by Ed McBain
'What made you feel that, Miss Kingsley?'
'He seemed… violent. I had the feeling he was capable of enormous violence. He made me extremely uncomfortable. I'm glad Andy never brought him back here again.'
'How old was he?'
'In his thirties, I would guess.'
'Any idea where he lives?'
'In the Quarter, I think. He mentioned Audibon Avenue. That's in the Quarter, isn't it?'
'Yes. What else can you tell us about him?'
'Do you think he killed my brother?'
'We have no ideas about that as yet, Miss Kingsley."
'I'll bet he did,' Phyllis said, and nodded gently. 'He seemed like the kind of person who could do murder.'
'What did he look like?'
'He was very tall and quite good-looking. A dark complexion, longish brown hair.'
'When was he here with your brother?'
'A week ago? Six days ago? I'm not sure.'
'When did you last see your brother alive?'
'Sunday night.'
'Did he say where he was going?'
'He said he had business uptown.'
'Where uptown?'
'He only said uptown.'
'What kind of business?'
'He didn't say.'
'What time did he leave here?'
'About six o'clock.'
'Did he say what time he'd be back?'
'No.'
'Were you expecting him back?'
'I had no expectations either way. He often stayed out all night He had his own key. He was an adult, I never questioned him about his comings and goings.'
'What was he wearing the last time you saw him?'
'A Navy pea jacket, a plaid shirt, dark trousers… brown or blue, I'm not sure.'
'Hat? Gloves?'
'Black leather gloves, no hat.'
'Muffler?'
'No.'
'Wallet? Keys?'
'He had a black leather wallet, I assume he was carrying it with him. The only key he had was the key to this apartment.'
'We're very anxious to know where he might have been heading on the night he was killed, Miss Kingsley. Would your brother have kept a diary, or an appointment book, or even a calendar on which he might have marked…?'
'I'll show you his room,' Phyllis said, and rose, and pulled the afghan tighter around her shoulders, and led them through the apartment. There were four rooms altogether: the living room in which they had interrogated Phyllis, a kitchen, and two bedrooms. Andrew Kingsley's room was at the end of a long windowless corridor. The corridor was hung with photographs of people dressed in clothing of the thirties, forties, and fifties. Carella assumed they were family pictures. The pictures could have been taken anywhere in the city. Or anywhere in any city, for that matter. There was one picture of a very young boy standing before what looked like a late-forties automobile. Carella hesitated before it, and Phyllis immediately said, 'My brother. He was only four when the picture was taken.' In the next breath she said, 'It's hard to believe he's dead. He's been gone from this city for a long time, first to college and then California, it's not that I saw him that often. And yet… it's hard to believe. It's very hard to believe.'
'Are your parents alive, Miss Kingsley?' Carella asked.
'No. They were killed in an automobile accident in France, seven years ago. It was the first time they'd been to Europe. My mother had wanted to go all her life, and they'd finally saved enough money.' She shook her head and fell silent
'Do you have any other brothers or sisters?'
'No. I'm alone now,' she said.
Andrew Kingsley's room contained a dresser and a bed. There were very few articles of clothing in the dresser, and even fewer in the closet. There were no diaries, notebooks, appointment books, or calendars. A package of cheap stationery was in the top drawer of his dresser. One sheet of paper had been pulled from the others and a letter had been started. The beginning of the unfinished letter read:
Dear Lisa,
How are you, Golden Girl? I am enjoying every minute of being here. The only sad part is that you're not with me and I hope you've been giving some serious
'Is this your brother's handwriting?' Carella asked.
'Let me see,' Phyllis said, and looked at the page he extended. 'Yes.'
'Any idea who Lisa might be?'
'No.'
'Are these all his personal belongings?'
'Yes, he… didn't have very much.'
'Miss Kingsley,' Carella said, 'I don't wish to compound your grief, but if you could find it in yourself to go over to the hospital and identify your brother…'
'Yes, but… do I have to do it today? I'm not feeling too well. That's why I'm home from work.'
