Eight Black Horses

by Ed McBain

‘... any involvement with criminals or...’

  ‘No.’

  ‘... people engaged, even tangentially, in criminal activities?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you know if she owed money to anyone?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘She wasn’t doing drugs, was she?’ Brown asked.

  The question nowadays was almost mandatory.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ Inge said. ‘In fact...’

  She stopped herself mid-sentence.

  ‘Yes?’ Carella said.

  ‘Well, I was only going to say ... well, in fact, that was one of the things she objected to.’

  ‘What was that, Miss Turner?’

  ‘My friends and I did a few lines every now and then.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s common in Los Angeles.’

  ‘But your sister never, to your knowledge...’

  ‘Not in L.A., no. I don’t know what she might have got into once she came here.’ She paused, and then said, ‘L.A. is civilized.’

  Neither of the detectives said anything.

  ‘You see,’ Inge said, ‘this whole thing is so unbelievable. I mean, you’d have to have known Lizzie to realize that... that dying this way, dying a violent death, someone shooting her ... well, it’s unimaginable. She was a very quiet, private sort of person. My friends used to speculate on whether she’d ever even been kissed, do you know what I’m saying? So when you ... when you ... when the mind tries to associate Lizzie, sweet goddamn innocent Lizzie with a ... with a gun, with someone holding a gun to the back of her head and shooting her ... it’s ... I mean, the mind can’t possibly make that connection, it can’t make that quantum leap.’

  She looked at her hands. She had very beautiful hands, Carella noticed.

  ‘Detective Lipman said ... he’d read some sort of report that was sent to him ... he said she had to have been on her knees when she was shot. The angle, the trajectory, whatever the hell, indicated she’d been on her knees, with ... with ... with the ... person who ... who shot her standing behind her. Lizzie on her knees.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I can’t believe this has happened,’ she said, and reached into her handbag for another cigarette.

  She was smoking again when the detectives left the room.

  * * * *

  ‘His specialty is banks,’ Carella said.

  ‘Just what I was thinking,’ Brown said.

  They were driving crosstown and downtown to Elizabeth Turner’s apartment and they were talking about the Deaf Man.

  ‘That’s if you consider two out of three a specialty,’ Carella said.

  He was remembering that once, and only once, had the Deaf Man’s attempts at misdirection been designed to conceal and simultaneously reveal an elaborate extortion scheme. On the other two occasions it had been banks. Tell the police beforehand, but not really, what you’re planning to do, help them dope it out, in fact, and then do something different but almost the same—it all got terribly confusing when the Deaf Man put in an appearance.

  Eight black horses, five walkie-talkies, and one white lady who probably had nothing whatever to do with the Deaf Man, except for the fact that she had worked in a bank.

  ‘Banks have security officers, you know,’ Brown said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Carella said.

  ‘And they carry walkie-talkies, don’t they?’

  ‘I don’t know. Do they?’

  ‘I guess they do,’ Brown said. ‘Do you think there might be a bank someplace in this city that’s got five security guards carrying walkie-talkies?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Carella said.

  ‘Five walkie-talkies, you know?’ Brown said. ‘And she worked in a bank.’

  ‘The only real thing we’ve got...’

  ‘If it’s a connection.’

  ‘Which it probably isn’t.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with the Deaf Man,’ Carella said.

  ‘He drives you crazy,’ Brown said.

  ‘What’s that address again?’

  ‘Eight-oh-four.’

  ‘Where are we now?’

  ‘Eight-twenty.’

  ‘Just ahead then, huh?’

  ‘With the green canopy,’ Brown said.

  Carella parked the car at the curb in front of the building and then threw down the visor on the driver’s side. A sign was attached to it with rubber hands. Visible through the windshield, it advised any overzealous foot patrolman that the guys who’d parked the car here were on the job. The city’s seal and the words isola p.d. printed on the sign were presumably insurance against a parking ticket. The sign didn’t always work. Only recently they had busted a cocaine dealer who’d stolen an identical sign from a car driven by two detectives from the Eight-One. In this city it was sometimes difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

  It was difficult, too, to tell a good building from a bad building.

  Usually a building with an awning out front indicated that there would be a doorman or some other sort of security. There was neither here. They found the superintendent’s apartment on the street level floor, identified themselves, and asked him to unlock the door to Elizabeth Anne Turner’s apartment. On the way up in the elevator Brown asked him if she’d lived here alone.

  ‘Yep,’ he said.

  ‘Sure about that?’ Carella said.

  ‘Yep,’ the super said.

