Lullaby

by Ed McBain

'Black slacks.'

  'And sneakers.'

  'White sneakers.'

  'And my coat,' Unger said.

  'Your what?'

  'My camel hair coat Shirley bought for me at Ralph Lauren for eleven hundred bucks.'

  Must be some coat, Meyer thought.

  Carella was thinking the same thing. The first car he'd owned had cost eleven hundred bucks.

  'What color was the coat?' Meyer asked.

  'I told you. Camel hair. Tan.'

  'And he was wearing this over the black leather jacket . . .'

  'Yes.'

  'And the black slacks . . .'

  'Yes, and the white sneakers.'

  'Any hat?' Meyer asked.

  'No.'

  'Did you say anything to him?'

  'Yes, I yelled "Take off my coat, you fucking crook!"'

  'Did he say anything to you?'

  'Yes.'

  'What did he say?'

  'He said, "If you call the cops, I'll come back!"'

  'Very scary,' Shirley said.

  'Because he was pointing a gun at us,' Unger said.

  'He had a gun?' Carella said.

  'Yeah, he pulled a gun out of his pocket.'

  'Very scary,' Shirley said again.

  'So I called the police right away,' Unger said, and nodded for emphasis.

  'Do you think he'll be back?' Shirley asked.

  Carella didn't know what she was playing now.

  Maybe the expectant rape victim.

  'I don't think so,' he said.

  'Did Detective Willis examine that fire escape?' Meyer asked.

  'Yes, he did.'

  'Would you know if he found anything out there?'

  'Nothing belonging to us, that's for sure,' Shirley said.

  * * * *

  Detective Hal Willis was in bed with a former hooker when the telephone rang at ten minutes past twelve that afternoon. He was sleeping soundly, but the phone woke him up and he grabbed for the receiver at once. Every time the phone rang, Willis thought the call would be from some police inspector in Buenos Aires, telling him they had traced a murder to the city here and were planning to extradite a woman named Marilyn Hollis. Every time the phone rang, even if he was asleep, Willis began sweating. He began sweating now.

  Not many cops on the squad knew that Marilyn Hollis had done marijuana time in a Mexican prison or that she'd been a hooker in B.A. Willis knew, of course. Lieutenant Byrnes knew. And Carella knew. The only cop who knew that Marilyn had murdered her Argentine pimp was Willis.

  'Willis,' he said.

  'Hal, it's Steve.'

  'Yes, Steve,' he said, relieved.

  'You got a minute?'

  'Sure.'

  'This burglary you caught last night . . .'

  'Yeah.'

  Beside him, Marilyn grunted and rolled over.

  'We're working a double homicide in the same building.'

  'Oh boy,' Willis said.

  'Occurred sometime between twelve-thirty and two-thirty.'

  'Mine was at one-thirty,' Willis said.

  'So the Ungers told us.'

  'How'd you like her tits?' Willis asked.

  Beside him, Marilyn rammed her elbow into his ribs.

  'I didn't notice,' Carella said.

  'Ha!' Willis said.

  'The Ungers told us you were poking around on . . .'

  'Who's us?'

  'Me and Meyer. Poking around on the fire escape.'

  'Yeah.'

  'Did you find anything?'

  'A vial of crack.'

  'So what else is new?'

  'Plus there looked like a lot of grimy prints on the windowsill, where he was working with a jimmy to get in. I called in for the van, but nobody showed. This was only a two-bit burglary, Steve. On New Year's Eve, no less.'

  'If it's linked to a homicide . . .'

  'Oh, sure, they'll dust the whole damn city for you. Two homicides, no less.'

  'You mind if I give them a call?'

  'Please do. We bust the burglar, I'll have an excuse to go see Shirley again.'

  Marilyn gave him another poke.

  'Did you file your report yet?' Carella asked.

  'It's probably still sitting on Pete's desk.'

  'Mind if I have a look at it?'

  'Go right ahead. Let me know what happens, okay? I bust a big burglary, I'll maybe make Second Grade.'

  'Don't hold your breath,' Carella said.

  'Talk to you,' Willis said, and hung up.

