by Ed McBain
“Where were you on Friday, May fourth?” Carella asked.
“I was home,” Redfield answered.
“You didn’t go to work?”
“No, I had a cold.” He paused. “Ask my wife. She’ll tell you. I was home all day.”
“We will ask her, believe me, Mr. Redfield,” Carella said. “As soon as she’s able to talk to us.”
“She’ll tell you.”
“She’ll tell us you weren’t in Minneapolis, huh?”
“I’ve never been there in my life. I had nothing to do with any of this. You’re making a terrible mistake.”
And that was when the patrolman walked into the squadroom. Maybe Redfield would have told it all, anyway. It is a convention that they tell it all in the end, and besides, human beings will reach a point where hope is balanced against despair, where they see the scale slowly tilting against them. They recognize this point when it arrives, they stare at it with wise, discovering eyes, and they know there is nothing left for them. There is relief in confession. If there is any hope at all in despair, it is the hope of confession, so perhaps he would have told it all, anyway.
The patrolman walked directly to Carella’s desk. He put down the long leather case and said, “We found this at the back of his bedroom closet.”
Carella opened the case.
The rifle was a bolt-action Winchester Model 70.
“This your gun, Mr. Redfield?” Carella asked.
Redfield stared at the rifle and said nothing.
“These were on the shelf, behind his hats,” the patrolman said. He put the box of Remington .308 cartridges on the desktop. Carella looked at the cartridges, and then looked at Redfield, and then said, “Ballistics’ll give us the answer in ten minutes’ time, Mr. Redfield. You want to save us the trouble?”
Redfield sighed,
“Well?”
Redfield sighed again.
“Call Ballistics, Meyer,” Carella said. “Tell them a patrolman’s on his way down with a rifle. We want a comparison test made with the bullets and discharged shells we’ve got on—”
“Never mind,” Redfield said.
“You want to tell us about it?” Carella said.
Redfield nodded.
“Stenographer!” Carella yelled.
“I didn’t plan to kill any of them,” Redfield said. “Not at first.”
“Just a second,” Meyer said. “Miscolo, you got a stenographer coming?”
“You see,” Redfield said, “when Dr. Fidio told me about Margaret, I…I was shocked, of course, I thought…I don’t know what I thought…”
“Miscolo! Goddamnit!”
“Coming, coming!” Miscolo shouted, and he ran into the squadroom and began taking the confession himself, his open pad poised on his lap.
“Sadness, I suppose,” Redfield said. “I wanted a family, you see. I’m not a young man. I wanted a family before it was too late.” He shrugged. “Then…as I…as I began thinking about it, I guess I…I began to get…angry. My wife couldn’t have a baby, you see. She could never have a baby. Because of the hysterectomy. And they were responsible, you see. The ones who had done this to her. The ones who had been at that party Dr. Fidio described to me. Only, I…I didn’t know who they were.”
“Go on, Mr. Redfield.”
“I came upon the theater program by accident. I was looking for something in one of the closets, and I found the trunk, covered with dust, all covered with dust, and the program was inside it. So you see, I…I knew their names then. I knew the people who had done it to her, the ones who were at the party, and I…I began looking for them, not intending to kill them at first, but only wanting to see them, wanting to get a good look at the people who had…who had made it impossible for me to have children, my wife to have children. Then, I don’t know when, I think it was the day I found Blanche Lettiger, traced her to that dingy neighborhood, followed her, and she…she stopped me on the street and propositioned me, I think it was that day, seeing the filth she had become, and knowing the filth that had poisoned Margaret, I think it was that day I decided to kill them all.”
Redfield paused. Miscolo looked up from his pad.
“I killed Anthony Forrest first, not for any special reason, only because he was the one I decided to kill first, and maybe in the back of my mind I thought it would be better not to kill them in the order they appeared on the program, but just at random, you know, so it wouldn’t seem they were connected, just to kill them, you know, as if…as if there were no connection.”
“When did you decide to kill your own wife, Mr. Redfield?” Meyer asked.
“I don’t know when. Not at the beginning. After all, she’d been a victim of the others, hadn’t she? But then, I…I began to realize how dangerous my position was. Suppose a connection was made between the murder victims? Suppose you discovered all ten of them had been members of the same college drama group? Why, if I killed them all but allowed Margaret to live, well…well, wouldn’t you wonder about this? Wouldn’t you want to know why she alone hadn’t been killed? Of the entire group? My position was very dangerous, you see.”
“So you decided to kill her, too? To protect yourself?”
“Yes. No. More than that. Not only that.” Redfield’s eyes suddenly flared. “How did I know she’d really been such an innocent? Was she really a victim that night? Or had she gone along with the others willingly in their…their dirty…I didn’t know, you see. So I…I decided to kill her, too, along with the other ten. That was why I came here to talk with you. To throw off suspicion. I figured if I’d already been to the police to warn them of possible danger to Margaret, why, then, when she was actually killed, I wouldn’t be suspect, don’t you see? That was what I figured.”
“Were you in Minneapolis on May fourth, Mr. Redfield?”
“Yes. Oh, yes, I killed Peter Kelby.”
“Tell us about Cohen.”
“What do you want to know?”
“How you managed the timing on it.”
“That was risky. I shouldn’t have attempted it. But it worked, so maybe…”
“How, Mr. Redfield?”