'What kind of work do you do?'
'I'm a bookkeeper. I felt something coming on last night, and I took some cold pills, and I'd probably have been all right if the heat hadn't gone on the fritz. I felt absolutely awful this morning. In fact, I was still in bed when my neighbor came in to show me the newspaper. And my brother's picture.'
'You can go over there tomorrow, if you like. If you're feeling better,' Carella said.
'Yes. Which hospital is it?'
'Buena Vista. On Culver Avenue.'
'Yes, all right,' she said. 'Was there anything else?'
'No. Thank you, Miss Kingsley, you've been very helpful.' As she led them to the front door, she said, 'He was a good boy. He hadn't found himself yet, but he was trying. I loved him a lot. I'm going to miss him. It's not that I saw him that often…' She began weeping then. She fumbled with the door lock, managed at last to twist it open, and then covered her nose and her mouth with one hand, the tears spilling from her eyes, and let them out of the apartment, and locked the door behind them. As they went down the steps they could hear her still weeping behind the locked door of the apartment in which she lived alone again.
The Isola telephone directory listed one David Harris on South Philby, and another on Avenue Y in the Quarter. A look at a street map of the city showed that Avenue Y crossed Audibon at one point, and they assumed that this was the address they wanted. They hit the apartment at close to noon. They knocked five times in succession before they got an answer, and then the voice was muffled, as though it were coming from someplace deep inside the apartment. They knocked again.
'Okay, okay,' a voice shouted.
They heard footsteps approaching the door.
'Who is it?' the voice asked.
'Police,' Kling said. 'Want to open up, please?'
They were totally unprepared for what happened next.
If they considered Harris a possible suspect, it was only because Phyllis had described him as a violent person. Other than that, they had no reason to believe that he had killed six people. They were here to ask questions about the extent of his relationship with Kingsley. They were here, too, because Harris was the only link to the life Andrew Kingsley was living outside his sister's apartment. They wanted to know what, if anything, Harris could tell them about that life, in the hope that the information would shed some light on how or why Kingsley had ended up dead in a ditch with five other people. Their intentions were peaceful.
They changed their minds in the next ten seconds.
In the next ten seconds, or eight seconds, or six seconds, or however long it took the person behind the door to squeeze the trigger of a gun three times in rapid succession, they changed their minds about peaceful intentions, suspects, and laws that prohibited the kicking-in of doors. The explosions were shockingly loud, the wood paneling on the door shattered, the bullets struck the plaster wall opposite and began ricocheting wildly in the narrow corridor. Kling and Carella were already on the floor. Carella's pistol was in his hand, and Kling's was coming out of its holster. Three more shots splintered the wooden door, buzzed overhead, whistled in ricochet.
'That's six,' Carella said.
He scrambled to one side of the door and got to his feet. Kling, following his su
it, crawled to the other side of the door and stood up. They looked across the door at each other, and hesitated, only because the decision they made in the next several seconds could cost either one of them his life. Six shots had been fired. Had the man inside exhausted the ammunition in a six-shot revolver, and was he now reloading? Or was he armed with an automatic, some of which had a capacity of eleven cartridges? Carella heard his watch ticking. If he waited any longer, the man would have reloaded even if he were toting a revolver. He made his move instantly, and Kling picked up on it like a quarterback following his blocker. Carella moved swiftly to the wall opposite the door, put his back against it for support and leverage, lifted his knee like a piston, and kicked out flat-footed at the lock. The lock sprang on the first kick, and Carella rushed forward at once, following the door as it opened into the room, Kling peeling off immediately behind him as he passed the doorjamb.
