by Ed McBain
It is easy to solve murder cases if you are alert.
It is also easy to get beat up if you are not careful. Bert Kling was not too terribly alert that afternoon, and so he did not come even close to solving the Leyden case. Being careless, he got beat up.
He got beat up by a woman.
Anne Gilroy marched up the front steps of the station house at ten minutes to 3:00, wearing a blue-and-red striped mini, her long blonde hair caught at the back of her neck with a red ribbon. Her shoes were blue, they flashed with November sunshine as she mounted the steps and walked past the green globes flanking the stoop. She walked directly to where Sergeant Dave Murchison sat behind the high muster desk, beamed a radiant smile at him, batted her blue eyes in a semaphore even desk sergeants understand, and sweetly said, “Is Detective Kling in?”
“He is,” Murchison said.
“May I see him, please?”
“Who shall I say is here, whom?” Murchison said.
“Miss Anne Gilroy,” she said, and wheeled away from the desk to study first the Wanted posters on the bulletin board, and then the clock on the wall. She sat at last on the wooden bench opposite the muster desk, took a cigarette from her blue bag, glanced inquiringly at Murchison before lighting it (he nodded permission) and then, to his distraction, crossed her legs and sat calmly smoking while he tried to reach Kling, who was at that moment in the lieutenant’s office.
“Tied up right now,” Murchison said. “Would you mind waiting a moment?”
“Thank you,” Anne Gilroy said, and jiggled her foot. Murchison looked at her legs, wondering what the world was coming to, and wondering whether he should give permission to his twelve-year-old daughter, prepubescent and emerging, to wear such short skirts when she entered her teens, see clear up the whole leg, he thought, and then mopped his brow and plugged into the switchboard as a light flashed. He held a brief conversation, pulled out the cord, looked again to where Anne Gilroy sat with crossed legs and smoke-wreathed blonde hair, and said, “He’ll be right down, Miss.”
“Oh, can’t I go up?”
“He said he’d be down.”
“I was hoping to see a squadroom.”
“Well,” Murchison said, and tilted his head to one side, and thought, What the hell do you hope to see up there except a few bulls working their asses off? The switchboard blinked into life again. He plugged in and took a call from an irate patrolman on Third who said he had phoned in for a meat wagon half an hour ago and there was a lady bleeding on the goddamn sidewalk, when was it gonna get there? Murchison told him to calm down, and the patrolman told Murchison he had never seen so much blood in his life, and the lady was gonna die, and the crowd was getting mean. Murchison said he’d call the hospital again, and then yanked out the cord, and gave himself an outside line.
He was dialing the hospital when Kling came down the iron-runged steps leading from the second floor. Kling looked surprised, even though Murchison had told him who was here. Maybe it was the short skirt that did it. Murchison watched as Kling walked to the bench (“Hello, this is Sergeant Murchison over at the 87th Precinct,” he said into the phone, “where the hell’s that ambulance?”) extended his hand to Anne Gilroy and then sat on the bench beside her. Murchison could not hear them from across the room. (“Well, I got a patrolman screaming at me, and a crowd about to get unmanageable, and a lady about to bleed to death right on the sidewalk there, so how about it?”) Kling now seemed more embarrassed than surprised, he kept nodding his head at Anne Gilroy as she smiled and batted her blue eyes, talking incessantly, her face very close to his as though she were whispering all the secrets of the universe to him. (“Yeah, well how about breaking up the goddamn pinochle game and getting somebody over there?” Murchison shouted into the phone.) Kling nodded again, rose from the bench, and walked toward the muster desk. (“If I get another call from that patrolman, I’m going straight to the Mayor’s office, you got that?” Murchison yelled, and angrily pulled the cord from the switchboard.)
“I’m going out for some coffee,” Kling said.
“Okay,” Murchison said. “When will you be back?”
“Half an hour or so.”
