by Ed McBain
“Steve’ll be in touch.”
“Because after all, Bert, if they’re over in the next state eating, what’s there to listen to in the apartment?”
“Right, I’m sure Steve’ll agree.”
“Okay. How’s everything up there?”
“Quiet.”
“Really?” Brown asked, and hung up.
15
T he detective who engaged the garage attendant in a bullshit conversation about a hit-and-run accident was Steve Carella. The lab technician who posed as a mechanic sent by the Automobile Club to charge a faulty battery was the same man who had wired Arlene Orton’s apartment.
Fletcher’s car was parked in a garage four blocks from his office, a fact determined simply by following him to work that morning of December 24. (Carella had already figured that Fletcher would park the car where he finally did park it because the pattern had been established in the earlier surveillance; a man who drove to work each day generally parked his car in the same garage or lot.)
On the sidewalk outside the garage, Carella asked invented questions about a damaged left fender and headlight on a fictitious 1968 Dodge, while upstairs the lab technician was installing his bug in Fletcher’s 1972 Oldsmobile. It would have been simpler and faster to put in a battery-powered FM transmitter similar to those he had installed in Arlene Orton’s apartment, but since batteries needed constant changing, and since access to any given automobile was infinitely more difficult than access to an apartment, he decided on wiring his bug into the car’s electrical system instead. With the hood open, with charge cables going to Fletcher’s battery from his own tow-truck battery, he busily spliced and taped, tucked and tacked. He did not want to put the bug under the dashboard (the easiest spot) because this was wintertime, and the car heater would undoubtedly be in use, and the sensitive microphone would pick up every rattle and rumble of the heater instead of the conversation in the car. So he wedged the microphone into the front cushion, between seat and back, and then ran his wires under the car rug, and up under the dashboard, and finally into the electrical system. Within the city limits, the microphone would effectively broadcast any sound in the car for a distance of little more than a block, which meant that Fletcher’s Oldsmobile would have to be closely followed by the monitoring unmarked police sedan. If Fletcher left the city, as he planned to do tonight when he took Arlene to The Chandeliers, the effective range of the transmitter on the open road would be about a quarter of a mile. In either case, the listener-pursuer had his work cut out for him.
On the sidewalk, Carella saw the technician drive out in his battered tow truck, abruptly thanked the garage attendant for his time, and headed back to the squadroom.
The holiday was starting in earnest and so, in keeping with the conventions of that festive season, the boys of the 87th Squad held their annual Christmas party at 4 P . M . that afternoon. The starting time for the party was entirely arbitrary, since it depended on when the squad’s guests began dropping in. The guests, unlike those to be found at most other Christmas parties in the city, were in the crime business, mainly because the hosts were in that same business. Most of the guests were shoplifters. Some of them were pickpockets. A few of them were drunks. One of them was a murderer.
The shoplifters had been arrested in department stores scattered throughout the precinct, the Christmas shopping season being a good time to lift merchandise, Christmas Eve being the last possible day to practice the art in stores still jammed to the rafters. The shoplifters plied their trade in various ways. A skinny lady shoplifter named Hester Brady, for example, came into the squadroom looking like a pregnant lady. Her pregnancy had been caused by stuffing some two hundred dollars worth of merchandise into the overlarge bloomers she wore under her dress, a risky procedure unless one is skilled at lift, grab, stuff, drop the skirt, move to the next aisle, advance in the space of twenty minutes from a sweet Irish virgin to a lady eight months along; such are the vagaries of birth control.
A man named Felix Hopkins dressed for his annual shopping spree in a trenchcoat lined with dozens of pockets to accommodate the small and quite expensive pieces of jewelry he lifted from counters here and there. A tall, thin distinguished-looking black man with a tidy mustache and gold-rimmed spectacles, he would generally approach the counter and ask to see a cigarette lighter, indicating the one he wanted, and then rip off five or six fountain pens while the clerk was busy getting the lighter out of the display case. His hands worked as swiftly as a magician’s; he had been at the job such a long time now that he didn’t even have to unbutton the coat anymore. And though the pockets inside the coat now contained a gold fountain pen, a platinum watch, a gold money clip, a rhinestone necklace, an assortment of matched gold earrings, a leather-bound traveling clock, and a monogrammed ring with a black onyx stone, he still protested to the arresting officer that he had bought all these items elsewhere, had thrown away the sales slips, and was taking them home to wrap them himself because he didn’t like the shitty job the stores did.