  ‘No girlfriend living with her?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘No boyfriend?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘No roommate at all, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘When’d you see her last?’

  ‘Beginning of October, musta been.’

  ‘Going out or coming in?’

  ‘Going out.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Alone.’

  ‘Carrying anything?’

  ‘Just her handbag.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘In the morning sometime. I figured she was on her way to work.’

  ‘And you didn’t see her again after that?’

  ‘Nope. But I don’t keep an eye out twenty-four hours a day, you know.’

  There is a feel to an apartment that has been lived in.

  Even the apartment of a recent homicide victim can tell you at once whether anyone had been living there. There was no such sense of habitation in Elizabeth Turner’s apartment.

  The windows were closed tight and locked—not unusual for this city, even if someone were just going downstairs for a ten-minute stroll. But the air was still and stale, a certain indication that the windows hadn’t been opened for quite some time. Well, after all, Elizabeth Turner had been found dead eight days ago, and perhaps that was a long enough time for an apartment to have gone stale.

  But a slab of butter in the refrigerator had turned rancid.

  And a package of sliced Swiss cheese had mold growing on it.

  And a container of milk was sour to the smell; the sell-by date stamped at the top of the carton read ‘oct. 1.’

  There were no dishes on the drainboard, none in the dishwasher.

  The ashtrays were spotlessly clean.

  The apartment revealed none of the detritus of living—even if the living had been done by a compulsive house-keeper.

  There was only one coat hanging in the hall closet.

  The double bed in the bedroom was made.

  A framed picture of Elizabeth was on the dresser opposite the bed. She looked prettier alive.

  The three top drawers of the dresser were empty.

  The middle row of drawers contained one blouse.

  The bottom row of drawers contained two sweaters and a handful of mothballs.

  Only a suit, a pair of slacks, and a ski parka were hanging in the bedroom closet. There were two pairs of high-heeled pumps on the closet floor. They could find no suitcases anywhere in the apartment.

  The roll of toilet paper in the bathroom holder was almost all gone.
<
br />   They could not find a toothbrush in the medicine cabinet.

  Nor a diaphragm. Nor a birth control pill dispenser. Nor any of the artifacts, cosmetic or otherwise, they normally would have found in an apartment actively occupied by a woman.

  They went back into the bedroom and searched the desk for an appointment calendar.

  Nothing.

  They looked for a diary.

  Nothing.

  They looked for an address book.

  Nothing.

  ‘What do you think?’ Carella asked.

  ‘Flew the coop, looks like,’ Brown said.

  * * * *

  Another envelope was waiting when they got back to the squadroom.

  Kling handed it to Carella and said, ‘It looks like your pen pal again.’

  Carella’s name was typewritten across the face of the envelope.

  No return address.

  The stamp was postmarked November 1.

  ‘Shouldn’t we be checking these for fingerprints or something?’ Brown said.

  ‘If it’s the Deaf Man,’ Kling said, ‘we’d be wasting our time.’

  He looked very blond standing alongside Brown. He was very blond, but Brown made him look blonder. And younger. And more like a hit-kicking farmboy than usual. Born and raised in this city, he nonetheless exuded an air of innocence, a lack of guile or sophistication that automatically made you think he’d migrated from Kansas or someplace like that, wherever Kansas was—the detectives on the 87th Squad all thought Kansas was ‘out there someplace.’

  Kling looked as if he’d come from out there in the boon-docks of America someplace, where you rove your car two hundred miles every Saturday night to a hamburger stand. Kling looked as if he still necked in the back seat of an automobile. Hazel-eyed and clean-shaven, blond hair falling loose over his forehead., he looked like a bumpkin who had wandered into the police station to ask directions to the nearest subway stop. He was very good at the Mutt and Jeff ploy. In much the same way that any cop teamed with Brown automatically became Jeff, any cop teamed with Kling automatically became Mutt. Together Kling and Brown were perhaps the best Mutt and Jeff act to be found anywhere in the city. It was almost unfair to the criminal population of this city to foist such a Mutt and Jeff team upon it. There was no way you could win, not with Brown playing the heavy and Kling playing the good-natured soul trying to keep his partner from chewing you to bits. No way.

  ‘Even so,’ Brown said.

  ‘Been handled by ten thousand people already,’ Kling said. ‘Postal clerks, letter carriers...’

  ‘Yeah,’ Brown said, and shrugged.

  ‘You going to open it or what?’ Kling said.

  ‘You open it,’ Carella said, and extended the envelope to him.

  ‘It’s not my case,’ Kling said.

