Sadie When She Died

by Ed McBain

  He looked up too late.

  A fist came out of the flying snow, smashing him full in the face. He staggered back, his hands still in his pockets. Two of the men seized him from behind, grabbing both his arms, his hands still trapped in his pockets. The one standing in front of him smashed a fist into his face again. His head snapped back. He felt blood gushing from his nose. “Keep away from Nora,” the man whispered, and then began pounding his fists into Kling’s abdomen and chest, blow after blow while Kling fought to free his arms and his hands, his strength ebbing, his struggle weakening, slumping as the men behind him held his arms, and the man in front battered relentlessly with short hard jabs until Kling wanted to scream aloud, and then wanted only to die, and then felt the welcome oblivion of unconsciousness and did not know when they released him at last and allowed him to fall face forward into the white snow, bleeding.

  12

  “A ll right,” Byrnes said, “I’ve got a cop in the hospital, now what the hell happened?”

  Tuesday morning sunshine assaulted the lieutenant’s corner window. The storm had ended, and the snowplows had come through, and mile-high snowbanks lined the streets, piled against the curb. It was four days before Christmas, and the temperature was below freezing, and unless the city’s soot triumphed, the twenty-fifth would still be white.

  Arthur Brown was black. Six feet four inches tall, weighing 220 pounds, with the huge frame and powerful muscles of a heavyweight fighter, he stood before the lieutenant’s desk, his eyes squinted against the sunshine.

  “I thought you were tailing Fletcher,” Byrnes said.

  “I was,” Brown answered.

  “All right. Fletcher and this girl live in the same goddamn building. Kling was jumped leaving the building. If you were on Fletcher . . .”

  “I was on him from five o’clock yesterday afternoon, when he left his office downtown.” Brown reached into his inside jacket pocket. “Here’s the timetable,” he said. “I didn’t get back to Silvermine Oval till after midnight. By that time, they’d already taken Bert to the hospital.”

  “Let me see it,” Byrnes said, and took the typewritten sheet from Brown’s hand, and silently studied it:

  SURVEILLANCE GERALD FLETCHER Monday, December 20

  4:55 P.M.–Relieved Detective Kapek outside office bldg 4400 Butler. Suspect emerged 5:10 P.M., went to his car parked in local garage, and drove to home at 721 Silvermine Oval, entered bldg at 5:27 P. M.

  7:26 P.M.–Suspect emerged from building, started to walk south, came back, talked to doorman, and waited for his car. Drove to 812 North Crane, parked. Suspect entered apartment building there at 8:04 P.M.

  8:46 P.M.–Suspect emerged from 812 North Crane in company of redheaded woman wearing fur coat (black) and green dress, green shoes, approx height and weight five-six, 120, approx age thirty. Drove to Rudolph’s Restaurant, 127 Harrow. Surveillant (black) tried to get table, was told he needed reservations, went outside to wait in sedan. 9:05 P.M.

  Byrnes looked up. “What’s this crap about needing a reservation? Was the place crowded?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “Anything we can nail them on, Artie?”

  “Just try to prove anything,” Brown said.

  “Stupid pricks,” Byrnes said, and went back to the timetable.

  10:20 P.M.–Suspect and redheaded woman came out of Rudolph’s, drove back to 812 Crane, arrived 10:35 P.M., went into building. No doorman, surveillant entered unobserved, elevator indicator stopped at eleventh floor. Check of lobby mailboxes showed eight apartments on eleventh floor (names of occupants not marked as to color of hair).

  Byrnes looked up again, sharply this time. Brown grinned. Byrnes went back to the report, sighing.

  11:40 P.M.–Suspect came out of building, walked north to Glade, where he had parked car, and drove directly home, arriving there ten minutes past midnight. 721 Silvermine scene of great activity, two RMP cars in street, patrolman questioning doorman. Suspect said few words to doorman, then went inside. Detective Bob O’Brien already on scene and waiting to relieve, reported Kling had been assaulted half hour ago and taken to Culver Avenue Hospital. Relieved by O’Brien at 12:15 A.M.

  “When did O’Brien get there?” Byrnes asked.

  “I radioed in when I was leaving the woman’s building, told O’Brien the suspect was probably heading home, and asked him to relieve me there. He said he arrived a little after midnight. The ambulance had already come and gone.”