A huge and hugely handsome man was inserting a cartridge into the cylinder of what looked like a Colt .38. He was standing about five feet from the door, and he was wearing only pajama bottoms, and the moment Carella and Kling burst into the room, he dropped the cartridges he was holding in the palm of his left hand and swung the gun hand into position. Carella, because he had learned over the years that yelling had more effect than whispering, shouted 'Drop it!' and right behind him Kling yelled 'Drop the gun!' and the man, who they assumed was Harris, hesitated a moment, and looked from one to the other of them, and made his own decision in the nick of time because each of the cops would have given him only another second before they shot him down where he stood. He dropped the gun. It clattered to the floor. He was wearing only pajama bottoms, but they threw him up against the wall anyway, and tossed him, and then slapped him into handcuffs.
They were both breathing very hard.
Chapter Three
I don't read nothing.
I don't have to read nothing. The clique has been mentioned a couple of times in the papers, and there's always reporters up here nosing around. But I don't talk to reporters, and I don't read what they write. That way I can keep cool. Whenever we have a meeting, I'm the coolest man in the room. That's because my head ain't cluttered. I hardly ever go to the flicks or watch television, either, except for football. I like football. I like to figure out the plays. It's like figuring out life, you know what I mean? Those guys down there on the field are thinking every minute, and they're alert to danger, and they react automatically. Before I graduated from Whitman, which is the high school over on Crestview, I was on the football team. That's the only decent thing I ever got out of that school, being on the team. I wasn't the quarterback or nothing, I was just in the line. I'm a big guy, you know, and I was even huskier then, when I was a kid. That always stuck with me, my experience on the football team. Watching the games on television relaxes me and helps me make decisions. Reading only gets me confused. A person has got to keep a clear head all the time.
Anyway, it was Mace who brung the newspaper to me on Wednesday and read about the guy the fuzz had picked up, and how he was maybe linked some way to the bearded guy Chingo and the raiders had shot. The newspaper story told who the dead guy was, some cat named Andrew Kingsley, who had just come in from California a little while ago. He should have stood where he was. It didn't say what he'd been doing in that spic pad, and it also didn't say who the spies were. That figured. If I knew anything about the Death's Heads (man, that name really kills me!), it was that they weren't about to run to the fuzz and identify none of their people. Around here, the fuzz are trouble, no matter which end of the stick you're holding. You call them in because somebody busted your legs with a baseball bat, and next thing you know, you're the one being sent to jail for bleeding on the sidewalk. The Heads knew better than to tell the cops it was their president who got shot and dumped in the ditch. The cops would have to find that out for themselves, and according to the story Mace read me from the newspaper, they weren't doing such a hot job of it. And the Scarlets wouldn't tell the cops nothing neither. If they did anything at all, it would be they'd try to settle the score. Which is why we were being very careful those first few days after the hit.
We got a very tight security system around here, anyway. We don't let nobody near us. We got sentries posted on all the rooftops and on all the street corners. There ain't nobody who can come anywhere close to the clubhouse without us knowing it way in advance. Even before Mace knocked on the door and brought me the newspaper, I knew he was on the way. I don't trust nobody, not even Mace. All the members got orders that whoever's approaching the clubhouse, even if it's another member, the president's got to know about it. Four minutes before Mace knocked on the door, a runner came and told me he was on the way up. That's the way I like it.
The clubhouse is on the third floor of this abandoned building on 57th. We got it painted in these nice Day-Glo colors in a sort of abstract design, you know? The Bullet, aside from being an experienced combat trooper, is also quite an artist. He designed the pictures on the walls, and he painted them with the help of some of the younger kids in the clique. We don't have no obscene pictures on our walls, like some of the other cliques have. No pictures of naked women, nothing like that. I don't go for that kind of stuff, and I made it clear to the members that I won't tolerate nothing like that around the clubhouse. Sex is a private thing you do in private with the person you love. I don't go for dirty actions, and I don't go for dirty talk, either. One of our rules is no profanity. You hear me say a dirty word in all the time I've been talking to you? You bet you didn't. I pride myself on that. Oh, sure, I know it's easier to express yourself in language that's not correct. But I've never been a person who took the easy road. I don't go looking to do things the hard way, but I guess it's my nature to make sure things come out right, you know? And that goes for language, too. And that's why I never swear, I never even say 'hell' or 'damn,' I'm just saying them now as an example. And I don't allow none of the people around me to use profanity neither. Sure, I could be permissive about it, let the guys say whatever they want to, let them bring in the chicks and ball them right in the clubhouse, let them smoke pot, all of that. But I don't believe in it. It's not right, none of them things are right.
