by Ed McBain
“I hated her guts,” he said, and Meyer raised his eyebrows and glanced at Byrnes, who in turn raised his eyebrows and glanced at Carella, who was facing the one-way mirror and had the opportunity of witnessing his own reflection raising its eyebrows.
“Mr. Fletcher,” Byrnes said, “I know you understand your rights, as we explained them to you . . .”
“I understood them long before you explained them,” Fletcher said.
“And I know you’ve chosen to answer our questions without an attorney present . . .”
“I am an attorney.”
“What I meant . . .”
“I know what you meant. Yes, I’m willing to answer any and all questions without counsel.”
“I still feel I must warn you that a woman has been murdered . . .”
“Yes, my dear, wonderful wife,” Fletcher said sarcastically.
“Which is a serious crime . . .”
“Which, among felonies, may very well be the choicest of the lot,” Fletcher said.
“Yes,” Byrnes said. He was not an articulate man, but he felt somewhat tongue-tied in Fletcher’s presence. Bullet-headed, hair turning from iron-gray to ice-white (slight bald spot beginning to show at the back), blue-eyed, built like a compact linebacker for the Minnesota Vikings, Byrnes straightened the knot in his tie, cleared his throat, and looked to his colleagues for support. Both Meyer and Carella were watching their shoelaces.
“Well, look,” Byrnes said, “if you understand what you’re doing, go right ahead. We warned you.”
“Indeed you have warned me. Repeatedly. I can’t imagine why,” Fletcher said, “since I don’t feel myself to be in any particular danger. My wife is dead, someone killed the bitch. But it was not me.”
“Well, it’s nice to have your assurance of that, Mr. Fletcher, but your assurance alone doesn’t necessarily still our doubts,” Carella said, hearing the words and wondering where the hell they were coming from. He was, he realized, trying to impress Fletcher, trying to ward off the man’s obvious condescension by courting his acceptance. Look at me, he was pleading, listen to me. I’m not just a dumb bull, I’m a man of sensitivity and intelligence, able to understand your vocabulary, your sarcasm, and even your vituperative wit. Half-sitting upon, half-leaning against the scarred wooden table, a tall athletic-looking man with straight brown hair, brown eyes curiously slanted downwards, Carella folded his arms across his chest in unconscious imitation of Fletcher. The moment he realized what he was doing, he uncrossed his arms at once, and stared intently at Fletcher, waiting for an answer. Fletcher stared intently back.
“Well?” Carella said.
“Well what, Detective Carella?”
“Well, what do you have to say?”
“About what?”
“How do we know it wasn’t you who stabbed her?”
“To begin with,” Fletcher said, “there were signs of forcible entry in the kitchen and hasty departure in the bedroom—witness the wide-open window in the aforementioned room, and the shattered window in the latter. The drawers in the dining-room sideboard were open . . .”
“You’re a very observant person,” Meyer said suddenly. “Did you notice all this in the four minutes it took you to enter the apartment and call the police?”
“It’s my job to be an observant person,” Fletcher said, “but to answer your question, no. I noticed all this after I had spoken to Detective Carella here, and while he was on the phone reporting to your lieutenant. I might add that I’ve lived in that apartment on Silvermine Oval for the past twelve years, and that it doesn’t take a particularly sharp-eyed man to notice that a bedroom window is smashed or a kitchen window open. Nor does it take a sleuth to realize that the family silver has been pilfered—especially when there are several serving spoons, soup ladles, and butter knives scattered on the bedroom floor beneath the shattered window. Have you checked the alleyway below the window? You’re liable to find your murderer still lying there.”
“Your apartment is on the second floor, Mr. Fletcher,” Meyer said.
“Which is why I suggested he might still be there,” Fletcher answered. “Nursing a broken leg or a fractured skull.”
“In all my years of experience,” Meyer said, and Carella suddenly realized that he, too, was trying to impress Fletcher, “I have never known a criminal to jump out a window on the second floor of a building.” (Carella was surprised he hadn’t used the word “defenestrate.”)
“This criminal may have had good reason for imprudent action,” Fletcher said. “He had just killed a woman, probably after coming upon her unexpectedly in an apartment he thought was empty. He had heard someone opening the front door, and had realized he could not leave the apartment the way he’d come in, the kitchen being too close to the entrance. He undoubtedly figured he would rather risk a broken leg than the penitentiary for life. How does that portrait compare to those of other Criminals You Have Known?”
“I’ve known lots of criminals,” Meyer said inanely, “and some of them are too smart for their own damn good.” He felt idiotic even as he delivered his little preachment, but Fletcher had a way of making a man feel like a cretin. Meyer ran his hand self-consciously over his bald pate, his eyes avoiding the glances of Carella and Byrnes. Somehow, he felt he had let them all down. Somehow, a rapier thrust had been called for, and he had delivered only a puny mumbletypeg penknife flip. “What about that knife, Mr. Fletcher?” he said. “Ever see it before?”
“Never.”
“It doesn’t happen to be your knife, does it?” Carella asked.
“It does not.”
“Did your wife say anything to you when you entered the bedroom?”
“My wife was dead when I entered the bedroom.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“I’m positive of it.”
