by Ed McBain
'Mr Flynn . . .'
'What is it, Harry?'
A woman appeared behind him in the small entryway. The detectives had not yet entered the apartment. They stood outside the door, the cold air of the hallway enveloping them. In that instant, the doorsill seemed to Carella a boundary between life and death, the two detectives bearing the chill news of bloody murder, the man and the woman warm from sleep awaiting whatever dread thing had come to them in the middle of the night. The woman had one hand to her mouth. A classic pose. A movie pose. 'What is it, Harry?' and the hand went up to her mouth. No lipstick on that mouth. Hair as red as her dead daughter's. Green eyes. Flynn, indeed. A Maggie or a Molly, the Flynn standing there behind her husband, long robe over long nightgown, hand to her mouth, wanting to know what it was. Carella had to tell them what it was.
'May we come in?' he asked gently.
* * * *
The squadroom at a quarter past five on New Year's morning looked much as it did on any other day of the year. Dark green metal filing cabinets against apple green walls. The paint on the walls flaking and chipping. A water leak causing a small bulge in the ceiling. Cigarette-scarred wooden desks. A water cooler in one corner of the room. A sink with a mirror over it. Duty chart hanging on the wall just inside the wooden slatted rail divider that separated the squadroom from the long corridor outside. A sense of dimness in spite of the naked hanging light bulbs. An empty detention cage. Big, white-faced clock throwing minutes into the empty hours of the night. At one of the desks, Detective/Third Grade Hal Willis was typing furiously.
'Don't bother me,' he said the moment they came into the room and before anyone had said a word to him.
Willis was the shortest man on the squad. Curly black hair. Brown eyes.
Hunched over the machine like an organ grinder's monkey, he pounded at the keys as if he'd been taught a new and satisfying trick. Battering the machine into submission. Both fists flying. The reports Willis submitted were no masterpieces, but he didn't realize that. He would have made a good lawyer; his English composition qualified him for writing contracts no one could understand.
Neither Carella nor Meyer bothered him.
They had business of their own.
They had learned little of substance from either the Hoddings or the Flynns; they would question them again later, when the shock and subsequent numbness had worn off. But they had been able to garner from them some definite times that pinpointed Annie Flynn's whereabouts and activities while she was not being murdered. Starting with all the negatives, they hoped one day they might get lucky enough to fill in the positives that would lead to the killer. Cops sometimes got lucky, Harold.
Meyer sat behind the typewriter.
Carella sat on the edge of the desk.
'Quiet, you two,' Willis called from across the room.
Neither of them had yet said a word to him.
'Eight p.m.,' Carella said. 'Annie Flynn leaves her apartment at 1124 North Sykes…'
Meyer began typing.
'. . . arrives Hodding apartment, 967 Grover Avenue, at eight-fifteen P.M.'
He waited, watching as Meyer typed.
'Okay,' Meyer said.
'Eight-thirty p.m. Hoddings leave Annie alone with the baby . . .'
Meyer kept typing.
* * * *
A cold gray dawn was breaking to the east.
He had shared bacon and eggs with Eileen in an all-night diner on Leland and Pike and then had jokingly but hopefully asked, 'Your place or mine?' to which she had given him a look that said, 'Please, Bert, not while I'm eating,' which was the sort of look she always gave him these days whenever he suggested sex.
Ever since she'd blown away that lunatic last October, Eileen had sworn off sex and decoy work. Not necessarily in that order. She had also told Kling - who, she guessed, was still her Significant Other, more or less - that she planned to leave police work as soon as she could find another job that might make use of her many-splendored talents, like for example being able to disarm rapists in the wink of an eye or put away serial killers with a single shot. Or, to be more accurate, six shots, the capacity of her service revolver, the first one in his chest, the next one in his shoulder, the third one in his back, and the others along the length of his spine as he lay already dead on the bed. I gave you a chance, she'd said over and over again, I gave you a chance, blood erupting on either side of his spine, I gave you a chance.