  ‘It’s everybody’s case,’ Carella said.

  ‘Throw it away,’ Kling said, backing away from the envelope. ‘He gives me the creeps, that guy.’

  ‘I’ll open it, for Christ’s sake,’ Brown said, and took the envelope from Carella.

  He tore open the flap. He unfolded the single white sheet of paper that was inside:

  ‘Huh?’ he said.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER THREE

  The city for which these men worked was divided into five separate geographical sections.

  The center of the city, Isola, was an island; hence its name: Isola means ‘island’ in Italian. In actual practice the entire city was referred to as Isola, even though the other four sections were separately and more imaginatively named.

  Riverhead came from the Dutch, though not directly. The land up there had once been owned by a patroon named Ryerhurt, and it had been called Ryerhurt’s Farms, which eventually became abbreviated and bastardized to Riverhead.

  No one knew why sprawling, boisterous Calm’s Point was called that. Maybe at one time, when the British were still there, it had indeed been a peaceful pastoral place. Nowadays it was worth your life to wear a gold chain in some sections of Calm’s Point.

  Majesta had without question been named by the British; the name rang with all the authority, grandeur, greatness, and dignity of sovereignty, its roots being in the Middle English word maieste, from the Old French majeste, from the Latin mājestās, which was a long way around the mulberry bush.

  Bethtown had been named for the virgin queen Elizabeth, but undoubtedly by a British official with a lisp; it was supposed to have been called Besstown.

  Isola was the hub of the city.

  Some people who lived there thought it was the hub of the entire universe, a belief that did much to contribute to its reputation for rudeness. Even people who lived elsewhere in the city held Isola in awe, invariably referring to it as ‘the City,’ as though they lived in the middle of a wheat field on its outer fringes.

  There were no wheatfields in any part of this city.

  But there were a hell of a lot of banks.

  In Isola there were 856 banks.

  In Majesta there were 296 banks.

  In Calm’s Point there were 249 banks.

  In Riverhead there were 127 banks.

  And in Bethtown there were 56 banks.

  That came to 1,584 banks, more than a quarter of all the banks in the entire state.

  On Thursday morning, November 3, a flyer from the Eight-Seven went out to the main branch of every bank in the city, requesting information on a homicide victim named Elizabeth Anne Turner, who may have been employed as a cashier sometime during the past three years. A photograph and description accompanied the flyer together with the social security number the detectives had got from Suncoast Federal in Los Angeles, where Elizabeth had worked before coming east.

  On Friday morning, November 4, a call came from the branch manager of the First Fidelity Trust on Beverly Street downtown.

  Carella and Brown were in his office not twenty minutes later.

  * * * *

  Arnold Holberry was a man with a summer cold. He thought it was ridiculous to have a summer cold when it was already four days into November.

  ‘I hate this weather,’ he told the detectives, and blew his nose. Outside the windows of his office November looked like June. ‘This is supposed to be autumn,’ he said. ‘The first day of autumn was September twenty-first. We are already into the last quarter of the year,’ he said. ‘The winter solstice is almost upon us. We are not supposed to be having this kind of weather. This kind of weather is dangerous for human beings at this time of year.’

  He blew his nose again.

  He was a trim man in his late fifties, his hair graying at the temples, a gray mustache under his nose—which was very red at the moment. A bottle of cold tablets was on his desk. A box of tissues was on his desk as well. He looked thoroughly miserable, but he told the detectives he was willing lo give them all the time they needed. He remembered Elizabeth Turner quite well and had been inordinately fond of her.

  ‘How long did she work here, Mr. Holberry?’ Brown asked.

  ‘Almost two years. She used to live in California, excellent credentials out there. Well, a marvelous person all around. I was sorry to have her leave us.’

  ‘When was that?’ Carella asked.

  He was afraid he would catch Holberry’s cold. He didn’t want to bring a cold home to the kids just when the holidays were about to begin. Thanksgiving was only a few weeks off, and after that Christmas would be right around the corner. He was unaware of it, but his posture in the chair opposite Holberry’s desk was entirely defensive. He sat leaning all the way back, his arms folded across his chest. Each time Holberry blew his nose, Carella winced, as if a battery of nuclear missiles were rushing out of their silos, aimed at his vulnerable head.

  ‘In February,’ Holberry said.

  ‘This past February?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When, exactly, in February?’ Brown asked.

  ‘On February fourth,’ Holberry said, and reached for a tissue and blew his nose
again. ‘These pills don’t work at all,’ he said. ‘Nothing works when you’ve got a cold like this one.’