by Ed McBain
“What makes you think I can fix a ticket?”
“I have heard it bruited about that one can fix anything but narcotics or homicide in this city.”
“And do you believe that?”
“Assault costs a hundred dollars on the line, I’ve been told. Burglary can be fixed for five hundred.”
“Where do you get your information, Miss Moriarty?”
“For a maiden lady,” Miss Moriarty said, “I get around.”
“I can arrest you for attempting to bribe an officer, and also for withholding information,” Carella said, smiling.
“What information? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Peter Kelby’s last-known address.”
“Who’s Peter Kelby?” Miss Moriarty said, and Carella burst out laughing.
“Okay, okay,” he said, “you’ve got my promise. No guarantees, you understand, but I’ll certainly try….”
“Have you got a pencil?” Miss Moriarty asked.
The telephone operator supplied Carella with a number listed to the address of Peter Kelby in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He asked her if she would try the number for him, and then he listened to a series of clickings and bongs and chimes on the line, and finally he heard the phone ringing on the other end, lo, those many miles away, and then a woman answered the phone and said, “Kelby residence.”
“May I speak to Mr. Kelby, please?” Carella said.
“Who’s calling, please?” the voice asked.
“Detective Stephen Carella.”
“Just a minute, please.”
Carella waited. He could hear a voice calling to someone on the other end, and then he heard someone asking “Who?” and the original voice saying, “A Detective Carella,” and then the sound of footsteps approaching the phone, and the sound of the phone being lifted from the tabletop, and then a different woman’s voice saying, “Hello?”
“Hello,” Carella said. “This is Detective Carella of the 87th Squad in Isola. I’m calling…”
“Yes? This is Mrs. Kelby speaking.”
“Mrs. Peter Kelby?”
“Yes, that’s right. What is it?”
“May I speak to your husband, please, Mrs. Kelby?” Carella said.
There was a long pause on the line.
“Mrs. Kelby?”
“Yes?”
“May I…?”
“Yes, I heard you.”
There was another pause.
Then Mrs. Kelby said, “My husband is dead.”
Which, of course, explained only one thing.
Peter Kelby had been shot to death on May 4. He had been killed while driving to the country club for a drink, as was his habit, after a long week of labor in the insurance office he headed. The Remington .308 slug had smashed through the windshield and entered his throat, and the automobile had swerved out of control and hit a milk truck going in the opposite direction. Peter Kelby was dead before the vehicles struck each other. But the murderer now had a few residual benefits to his credit, since there were two men in the cab of the milk truck and when Kelby’s car hit it, one of the men went through the windshield and had his jugular severed by a shard of glass, and the other wrenched at the wheel in an attempt to keep the truck on the road, and suddenly discovered that the steering shaft was pushing up into his chest. That was the last discovery he ever made, because he was dead within the next ten seconds.
The three deaths explained only one thing.
They explained why there had been no murders in the city between May 2, when Andrew Mulligan was killed, and May 7, when Rudy Fenstermacher was killed.
It is very difficult for someone to be in two places at the same time.
The woman walked into the squadroom at exactly 5:37, just as Carella and Meyer were leaving for home. Carella was in the middle of sentence containing a choice bit of profanity, the words “Now why the f—” stopping immediately in his throat when the woman appeared at the slatted rail divider.
She was a tall redhead, with a creamy pale complexion and slanted green eyes. She wore a dark-green suit that captured the color of her eyes and captured, too, the mold of her body, classically rounded, narrow-waisted, wide-hipped. She was pushing forty, but there was contained voluptuousness in the woman who stood at the railing, and Meyer and Carella—both married men—caught their breaths for an instant, as though a fantasy had suddenly materialized. Down the corridor, and behind the woman, Miscolo—who had caught a glimpse of her as she passed his open door—peeked around the jamb of the clerical office for a better look, and then rolled his eyes toward the ceiling.
“Yes, miss?” Carella said.
“I’m Helen Vale,” she said.
“Yes, Miss Vale?” Carella said. “What can we do for you?”
“Mrs. Vale,” she corrected.
“Yes, Mrs. Vale?”
“Helen Struthers Vale.”
She spoke in a normally deep voice that carried the unmistakable stamp of elocution lessons. She kept both hands on the slatted rail divider, clinging to it as if it were a lover. She waited patiently, as though embarrassed by her surroundings, and embarrassed, too, by the mature ripeness of her own body. And yet, her own awareness seemed to heighten the awareness of the observer. She was a potential rape victim expecting the worst, and inviting it through dire expectation. It took several seconds for the detectives to extract the maiden name “Struthers” from the names fore and aft, and then to separate it from the heavy miasma of sensuality that had suddenly smothered the room.
“Come in, Mrs. Vale,” Carella said, and he held open the gate in the railing for her.
“Thank you,” she said. She lowered her eyes as she passed him, like a novice nun who has reluctantly taken a belated vow of chastity. Meyer pulled a chair out from one of the desks and held it for her while she sat. She crossed her legs, her skirt was short, it rode up over splendid knees, she tugged at it but it refused to yield, she sat in bursting provocative awareness.
Meyer wiped his brow.