“All right, Mr. Fletcher,” Byrnes said abruptly. “You want to wait outside, please?”
“Certainly,” Fletcher said, and rose, and left the room. The three detectives stood in silence for a respectable number of minutes. Then Byrnes said, “What do you think?”
“I think he did it,” Carella said.
“What makes you think so?”
“Let me revise that.”
“Go ahead, revise it.”
“I think he could have done it.”
“Even with all those signs of a burglary?”
“Especially with all those signs.”
“Spell it out, Steve.”
“He could have come home, found his wife stabbed—but not fatally—and finished her off by yanking the knife across her belly. The M.E.’s report says that death was probably instantaneous, either caused by severance of the abdominal aorta, or reflex shock, or both. Fletcher had four minutes when all he needed was maybe four seconds.”
“It’s possible,” Meyer said.
“Or maybe I just don’t like the son of a bitch,” Carella added.
“Let’s see what the lab comes up with,” Byrnes said.
There were good fingerprints on the kitchen window sash, and on the silver drawer of the dining-room sideboard. There were good prints on some of the pieces of silver scattered on the floor near the smashed bedroom window. More important, although most of the prints on the handle of the switchblade knife were smeared, some of them were very good indeed. All of the prints matched; they had all been left by the same person.
Gerald Fletcher graciously allowed the police to take his fingerprints, which were then compared with those Marshall Davies had sent over from the police laboratory. The fingerprints on the window, the drawer, the silverware, and the knife did not match Gerald Fletcher’s.
Which didn’t mean a damn thing if he had been wearing his gloves when he finished her off.
2
O n Monday morning, the sky above the River Harb was a cloudless blue. In Silvermine Park, young mothers were already pushing baby buggies, eager to take advantage of the unexpected December sunshine. The air was cold and sharp,
but the sun was brilliant and it transformed the streets bordering the river into what they must have looked like at the turn of the century. A tugboat hooted, a gull shrieked and swooped low over the water, a woman tucked a blanket up under her baby’s chin and cooed to him gently. Near the park railing, a patrolman stood with his hands behind his back, and idly stared out over the sun-dappled river.
Upstairs, in the second-floor rear apartment of 721 Silvermine Oval, a chalked outline on the bedroom floor was the only evidence that a woman had lain there in death the night before. Carella and Kling sidestepped the outline and moved to the shattered window. The lab boys had carefully lifted, packaged, and labeled the shards and slivers of glass, on the assumption that whoever had jumped through the window might have left bloodstains or clothing threads behind. Carella looked through the gaping irregular hole at the narrow alleyway below. There was a distance of perhaps twelve feet between this building and the one across from it. Conceivably, the intruder could have leaped across the shaftway, caught the windowsill on the opposite wall, and then boosted himself up into the apartment there. But this would have required premeditation and calculation, and if a person is going to make a trapeze leap for a windowsill, he doesn’t dive through a closed window in haste and panic. The apartment across the way would have to be checked, of course; but the more probable likelihood was that the intruder had fallen to the pavement below.
“That’s a long drop,” Kling said, peering over Carella’s shoulder.
“How far do you figure?”
“Thirty feet. At least.”
“Got to break a leg taking a fall like that.”
“Maybe the guy’s an acrobat.”
“You think he went through the window head first?”
“How else?”
“He might have broken the glass out first, and then gone through.”
“If he was about to go to all that trouble, why didn’t he just open the damn thing?”
“Well, let’s take a look,” Carella said.
They examined the latch, and they examined the sash.
“Okay to touch this?” Kling asked.
“Yeah, they’re through with it.”
Kling grabbed both handles on the window frame and pulled up on them. “Tough one,” he said.
“Try it again.”
Kling tugged again. “I think it’s stuck.”
“Probably painted shut,” Carella said.
“Maybe he did try to open it. Maybe he smashed it only when he realized it was stuck.”
“Yeah,” Carella said. “And in a big hurry, too. Fletcher was opening the front door, maybe already in the apartment by then.”
“The guy probably swung his bag . . .”
“What bag?”
“Must’ve had a bag or something with him, don’t you think? To put the loot in?”
“Probably. Though he couldn’t have been too experienced.”
“What do you mean?”
“No gloves. Left prints all over the place. Got to be a beginner.”
“Even so, he’d have carried a bag. That’s probably what he smashed the window with. Which might explain why there was silverware on the floor. He could’ve taken a wild swing when he realized the window was stuck, and maybe some of the stuff fell out of the bag.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Carella said.
“Then he probably climbed through the hole and dropped down feet first. That makes more sense than just diving through the thing, doesn’t it? In fact, what he could’ve done, Steve, was drop the bag down first . . .”
“If he had a bag.”
“Every burglar in the world has a bag. Even beginners.”
“Well, maybe.”
“Well, if he had a bag, he could’ve dropped it down into the alley there, and then climbed out and hung from the sill before he jumped, you know what I mean? To make it a shorter distance.”
“I don’t know if he had all that much time, Bert. Fletcher must’ve been in the apartment and heading for the bedroom by then.”
“Did Fletcher say anything about glass breaking? About hearing glass?”
