by McBain, Ed
“Right …”
“—first thing they’ll say is ‘Don’t call the police.’ Shit, Steve, I am the police! Who’d be crazy enough to pull a stupid fucking thing like this?”
His use of profanity, too, was unusual. He was puffing and pacing, and swearing like a sailor, and there was a feverish glow on his face, and his eyes seemed moist and on the edge of tears.
“All right, calm down now,” Carella said. “Let’s try to work up a timetable, okay? Tell me when you left the room.”
“I went into the bathroom at about eleven-twenty, and came out about eleven-thirty.”
“Hear anything during that time? Any sounds of a struggle, any—”
“Nothing. I was in the shower, Steve. How could I hear—”
“You weren’t in the shower all that time, were you? You came out of the shower at some point, and you dried yourself, didn’t you? I’m assuming you dried yourself, Bert.”
“Yes. I also brushed my teeth.”
“After you got out of the shower?”
“Yes.”
“All right, did you hear anything while you were drying yourself or brushing your teeth?”
“Nothing.”
“How long were you in the shower?”
“About five minutes.”
“Then whoever abducted Augusta—”
“Christ!” Kling said.
“What’s the matter?”
“The one fucking thing I don’t need right now is cop talk!”
“All right, fine. Whoever took Augusta out of this room did it during the five minutes you were actually in the shower. Sometime between eleven-twenty and eleven twenty-five.”
“Yes. Steve, can we just—”
“Take it easy,” Carella said. “Were you and Augusta talking before you left the room?”
“Talking? I guess so. No, wait a minute, we weren’t. Well, we exchanged a few words. But we were pretty quiet, I guess.”
“When did you exchange the few words?”
“I asked her if she wanted a nightcap.”
“Uh-huh,” Carella said, and nodded.
“And she said she’d had too much to drink already.”
“Uh-huh, was that it?”
“No, then she, uh…No, I asked her if she wanted to use the bathroom first, and she said she wanted to lay out the clothes she’d be wearing in the morning, and then, uh, I told her I loved her.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh.”
“And, uh, she said she loved me, too, I guess, and we, uh, embraced, and then I went into the bathroom to shower.”
“Did she say anything to you before you went into the bathroom?”
“Yeah. She said, ‘Now go take your shower.’”
“So if someone had been listening outside the door, he’d have known you were leaving the room at that point.”
“I guess so.”
“Especially if he didn’t hear any voices after that.”
“Yeah.”
“Have you left this room since you called me?”
“No.”
“You didn’t check out the fire stairs or anything?”
“No.”
“Did you talk to anyone in the hotel? Elevator operators, anyone who might have seen her or the person who—”
“I spoke to the desk clerk and also the bartender. This was when I thought you guys were kidding around.”
“What do you mean?”
“What Parker said at the reception. About brides being kidnapped on their wedding night. I thought maybe …”
“Yeah, well, mmm,” Carella said, and grimaced. “Have you talked to anyone else here at the hotel? Aside from the desk clerk and the bartender?”
“No.”
“How do you feel?”
“Okay.”
“Bert, I want you to stay out of this one.”
“Why?”
“I want you to relax a bit.”
“I’m relaxed,” Kling said.
“You don’t look that way to me. When they call here, they’re going to ask to talk to you. You’ve got to stay on top of this, Bert, so you can stall them while we—”
“I am on top of it! If you’d just stop the bullshit and—”
“Bert,” Carella said very quietly. “Come on, huh?”
Kling said nothing.
“Let us handle it, okay? Just put yourself out of it for now. Your only job is to talk to those people when they call.”
Kling still said nothing.
“Bert? Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Okay then.”
“What do they hope to get from a salaried cop?” Kling asked. He did not expect an answer; he was shaking his head and staring down at his own shoes.
“Has her father got money?” Carella asked.
“I suppose so. He owns a paper mill in Seattle.”
“Then maybe he’s the target,” Carella said. He thought about this for a moment, nodded his head in the equivalent of a shrug, and then went to the telephone to make his various calls. When he got off the phone, he saw Kling reaching into Augusta’s bag for another cigarette.
“You don’t need that,” he told him.
“I need it,” Kling said.
Carella nodded again, but this time the nod was more like a sigh. “Tech crew should be here within ten minutes, the lieutenant and Meyer are on their way, too. We want to cool this for now, Bert, keep the hotel people in the dark as long as we can. At least until we’ve had some contact. Okay?”
“Yeah,” Kling said glumly.
“I want to check out those fire stairs. Will you be all right?”
“Yeah.”
“Bert?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Okay,” Carella said, and went out of the room.
The main entrance to the hotel was on Mayr Terrace, and the fire stairs were at the rear of the building, opening on a service courtyard between the hotel and the apartment house adjacent to it. Carella, reasoning that anyone carrying an unconscious woman would hardly take her down in the elevator, automatically tried the fire stairs as the most logical escape route. The room from which Augusta had been abducted was on the eighth floor of the hotel, and there were seventeen floors in all. Carella had a choice of moving either up or down—Augusta’s kidnapper could have headed for the service court below or the roof above. Again, remembering that the kidnapper had been carrying the dead weight of an unconscious woman, Carella reasoned he’d have taken the easiest path of escape—to the service court below. He started down the steps.
