Til Death

by Ed McBain

  “Damnit,” Christine said again.

  “Steve,” Hawes said into the phone, “we’ll come.”

  “Damnit,” Christine said.

  “Where do you want us to meet you?”

  “Can you come over to my place at about noon?”

  “Sure. What’s the address?”

  “837 Dartmouth. In Riverhead.”

  “We’ll be there.”

  “Thanks a lot, Cotton.”

  “Send flowers to my funeral,” Hawes said, and he hung up.

  Christine stood fuming by the telephone, her arms crossed over her breasts. Hawes reached for her and she said, “Don’t touch me, Mr. Hawes.”

  “Honey…”

  “Don’t honey me.”

  “Christine, honey, he’s in a jam.”

  “You promised we would go on this boat ride. I made the arrangements three weeks ago. Now—”

  “This is something I couldn’t avoid. Look, Carella happens to be a friend of mine. And he needs help.”

  “And what am I?”

  “The girl I love,” Hawes said. He took her into his arms.

  “Sure,” Christine answered coldly.

  “You know I love you.” He kissed the tip of her nose.

  “Sure. You love me, all right. I’m just the merry widow, to you. I’m just the girl you…”

  “You’re a very lovely widow.”

  “…picked up in a bookshop.”

  “It’s a very lovely bookshop,” Hawes said, and he kissed the top of her head. “You’ve got nice soft hair.”

  “I’m not quite as alone in the world as you may think,” Christine said, her arms still folded across her breasts. “I could have got a hundred men to take me on this boat ride.”

  “I know,” he said, and he kissed her earlobe.

  “You louse,” she said. “It just happens that I love you.”

  “I know.” He kissed her neck.

  “Stop that.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  “Why?”

  “Stop it,” she said, but her voice was gentler, and her arms were beginning to relax. “We have to go to your friend’s house, don’t we?”

  “Not until noon.”

  Christine was silent. “I do love you,” she said.

  “And I love you.”

  “I’ll bet you do. I’ll just bet you—”

  “Shhh, shhh,” he said, and he sought her mouth, and she brought her arms up around his neck. He clung to her, his big hands twisting in the long blonde hair. He kissed her again, and she buried her face in his shoulder, and he said, “Come. Come with me.”

  “Your friend. There isn’t time…”

  “There’s time.”

  “We have to…”

  “There’s time.”

  “But won’t we…?”

  “There’s time,” he said gently.

  Bert Kling was reading the Sunday comics when Carella’s call came. He took a last wistful look at Dick Tracy’s wrist radio and then went to answer the phone.

  “Bert Kling,” he said.

  “Hi, Bert. This is Steve.”

  “Uh-oh,” Kling said immediately.

  “You busy?”

  “I won’t answer any leading questions. What happened? What do you want?”

  “Don’t be so brusque. Brusqueness is not flattering to youth.”

  “Do I have to go to the squad?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  “My sister’s getting married this afternoon. The groom received what could amount to a threatening note.”

  “Yeah? Why doesn’t he call the police?”

  “He did. And now I’m calling you. Feel like going to a wedding?”

  “When? What time?”

  “Can you be here at twelve?”

  “I’ve got to pick up Claire at nine tonight. There’s a movie she wants to see.”

  “Okay.”

  “Where are you now?” Kling asked.

  “Home. 837 Dartmouth. In Riverhead. Can you be here by noon?”

  “Yeah. I’ll see you.”

  “Bert?”

  “What?”

  “Bring your gun.”

  “Okay,” Kling said, and he hung up. He walked back to the newspaper. He was a tall blond man of twenty-five years, and he looked younger in his undershorts because his legs were covered with a light blond fuzz. He curled up in the armchair, studying the wrist radio design again, and then he decided to call Claire. He went to the telephone and dialed her number.

  “Claire,” he said, “this is Bert.”

  “Hello, lover.”

  “I’m going to a wedding this afternoon.”

  “Not your own, I hope.”

  “No. Steve’s sister. You want to come?”