Most of the other shoplifters were junkies, desperate in their need, unmindful of store detectives and city detectives, sorely tempted by the glittering display of goods in what was surely the world’s largest marketplace, knowing only that whatever chances they took might net them a bag or two of heroin before nightfall, guarantee them a Christmas Day free from the pangs of drug-hunger and the pains of withdrawal. They were the pitiful ones, pacing the detention cage at the rear of the squadroom, ready to scream or vomit, knowing that being busted meant cold turkey for Christmas Day, with the only hope being methadone instead—maybe. They were looked upon with disdain by the haughty professionals like Hester Brady of the pregnant bloomers, Felix Hopkins of the pocketed raincoat, and Junius Cooper of the paper-stuffed packages.
Junius Cooper had figured out his dodge all by himself. He was a man of about forty-three, well-dressed, looking somewhat like a harried advertising executive who was rushing around picking up last-minute gifts his secretary had neglected to buy. He came into each department store carrying several shopping bags brimming with gift wrapped parcels. His modus operandi worked in two ways, both equally effective. In either instance, he would stand next to a man or woman who was legitimately shopping and who had momentarily put his own shopping bag on the floor or on the counter top. Junius would immediately: (a) transfer one of the legitimate shopper’s gift-wrapped packages into his own shopping bag or (b) pick up the legitimate shopper’s bag and leave his own bag behind in its place. The beautifully wrapped boxes in Junius’ bag contained nothing but last Sunday’s newspapers. His system was a bit potluckish, but it provided the advantage of being able to walk innocently past department-store cops, carrying packages actually paid for by bona-fide customers and wrapped by department-store clerks. It was almost impossible to catch Junius unless you saw him making the actual exchange. That was how he had been caught today.
This mixed bag of shoplifters mingled in the squadroom with their first cousins, the pickpockets, who similarly looked upon the frantic shopping days before Christmas as their busiest time of the year. A pickpocket enjoys nothing better than a crowd, and the approaching holiday brought the crowds out like cockroaches from under the bathroom sink: crowds in stores, crowds in the streets, crowds in the buses and subways. They worked in pairs or alone, these light-fingered artists, a nudge or a bump, an “Oh, excuse me,” and a purse delicately lifted from a handbag, a hip pocket slit with a razor blade to release the bulging wallet within. There was not a detective in the city who did not carry his wallet in the left-hand pocket of his trousers, close to his balls, rather than in the sucker hip pocket; cops are not immune to pickpockets. They were surrounded by them that afternoon, all of them innocent, naturally, all of them protesting that they knew their rights.
The drunks did not know their rights, and did not particularly care about them. They had all begun celebrating a bit early and had in their exuberance done one thing or another considered illegal in this fair c
ity—things like throwing a bus driver out onto the sidewalk when he refused to make change for a ten-dollar bill, or smashing the window of a taxicab when the driver said he couldn’t possibly make a call to Calm’s Point on the busiest day of the year, or kicking a Salvation Army lady who refused to allow her trombone to be played by a stranger, or pouring a quart of scotch into a mailbox, or urinating on the front steps of the city’s biggest cathedral. Things like that. Minor things like that.
One of the drunks had killed someone.
He was unquestionably the star of the 87th’s little Christmas celebration, a small man with vivid blue eyes and the hands of a violinist, beetling black brows, a mane of black hair, stinking of alcohol and vomit, demanding over and again to know just what the hell he was doing in a police station, even though there was blood all over his white shirt front and speckled on his pale face and staining his long thin, delicate fingers.