On the third-floor landing, he found Augusta’s second shoe. It had probably fallen from her foot as the kidnapper moved downstairs with his heavy burden. Carella put the shoe into his coat pocket and continued down to the lobby floor. There were two fire doors on the landing there. One of them opened onto the lobby; the other opened onto the courtyard outside. He knew the kidnapper would not have carried Augusta across the lobby, so he opened the door to the courtyard. A fierce November gust of wind whipped into the building, causing his coat to flap wildly about his legs. He went out into the courtyard, his hair blowing, his eyes at once beginning to tear. Immediately opposite the exit door, some thirty feet from the hotel, there was the unbroken brick wall of the apartment house next door. On Carella’s left, as he stood with his back to the exit door, he could see the driveway that ran between the two buildings, and he could see the early-morning traffic on the cross street. On his right he saw a bank of grimy windows running like a lighted bridge from hotel to apartment house, part of a low stucco structure that crouched between the two buildings as though frightened it would be squashed flat by one or the other of them. A metal door to the right of the windows was painted red. Carella did not appreciate the current slang for cops, but neither had he appreciated the terminology that was in vogue when he’d first made detective. In those days, detectives were called “bulls.” Nonetheless, he zeroed in on that red door as if it were a cape being waved by a matador. Crossing
the windy courtyard, cursing the cold, he reached the door and knocked on it.
There was no answer.
He knocked again.
“Who is it?” a voice said.
“Police,” Carella said.
“Who?”
“Police officer. Would you please open the door, sir?”
“Just a second, okay?”
The man who unlocked and then opened the door appeared to be in his early seventies, a tall thin man wearing eyeglasses, black trousers, a white shirt, and a long dirty white apron. He was holding a broom in his left hand.
“Could I see your badge, please?” he asked Carella.
Carella showed him the gold shield.
“Come in, officer,” the man said, and then waited for Carella to enter, and closed and locked the door behind him. As soon as he had performed this task, he shifted the broom to his right hand. “Cold out there, ain’t it?” he said.
“Very,” Carella said.
The man had brown eyes, magnified by the thick lenses of his glasses. He had a very soft speaking voice, so low that Carella had trouble hearing him. A gray bristle was on his chin and cheeks. “What’s the trouble, officer?” he asked.
“This is a routine investigation,” Carella said, hauling out the old police pacifier. Routine investigation. Two words that usually satisfied any honest citizen’s curiosity. Try them on a crook, though, and they often struck terror in his heart. “How long have you been in here tonight, sir?”
“I got in around ten.”
Looking around now, Carella saw that he was in a kitchen. A huge black cookstove ran almost the length of the courtyard wall. The grimy windows Carella had seen from outside had undoubtedly got that way from the grease spatters of the day’s cooking. There was a large butcher-block worktable opposite the stove, spotless stainless-steel bowls and utensils ranged on it in readiness for the morning’s work. On the other side of the worktable, there was a bank of stainless-steel refrigerators. “Is this a restaurant?” Carella asked.
“Luncheonette,” the old man answered. “The R and M Luncheonette. I seen you looking at the windows there. Haven’t got to them yet. They’ll be spotless clean, time I leave here.”
“You say you got to work at ten?” Carella asked.
“That’s right. My job’s cleaning up. They close right after supper, usually around nine o’clock, sometimes a little later. I come in at ten. My name’s Bill Bailey, please don’t make no jokes, okay? Every time I meet somebody, he says, ‘Bill Bailey, whyn’t you go on home and stop causing that woman so much trouble?’” Bailey chuckled and shook his head. “Wish they’d never written that song, I’ve got to tell you.” But it was plain to see he enjoyed whatever small notoriety the song offered him. “What’s your name, sir, if I may ask?”
“Detective Carella.”
“How do you do, sir?” Bailey said, and shifted the broom to his left hand again, and extended his right hand.
“How do you do?” Carella said. They shook hands almost solemnly. For Bailey, this must have been a rare occurrence, a detective coming into the luncheonette in the early hours of the morning. He lingered over the handshake, savoring it, and finally let Carella’s hand go.
“Mr. Bailey?” Carella said.
“Yes, sir?”
“I wonder if you can tell me whether you saw anyone outside in the courtyard tonight?”
“A person, do you mean?”
“Yes. A person.”
“No, sir, I did not see any person out there.”
“What did you see?” Carella asked, suddenly realizing that Bailey had wanted clarification only because he’d seen something other than a person.
“A truck,” Bailey said.
“When was this?”
“Pulled in around eleven o’clock, I would say. Around that time.”
“What kind of a truck?”
“A white one. Driver backed it in. Backed it all the way up the alley to where the hotel’s fire door is. You don’t see many of the delivery trucks doing that. Fellows usually drive them in headfirst, and then back them out when they’re leaving. This fellow backed it in all the way.”
“How’d you happen to see it?” Carella asked. “Were you outside in the courtyard?”
