by Ed McBain
As he got out of bed, he heard the announcer telling him about some offshore islands someplace, and he muttered, “Go to hell, you and your islands,” and then walked wearily to the bedroom window, pulling up his pajama top and scratching his belly, generally resenting the clock radio and his wife, Mae, who was sound asleep in the bed, and even his children, who were sound asleep in their separate rooms at the other end of the apartment, and also the maid, who, although he was her employer, slept later than he each morning, making it necessary for him to get his own breakfast. He pulled up the shade, feeling reckless as he hoped sunlight would hit the bed and the face of his wife, and then feeling immediately guilty and turning rapidly to see if sunlight had indeed touched Mae’s face. It had not. For a desperate moment, he thought, No sun today, but then he looked out and over the rooftops to where the sky curved in robin’s-egg-blue artificiality, and a smile touched his mouth, and he gave a short affirmative nod, and then opened the window.
He stuck his head outside. The air was warm, with a gentle balmy breeze blowing south off the River Harb. From his twelfth-floor apartment, he could see the river traffic and the magnificent span of the bridge in the near distance. The smile widened into a grin. He left the window open, walked back to the bed, turned off the clock radio, and then took off his pajamas. He dressed swiftly and soundlessly, putting on underwear, trousers, socks, and shoes, and then going into the bathroom where he shaved with an electric razor. As he shaved, his convictions about the day began to take firmer, more confident shape. He was a man who was fond of repeating that his best thoughts always came to him while shaving, and he did indeed have some wonderfully inventive—or so they seemed to him—thoughts while he ran the razor over his stubble. By the time he had finished shaving, put on his shirt, tie, and jacket, and had gone into the kitchen to pour himself some juice and brew himself some coffee, he was anxious to get to his law office on Hall Avenue, where he would begin putting some of those wonderfully inventive ideas to work. He gulped his juice and coffee, and then marched to the other end of the apartment, where the children were still in bed. Joanie was awake by now, sitting up and reading a Golden Book, wearing the distorted features of half-asleep awareness.
“G’morning, Daddy,” she said, and then went back to her book.
He kissed her and said, “I’ll see you tonight, huh?” and she nodded and continued reading. He went into the other bedroom, where Mike was still asleep. He did not disturb him. He went instead, to the other end of the apartment again and kissed Mae, who mumbled something and then rolled over. He smiled, went to the front door, picked up his attache case, and stepped into the hallway.
The elevator operator said, “Good morning, Mr. Norden. Beautiful day today.”
“Yes, it is, George,” he answered.
They rode in silence to the lobby. He got out, nodded in answer to George’s “Have a good day, Mr. Norden,” and then walked to the mailboxes, which he checked routinely even though he knew it was too early for a mail delivery. He opened the front door of the building, stepped out onto the pavement, looked up at the sky, and grinned again.
He was taking a deep breath of fresh spring air when the bullet struck him between the eyes and killed him.
The detective who caught the squeal at the 65th Precinct was a fairly hip organization man who tried to keep up with anything important happening in the department. Homicide was a rare and unusual occurrence in the posh 65th, and he was somewhat surprised when the beat patrolman called it in. He put on his hat, motioned to his partner, checked out a police sedan with two bald front tires, and drove over to where Randolph Norden was lying dead on the sidewalk. It didn’t take him very long to realize that Norden had been shot from somewhere high up in one of the buildings across the street, either a window or a roof; the entrance hole was between Norden’s eyes, and the exit hole was low on the back of his neck, indicating a very sharp angle of trajectory. He was not a cop anxious to shirk work; he was, in fact, a little reluctant to let go of a bona fide murder in a precinct where the biggest crimes were usually burglaries or street muggings. But he had read the morning’s newspaper, and he knew that a man named Anthony Forrest had been shot to death on Culver Avenue in the Eight-Seven the day before, and his mind made an automatic connection—but still, he decided to wait before relinquishing the case. He did not have to wait long.
Ballistics told him that the bullet that had passed through Norden’s head and flattened itself against the pavement, and the discharged shell found on the roof of the building across the street, were separate parts of a .308-caliber Remington cartridge. The report went on to point out that the .308 had a full metal case, with a copper-jacketed bullet that had six lands and grooves, a soft point, a right twist, and weighed 191.6 grains. And then, because someone at Ballistics was on the ball, there was an additional handwritten note on the bottom of the report:
The detective at the 65th read the report and the additional comment, and then said to no one in particular in the squadroom, “What the hell makes him think he had to tell me?”
He moved the phone into position and began dialing.
The possibility that Carella and Meyer had fastidiously avoided was the possibility that Anthony Forrest had been killed by a sniper.