“Right,” Murchison said, and watched as Kling went back to the bench. Anne Gilroy stood up, looped her arm through Kling’s, smiled over her shoulder at Murchison, and clickety-clacked on her high heels across the muster-room floor, tight little ass twitching busily, long blonde hair bouncing on her back. The switchboard was glowing again. Murchison plugged in to find the same patrolman, nearly hysterical this time because the lady had passed away a minute ago, and her brother was screaming to the crowd that this was police negligence, and the patrolman wanted to know what to do. Murchison said whatever he did, he shouldn’t draw his revolver unless it got really threatening, and the patrolman told him it looked really threatening right now, with the crowd beginning to yell and all, and maybe he ought to send some reinforcements over. Murchison said he’d see what he could do and that was when the scream came from the front steps outside the precinct.
Murchison was a desk cop, and he wasn’t used to reacting too quickly, but there was something urgent about this scream, and he put two and two together immediately and realized that the person screaming must be the girl named Anne Gilroy who had sashayed out of here just a minute ago on the arm of Bert Kling. He came around the muster desk with all the swiftness of a corpulent man past fifty, reaching for his holstered revolver as he puffed toward the main doors, though he couldn’t understand what could possibly be happening on the front steps of a police station, especially to a girl who was in the company of a detective.
What was happening—and this surprised Murchison no end because he expected to find a couple of hoods maybe threatening the girl or something—what was happening was that another blonde girl was hitting Kling on the head with a dispatch case. It took a moment for Murchison to recognize the other blonde girl as Cindy Forrest, whom he had seen around enough times to know that she was Kling’s girl, but he had never seen her with such a terrible look on her face. The only time he had ever seen a woman with such a look on her face was the time his Aunt Moira had caught his Uncle John screwing the lady upstairs on the front-room sofa of her apartment. Aunt Moira had gone up to get a recipe for glazed oranges and had got instead her glassy-eyed husband humping the bejabbers out of the woman who until then had been her very good friend. Aunt Moira had chased Uncle John into the hallway and down the steps with his pants barely buttoned, hitting him on the head with a broom she grabbed on the third-floor landing, chasing Uncle John clear into the streets where Murchison and some of his boyhood friends were playing Knuckles near Ben the Kosher Delicatessen. The look on Aunt Moira’s face had been something terrible and fiery to see, all right, and the same look was on Cindy Forrest’s young and pretty face this very moment as she continued to clobber Kling with the brown leather dispatch case. The blonde girl, Anne Gilroy, kept screaming for her to stop, but there was no stopping a lady when she got the Aunt Moira look. Kling, big detective that he was, was trying to cover his face and the top of his head with both hands while Cindy did her demolition work. The girl Anne Gilroy kept screaming as Murchison rushed down the steps yelling, “All right, break it up,” sounding exactly like a cop. The only thing Cindy seemed intent on breaking up, however, was Kling’s head, so Murchison stepped between them, gingerly avoiding the flailing dispatch case, and then shoved Kling down the steps and out of range, and shouted at Cindy, “You’re striking a police officer, Miss,” which she undoubtedly knew, and the girl Anne Gilroy screamed once again, and then there was silence.
“You rotten son of a bitch,” Cindy said to Kling.
“It’s all right, Dave,” Kling said from the bottom of the steps. “I can handle it.”
“Oh, you certainly can handle it, you bastard,” Cindy said.
“Are you all right?” Anne Gilroy asked.
“I�
��m fine, Anne,” Kling answered.
“Oh, Anne is it?” Cindy shouted, and swung the dispatch case at her. Murchison stepped into the line of fire, deflected the case with the back of his arm, and then yanked Cindy away from the girl and shouted, “Now goddamn you, Cindy, do you want to wind up in the cooler?”
By this time a crowd of patrolmen had gathered in the muster room, embarrassing Kling, who liked to maintain a sort of detective-superiority over the rank and file. The patrolmen were enormously entertained by the spectacle of Sergeant Murchison trying to keep apart two very dishy blondes, one of whom happened to be Kling’s girl, while Kling stood by looking abashed.