'Now I want a chance,' she'd told Kling.
He hoped she didn't mean it. He could not imagine her as a private ticket, tailing wayward husbands in some imitation city, of which there were many in the US of A. He could not imagine her doing square-shield work in a department store somewhere in the boonies, collaring shoplifters and pickpockets. I'm quitting the force, she'd told him. Quitting this city, too. This fucking city.
Tonight, they'd left the diner and he'd gone up to her apartment for another cup of coffee, greet the new year. Kissed her demurely on the cheek. Happy New Year, Eileen. Happy New Year, Bert. A sadness in her eyes. For what had been. For the Eileen who'd been his lover. For the Eileen who'd been a fearless cop before the city and the system burned it out of her. Ah, Jesus, he'd thought and had to turn his head away so she wouldn't see the sudden tears flooding his eyes. Still dark outside when he'd left the apartment. But as he'd driven home through silent deserted streets, a thin line of light appeared in the sky in the towers to the east.
He turned the corner onto Concord.
Oh, shit, he thought, I don't need this.
There were four men on the street corner.
Three huge black men and a small Puerto Rican.
The streetlamp was still on over their heads. They struggled silently in the morngloam, natural light mingling with artificial, the three black men wielding baseball bats, the little Puerto Rican trying to defend himself with nothing but his hands. Blood spattered up onto the brick wall behind him. This was in earnest.
Kling yanked up the hand brake and came out of the car at a run, hand going for his gun, rules and regs racing through his mind, felony in progress, substantial reason to unholster the piece. 'Police officer,' he shouted, 'freeze!'
Nobody froze.
A bat came spinning out of the half-light, moving like a helicopter blade, horizontal on the air, twirling straight for his head. He threw himself flat to the pavement, a mistake. As he rolled over and brought the gun into firing position, one of the black men kicked him in the head. In the dizziness, he thought Hold on. In the dizziness, he thought Shoot. Blurred figures. Someone screaming. Shoot, he thought. And fired. One of them fell to the pavement. Someone else kicked him again. He fired again. Knew he was okay by the book, piece as a defensive weapon, tasted blood in his mouth, not a means of apprehension, lip bleeding, how the hell, almost choked on something, a tooth, Jesus, and fired again, blindly this time, angrily, and scrambled to his feet as one of the men swung a baseball bat for his head.
He took a step to the side, the thick end of the bat coming within an inch of his nose, and then he squeezed the trigger again, going for the money, catching the batter too high, five inches above the heart, spinning him around with a slug in the shoulder that sent him staggering back toward the blood-spattered brick wall of the building where the third black man was busily beating the shit out of the little Puerto Rican, swinging the bat at him again and again, long-ball practice here on the corner of Concord and Dow.
'Put it down!' Kling shouted, but his words this morning were having very little positive effect, because all the man seemed intent on doing was finishing off the little Puerto Rican who was already so bloody he looked like a sodden bundle of rags lying on the sidewalk. 'You dumb fuck!' Kling shouted. 'Put it down!'
The man turned.
Saw the gun. Saw the big blond guy with the gun. Saw the look in his eyes, knew the man and the gun were both on the thin edge of explosion. He dropped the bat.
'Hey, cool it, man,' he said.
'Cool shit
!' Kling said, and threw him against the wall, and tossed him, and then handcuffed his hands behind his back.
He knelt to where the little Puerto Rican was lying on the sidewalk, bleeding from a dozen wounds.
'I'll get an ambulance,' he said.
'Gracias por nada,' the Puerto Rican said.
Which in Spanish meant, 'Thanks for nothing.'
* * * *
2
A reconstructed timetable can only be verified by the one person who cannot possibly verify it: the corpse.
It appeared, however, that Annie Flynn had left her home on North Sykes, seven and a half blocks from the Hodding apartment, at eight o'clock and had taken a Grover Avenue bus (she'd told this to the Hoddings) down to Twelfth Street, arriving there at eight-fifteen. The Hoddings had left for their party at eight-thirty sharp, taking a cab to their friends' apartment only four blocks downtown on Grover; Mrs Hodding said she hadn't wanted to walk even such a short distance because of the high heels and the long gown.