  * * * *

  In this city, if your apartment got burglarized, the police sometimes sent around a team of technicians to see what they could find by way of latent fingerprints. This was if the burglary involved big bucks. A dozen fur coats, negotiable securities, expensive jewelry, cash, like that. In smaller burglaries, which most of them were, the technicians never showed. This was not negligence. Close to a hundred and twenty-five thousand burglaries had been committed in this city during the preceding year, and there were only one lieutenant, six sergeants and sixty-three detectives in the Crime Scene Unit. Moreover, these people were more urgently needed in cases of homicide, arson, and rape.

  So your average responding uniformed police officer would tell the burglary victim that a detective would be handling the case, and that they could expect a visit from him within the next day or so. Which was normally true unless the detective's case load was backed up clear to China, in which event the victim wouldn't be getting a visit from him until sometimes a week, ten days, even two weeks after the burglary. The detective would then take a list of what was stolen and he would tell the victim, quite honestly, that unless they caught the perpetrator in the act of committing another burglary or else trying to pawn the stuff he'd stolen here, there wasn't much chance they'd ever find him or their goods. And then the detective would sigh for the dear, dead days when cops used to have respect for burglars.

  Ah, yes, there once was a time when burglars were considered the gentlemen of the crime profession. But that was then and this was now. Nowadays, most burglars were junkie burglars. Your more experienced junkie burglars usually jimmied open a window, the way the Unger burglar had done, because they knew that nothing woke up neighbors like the sound of breaking glass. Your beginning junkie burglars didn't give a shit. Whap, smash the window with a brick wrapped in a dish towel, knock out the shards of glass with a hammer, go in, get out, and then run to your friendly neighborhood fence (who was most often your dope dealer as well) and pick up your ten cents on the dollar for what you'd stolen. Only the most inexperienced burglar went to a pawnshop to get rid of his loot. Even a twelve-year-old kid just starting to do crack knew that cops sent out lists of stolen goods to every pawnshop in the city. To take your stuff to a pawnshop, you had to be either very dumb or else so strung out you couldn't wait another minute. Either that, or you were visiting from Mars.

  So the chances of the Crime Scene Unit showing up at the Unger apartment were very slight, when one considered that the only items stolen were an emerald ring purchased in Italy for the sum of $2000, which gave you some idea of the quality of the emerald; a VCR that had cost $249 on sale at Sears; and an admittedly expensive cloth coat which was, nonetheless, merely a cloth coat. In a city crawling with addicts of every color and stripe, in a city that was the nation's drug capital, the dollar amount of your average burglary haul fell somewhat lower than what had been stolen from the Ungers, but this was still nothing to go shouting in the streets about and nobody down at the lab was about to dispatch the van for a garden-variety burglary, for Christ's sake, when people were getting killed all over the place, for Christ's sake!

  Until Carella called in to say they had a double homicide and that one of the victims was a six-month-old baby.

  * * * *

  In the private sector, if a CEO asked for an immediate report on something which in his business would have been the equivalent of a homicide, that report would have been on his desk in the morning. All two hundred and twenty pag
es of it. Otherwise, heads would have rolled. But this was not the private sector. This was civil service work. Considering, then, that New Year's Day was a Sunday and that the holiday was officially celebrated on a Monday, Carella and Meyer were hoping that by the end of the week - maybe - they'd have some urgently needed information from the Latent Print Unit. If one of the forty-three examiners assigned to that unit could come up with a match on the prints the Crime Scene boys had lifted from the Unger windowsill; if they could further match the prints on the handle of the Flynn murder weapon with prints in the Identification Section's files, everybody could go to Lake Como for a vacation.

  On Tuesday morning, the third day of the New Year, they had a long talk with Annie Flynn's parents. Harry Flynn worked as a stockbroker for a firm all the way downtown in the Old City; the walls of the Flynn apartment were covered with oils he painted in whatever spare time he managed to salvage from his rigorous routine. His wife - neither a Molly nor a Maggie but a Helen instead - was secretary to the president of a firm in the garment district; she mentioned the name of the clothing line, but neither of the detectives was familiar with it. This was now ten o'clock in the morning. The Flynns were dressed to go to the funeral home. He was wearing a dark suit, a white shirt, and a black tie. His wife was wearing a simple black dress, low-heeled black pumps, and dark glasses.