  “I can’t. I told you that I’ve got to drive my father out to the cemetery.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right. Okay, I’ll see you at nine then, okay?”

  “Right. This movie’s at a drive-in. Is that all right?”

  “That’s fine. We can neck if it gets dull.”

  “We can neck even if it doesn’t get dull.”

  “What’s the picture anyway?”

  “It’s an old one,” Claire said, “but I think you’ll enjoy it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Dragnet,” she answered.

  The packet from the Bureau of Criminal Identification arrived at the squadroom at 10:37 A.M.

  Meyer Meyer was, in truth, surprised to see it. The chances of this Marty Whatever-His-Name-Was having a record were pretty slim to begin with. Add to that the possibility of his having a record in this city, and the chances were beyond the realm of plausibility. But record he had, and the record was in the voluminous files of the IB, and now a photostated copy of the file rested on Meyer’s desk, and he leafed through it leisurely.

  Marty Sokolin was not a big-time thief. He wasn’t even, by any police standards, a small-time thief. He was a man who’d got into trouble once. His record happened to be in the IB’s files because he’d got into trouble in this city while on vacation from California.

  It was perhaps significant that Marty Sokolin had not been discharged from the Army because of frostbite as Tommy Giordano had supposed. True enough, he had been medically discharged. But he’d been released to a mental hospital in Pasadena, California, as a neurasthenic patient.

  Meyer Meyer knew nothing of Tommy’s frostbite supposition. He knew, however, that neurasthenia was the modern psychiatric term for what, during World War I, had been called plain and simple “shell shock.” A psychiatrist probably would have defined it as nervous debility or exhaustion, as from overwork or prolonged mental strain. Meyer simply called it “shell shock” and noted that Sokolin had been released from the hospital as fit to enter society in the summer of 1956.

  He did not have his brush with the law until almost two years later in March of 1958. He’d been working, at the time, as a salesman for a paint company in San Francisco. He’d come East for a sales convention and had begun drinking with a stranger in a midtown bar. At some point during the evening, the conversation had swung around to the Korean War. The stranger had admitted that he’d been 4-F and rather glad of it. Because of his disability, a slight heart murmur, he’d been able to make fantastic advances in his company while men of his own age were away fighting.

  Sokolin had at first reacted to the man’s confession with slightly drunken solemnity bordering on the maudlin. One of his best friends, he informed the stranger, had been killed in Korea because another soldier had failed to do his duty. The stranger sympathized, but his sympathy must have sounded hollow and insincere to Sokolin. Before the stranger fully realized what was happening, Sokolin was hurling curses at him for being a deserter and a shirker and another son of a bitch who didn’t do his duty when he saw it. The stranger tried to get away, but Sokolin’s ire mounted irrationally until finally he smashed a beer mug on the edge of the bar and c
ame at the stranger with the broken shard clutched in his fist.

  He did not kill the surprised 4-Fer, but he did manage to cut him badly. And perhaps the attack would have been considered second-degree assault had not Sokolin accompanied it with eight words spoken clearly and distinctly in the presence of the halfdozen witnesses lining the bar.

  Those words were: “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch!”

  And so the assault had leaped into the rarefied atmosphere bounded by the words “with an intent to kill a human being,” and the indictment read first-degree, and the maximum penalty for violation of Section 240 of the Penal Law was ten years in prison as opposed to the maximum five years for the second-degree crime.

  Sokolin had come off pretty well. He was a war veteran, and this was a first offense. It was, nonetheless, first-degree assault and the judge could not let him off with a fine and a fatherly pat on the head. He was found guilty and sentenced to two years in Castleview Prison upstate. He’d been an ideal prisoner. He’d applied for a parole after serving a year of his term, and the parole had been granted as soon as a firm job offer was presented to the board. He had been released from Castleview two months ago— on April 3.

  Meyer Meyer pulled the phone to him and dialed Carella’s home number. Carella answered the phone on the third ring.

  “I’ve got that stuff you wanted on Sokolin,” Meyer said. “Did that patrolman show up for the note yet?”