“All right, break it up,” Kling said to them, also sounding like a cop. The other cops thought this was amusing, but none of them laughed. Neither did any of them break it up. Instead, they crowded into the doorway, ogled the girl in the red-and-blue mini, ogled Cindy too (even though she was more sedately dressed in a blue shift), and then glanced first at Kling and then to Murchison to see who would make the next move.
Neither of them did.
Instead, Cindy turned on her heel, tilted her nose up, and marched down the steps and past Kling.
“Cindy, wait, let me explain!” Kling cried, obviously thinking he was in an old Doris Day movie, and immediately ran up the street after her.
“I want to press charges,” Anne Gilroy said to Murchison.
“Oh, go home, Miss,” Murchison said, and then went up the steps and shoved past the patrolmen in the doorway and went back to the switchboard, where the most he’d have to contend with was something like a lady bleeding to death on the sidewalk.
Carella wondered why everybody always seemed to swim up out of unconsciousness. He himself was suddenly and completely conscious, no swimming up, no dizzying ascending spiral, none of that crap, he merely opened his eyes, and knew exactly where he was, and got to his feet, and felt the very large bump at the back of his head, felt it first as a radiating nucleus of pain on his skull, then actually touched it with his fingertips, causing it to hurt even more. There was no blood, thank God for that, his attacker had spared him the indignity of a cracked skull. Belatedly, he looked behind the door just to make sure another little surprise wasn’t being planned, and then drew his revolver and went through each room of the apartment because it’s always good to lock the barn door after the horse has gone. Satisfied that he was alone, he went back into the bedroom.
The top dresser drawer was closed.
It had been open when he’d come into the apartment, so it was reasonable to assume he’d surprised an intruder in the act of ransacking it. He went to it now and began doing a little ransacking himself. The drawer was divided into clearly masculine and feminine halves. On Rose Leyden’s side of the drawer there were nylon stockings, panties, garter belts, bras, and handkerchiefs, as well as a small circular tin box once containing throat lozenges but now holding stray earrings, bobby pins, and buttons. On Andrew Leyden’s side there were socks (blue solids, black solids, and gray solids), handkerchiefs, undershorts, a lone athletic supporter, and, at the very rear of the drawer, a mint-condition Kennedy half dollar. Carella closed the drawer and went through the rest of the dresser. Rose Leyden’s side contained folded sweaters, blouses, slips, scarves, and nightgowns. Andrew Leyden’s side contained ironed dress shirts and sports shirts, and folded sweaters. Carella closed the last drawer and walked to the closet.
The same system seemed to apply here as did in the dresser. The single clothes bar was again divided, with Rose Leyden’s dresses, slacks, and suits occupying perhaps two thirds of the space, and Andrew Leyden’s suits, trousers, and sports jackets filling the remaining third. His ties were on a tie bar nailed to the inside of the door. A shoe rack ran the length of the closet. Rose’s pumps and slippers rested on it beneath her hanging clothes; Andrew’s were on the rack below his clothes. Everything very neat, everything His and Hers.
So what had the intruder wanted in the top dresser drawer?
And had the intruder been Walter Damascus?
Carella’s head began to hurt a little more.
Kling used his own key on the door, and then twisted the knob, and shoved the door inward, but Cindy had taken the precaution of fastening the safety chain, and the door abruptly jarred to a stop, open some two-and-a-half inches, but refusing to budge further.
“Cindy,” he shouted, “take off this chain! I want to talk to you.”
“I don’t want to talk to you!” she shouted back.
“Take off this chain, or I’ll break the door off the hinges!”
“Go break your bimbo’s door, why don’t you?”
“She’s not a bimbo!”
“Don’t defend her, you louse!” Cindy shouted.
“Cindy, I’m warning you, I’ll kick this door in!”
“You do, and I’ll call the police!”
“I am the police.”
“Go police your bimbo, louse.”
“Okay, honey, I warned you.”
