could be heard, and using the phone line as an antenna, passed it on to the terminal box. Inside the box, Coulter would install a device known as a “slave,” which would take the high-frequency signal, demodulate it, and bridge it electronically to the access line, where anyone listening would again hear it as a normal audio signal.

  “Should be simple,” Coulter said.

  My ass, Regan thought.

  The phone on Michael’s desk rang. He picked up at once.

  “ADA Welles,” he said.

  From where Sarah stood at the pay phone, she could see Mollie circling the rink, trying to do a series of linked pirouettes.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “Good,” he said. “You having fun?”

  “Mollie is. I hate skating. What time do you think you’ll be home? It’s Sunday, you know, I thought we could go to a movie. There’s a good one playing on Eighty-Sixth.”

  “What time does it go on?”

  “We’ve already missed the two o’clock.”

  “When’s the next one?”

  “Four fifteen.”

  “And the one after that?”

  “I didn’t even bother.”

  “What’s it now?” Michael said.

  “Three ten.”

  “I’ll try to wrap up here in ten minutes,” he said, “be home no later than four.”

  “That’s cutting it close.”

  “Best I can do.”

  “Chinese after the movie?”

  “Yeah, good.”

  “Shall I reserve?”

  “Be a good idea. Honey, let me go. Sooner I can …”

  “Goodbye already,” she said, and hung up.

  She looked out over the rink to check on Mollie again, and then dialed “O” for operator, and then the area code and number Andrew had given her for his house on Long Island. When the operator came on, she did just what Andrew had instructed her to do.

  “This is a collect call,” she said.

  “Thank you for using New York Telephone,” the operator said.

  Sarah waited.

  The phone was ringing on the other end. Once, twice …

  “Hello?”

  His voice.

  “I have a collect call for you sir.”

  “Yes?”

  “Miss, may I have your name, please?”

  Miss, she thought.

  “Sarah,” she said.

  “I’ll accept,” Andrew said.

  “Go ahead, please.”

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Where are you?” he said.

  “The Wollman Rink.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Central Park. Are you from Mars?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I love you, do you know that?”

  “Say it.”

  “I love you.”

  “Again.”

  “I love you.”

  “Say it in Martian.”

  “Meet me at the apartment and I’ll fuck your brains out.”

  “Is that Martian?”

  “It’s plain English.”

  “Basic English, I’d say.”

  “Can you meet me?”

  “Andrew; it’s Sunday!”’

  “So what?”

  “You know I can’t. You’re not serious. You won’t be going, there, will you?”

  “Not unless you say you’ll meet me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Are we set for Wednesday, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “No problems?”

  “None. What are you doing?”

  “Watching television.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “No, there are three Chinese girls with me.”

  “I’ll break your head.”

  “What are you wearing?”

  “Oh, I’m very sexy freezing here in the cold.”

  “What’ll you wear Wednesday?”

  “My teacher clothes.”

  “Do you plan to teach me something?”

  “Maybe. I have to go. My daughter’s skating over.”

  “Wednesday,” he said. “Billy will be waiting.”

  “Outside the movie theater on Third and Fifty-Ninth,” she said. “Four o’clock.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  “Wednesday,” she said, and hung up before she had to say it.

  Mollie executed a smart stop near the fence, sending up a spray of ice flakes.

  “Who was that?” she asked.

  “Daddy,” Sarah said.

  In the bedroom of the Great Neck house, Andrew put the receiver back on its cradle and turned to the bathroom door. Redheaded Oona Halligan was standing there wearing high-heeled pumps and one of his pajama tops unbuttoned low over her breasts.

  “Who was that?” she asked.

  “My mother,” he said, and opened his arms to her.