The sniper is usually a rare breed of murderer who is related to his wartime counterpart only in the methods both employ. The wartime sniper and the peacetime sniper both are hidden, both wait in ambush for their prey. Their success is based on the element of surprise, in combination with a swiftness of action and an accuracy that must be unerring. A wartime sniper hidden in the trees can effectively debilitate and cripple an entire squad, killing several members of it before the squad disperses for cover, pinning down the rest in helpless immobilization. A team of good snipers working in concert can change the outcome of a battle. They are fearful enemies because they rain sudden death from the skies, like the angry wrath of God.
Wartime snipers are trained to kill enemy soldiers. If they kill enough of them, they get medals. A good wartime sniper can even earn the grudging admiration of the men he is trying to kill. They will play a silent game of wits with him, trying to find out where he is, and then trying to discover how they can dislodge him from his vantage point before he slaughters them all. A wartime sniper is a dangerous expert.
A peacetime sniper is anything.
He can be a kid trying out his new BB gun by taking potshots at passersby from his bedroom window. He can be a man who shoots at anything wearing red. He can be a Jack the Ripper type who fires at any shapely blonde who passes. He can be an anticleric, an antivegetarian, an antioctogenarian, an anti-Semite, an antipacifist, an anti-any-human-being. The one clear fact about a peacetime sniper would seem to be that he is anti. And yet the police have often arrested snipers who were shooting people for fun, who had disconnected the act of murder from what they considered to be the sport of shooting. To many snipers, the deadly game is only target practice. To others, it is a hunt, and they will sit in ambush the way some men will sit in a duck blind. To some, it is a form of sexual release. The wartime sniper has a reason and a purpose; the peacetime sniper will most often have neither. The wartime sniper is usually pinned to one spot, lashed to a tree, crowded into a bombed-out attic room. If he moves, he will be spotted and hunted down. Lack of mobility is his tactical weakness. The peacetime sniper can shoot and then vanish. He can do this because his victims are almost always unarmed and never expecting violence. Confusion will generally follow the shooting, and in the confusion he will disappear. There is no one to shoot back at him. He has left a dead man, and now he can take a casual stroll like anyone else in the city.
War is dishonorable, but wartime snipers are only trained technicians doing a job.
Peacetime snipers are wholesale murderers.
Neither Carella nor Meyer wanted their man to be a sniper. The 87th Squad had caught the original squeal, which made the case theirs, a nice, fat, snarling baby left in a basket on th
e doorstep. If their man was a sniper, and if he decided to shoot up the entire city, the case was still theirs. Oh, yes, there would be additional detectives assigned from other precincts—maybe—and the department would offer whatever help it could—maybe—but the sniper was theirs, and there were ten million people in the city, and any one of them could be either the murderer or the next victim.
How do you play a game without rules?
How do you apply logic to something illogical?
You try.
You start from the beginning.
“If he’s a sniper,” Meyer said. “We’re not even sure of that yet. There’ve only been two so far, Steve. You want my opinion, I think this guy at the 65th—what’s his name?”
“Di Nobile.”
“Yeah, I think he dumped this into our laps prematurely.”
“Same m.o.,” Carella said.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Same cartridge.”
“All men are bipeds,” Meyer said cryptically, “therefore, all bipeds are men.”
“So?” Carella said.
“So it may be too early to assume that because two guys were shot from two different rooftops, and the same kind of slug was used in both cases, that…”
“Meyer, I wish to God these guys were both shot by my Aunt Matilda because she’s named in their insurance policies as beneficiary. It doesn’t look that way so far. So far, there’s a pattern.”
“What pattern?”
“The obvious one, to begin with. The way it was done, and the weapon used.”
“Could be a coincidence.”
“Could be, I’ll grant you that. But the rest seems to add up.”
“It’s too early for anything to be adding up,” Meyer said.
“Yeah? Then try this.” Carella picked up a typewritten sheet from his desk. He glanced up at Meyer once, and then began reading. “Anthony Forrest was almost forty-five years old, married, with three children. Held an important position, vice president, salary forty-seven thousand dollars a year. Religion Protestant, politics Republican. You got that?”
“Go ahead.”
“Randolph Norden was forty-six years old, married, with two children. Held an important position, junior partner in a law firm, salary fifty-eight thousand dollars a year. Religion Protestant, politics Republican.”
“So?”
“So change their names, and they could almost be the same guy.”
“Are you trying to tell me you think a sniper is after all middle-aged men who are married, with children, and holding important—”
“Maybe.”
“Why not carry it further and isolate some of the facts then?” Meyer said. “Why don’t we simply say our sniper is after anybody in this city who is more than forty-five years old?”
“He might be.”
“Or maybe all married men with a couple or more children, huh?”
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe anybody who earns more than forty thousand a year, huh?”
“Maybe.”
“Or all Protestants? Or all Republicans?”
Carella dropped the typewritten sheet on the desk and said, “Or maybe only people who have all those characteristics.”
“Steve, I imagine that description would fit at least—at the very least—a hundred thousand people in this city.”
“So? Who says our sniper hasn’t got all the time in the world? He just may be out to get each and every one of them.”