  “How’s Bert?” Byrnes asked.

  “I checked a few minutes ago. He’s conscious, but they’re holding him for observation.”

  “He say anything?”

  “Three guys jumped him,” Brown said.

  “Sons of bitches,” Byrnes said.

  Carella had not yet spoken to either Sal Decotto or Richard Fenner, the two remaining people listed in Sarah’s book, but he saw no reason to pursue that trail any further. He had been taken to the bars where Sarah (or rather Sadie) had picked them up, and whereas he was not the type of person who ordinarily judged a book by its cover, he had a fair idea of what the men themselves would be like. Big and mean, according to the bartender at The Saloon.

  The hardest thing Carella had ever had to learn in his entire life was that there actually were mean people in the world. As a young man, he had always believed that people behaved badly only because they’d experienced unhappy childhoods or unfortunate love affairs or deaths in the family or any one of a hundred assorted traumas. He changed his mind about that when he began working for the Police Department. He learned then that there were good people doing bad things, and there were also mean rotten bastards doing bad things. The good ones ended in jail just as easily as the mean ones, but the mean ones were the ones to beware. Why Sarah Fletcher had sought out big, mean men (and apparently one mean woman as well) was anybody’s guess. If the place-listings in her book could be considered chronological, she’d gone from bad to worse in her search for partners, throwing in a solitary dyke for good measure (or was Sal Decotto a woman, too?), and ending up at Quigley’s Rest, which was no afternoon tea party.

  But why? To give it back to her husband in spades? If he was playing around with someone each and every weekend, maybe Sarah decided to beat him at his own game, become not only Sadie, but a Sadie who was, in the words of her various admirers, “a crazy bitch,” “a stupid twat,” and “a wild one.” It seemed entirely possible that the only thing Carella would learn from Richard Fenner or Sal Decotto was that they shared identical opinions of the woman they had similarly used and abused. And affirmation of a conclusion leading nowhere was a waste of time. Carella tossed Sarah’s little black book into the manila folder bearing the various reports on the case, and turned his attention to the information Artie Brown had brought in last night.

  Cherchez la femme was a handy little dictum perhaps used more often by the Sûreté than by the 87th. But without trying to cherche any femme, Brown had inadvertently come across one anyway, a thirty-year-old redhead who lived on the eleventh floor at 812 North Crane and with whom Gerald Fletcher had spent almost four hours the night before. It would have been a simple matter to hit the redhead’s building and find out exactly who she was, but Carella decided against such a course of action. A chat with the superintendent, however quiet, a questioning of neighbors, however discreet, might get back to the woman herself, and serve to alert Fletcher. Fletcher was the suspect. Carella sometimes had to remind himself of that fact. Sarah had been playing around with an odd assortment of men and women, five according to her own record (and God knew how many more she had not listed, and God knew what the “TG” after four of the names meant); her blatant infidelity provided Fletcher with a strong motive, despite his own weekend sorties into realms as yet uncharted. So why take Carella to his wife’s unhappy haunts, why show Carella that he had good and sufficient reason to rip that knife across her belly? And why the hell offer to get a good defense attorney for the boy who had already been indicted for
the slaying and who, unless somebody came up with something concrete damn soon, might very well be convicted of the crime?

  Sometimes Carella wondered who was doing what to whom.

  At five o’clock that evening, he relieved Detective Hal Willis outside Fletcher’s office building downtown, and then followed Fletcher to a department store in midtown Isola. Carella did not normally go in for cops-and-robbers disguises, but Fletcher knew exactly what he looked like and so he was wearing a false mustache stuck to his upper lip with spirit gum, a wig with longer hair than his own and of a different color (a dirty blond whereas his own was brown), and a pair of sunglasses. The disguise, he was certain, would not have fooled Fletcher at close range. But he did not intend to get that close, and he felt pretty secure he would not be made. He was, in fact, more nervous about losing Fletcher than about being spotted by him.