  At eight o’clock that night, while Sarah and Michael and Mollie were coming out of a Chinese restaurant on Eightieth and Third, and while Andrew was really on the phone to his mother in Stonington, Connecticut, a uniformed police officer came up Broome Street, shaking doorknobs to make sure the shops lining the street were locked for the night. He tested doorknob after doorknob, rattling a knob, moving on, rattling yet another knob, until he came to the tailor shop on the corner of Broome and Mott, where he went through the same automatic routine before crossing the street. On the other side of the street, he went through the same ritual with the doors there, and then crossed over again and started back toward the tailor shop, checking both sides of the street as he approached the door. This time, there was a credit card in his left hand.

  He took the doorknob in his right hand, made a swift pass at the doorjamb with the credit card, sliding it between jamb and spring bolt, and had the door open in exactly three seconds. In another two seconds, he was inside, the door locked again behind him. Two seconds after that, two men turned the corner from Mott Street and walked past the shop. By then, Freddie had brushed aside the hanging curtain and was in the back room. The two men took up a position in a dark doorway across the street. They were Freddie’s backups.

  He snapped on his penlight only long enough to find an electrical outlet. He plugged a quarter-watt night-light into it and then waited while his eyes adjusted to the scant illumination. A moving flashlight would have been unmistakable from outside the shop. The beat officers had been alerted that he’d be in here, but he didn’t want one of the paisans passing by and noticing any flickering movement. From the outside, it would now appear as if someone had deliberately left a night-light burning, a not uncommon occurrence. He would work only by this light; he knew his tools well.

  The back room was long and narrow.

  You came through the curtains separating it from the front of the shop and immediately on the right, on o
ne of the short walls was a pressing machine. On the long wall opposite the curtains was the table above which Coulter had plugged in his light. There was a huge pair of cutting shears on the table, several cardboard patterns, a bolt of blue cloth, a heavy pressing iron. A calendar hung on the wall behind the table, just above the outlet. Its illustration showed a peasant girl in a scoop-neck blouse, grinning and holding a basket overflowing with ripe yellow grapes. The days in January had been methodically X’d out to date; today was the thirty-first, the end of the month.

  There was a door to the left of the table. Doorknob on it, a deadbolt lock above it. The door was painted white, like the rest of the room. A speaker with a push button on it was set into the jamb on the right. Coulter moved to the door, rapped gently on it with his knuckles, testing. It did not give back the sound of another room behind it; he guessed it opened on a stairwell. There were no wires running around the jamb; the speaker had been wired from the other side of the wall.

  There were several chairs pulled up to the long table. Coulter surmised the table served several purposes. Shove the chairs back when you wanted to cut a garment, pull them up again when you wanted to talk or eat. On the short wall opposite the pressing machine and right-angled into the wall with the door and the cutting table, there was a pay telephone. Coulter was in business.

  When the batteries in a battery-powered transmitter gave out, they had to be replaced, and this meant having to go in all over again, doubling or tripling or even quadrupling the risk depending on the length of the surveillance. You wired a person with a battery-­powered transmitter, but when you were bugging a room, you looked for your AC power source. A telephone of any kind gave you exactly what you needed.

  Coulter guessed that any meetings taking place back here would be at the long table against the far wall. That was where the chairs were. He further guessed that any business-related calls were made from the pay phone on the wall. The eavesdropping warrant did not give them the right to install a wiretap, but using the phone’s electrical power, he could install a bug that would pick up any conversation taking place in the room, including whatever was said into the phone on this end.

  Coulter went to work.

  He’d done jobs where the least-suspected installation was in plain sight. People felt comfortable in their own environments, they didn’t go looking for anything unusual. Theory of “The Purloined Letter.” Splice into the phone line, run your wire along the baseboard where it could be clearly seen, straight into a bug in your 42A block across the room. You could buy a 42A block in any store selling telephone accessories; it was just a simple two-by-three-inch ivory-colored receptacle with either a single or a double phone jack in it. A Brady bug fit neatly inside it. You fastened the block in plain sight, nobody ever noticed it or the bare-faced wire running to it. But according to Welles, there were some heavy wiseguys coming in and out of this place, and maybe they were a little smarter than your average Gabagootz Mafia bum.