“Then that makes him a nut,” Meyer said.
Carella stared at him. “Meyer,” he said, “that’s exactly why I was hoping this wouldn’t turn out to be a sniper.”
“It isn’t yet,” Meyer said. “Just ‘cause that guy from the 65th jumps the gun…”
“I don’t think he jumped the gun. I think he was a smart cop who made the only logical deduction. I think this is a sniper, and I hope it isn’t a nut, and I think we’d better start tracking down both Forrest and Norden to find out what other similarities existed or did not exist. That’s what I think.”
Meyer shrugged and then put his hands in his pockets and said, “All we needed right now was a sniper.”
The president of Indian Exports, Inc., the firm with which Anthony Forrest had been connected, was a balding man in his sixties, somewhat stout, somewhat pompous, somewhat German. He was perhaps five feet eight inches tall, with a protruding middle and a flat-footed walk. Meyer Meyer, who was Jewish, felt instantly uncomfortable in his presence.
The man’s name was Ludwig Etterman. He stood before his desk in what seemed to be genuine despair and he said, with only the faintest German accent, “Tony was a good man. I cannot understand why this happened.”
“How long had you been associated with him, Mr. Etterman?” Carella asked.
“Fifteen years. That is a long time.”
“Can you give us some of the details, sir?”
“What would you like to know?”
“How you met, what sort of business arrangement you had, what Mr. Forrest’s function was.”
“He was a salesman when we met. I already had the business. He sold cartons for a company that was downtown at the time—it has since gone out of business. We import from India, you know, and we ship goods all over the United States, so naturally we need cartons in which to ship them. At that time, I bought most of my cartons from Tony’s company. I saw him, oh, perhaps twice a month.”
“This was shortly after the war, is that right, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Would you know if Mr. Forrest had been in the service?”
“Yes, he was,” Etterman said. “He was with the artillery. He was wounded in Italy, in a battle with the Germans.” Etterman paused. He turned to Meyer and said, “I am an American citizen, you know. I was here from 1912, my parents came here when I was still a boy. Most of the family left Germany. Some of them went to India, which is how the business started.”
“Do you know what rank Mr. Forrest held in the Army, sir?” Carella asked.
“He was a captain, I believe.”
“All right, go ahead, please.”
“Well, I liked him from the beginning. There was a nice manner about him. Cartons, after all, are the same no matter where you buy them. I bought from Tony because I liked him personally.” Etterman offered the detectives a cigar, and then lit one himself. “My one vice,” he said. “My doctor says they will kill me. I told my doctor, I would like to die in bed with a young blonde, or else smoking a cigar.” Etterman chuckled. “At my age, I will have to be content to die smoking a cigar.”
“How did Mr. Forrest come to the firm?” Carella said, smiling.
“I asked him one day if he was satisfied with his position, because if he wasn’t, I was ready to make him an offer. We discussed it further, and he came to work for the company. As a salesman. That was fifteen years ago. Today, or rather when he died, he was a vice president.”
“What prompted your offer, Mr. Etterman?”
“As I told you, I liked him from the beginning. Then, too…” Etterman shook his head. “Well, it does not matter.”
“What, sir?”
“You see…” Etterman shook his head again. “You see, gentlemen, I lost my son. He was killed in the war.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Carella said.
“Yes, well, it was a long time ago, we must go on living, isn’t that so?” He smiled a brief, sad smile. “He was with a bomber squadron, my son. His plane was shot down in the raid on Schweinfurt on April thirteenth, 1944. It was a ball-bearings factory there.”
The room went silent.
“Our family came originally from a town close to Schweinfurt. It is sometimes odd, don’t you think, the way life works out? I was born as a German in a town near Schweinfurt, and my son is killed as an American flying over Schweinfurt.” He shook his head. “It sometimes makes me wonder.”
Again there was silence.
Carella cleared his throat and said, “Mr. Etterman,
what sort of a person was Anthony Forrest? Did he get along well with your staff, did he…?”
“He was the finest human being I have ever known,” Etterman said. “I do not know of anyone who disliked him.” He shook his head. “I can only believe that some maniac killed him.”
“Mr. Etterman, did he usually leave the office at the same time each day?”
“We close at five,” Etterman said. “Tony and I would usually talk for, oh, perhaps another fifteen minutes. Yes, I would say he usually left the building between five-fifteen and five-thirty.”
“Did he get along with his wife?”
“He and Clara were very happily married.”
“How about the children? His daughter is nineteen, is that right, and the two boys are about fifteen?”
“That is correct.”
“Any trouble with them?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, have they ever been in any kind of trouble?”
“I do not know what you mean.”
“With the law, with other kids, bad company, anything like that.”
“They are fine children,” Etterman said. “Cynthia was graduated highest in her class from high school, and won a scholarship to Ramsey University. The two boys do very well scholastically. One of them is on his school baseball team, and the other belongs to the debating club. No, there was never any trouble with Tony’s children.”