  “About a half-hour ago,” Carella said.

  “Well, he’s not back here yet. You’re leaving about noon, huh?”

  “About one o’clock, actually.”

  “Where can I reach you if the lab comes up with something?”

  “The wedding’s at three at the Church of the Sacred Heart at the intersection of Gage and Ash in Riverhead. The reception starts at five at my mother’s house. It’s gonna be an outdoor thing.”

  “What’s the address there?”

  “831 Charles Avenue.”

  “Okay. You want this stuff on Sokolin?”

  “Give it to me.”

  Meyer gave it to him.

  When he’d finished talking, Carella said, “So he’s on parole now, huh? Went back to California with a firm job offer.”

  “No, Steve. I didn’t say that.”

  “Then where is he?”

  “Right here. The job offer came from this city.”

  By one-thirty that bright Sunday afternoon, Antonio Carella was ready to shoot his wife, strangle his son, disown his daughter, and call off the whole damn wedding.

  To begin with, Tony was paying for the wedding. This was the first time—and the last time, thank God—a daughter of his was getting married. When Steve married Teddy, it was her parents who had paid for the festivities. Not so this time. This time, Tony was shelling out, and he was discovering that the wedding would cost, at a conservative estimate, just about half what he earned in an entire year at his bakery.

  The biggest of the thieves, and he had half a mind to ask Steve to arrest the crooks, were the men who called themselves Weddings-Fetes, Incorporated. They had arrived at the Charles Avenue address at 9:00 A.M. that morning (after Tony had stayed up all night in the bakery getting his Sunday morning breads baked) and proceeded to turn the Carella backyard into a shambles. The Carella house in Riverhead was a small one, but the land on which it rested was possibly the largest plot on the street, stretching back from the house in a long rectangle that almost reached the next block. Tony was very proud of his land. His back yard boasted a grape arbor that rivaled any to be found in his home town of Marsala. He had planted fig trees, too, nourished them with loving care, pruned them in the summer, wrapped them with protective tarpaulin in the winter. And now these crooks, these brigandi, were trampling over his lawn with their tables and their ridiculous flags and flower canopies and…

  “Louisa!” he had screamed to his wife. “Why inna hell we can’t hire a hall? Why inna hell we have to have a outdoor wedding! A hall was good enough for me, an’ good enough for you, an’ good enough for my son, but Angela has to have a outdoor wedding! So those crooks can tear up my lawn an’ ruin my grapes an’ my figs! Pazzo! E proprio pazzo!”

  “Shut up,” Louisa Carella said kindly. “You’ll wake up the whole house.”

  “The whole house is wake up already!” Tony said. “Besides, there’s nobody in the whole house but me, you, an’ Angela, an’ she’s getting married today an’ she’s not sleeping, anyway!”

  “The caterers will hear you,” Louisa said.

  “For what I’m paying them, they’re entitled to hear,” Tony replied, and grumblingly he had got out of bed and gone down to the back yard to supervise the setting of the tables and the construction of the bridal arbors and bandstand and dance floor. The caterers, he discovered, were very fancy people. Not only were they turning his back yard into a Hollywood set for Father of the Bride (starring me, Antonio Carella, he thought sourly) but they were also building a twelve-foot mermaid, the length of the young fish-woman’s body to be sculpted from ice, a similarly sculpted ice tub to rest beneath her and contain bottles of champagne for any thirsty guests. Tony prayed to God the sun would not get too strong. He visualized the fish-woman melting into the tub, the champagne beginning to taste like lukewarm ginger ale.