  The store was thronged with late shoppers. This was Tuesday, December 21, four days to the big one, only three more days of shopping once the stores closed tonight at nine. Hot desperation flowed beneath the cool white plastic icicles that hung from the ceiling, panic in wonderland, the American anxiety syndrome never more evident than at Christmas, when the entire nation became a ruthless jackpot—Two Hundred Million Neediest gifting and getting, with a gigantic hangover waiting just around the new year’s corner. Gerald Fletcher shoved through the crowd of holiday shoppers like a quarterback moving the ball downfield without benefit of blockers. Carella, like a reticent tackler, followed some twenty feet behind.

  The elevator would be a danger spot. Carella saw the elevator bank at the far end of the store, and knew that Fletcher was heading directly for it, and weighed the chances of being spotted in a crowded car against the chances of losing Fletcher if he did not follow immediately on his heels. He did not know how many thousands of people were in the store at that moment; he did know that if he allowed Fletcher to get into an elevator without him, the surveillance was blown. The elevator would stop at every floor, the way most department-store elevators did, and Fletcher could get out at any one of them, then try to find him again.

  An elevator arrived. Its door opened, and Fletcher waited while the passengers disembarked and then stepped into the car together with half a dozen shoppers. Carella ungentlemanly shoved his way past a woman in a leopard coat and got into the car with his back to Fletcher, who was standing against the rear wall. The car, as Carella had surmised, stopped at every floor. He studiously kept his back to the rear of the car, moving aside whenever anyone wanted to get out. On the fifth floor, he heard Fletcher call, “Getting out, please,” and then felt him coming toward the front of the car, and saw him stepping out, and waited for the count of three before he, himself, moved forward, much to the annoyance of the elevator operator, who was starting to close the door.

  Fletcher had walked off to the left. Carella spotted him moving swiftly up one of the aisles, looking about at the signs identifying each of the various departments, and stopping at one marked INTIMATE APPAREL . Carella walked into the next aisle over, pausing to look at women’s robes and kimonos, keeping one eye on Fletcher, who was in conversation with the lingerie salesgirl. The girl nodded, smiled, and showed him what appeared to be either a slip or a short nightgown, holding the garment up against her ample bosom to model it for Fletcher, who nodded, and said something else to her. The girl disappeared under the counter, to reappear several moments later, her hands overflowing with gossamer undergarments, which she spread on the counter before Fletcher, awaiting his further choice.

  “May I help you, sir?” a voice said, and Carella turned to find a stocky woman at his elbow, gray hair, black-rimmed spectacles, wearing army shoes and a black dress with a small white collar. She looked exactly like a prison matron, right down to the suspicious smile that silently accused him of being a junkie shoplifter or worse.

  “Thank you, no,” Carella said. “I’m just looking.”

  Fletcher was making his selections, pointing now to this garment, now to another. The salesgirl wrote up the order, and Fletcher reached into his wallet to give her either cash or a credit card, it was difficult to tell from this distance. He chatted with the girl a moment longer, and then walked off toward the elevator bank.

  “Are you sure I can’t assist you?” the prison matron said, and Carella immediately answered, “I’m positive,” and moved swiftly toward the lingerie counter. Fletcher had left the counter without a package in his arms, which meant he was sending his purchases. You did not send dainty underthings to a prize fighter, and Carella wanted very much to know exactly which woman was to be the recipient of the “intimate apparel.” The salesgirl was already gathering up Fletcher’s selections—a black half-slip, a wildly patterned Pucci chemise, a peach-colored baby-doll nightgown with matching bikini panties, and four other pairs of panties, blue, black, white, and beige, each trimmed with lace around the leg-holes. The girl looked up.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, “may I help you?”

  Carella opened his wallet and produced his shield. “Police officer,” he said. “I’m interested in the order you just wrote up.”

  The girl was perhaps nineteen years old, a college girl working in the store for the Christmas rush. The most exciting thing that had happened on the job, until this very moment, was an elderly Frenchman asking her if she would like to spend the month of February on his yacht in the Mediterranean. Speechlessly, the girl studied the shield, her eyes bugging. It suddenly occurred to Carella that Fletcher might have had the purchases sent to his home address, in which case all this undercover work was merely a waste of time. Well, he thought, you win some, you lose some.

  “Are these items being sent?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” the girl said. Her eyes were still wide behind her glasses. She wet her lips and stood up a little straighter, prepared to be a perfect witness.