  The detectives did not yet know where to hang their hats.

  The Flynns came up with a possible peg.

  'Scott Handler,' Flynn said.

  'Her boyfriend,' Mrs Flynn said.

  'Used to be, anyway.'

  'Until Thanksgiving.'

  'Broke off with him when he came down for the Thanksgiving weekend.'

  'The long weekend they had in Thanksgiving.'

  'Broke off with him then.'

  'Came down from where?' Carella asked.

  'Maine. He goes to a private school in Maine.'

  'How old is he?' Meyer asked.

  'Eighteen,' Mrs Flynn said. 'He's a senior at the Prentiss Academy in Caribou, Maine. Right up there near the Canadian border.'

  'They'd been going together since she was fifteen,' Flynn said.

  'And you say she broke off with him in November?'

  'Yes. Told me she was going to do it,' Mrs Flynn said. 'Told me she'd outgrown him. Can you imagine that? Sixteen years old, she'd outgrown somebody.' Mrs Flynn shook her head. Her husband put his hand on her arm in, comforting her.

  'Called the house day and night,' Mrs Flynn said. 'Used to burst into tears whenever I told him she didn't want to talk to him. Spent hours talking to me instead. This was long distance from Maine, mind you. Wanted to know what he'd done wrong. Kept asking me if he'd done something. I really felt sorry for him.'

  'He came by again just before Christmas,' Flynn said. 'Home for the holidays.'

  'Caught Annie here in the apartment, she was the one who answered the door.'

  'We were in the back room, watching television.'

  'Started begging her to tell him what he'd done wrong. Same thing he'd kept asking my wife on the phone. What'd I do wrong? What'd I do wrong? Over and over again.'

  'Annie told him it was over and done with . . .'

  'Said she didn't want him to come here ever again . . .'

  'Said she wanted nothing further to do with him.'

  'That's when he raised his voice.'

  'Began hollering.'

  'Wanted to know if some other guy was involved.'

  'We were in the back room, listening to all this.'

  'Couldn't hear what Annie said.'

  'But he said . . .'

  'Scott.'

  'He said, "Who is it?"'

  'And then Annie said something else . . .'

  'Couldn't quite make it out, her back, must've been to us . . .'

  'And he yelled, "Whoever it is, I'll kill him!"'

  'Tell them what else he said, Harry.'

  'He said, "I'll kill you both!"'

  'Those exact words?' Carella asked.

  'Those exact words.'

  'Do you know his address?' Meyer asked.

  * * * *

  Scott Handler's mother was a woman in her late forties, elegantly dressed at eleven-thirty that Tuesday morning, ready to leave for a meeting with clients for whom she was decorating an apartment. She looked a lot like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Meyer thought that in this day and age, he would not like to be any woman who looked like the lady in that movie. If Meyer had been a woman with naturally curly blonde hair, he'd have paid a fortune to have it straightened and dyed black just so he wouldn't have to look like the woman in that movie. Luckily, he was bald and didn't look like her in the slightest. On the other hand, Mrs Handler had a problem. Right down to a somewhat chilling smile.

  'My son left for Maine early this morning,' she said.

  'Went back to school, did he?' Meyer asked.

  'Yes,' Mrs Handler said, and smiled that slightly psychotic, hair-raising smile, although Meyer did not have any hair.

  'The Prentiss Academy,' Carella said.

  'Yes.'

  'In Caribou, Maine.'

  'Yes. Why do you want to see him? Does this have something to do with the little Irish girl?'

  'Who do you mean?' Meyer asked innocently.

  'The one who got killed on New Year's Eve. He broke off with her months ago, you know.'

  'Yes, we know,' Carella said.

  'If their relationship is why you came here.'

  'We just wanted to ask him some questions.'

  'About where he was on New Year's Eve, I'd imagine.'

  The chilling smile again.

  'Do you know where he was?' Carella asked.