  At one o’clock, his son and daughter-in-law arrived. Now Steve was a boy Tony could usually count on. Before Steve had gone into the Army, he used to work nights at the bakery, even though he was going to college during the day. Steve was a boy who could be trusted. He was a boy a father could count on. So today—San Giacinto di California!—even Steve had turned on him. Today, of all days, with those thieving Weddings-Fetes, Incorporated, tearing up the lawn, with Angela running around like a chicken senza capo, with the world of Antonio Carella slowly collapsing around him, his own true son Steve had arrived at the house with three additional guests! Not that Tony minded the extra expense. No, that didn’t matter to him at all. So he would work an additional four months in the bakery to make up the money. But it was having to explain to these Incorporateds that there would be three more people and that they would have to arrange them at different tables. Steve was insistent on that. No, he did not want to sit with his friends. He wanted one here, and one here, and himself over there! Pazzo! His own son, as crazy as all the others.

  And the tall one, the redheaded one with the white streak in his hair—sangue della maruzza! He was enough to frighten all the bridesmaids in Riverhead. And Tony was sure he had seen a gun under the redhead’s coat when he stooped down to tie his shoe. A big black revolver sticking out of a shoulder holster. All right, it was a good thing for his son to be a cop, but did his friends have to carry weapons to a peaceful Christian wedding?

  And then Angela had started. At one-fifteen, exactly one hour and forty-five minutes before the wedding, she had begun to cry as if the world was trying to rape her. Louisa had come running out back, wringing her hands.

  “Stevie,” she said, “go up to her. Tell her it’ll be all right, will you? Go. Go to your sister.”

  Tony had watched his son go upstairs. That wailing from the upper-story bedroom window had not ceased. Tony sat with his daughter-in-law Teddy—com’é grande, he thought, povera Theodora!—and the three strangers, Mr. Hawes, Mr. Kling, and Miss Maxwell, drinking wine and ready to shoot his wife, strangle his son, disown his daughter, and call off the whole damn wedding!

  He fumed and fretted until Teddy patted his hand. And then he smiled at her, and nodded his head, and rested his hands on his paunch and hoped—please, dear God!—that everything would turn out all right and that somehow he, Antonio Carella, would survive the day.

  Standing in the corridor outside Angela’s bedroom, Carella could hear his sister sobbing beyond the door. He knocked gently and then waited.

  “Who is it?” Angela said, her voice breaking.

  “Me. Steve.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Come on, Slip, open up.”


  “Go away, Steve.”

  “You can’t chase me away. I’m a police officer investigating a disturbance of the peace.” He wasn’t quite sure, but he thought he heard his sister stifle a laugh on the other side of the door. “Slip?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Do I have to kick it in?”

  “Oh, wait a minute,” Angela said. He heard footsteps approaching the door. The bolt was slipped, but Angela did not open the door for him. He heard her footsteps retreating and then the bedsprings creaking as she hurled herself down. He eased the door open and entered the room. Angela was lying full length on the bed, her face buried in the pillow. She wore a full white slip and her brown hair tumbled to her shoulders in a riot of disarray. Her slip had pulled back to reveal a blue garter taut around her nylon.

  “Pull down your dress,” Carella said. “Your behind is showing.”

  “It’s not a dress,” Angela said poutingly. “It’s a slip. And who asked you to look?” but she pulled it down over her leg instantly.

  Carella sat on the edge of the bed. “What’s the trouble?”

  “There’s no trouble.” She paused. “There’s no trouble at all.” And then she sat up suddenly, turning her brown eyes toward her brother, surprisingly Oriental eyes in a high-cheekboned face, the face a refinement of Carella’s, pretty with an exotic tint that spoke of Arabian visits to the island of Sicily in the far distant past. “I don’t want to marry him,” she said. She paused. “That’s the trouble.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t love him.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Carella said.

  “I don’t like swearing, Steve. You know that. I never could stand swearing, even when we were kids. You used to swear on purpose, just to annoy me. That, and calling me ‘Slip.’”

  “You started the ‘slip’ business,” Carella said.

  “I did not,” Angela told him. “You did. Because you were mean and rotten.”

  “I was telling you the truth,” Carella said.

  “It’s not nice to tell a thirteen-year-old girl that she’s not really a girl because she still wears cotton slips.”

  “I was helping you on the road to maturity. You asked Mama to buy you some nylon slips after that, didn’t you?”