  “Can you tell me where?” Carella asked.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and turned the sales slip toward him. “He wanted them wrapped separately, but they’re all going to the same address. Miss Arlene Orton, 812 Crane Street, right here in the city.”

  “Thank you very much,” Carella said.

  It felt like Christmas Day already.

  Bert Kling was sitting up in bed and polishing off his dinner when Carella got to the hospital at close to 7 P . M . The men shook hands, and Carella took a seat by the bed.

  “This stuff tastes awful,” Kling said, “but I’ve been hungry as hell, ever since I got in here. I could almost eat the tray.”

  “When are you getting out?”

  “Tomorrow morning. I’ve got a broken rib, nice, huh?”

  “Very nice,” Carella said.

  “I’m lucky they didn’t mess up my insides,” Kling said. “That’s what the doctors were afraid of, internal hemorrhaging. But I’m okay, it seems. They taped up the rib, and whereas I won’t be able to do my famous trapeze act for a while, I should be able to get around.”

  “Who did it, Bert?”

  “Three locomotives, it felt like.”

  “Why?”

  “A warning to stay away from Nora Simonov.”

  “Were you seeing a lot of her?”

  “I saw her twice. Apparently someone saw me seeing her. And decided to put me in the hospital. Little did they know I’m a minion of the law, huh?”

  “Little did they know,” Carella said.

  “I’ll have to ask Nora a few questions when I get out of here. How’s the case going?”

  “I’ve located Fletcher’s girlfriend.”

  “I didn’t know he had one.”

  “Brown tailed them last night, got an address for her, but no name. Fletcher just sent her some underwear.”

  “Nice,” Kling said.

  “Very nice. I’m getting a court order to put a wire in the apartment.”

  “What do you expect them to talk about?”

  “Bloody murder maybe,” Carella said, and shrugged. Both men were silent for several moments
.

  “You know what I want for Christmas?” Kling asked suddenly.

  “What?”

  “I want to find those guys who beat me up.”

  13

  T he man who picked the lock on Arlene Orton’s front door, ten minutes after she left her apartment on Wednesday morning, was better at it than any burglar in the city, and he happened to work for the Police Department. He had the door open in three minutes flat, at which time a technician went in and wired the joint. It took the technician longer to set up his equipment than it had taken his partner to open the door, but both were artists in their own right, and the sound man had a lot more work to do.

  The telephone was the easiest of his jobs. He unscrewed the carbon mike in the mouthpiece of the phone, replaced it with his own mike, attached his wires, screwed the mouthpiece back on, and was instantly in business—or almost in business. The tap would not become operative until the telephone company supplied the police with a list of so-called bridging points that located the pairs and cables for Arlene Orton’s phone. The monitoring equipment would be hooked into these, and whenever a call went out of or came into the apartment, a recorder would automatically tape both ends of the conversation. In addition, whenever a call was made from the apartment, a dial indicator would ink out a series of dots that signified the number being called. The police listener would be monitoring the equipment from wherever the bridging point happened to be; in Arlene Orton’s case, the location index was seven blocks away.

  The technician, while he had Arlene’s phone apart, could just as easily have installed a bug that would have picked up any voices in the living room and would also have recorded Arlene’s half of any telephone conversations. He chose instead to place his bug in the bookcase on the opposite side of the room. The bug was a small FM transmitter with a battery-powered mike that needed to be changed every twenty-four hours. It operated on the same frequency as the recording machine locked into it, a machine that was voice-actuated and that would begin taping whenever anyone began speaking in the apartment. The technician would have preferred running his own wires, rather than having to worry about changing a battery every twenty-four hours. But running wires meant that you had to pick a place to run them to, usually following electrical or telephone circuits to an empty apartment or closet or what-have-you where a policeman would monitor the recording equipment. If a tap was being set up in a hotel room, it was usually possible to rent the room next door, put your listener into it, and go about your messy business without anyone being the wiser. But in this city, empty apartments were about as scarce as working telephones, and whereas the wire was being installed by court order, the technician dared not ask the building superintendent for an empty closet or a workroom in which to hide his listener. Building supers are perhaps not as garrulous as barbers, but the effectiveness of a wiretap is directly proportionate to the secrecy surrounding it, and a blabbermouth superintendent can kill an investigation more quickly than a squad of gangland goons.