“I don’t remember asking him.”
“We’ll have to ask him,” Kling said.
“Why? What difference does it make?”
“I don’t know,” Kling said, and shrugged. “But if the guy was still in the aparment when Fletcher came in . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Well, that cuts it very close, doesn’t it?”
“He must’ve been here, Bert. He had to hear that front door opening. Otherwise, he’d have taken his good sweet time and gone out the kitchen window and down the fire escape, the way he’d come.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Kling nodded reflectively. “Fletcher’s lucky,” he said. “The guy could just as easily have waited and stabbed him, too.”
“Let’s take a look at that alley,” Carella said.
The woman looking through the ground-floor window saw only two big men in overcoats, poking around on the alley floor. Both men were hatless. One of them had brown hair and slanty Chinese eyes. The other one looked younger but no less menacing, a big blond tough with hardly nothing but peach fuzz on his face, the better to eat you, Grandma. She immediately went to the telephone and called the police.
In the alleyway, unaware of the woman who peered out at them from between the slats of her venetian blinds, Carella and Kling studied the concrete pavement, and then looked up at the shattered second-floor window of the Fletcher apartment.
“It’s still a hell of a long drop,” Kling said.
“Looks even longer from down here.”
“Where do you suppose he’d have landed?”
“Right about where we’re standing. Maybe a foot or so over,” Carella said, and looked at the ground.
“See anything?” Kling asked.
“No. I was just trying to figure something.”
“What?”
“Let’s say he did land without breaking anything . . .”
“Well, he must’ve, Steve. Otherwise he’d still be laying here.”
“That’s just my point. Even if he didn’t break anything, I can’t believe he just got up and walked away, can you?” He looked up at the window again. “That’s got to be at least forty feet, Bert.”
“Gets longer every minute,” Kling said. “I still think it’s no more than thirty, give or take.”
“Even so. A guy drops thirty feet . . .”
“If he hung from the windowsill first, you’ve got to subtract maybe ten feet from that figure.”
“Okay, so what do we say? A twenty-foot drop?”
“Give or take.”
“Guy drops twenty feet to a concrete pavement, doesn’t break anything, gets up, dusts himself off, and runs the fifty-yard dash, right?” Carella shook his head. “My guess is he stayed right where he was for a while. To at least catch his breath.”
“So?”
“So did Fletcher look out the window?”
“Why would he?”
“If your wife is dead on the floor with a knife in her, and the window is broken, wouldn’t you naturally go to the window and look out? On the off chance you might spot the guy who killed her?”
“He was anxious to call the police,” Kling said.
“Why?”
“That’s natural, Steve. If the guy’s innocent, he’s anxious to keep in the clear. He calls the police, he stays in the apartment . . .”
“I still think he did it,” Carella said.
“Don’t make a federal case out of this,” Kling said. “I personally would like nothing better than to kick Mr. Fletcher in the balls, but let’s concentrate on finding the guy whose fingerprints we’ve got, okay?”
“Yeah,” Carella said.
“I mean, Steve, be reasonable. If a guy’s fingerprints are on the handle of a knife, and the knife is still in the goddamn victim . . .”
“And if the victim’s husband realizes what a sweet setup he’s stumbl
ed into,” Carella said, “wife laying on the floor with a knife in her, place broken into and burglarized, why not finish the job and hope the burglar will be blamed?”
“Sure,” Kling said. “Prove it.”
“I can’t,” Carella said. “Not until we catch the burglar.”
“All right, so let’s catch him. Where do you think he went after he dropped down here?”
“One of two ways,” Carella said. “Either through the door there into the basement of the building. Or over the fence there at the other end of the alley.”
“Which way would you go?”
“If I’d just dropped twenty feet or more, I’d go home to my mother and cry.”
“I’d head for the door of the building. If I’d just dropped twenty feet, I wouldn’t feel like climbing any fences.”
“Not with the terrible headache you’d probably have.”
The basement door suddenly opened. A red-faced patrolman was standing in the doorway with a .38 in his fist.
“All right, you guys, what’s going on here?” he said.
“Oh, great,” Carella said.
Anyway, Marshall Davies had already done the work.
So while Carella and Kling went through the tedious routine of proving to a cop that they were cops themselves, Davies called the 87th Precinct and asked to talk to the detective who was handling the Fletcher homicide. Since both detectives who were handling the homicide were at that moment out handling it, or trying to, Davies agreed to talk to Detective Meyer instead.
“What’ve you got?” Meyer asked.
“I think I’ve got some fairly interesting information about the suspect.”
“Will I need a pencil?” Meyer asked.
“I don’t think so. How much do you know about the case?”
“I’ve been filled in.”
“Then you know there were latent prints all over the apartment.”
“Yes. We’ve got the I.S. running a check on them now.”
“Maybe you’ll get lucky.”
“Maybe,” Meyer said.
“Do you also know there were footprints in the kitchen?”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Yes, a very good one in the sink, probably left there when he climbed through the window, and some middling-fair ones tracking across the kitchen floor to the dining room. I got some excellent pictures, and some very good blowups of the heel—for comparison purposes if the need arises later on.”