  'Here. We had a big party. Scott was here.'

  'All night?'

  'All night.'

  'What time did the party start?'

  'Nine.'

  'And ended?'

  She hesitated. Merely an instant's pause, but both detectives caught it. They guessed she was trying to remember if she'd read anything about the time of Annie Flynn's death. She hadn't because that was one of the little secrets the detectives were keeping to themselves. But the hesitation told them that her son had not been at the party all night long. If he'd been there at all. Finally, she chose what they figured she thought was a safe time to be saying goodbye to the old year.

  'Four in the morning,' she said.

  'A late one,' Meyer said, and smiled.

  'Not very,' she said, and shrugged, and returned the smile.

  'Well, thank you very much,' Carella said.

  'Yes,' she said, and looked at her watch.

  * * * *

  On Wednesday morning, the fourth day of January, both murder victims were buried.

  The detectives did not attend either of the funerals.

  The detectives were on extension phones to the Prentiss Academy in Caribou, Maine, talking to an English professor named Tucker Lowery, who was Scott Handler's advisor. They would have preferred talking to Scott himself; that, after all, was why they had placed the long distance call. Both men were wearing sweaters under their jackets. It was very cold here in the city, but even colder in Caribou, Maine. Professor Lowery informed them at once that it was thirty degrees below zero up there. Fahrenheit. And still snowing hard. Carella imagined he could hear the wind blowing. He decided that if his son ever wanted to go to the Prentiss Academy, he would advise him to choose a school on the dark side of the moon. His daughter, too. If Prentiss ever began admitting females. Who, being the more sensible sex, probably would not want to go anyplace where it got to be thirty degrees below zero.

  'I don't know where he is,' Lowery said. 'He's not due back until the ninth. Next Monday.'

  'Let me understand this,' Carella said.

  'Yes?' Lowery said.

  Carella imagined a tweedy-looking man with a pleasant, bearded face and merry brown eyes. A man who was finding this somewhat amusing, two big-city detectives on extension telephones calling all the way up t
here to Maine.

  'Are you saying that classes won't resume until next Monday?' Carella said.

  'That's right,' Lowery said.

  'His mother told us he'd gone back to school,' Meyer said.

  'Scott's mother?'

  'Yes. We saw her yesterday morning, she told us her son had already gone back to school.'

  'She was mistaken,' Lowery said.

  Or lying, Carella thought.

  * * * *

  The Puerto Rican's name was José Herrera.

  There were tubes sticking out of his nose and mouth and bandages covering most of his face. One of his arms was in a cast. Kling was there at the hospital to try to learn when Herrera would be released. He had come here upon the advice of Arthur Brown, one of the black detectives on the squad.

  Brown had said, 'Bert, you have shot two men, both of them black. Now every time a cop in this city shoots a black man, you got deep shit. A cop can shoot seventeen honest Chinese merchants sitting in the park minding their own business, no one will even raise an eyebrow. That same cop sees a black man coming out of a bank with a .357 Magnum in his fist, he just stole fifty thousand dollars in cash and he shot the teller and four other people besides, your cop better not shoot that man or there's going to be an outcry. All kinds of accusations, racial discrimination, police brutality, you name it. Now, Bert, I would love to see what would happen if one day I myself shot a black man, I would love to see how that particular dilemma would be resolved in this city. In the meantime, my friend, you had best get over to that hospital and talk to the man whose brains were getting beat out on that street corner. Get him to back up your word that you were following departmental guidelines for drawing and firing your pistol. That is my advice.'

  'Go fuck yourself,' Herrera told Kling.

  The words came out from under the bandages, somewhat muffled, but nonetheless distinct.

  Kling blinked.

  'I saved your life,' he said.

  'Who asked you to save it?' Herrera said.

  'Those men were . . .'

  'Those men are gonna kill me anyways,' Herrera said. 'All you done . . .'

  'I almost got killed myself!' Kling said, beginning to get angry. 'I lost a goddamn tooth?

  'So next time don't butt in.'

  Kling blinked again.

  'That's what I get, huh?' he said. 'That's the thanks I get. I save a man's goddamn life . . .'