“We’ve been trying to locate you, Mrs. Vale,” Carella said. “You are the Helen Struthers who…”
“Yes,” she said.
“We assumed you were married, but we didn’t know to whom, and we had no idea where to begin looking because this is a very large city, and although we tried…” He abruptly stopped speaking, wondering why he was talking so rapidly and so much.
“Anyway, we’re glad you’re here,” Meyer said.
Carella wiped his brow.
“Yes, I thought I should come,” Helen said, “and now I’m glad I did.” She delivered these last words as if she were paying tribute to the two most handsome, charming, gallant, intelligent men in the world. Both detectives smiled unconsciously, and then, catching the smile on the other’s face, frowned and tried to become businesslike.
“Why did you come, Mrs. Vale?” Carella said.
“Well…because of the shootings,” Helen answered, opening her eyes wide.
“Yes, what about them?”
“He’s killing everyone in the play, don’t you see?” she said.
“Who is, Mrs. Vale?”
“Well, I don’t know,” she said, and she lowered her eyes again, and again tugged at her skirt, but her skirt didn’t budge. “I thought so at first when I connected the names Forrest and Norden, but then I thought, ‘No, Helen, you’re imagining things.’ I have a very good imagination,” she explained, raising her eyes.
“Yes, Mrs. Vale, go on.”
“Then the girl got killed, I forget her name, and then Sal Palumbo, the nice Italian man who was studying English in night school, and then Andy Mulligan, and Rudy, and I knew for certain. I said to my husband: ‘Alec, somebody’s killing everyone who was in The Long Voyage Home in 1940 at Ramsey University.’ That’s what I said.”
“And what did your husband say?”
“He said, ‘You’re crazy, Helen.’ “
“I see.”
“Crazy like a fox,” Helen said, her
eyes narrowing. “So I decided to come up here.”
“Why? Do you have some information for us, Mrs. Vale?”
“No.” Helen wet her lips. “I’m an actress, you see.”
“I see.”
“Yes. Helen Vale. Do you think ‘Struthers’ would be better?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Helen Struthers. My maiden name. Does that sound better?”
“Well, no, this is fine.”
“Helen Vale sounds very good,” Meyer agreed, nodding.
“Pure,” she said. “Classical.”
“What?”
“Helen. It sounds pure and classical.”
“Yes, it does.”
“And Vale adds mystery, don’t you think? Vale. V-a-l-e. Which is my husband’s real name. But it can also be spelled V-e-i-l, which is what gives it the mystery. Helen Vale. A veil is very mysterious, you know.”
“It certainly is.”
“Being an actress, I decided I should come up here.”
“Why?”
“Well, what good is a dead actress?” Helen said. She shrugged and then spread her hands in utter simplicity.
“That’s true,” Meyer said.
“So here I am.”
“Yes,” Carella said.
Miscolo sauntered casually into the squadroom and said, “Anybody want some coffee? Oh, excuse me, I didn’t know you had a visitor.” He smiled graciously at Helen, and she returned the smile demurely and tugged at her skirt. “Would you like some coffee, miss?” he asked.
“No, thank you,” she said. “But thank you for asking.”
“Not at all,” Miscolo said, and he went out of the squadroom humming.
“I almost married a man named Leach,” Helen said. “Helen Leach, wouldn’t that have been terrible?”
“Awful,” Meyer agreed.
“Still, he was a nice fellow.”
“Miss Lea…Miss…uh…Mrs. Vale,” Carella said, “what do you remember about The Long Voyage Home?”
“I played Kate,” she said. She smiled.
“What else do you remember about it?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
“It was lousy, I think. I don’t remember.”
“What do you remember about the other people in the cast?”
“The boys were all very sweet.”
“And the girls?”
“I don’t remember them.”
“Would you happen to know whether Margaret Buff ever married?”
“Margaret who?”
“Buff. She was in the play, too.”
“No. I don’t remember her.”
Two patrolmen wandered into the squadroom, went to the files, opened them, looked at Helen Vale where she sat with her legs crossed, and then went to the water cooler, where they drank three cups of water each while watching Helen Vale where she sat with her legs crossed. As they were leaving the squadroom, four more patrolmen wandered into the room. Carella frowned at them, but they all went about finding busywork that only happened to take Helen into their direct line of view.
“Have you been an actress ever since you got out of college, Mrs. Vale?” Carella asked.
“Yes.”
“Have you appeared on the stage here in this city?”
“Yes. I’m Equity, and AFTRA, and also SAG.”
“Mrs. Vale, has anyone ever made any threats on your life?”
“No.” Helen frowned. “That’s a very funny question. What’s this got to do with me alone, if the killer is after all of us?”
“Mrs. Vale, the wholesale slaughter may be just a smoke screen. He may be after one of you, and he may be killing the others to throw us off the track, to make it seem he has a different motive, other than what may be the real motive.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” Carella said.
“I didn’t understand a word of that,” Helen said.
“Oh. Well, you see…”
“Besides, that’s not what interests me. I mean, his motives or anything.”