“I left here at about one yesterday, and was back in my office by one-thirty. I dictated some letters to my secretary, and then attended a meeting at two-forty-five. I said it started at three, but it really started at two-forty-five and was over by three-fifteen. I left the office through the back stairs. My own private office has a back door opening on a corridor, you see, and I took the steps down…”
“No one saw you?”
“No.”
“Did you tell anyone you were leaving?”
“No. I thought of telling my secretary not to disturb me for the next hour or so, but then I decided against it. I thought if anyone started asking questions later, it would be better if everyone simply said they knew I was in the building somewhere, but not exactly where.”
“You did quite a bit of planning, didn’t you, Mr. Redfield?”
“I was murdering,” Redfield said simply.
“You realize you were murdering?”
“Of course I realize it!”
“Go on. What’d you do when you left the office?”
“I took a cab to my apartment. To get the rifle.”
“Is that where you usually stored it?”
“Yes. In the closet. Where your man found it.”
“Your wife never saw it?”
“Once.”
“Didn’t she ask you what you were doing with a rifle?”
“She didn’t know it was a rifle.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was in the case. I told her it was a fishing rod.”
“And she believed you?”
“I don’t think she has ever seen a rifle or a fishing rod. The gun was in its case. She had no way of knowing what was inside the case.”
“Go ahead. You went to pick up the rifle…”
“Yes. I took a cab. I was uptown in twenty minutes, and in anoth
er ten minutes, I was across the street, waiting in the park. Cohen came out at four o’clock, and I shot him.”
“Then what?”
“I ran south across the park, and took a cab on the other side.”
“Did you take the rifle back to the office with you?”
“No. I left it in a pay locker at Central Station.”
“And picked it up again on your way home last night?”
“Yes. Because I planned to kill Margaret last night, you see. The rain. I missed because of the rain.”
“Where’d you get the rifle, Mr. Redfield?”
“I bought it.”
“When?”
“The day I decided to kill them all.”
“And the silencer?”
“I made it from a piece of copper tubing. I was afraid it might injure the barrel of the rifle after a single firing, but it didn’t. I think I was lucky. Aren’t silencers supposed to ruin guns?”
“Mr. Redfield, you killed eight people, do you know that?” Carella said.
“Yes, I know that.”
“Why didn’t you adopt children, Mr. Redfield? You could have done that, you know. You planned all these murders, but you couldn’t see your way clear to going to an adoption agency! Why the hell…?”
“It never occurred to me,” Redfield said.
After the confession was typed and signed, after they led Redfield downstairs to the detention cells to await transportation downtown later in the morning, Carella picked up the phone and called Thomas Di Pasquale to tell him he could stop worrying.
“Thanks,” Di Pasquale said. “What the hell time is it?”
“Five A.M.,” Carella said.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” Di Pasquale said, and hung up.
Carella smiled and replaced the phone in its cradle. He did not call Helen Vale until later in the day. When he told her the good news, she said, “Oh, that’s wonderful. Now I can go away without that on my mind.”
“Away, Mrs. Vale?”
“For summer stock. The season starts next month, you know.”
“That’s right,” Carella said. “How could I forget a thing like that?”
“I want to thank you again,” Helen said.
“For what, Mrs. Vale?”
“For the patrolman,” she answered. “I really enjoyed having him.”
Cynthia Forrest came up to the squadroom that afternoon to pick up the material she had left, the old newspaper clippings, the report cards, the theater program. Bert Kling met her in the corridor as she was leaving.
“Miss Forrest,” he said, “I want to apologize for the way—”
“Drop dead,” Cynthia said, and went down the iron-runged steps to the street.
The three detectives were alone in the squadroom. May was dying, the long summer lay ahead. Outside on the street, they could hear the sound of a city rushing by, ten million people.
“I keep thinking about what you told me,” Meyer said suddenly.
“What was that, Meyer?”
“When we were leaving Etterman’s office, the German guy, the one whose son was shot down over Schweinfurt.”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“You said, ‘You can’t hate a people here and now for what another people in another time did.’ “
“Mmm,” Carella said.
“Redfield hated them here and now,” Meyer answered.
The telephone rang.
“Here we go,” Kling said, and picked up the receiver.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photograph (c) Dragica Hunter
Ed McBain was one of the many pen names of the successful and prolific crime fiction author Evan Hunter (1926-2005). Born Salvatore Lambino in New York, McBain served aboard a destroyer in the US Navy during World War II and then earned a degree from Hunter College in English and psychology. After a short stint teaching in a high school, McBain went to work for a literary agency in New York, working with authors such as Arthur C. Clarke and P.G. Wodehouse, all the while working on his own writing on nights and weekends. He had his first breakthrough in 1954 with the novel The Blackboard Jungle, which was published under his newly legal name Evan Hunter and based on his time teaching in the Bronx.
Perhaps his most popular work, the 87th Precinct series (released mainly under the name Ed McBain) is one of the longest running crime series ever published, debuting in 1956 with Cop Hater and featuring over fifty novels. The series is set in a fictional locale called Isola and features a wide cast of detectives including the prevalent Detective Steve Carella.
McBain was also known as a screenwriter. Most famously he adapted a short story from Daphne Du Maurier into the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). In addition to writing for the silver screen, he wrote for many television series, including Columbo and the NBC series 87th Precinct (1961-1962), based on his popular novels.
McBain was awarded the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in 1986 by the Mystery Writers of America and was the first American to receive the Cartier Diamond Dagger award from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. He passed away in 2005 in his home in Connecticut after a battle with larynx cancer.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
ABOUT THE AUTHOR