From eight-thirty p.m. until approximately twenty minutes past midnight neither the Hoddings nor the Flynns had talked to Annie. As was usual on New Year's Eve, all circuits were busy after midnight and it took Annie's father a while to get through to her. Both he and his wife wished her a happy new year and then chatted with her for five minutes or so. Hodding was trying to reach his home at about that same time. Kept getting a busy signal. It was around twelve-thirty when finally he got through. He ascertained that the baby was okay, wished Annie a happy new year, and then hung up. It was certain, then, that she was still alive at twelve-thirty in the morning. She was not alive at two thirty, when the Hoddings came back to the apartment. There was no way of knowing whether Annie Flynn - as was often the case with sitters - had made or received any other calls on the night of her murder. The telephone company did not keep records of local calls. Period.
It was now ten minutes past eight.
Meyer and Carella had been relieved officially at a quarter to, but this was a homicide and the first twenty-four hours were the most important. So once again they put on their overcoats, and their mufflers, and their gloves, and they went back to the Hodding building, this time to knock on doors. This was the tedious part. No cop liked this part. No cop liked getting shot at, either, but given the choice many cops would have preferred a good old-fashioned chase to the sort of legwork that required asking the same questions over and over again.
With only one exception, each and every resident of 967 Grover Avenue wanted to know whether it was necessary to be asking these questions so early in the morning. Didn't they know this was New Year's Day? Didn't they realize that a lot of people had been up late the night before? What was so important that it couldn't wait till later in the day? With only one exception, everyone in the building was shocked to learn that the Hodding baby and her sitter had been murdered last night. This was such a good neighborhood, they could understand if something like this had happened farther uptown, but here? With a doorman and everything? With only one exception, everyone the detectives interviewed had neither heard nor seen anything strange or unusual between the hours of twelve-thirty and two-thirty last night. Many of them hadn't even been home during those hours. Many of them had gone to sleep shortly after midnight. The one exception-
'You're a little late, aren't you?' the man said at once.
'What do you mean?' Meyer said.
'The big show was last night,' his wife said. 'We had the whole damn police department here.'
'Well, two uniformed cops and a detective,' the man said.
As opposed to all the other tenants in pajamas and robes, the Ungers - for such was the name on their doorbell - were fully dressed and ready to take their morning walk in the park, despite what had happened last night. What had happened last night . . .
'We were robbed last night is what happened,' the wife said.
Her name was Shirley Unger. She was a good-looking brunette in her late twenties, wearing a gray sweatshirt with a University of Michigan seal on it, gray sweat pants to match, red Reeboks. Hair springing from her head like a tangle of weeds. Red sweatband on her forehead. Luminous brown eyes. A Carly Simon mouth. She knew she was gorgeous. She played to the cops like a stripper on a runway.
'We got home at about one-thirty,' she said. 'The robber was just going out the window. In the TV room. Actually a second bedroom.'
She rolled her eyes when she said the word 'bedroom,' as though there'd been something licentious about a burglar going out the window. She seemed to be enjoying the thrill of all this criminal activity, although - like most honest citizens - she confused burglary with robbery. To your honest citizen, somebody stole something from you, it was robbery. Any cheap thief on the street knew the difference between burglary and robbery. Any garden-variety crook could reel off the penal-code numbers for each crime, the maximum prison terms. Just like a cop. In this business, you needed a scorecard to tell which player was which.
'We called the police right away,' Unger said.
'They were here in three minutes flat,' Shirley said. 'Two cops in uniform and a detective. A little short guy with curly hair.'
Willis, they both thought.
'Detective Willis?' Carella asked.
'Yes,' Shirley said. 'That's the one.'
'Must have picked it up on the car radio,' Meyer said.
Carella nodded.