There were fourteen patrolmen in the room now, and the word was spreading throughout the building, and perhaps the entire precinct, very rapidly. Only once during his entire career as a detective could Carella remember seeing so many patrolmen in the squadroom at one time, and that was when the commissioner had issued his edict against moonlighting, and every uniformed cop in the precinct had come upstairs to bellyache about it in a sort of open forum.
“What does interest you, Mrs. Vale?” he asked, and five more patrolmen came down the corridor and into the room.
“I think I need protection,” she said, and she lowered her eyes at that moment, as if she were talking not about the sniper who was going around shooting people, but about the patrolmen who were crowding into the room like migrating sardines.
Carella stood up suddenly and said, “Fellows, it’s getting a little stuffy in here. Why don’t you go have your meeting in the locker room?”
“What meeting?” one of the patrolmen asked.
“The meeting you’re going to have in the locker room in three seconds flat,” Carella said, “before I pick up the phone and have a talk with Captain Frick downstairs.”
The patrolmen began to disperse. One of them, in a very loud sotto voce, muttered the word “Chicken,” but Carella ignored it. He watched them as they left, and then he turned to Helen and said, “We’ll assign a man to you, Mrs. Vale.”
“I would appreciate that,” she said. “Who?”
“Well…I’m not sure yet. It depends on who’s available and what…”
“I’m sure he’ll be dependable,” she said.
“Mrs. Vale,” Carella said. “I wonder if you can try remembering about the play. I know it was a long time ago, but…”
“Actually, I have a very good memory,” Helen said.
“I’m sure you do.”
“Actresses need to have good memories, you know.”
“I know that.”
“Otherwise we’d never learn our lines,” Helen said, and she smiled.
“Good. What do you remember about the play?”
“Nothing,” Helen said.
“Everyone got along fine with each other, is that right?” Carella prodded.
“Oh, yes, it was a very nice group.”
“At the party, too, right? No trouble?”
“Oh, no, it was a lovely party.”
“You stayed late, is that right?”
“That’s right.” Helen smiled. “I always stay late at parties.”
“Where was this party, Mrs. Vale?”
“What party?” Helen asked.
“The one after the play.”
“Oh, that one. At Randy’s house, I think. Randy Norden. He was a regular rip. Very smart in school, you know, but oh what a rip! His parents were away in Europe, so we all went up there after the show.”
“And you and the other two girls stayed late, is that right?”
“That’s right, yes. It was a lovely party.”
“With three of the boys.”
“Oh no, there were a lot of boys.”
“I meant you stayed late. With three of the boys.”
“Oh. Yes, that’s right. We did.”
“Was there any trouble?”
“No,” Helen said. She smiled sweetly. “We were making love.”
“You were necking, you mean.”
“No, no. We were diddling.”
Carella cleared his throat and looked at Meyer.
“It was a very nice party,” Helen said.
“Mrs. Vale,” Carella said, “what do you mean by ‘diddling’?”
Helen lowered her eyes. “Well, you know,” she said.
Carella looked at Meyer again. Meyer shrugged in confusion.
“With the boys, do you mean? The three boys?”
“Yes.”
“You…you were in separate rooms, is that right?”
“Yes. Well, in the beginning,
anyway. There was an awful lot to drink, you know, and Randy’s parents were in Europe, so we just had a lot of fun.”
“Mrs. Vale,” Carella said, taking the bull by the horns, “do you mean that you and the other two girls were intimate with these boys?”
“Oh, yes, very intimate,” she said.
“And the three boys were Anthony Forrest, Randolph Norden, and David Arthur Cohen, is that right?”
“That’s right. They were all very nice boys.”
“And you…you were sort of wandering around from room to room, is that right? All of you?”
“Oh, yes,” Helen said delightedly. “It was a regular orgy.”
Carella began coughing, and Meyer hit him on the back.
“You’re coming down with something,” Helen said pleasantly. “You ought to get to bed.”
“Yes, yes, I will,” Carella said, coughing. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Vale, you’ve been very helpful.”
“Oh, I enjoyed talking with you,” Helen said. “I’d almost forgotten that party, and it was really one of the nicest parties I’ve ever been to.”
She rose, picked up her purse, opened it, and placed a small white card on the desk. “My home address and number,” she said, “and also my service, if you can’t reach me.”
She smiled and walked to the railing. Carella and Meyer sat rooted to the desk, watching her move across the room. At the railing, she turned and said, “You will do your best to see that I’m not killed, won’t you?”
“We will, Mrs. Vale,” Carella said fervently. “We most certainly will do our very utmost best.”
“Thank you,” she murmured, and then walked down the corridor. They could hear her high heels clattering on the ironrunged steps to the floor below.
“Because, lady,” Meyer whispered, “it would be a crime to kill you, I swear to God, it would be a heinous crime.”
They knew when she reached the street outside because a tumultuous cheer went up from the patrolmen waiting there for her.
Well, things were certainly looking up.
Not only did they now know that the seven murder victims had all been in a college production of The Long Voyage Home back in 1940, but they further knew there had been a party after the play, and that all the members of the cast and crew had been present at it, as well as Professor Richardson, the faculty adviser. They further knew that the faculty adviser had stopped advising some time during the night, and that the party had dwindled down to six people of opposite sexes who had taken advantage of the fact.