I know there's been commissions formed and they gave reports on hash, and they say it don't hurt to smoke it, and it ain't habit-forming, and all that. I don't care what the commissions say. As long as I'm president, I'll listen to my own heart and my own head on what's right and what's wrong. And you can't tell me that these movies they're showing, and these magazines that are on the stands, and these dirty books these guys are writing are right. 'Cause they ain't. They're wrong. The way cursing is wrong. When I was on Whitman's football team, anytime the coach heard anybody say a dirty word, it was eight laps around the field. You ever run eight laps around a football field? You learn not to curse pretty quick.
Mace said the cops - was it you guys? - had picked up a hood named David Harris, who opened fire on them the minute they knocked on the door. He was described as an unemployed laborer with a police record for assault and burglary. What he admitted, after the cops questioned him, was that he had held up a liquor store in Calm's Point the night before, and when they knocked on the door and said it was the police, he figured they were coming to bust him for the armed robbery. Which led them to questioning him about his relationship with this Andrew Kingsley cat, who Chingo and the boys had knocked off together with the Head spic and his girl. Harris said he hardly knew Kingsley from a hole in the wall. He had met him in a bar a week or so ago, and they had got to talking about life on the Coast, where Harris had spent some time - probably in jail - and then Kingsley had asked him up to meet his sister, and that was that. Harris said he didn't get along too hot with Kingsley's sister, who he described as a 'very up-tight lady.' He also said it came as news to him that Kingsley had been found dead in a ditch on the North Side, since Harris (like me) don't read newspapers. It looked good. The cops still didn't know who any of the other peop
le in the ditch were, and they weren't about to find out, either.
But then Midge opened her mouth.
The telephone on Carella's desk rang at two-fifteen on Wednesday afternoon, January 9, the day after they had busted David Harris and charged him with Armed Robbery. The story of his arrest had run in both morning newspapers, and had made headlines in the afternoon tabloid. The pictures of the six unknown victims were still running in all three papers, and Carella was still hoping, but not expecting, that someone would come forward to identify them. Identification of Andrew Kingsley, rather than simplifying matters, had complicated them for Carella and Kling—who until then had suspected the ditch murders were related to organized crime. (You have to start someplace, and organized crime is as good a place as any to leap off from when you find six bodies piled up in an open trench.) Their assumption hadn't been altogether unreasonable; the police all over the city had recently been plagued by an outbreak of shootings, the result of a struggle between old-line white racketeers and upstart blacks and Puerto Ricans.
The cause of this struggle was quite simple. The white hoods had held absolute control over the lucrative narcotics trade for a very long time now, and whereas they did not mind selling dope to blacks and Puerto Ricans, they did not appreciate blacks and Puerto Ricans muscling into their brisk little industry and trying to corner some of the profits for themselves. There is one sure way to discourage free enterprise, and that is to put a bullet in your competitor's nostril. Unidentified bodies kept turning up in deserted alleys or outdoor parking lots or in the trunks of abandoned Plymouths of unknown vintage. And since the underworld (white or black) stringently observed the code of omerta, roughly translated from the Italian as 'Mum's the word, sweetheart,' there was rarely anyone brave or stupid enough to step forward and identify an unknown corpse. The possibility had therefore existed that the six bodies in the ditch were related to the racial narcotics war. But that didn't explain the presence of the bearded white man, Andrew Kingsley, who had no record at all, and who—according to his sister—had been engaged in only noble pursuits on the West Coast. As it turned out, the cops had been thinking correctly in terms of gang warfare, but they were thinking a little big. The call from the girl named Midge caused them to lower their sights a bit.