The person he had killed was his sixteen-year-old daughter.
He seemed to have no knowledge that she was dead. He seemed not to remember at all that he had come into his apartment at three o’clock that afternoon, little more than an hour ago, having begun his Christmas celebrating at the office shortly after lunch, and had found his daughter making love with a boy on the living-room sofa, the television casting unseen pictures into the darkened room, television voices whispering, whispering, and his daughter locked in embrace with a strange boy, skirts up over belly and thighs, buttocks pumping, ecstatic moans mingling with the whisper of television shadows, not hearing her father when he came into the room, not hearing him when he went into the kitchen and searched in the table drawer for a weapon formidable enough, punishing enough, found only a paring knife and discarded that as unequal to the task, discovered a hammer in the shoebox under the sink, hefted it on the palm of his hand, and, thin-lipped, went into the living room where his daughter still moaned beneath the weight of her young lover, and seized the boy by the shoulder and pulled him off her, and then struck her repeatedly with the hammer until the girl’s face and head were gristle and pulp and the boy screamed until he fainted from exhaustion and shock and the woman next door ran in and found her neighbor still wielding the hammer in terrible dark vengeance for the unpardonable sin his daughter had committed on the day before Christmas. “George,” she had whispered, and he had turned to her with blank eyes, and she had said, “Oh, George, what have you done?” and he had dropped the hammer, and could not remember from that moment on what he had done.
It was a nice little Christmas party the boys of the 87th had.
He had forgotten, almost, what she looked like.
She came through the hospital’s chrome and glass revolving doors, and he saw at first only a tall blond girl, full-breasted and wide-hipped, honey blond hair clipped close to her head, cornflower-blue eyes, shoving through the doors and out onto the low, flat stoop, and he reacted to her the way he might react to any beautiful stranger stepping into the crisp December twilight, and then he realized it was Cindy, and his heart lurched.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
She took his arm. They walked in silence for several moments.
“You look beautiful,” he said.
“Thank you. So do you.”
He was, in fact, quite aware of the way they looked together, and fell immediately into the Young Lovers syndrome, positive that everyone they passed on the windswept street knew instantly that they were mad about each other. Each stranger (or so he thought) cased them quickly, remarking silently on their oneness, envying their youth and strength and glowing health, longing to be these two on Christmas Eve, Cindy and Bert, American Lovers, who had met cute, and loved long, and fought hard, and parted sadly, and were now together again in the great tradition of the season, radiating love like flashing Christmas bulbs on a sixty-foot-high tree.
They found a cocktail lounge near the hospital, one they had never been to before, either together or separately, Kling sensing that a “first” was necessary to their rediscovery of each other. They sat at a small round table in a corner of the room. The crowd noises were comforting. He suspected an English pub might be like this on Christmas Eve, the voice cadences lulling and soft, the room itself warm and protective, a good place for nurturing a love that had almost died and was now about to redeclare itself.
“Where’s my present?” he said, and grinned in mock, evil greediness.
She reached behind her to where she had hung her coat on a wall peg, and dug into the pocket, and placed a small package in the exact center of the table. The package was wrapped in bright blue paper and tied with a green ribbon and bow. He felt a little embarrassed; he always did when receiving a gift. He went into the pocket of his own coat, and placed his gift on the table beside hers, a slightly larger package wrapped in jingle-bells paper, red and gold, no bow.
“So,” she said.
“So,” he said.
“Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas.”
They hesitated. They looked at each other. They both smiled.
“You first,” he said.
“All right.”
She slipped her fingernail under the Scotch Tape and broke open the wrapping without tearing the paper, and then eased the box out, and moved the wrapping aside, intact, and centered the box before her, and opened its lid. He had bought her a plump gold heart, seemingly bursting with an inner life of its own, the antiqued gold chain a tether that kept it from ballooning ecstatically into space. She looked at the heart, and then glanced quickly into his expectant face and nodded briefly and said, “Thank you, it’s beautiful.”
“It’s not Valentine’s Day . . .”