“You’d better have a search warrant,” she shouted, “or I’ll sue you and the city and the—”
Kling kicked in the door efficiently and effortlessly. Cindy stood facing him with her fists clenched.
“Don’t come in here,” she said. “You’re not wanted here. You’re not wanted here ever again. Go home. Go away. Go to hell.”
“I want to talk to you.”
“I don’t want to talk to you ever again as long as I live, that’s final.”
“What are you so sore about?”
“I don’t like liars and cheats and rotten miserable liars. Now get out of here, Bert, I mean it.”
“Who’s a liar?”
“You are.”
“How am I—”
“You said you loved me.”
“I do love you.”
“Ha!”
“That girl—”
“That slut—”
“She’s not a slut.”
“That’s right, she’s a sweet Irish virgin. Go hold her hand a little, why don’t you? Get out of here, Bert, before I hit you again.”
“Listen, there’s nothing—”
“That’s right, there’s nothing, there’s absolutely nothing between us ever again, get out of here.”
“Lower your voice, you’ll have the whole damn building in here.”
“All snuggly-cozy, arm-in-arm, batting her eyes—”
“She had information—”
“Oh, I’ll just bet she has information.”
“…about the Leyden case. She came to the squadroom—”
“I’ll just bet she has information,” Cindy repeated, a bit hysterically, Kling thought. “I’ll bet she has information even Cleopatra never dreamt of. Why don’t you get out of here and leave me alone, okay? Just get out of here, okay? Go get all that hot information, okay?”
“Cindy—”
“I thought we were in love—”
“We are.”
“I thought we—”
“We are, dammit!”
“I thought we were going to get married one day and have kids and live in the country—”
“Cindy—”
“So a cheap little floozy flashes a smile and—”
“Cindy, she’s a nice girl who—”
“Don’t you dare!” Cindy shouted. “If you’re here to defend that little tramp—”
“I’m not here to defend her!”
“Then why are you here?”
“To tell you I love you.”
“Ha!”
“I love you,” Kling said.
“Yeah.”
“I do.”
“Yeah.”
“I love you.”
“Then why—”
“We were going out for a cup of coffee, that’s
all.”
“Sure.”
“There’s nobody in the whole world I want but you,” Kling said.
Cindy did not answer.
“I mean it.”
She was still silent.
“I love you, honey,” he said. “Now come on.” He waited. She was standing with her head bent, watching the floor. He did not dare approach her. “Come on,” he said.
“I wanted to kill you,” Cindy said softly. “When I saw you together, I wanted to kill you.” She began weeping gently, still staring at the floor, not raising her eyes to his. He went to her at last and took her in his arms, and held her head cradled against his shoulder, his fingers lightly stroking her hair, her tears wetting his jacket and his shirt.
“I love you so much,” she said, “that I wanted to kill you.”
On Sunday afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. George Pimm returned from their vacation in Puerto Rico and were promptly visited by the police.
They were in the midst of unpacking when Carella and Kling arrived. It was difficult to keep them to the point. This had been their first trip to the Caribbean, and they were naturally anxious to tell someone—anyone—all about it. Unfortunately, the detectives were the first people they’d seen since their return.
“A wonderful island,” Pimm said. “Have you ever been there?”
“No,” Carella said.
“No,” Kling said.
“Well, what’s your sight-unseen impression of it, would you tell me that?” Pimm said. He was a slender man with bright blue eyes and sandy-colored hair. He had acquired a deep tan on the island, and he unpacked now with all the sureness and vigor of a person who feels and looks healthy. His wife, Jeanine, was a petite brunette who kept carrying things to the dresser and the closet and the bathroom as Pimm took them from the suitcases. She was already beginning to peel, especially on the nose. She kept smiling as Pimm discussed the island. “If you judge from this city,” Pimm said, “you expect Puerto Ricans to be misfits, don’t you? Drug addicts, and street fighters and prostitutes, and what not, excuse me, honey,” he said to his wife.