A police department was a big organization. There were close to twenty-eight thousand cops in this city. Even in the same squadroom, you didn't always get a chance to cross-check one case against another. Willis had probably been making a routine run of the sector when he'd caught the 10-21. Burglary Past. Figured he'd run on over, save the responding blues the trouble of calling it back to the precinct. The report Willis had been typing so furiously when Meyer and Carella got back to the squadroom may have been on the Unger burglary. They hadn't told him they'd caught a double homicide at 967 Grover. He hadn't told them he'd caught a burglary at the same address. Nobody asked and nobody offered. Sometimes you had to go the long way around the mulberry bush.
'So what's this?' Shirley asked. 'The follow-up?'
They told her what this was.
She did not seem terribly impressed. She was more interested in whether the police were going to get back the emerald ring her husband Charlie had bought for her eight years ago on their honeymoon in Calle di Volpe, Italy, on the island of Sardinia. She was also interested in whether the police were going to get back the new VCR Charlie had bought her for Christmas this year. 'Well, last year already, am I right?' she said and smiled a radiant smile that said I would love to kiss your pectorals. She also wanted to know how long this was going to take because she wanted to go out for her walk and she was beginning to get hot here in the apartment, dressed for the outside as she was.
Carella told her that any questions regarding the burglary would have to be answered by Detective Willis, but that he and his partner wanted to know a little more about this man they'd seen going out the window . . .
'Yes, onto the fire escape,' Shirley said.
. . . because the burglary here in the Unger apartment on the sixth floor of the building might have been related somehow to the double homicide downstairs on the fourth floor.
'Oh,' Shirley said.
'Yes,' Meyer said.
'Then would you mind if I took off my sweatshirt?' she asked. 'Because, really, it is very warm in here.'
Without wailing for their permission, which she didn't need anyway, she pulled the U Mich sweatshirt over her head, revealing fat red suspenders and a flimsy white cotton T-shirt. She was not wearing a bra under the T-shirt. She smiled modestly.
'You say this was around one-thirty?' Carella said. 'When you came into the apartment?'
'Yes,' Shirley said shyly. Now that she was half-naked, she was playing a novitiate nun at a cloister in the mountains of Switzerland. Her husband was still wearing a ski parka. He had begun to perspire visibly, but he did not take of
f the parka. Perhaps he figured he could inspire the detectives to cut this short if he did not remove the parka. Let them know he wanted to get the hell out of here, go take his walk in the park. Subtly hint to them that he didn't give a flying fuck about the baby who'd got snuffed in the apartment downstairs. Or her babysitter, either. What were they going to do about getting back his camel hair coat that had been bought at Ralph Lauren for eleven hundred bucks was what he wanted to know.
'And you say the burglar was in the bedroom, going out the window…'
'Yes. The robber,' Shirley said. 'With my VCR under his arm.'
'What did he look like?' Meyer asked. 'Did you get a good look at him?'
'Oh, yes,' Shirley said. 'He turned to look back at us.'
'As we came into the bedroom,' Unger said.
Carella had already taken out his pad.
'Was he white?' he asked. 'Black? Hispanic? Orient . . . ?'
'White.'
'How old?'
'Eighteen, nineteen.'
'Color of his hair?'
'Blond.'
'Eyes?'
'I don't know.'
'Neither do I.'
'How tall was he?'
'That's difficult to say. He was all hunched over, you know, going out the window onto the fire escape.'
'Can you guess at his weight?'
'He was very thin.'
'Well, he was wearing black,' Shirley said. 'Black makes a person look thinner.'
'Even so, he was thin,' Unger said.
'Was he clean-shaven? Or did he have a beard, a mustache . . . ?'
'A mustache.'
'A small mustache.'
'Well, a scraggly mustache. He was just a kid, you know.'
'Like it was just growing in.'
'You know the kind of mustache a kid has? Like fuzzy?"
'That's the kind of mustache this was.'
'When you say he was wearing black . . .'
'A black leather jacket,' Unger said.