“Yes.” She was still nodding. She was looking down at the heart again, and nodding.
“But I thought . . .” He shrugged.
“Yes, it’s beautiful,” she said again. “Thank you, Bert.”
“Well,” he said, and shrugged again, feeling vaguely uncomfortable and suspecting it was because he hated the ritual of opening presents. He ripped off the bow on her gift, tore open the paper, and lifted the lid off the tiny box. She had bought him a gold tie-tack in the form of miniature handcuffs, and he read meaning into the gift immediately, significance beyond the fact that he was a cop whose tools of the trade included real handcuffs hanging from his belt. His gift had told her something about the way he felt, and he was certain that her gift was telling him the very same thing—they were together again, she was binding herself to him again.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Do you like it, Bert?”
“I love it.”
“I thought . . .”
“Yes, I love it.”
“Good.”
They had not yet ordered drinks. Kling signaled for the waiter, and they sat in curious silence until he came to the table. The waiter left, and the silence lengthened, and it was then that Kling began to suspect something was wrong, something was terribly wrong. She had closed the lid on his gift, and was staring at the closed box.
“What is it?” Kling asked.
“Bert . . .”
“Tell me, Cindy.”
“I didn’t come here to . . .”
He knew already, there was no need for her to elaborate. He knew, and the noises of the room were suddenly too loud, the room itself too hot.
“Bert, I’m going to marry him,” she said.
“I see.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no,” he said. “No, Cindy, please.”
“Bert, what you and I had together was very good . . .”
“I know that, honey.”
“And I just couldn’t end it the way . . . the way we were ending it. I had to see you again, and tell you how much you’d meant to me. I had to be sure you knew that.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Bert?”
“Yes, Cindy. Okay,” he said. He smiled and touched her hand reassuringly. “Okay,” he said again.
They spent a half hour together, drinking only the single round, and then they went out into the cold, and they shook hands briefly, and Cindy said, “Good-bye, Bert,” and he said, “Good-bye, Cindy,” and they walked off in opposite directions.
Peter Brice lived on the third floor of a brownstone on the city’s South Side. Kling reached the building at a little past six-thirty, went upstairs, listened outside the door for several moments, drew his service revolver, and knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again, waited, holstered his revolver, and was starting down the hall when a door at the opposite end opened. A blond-headed kid of about eight looked into the hallway and said, “Oh.”
“Hello,” Kling said, and started down the steps.
“I thought it might be Santa Claus,” the kid said.
“Little early,” Kling said over his shoulder.
“What time does he come?” the kid asked.
“After midnight.”
“When’s that?” the kid shouted after him.
“Later,” Kling shouted back, and went down to the ground floor. He found the super’s door alongside the stairwell, near where the garbage cans were stacked for the night. He knocked on the door and waited. A black man wearing a red flannel robe opened the door and peered into the dim hallway.
“Who is it?” he said, squinting up into Kling’s face.
“Police officer,” Kling said. “I’m looking for a man named Peter Brice. Know where I can find him?”
“Third-floor front,” the super said. “Don’t do no shootin’ in the building.”
“He’s not home,” Kling said. “Got any idea where he might be?”
“He hangs out on the corner sometimes.”
“What corner?”
“Barbecue joint on the corner. Brice’s brother works there.”
“Up the street here?”
“Yeah,” the super said. “What’d he do?”
“Routine investigation,” Kling answered. “Thanks a lot.”
The streets were dark. Last-minute shoppers, afternoon party-goers, clerks and shopgirls, workingmen and housewives, all of whom had been rushing toward tomorrow since the day after Thanksgiving, now moved homeward to embrace it, put the final fillip on the tree, drink a bit of nog, spend the last quiet hours in peaceful contemplation before the onslaught of relatives and friends in the morning, the attendant frenzied business of gifting and getting. A sense of serenity was in the air. This is what Christmas is all about, Kling thought, this peaceful time of quiet footfalls, and suddenly wondered why the day before Christmas had somehow become more meaningful to him than Christmas Day itself.