“In this weather? No, sir,” Bailey said. “I saw it through the windows there.” He gestured with the broom toward the grease-stained windows over the stove. The windows were set about five feet above the floor. Bailey was a thin scarecrow of a man, tall enough to have seen through the windows easily—if they’d been clean. But looking through them now, Carella had the feeling that a veil had been dropped over his eyes. He could barely make out the brick wall of the apartment building on the right, and could certainly not see the fire door of the hotel on the left.
“You saw the truck through these windows, huh?” Carella said.
“Yes, sir, I did. I know what you’re thinking, sir. You’re thinking I’m an old man wearing these thick eyeglasses here, and those windows are filthy, so how could I see anything out there in the courtyard? Well, sir, the windows are filthy, that’s true, but I’m used to looking through them that way, and I see all sorts of things out there, especially in the summertime when sometimes the chambermaids are out there with the bellhops. Not in the winter, mind you. Too cold. Freeze their behinds off out there. The thing people usually forget about anybody who wears eyeglasses, no matter how thick those glasses may be, is that the glasses are there to correct the person’s vision, do you understand? Man can see just fine when he’s got his glasses on. It’s only when he takes them off, he can’t see too well.”
“What kind of a truck did you say it was?” Carella asked.
“A white one. Must’ve been a milk truck, don’t you think? Or a bakery truck.”
“Would they normally make deliveries at eleven o’clock?” Carella asked.
“No, that’s right, they usually don’t, leastways I’ve never seen them. Maybe it was a linen truck. I would guess the hotel gets lots of linens picked up and delivered, wouldn’t you guess?”
“Mr. Bailey, you didn’t see any lettering on the truck, did you?”
“No, sir. I only saw the back of the truck. It backed in. Stopped near the fire door there.”
“And you didn’t see anyone getting out of the truck.”
“No, sir. I just looked out when I heard the truck, and then I went back to my work. I thought at first it might’ve been a delivery for us, you see, and I was worried about what to do, since they don’t give me no money to pay for deliveries, and besides, I’ve never had one at night all the time I’ve been working here. But nobody knocked on the door, so I figured it wasn’t for us. Tell you the truth, when you knocked on the door, I thought that might be a delivery, too.”
“When did the truck leave, Mr. Bailey, can you tell me that?”
“Must’ve been about eleven-thirty. I didn’t see it leaving, mind you, but I heard it, and I looked up at the clock. It was just about eleven-thirty, give or take.”
“Well, thanks a lot, Mr. Bailey, you’ve been very helpful.”
“Want a cup of coffee? I’ve got a pot right here on the stove.”
“Thank you, no, I’ve got to be going.”
“Nice talking to you,” Bailey said, and unlocked the door for him. Carella stepped out into the courtyard again. The wind was vicious; it ripped through the cloth of his coat and gnawed his bones to the marrow. Newspapers flew about the courtyard like winged night marauders, flapping noisily in the air, slapping blindly against the surrounding brick walls. He walked to the fire door and tried to open it, but it was blind locked on the courtyard side. Ducking his chin into his collar, he thrust his hands into his pockets and walked up the driveway, and out onto the sidewalk and up the block, and around the corner to the front entrance of the hotel.
They had set the police machinery in motion, and now they sat down to wait in the early hours of the morning, the empty hours of the night. It was Monday already, Novem
ber the tenth, but it still felt like Sunday night. Contrary to Carella’s hopes, it had proved impossible to keep the hotel staff from knowing what had happened. Too many technicians were crawling all over the room, the corridor, the elevator, the fire stairs, and the service courtyard, installing equipment and searching for fingerprints, footprints, and tire tracks. In the end Carella simply warned the hotel staff that the newspapers were not to get hold of this story, and he hinted broadly that news of an abduction wouldn’t do much to help the hotel’s image, either.
A full description of Augusta had been radioed to the police at air terminals, railroad stations, and bus depots, and a teletype had gone out to police departments in all the adjacent states. A police technician and a telephone installer, working in tandem, had hooked the room’s phone into a tape recorder, and the phone company had been alerted to expect a possible request for a trace if and when the kidnapper called. There was some question as to whether or not Kling’s home phone should be similarly wired; it was decided that he’d keep the room at the hotel till sometime tomorrow morning and then go back to his own apartment, by which time the phone there would also be equipped to record. For now, there was nothing more that any of them could do—except analyze what had happened and try to second-guess the kidnapper’s next move.
If he was a kidnapper.
Captain Marshall Frick, who was the captain in charge of the entire 87th Precinct, including the uniformed cops, the detectives, and the clerks, seemed to think otherwise. “It could have been a burglary,” he said. Frick was getting on in years, a man whose thinking was as ancient and as creaky as his white hair prepared one to expect.
“How do you figure a burglary?” Byrnes asked. They were all sitting in the hotel room, waiting for the phone to ring. Kling was sitting on the edge of the bed, nearest to the phone. Meyer was in a chair alongside the recording equipment; he was wearing earphones, one of them on his left ear, the other pushed away from the right ear so he could hear the conversation in the room. Carella was half sitting on, half leaning against the dresser. Frick was in the room’s one upholstered chair, and Byrnes was in a chair he’d pulled out from the desk. “With all due respect, Marshall, why would a burglar have come in here with chloroform?”