Killer's Wedge

by McBain, Ed

  "I ask you a question," Angelica said.

  "What was the question?"

  "How you like to see the res' of me?"

  "It might be nice," Hawes said.

  His eyes were glued to the telephone. It seemed to him that during the course of the day, the telephone usually rang with malicious insistence every thirty seconds.

  Someone was always calling in to report a mugging or a beating or a knifing or a robbery or a burglary or any one of a thousand offenses committed daily in the 87th. So why didn't it ring now? Who had declared the holiday on crime? We can't stand a holiday right now-not with Steve waiting to walk into a booby trap, not with Miscolo bleeding from a hole the size of my head, not with that bitch sitting with her bottle of nitro and her neat little .38.

  "It be dam' nice," Angelica said, "an' that's no bull. You see my bosom?"

  "I see it."

  Come on, phone! He could hear Angelica's words, and they drummed in his ears, but his ears were straining for another sound, the shrill sound of the telephone, and the squad room seemed to be an empty vacuum waiting only for that single sound.

  "Iss my real bosom," she said.

  "No bra. I got no bra on. You believe it?"

  "I believe it."

  "I show you."

  "You don't have to. I believe it."

  "So how 'bout it?"

  "How about what?"

  "You talk to the others, you let me go.

  Then you come see me later, hah?"

  Hawes shook his head.

  "No dice."

  "Why not? Angelica some piece," Angelica said.

  Hawes nodded.

  "Angelica some piece," he agreed.

  "So?"

  "Number one. You see that lady sitting over there?"

  "She's not letting anyone out of here, some piece or not. Understand?"

  "Si. I mean when she iss gone."

  "If she is ever gone," Hawes said.

  "And then I couldn't let you go anyway because that man standing over there near the bulletin board is thee lieutenant in charge of this squad. And if I let you go, he might fire me or send me to prison-or even shoot me."

  Angelica nodded.

  "It be worth it," she said.

  "Believe me. Angelica some stuff, believe me."

  "I believe you," Hawes said.

  He did not want to leave the girl because he had to be in her vicinity when the telephone rang, if it rang, wouldn't the damn thing ever ring? At the same time, he sensed that their conversation had reached a dead end, had come as far as it could possibly go. Stalling for time, he asked a timeless question.

  "How'd you get to be a hooker, Angelica?"

  "I no' hooker," she said.

  "Really."

  "Now, Angelica," he said chidingly.

  "Well, sometimes," she said.

  "But only to buy pretty clothes. I dress pretty, no?"

  "Yes. Oh, yes."

  "Listen, you come see me, hab? We make it."

  "Honey," he said, "where you're going, they don't make anything but license plates."

  "What?" she said, and the telephone rang.

  The sound startled Hawes. He almost turned automatically to reach for the wall, and then he remembered that he had to wait until Virginia picked up the phone. He saw Byrnes start across toward the instrument on the desk nearest him. He saw Byrnes waiting for Virginia's nod before he picked up the receiver.

  The phone kept shrilling into the squad room

  Virginia shifted the gun to her left hand.

  With her right hand, she picked up the receiver and nodded toward Byrnes. Byrnes lifted his phone.

  "Eighty-seventh Squad, Lieutenant Byrnes."

  "Well, well, how come they've got the big cheese answering telephones?" the voice said.

  Hawes edged toward the wall, backing toward it. Virginia Dodge was still partially facing him, so that he could not raise his hand. Then, slowly, she swiveled in the chair so that her back was to him. Swiftly, Hawes lifted his hand.

  "Who is this?" Byrnes asked into the mouthpiece.

  "This is Sam Grossman at the lab. Who the hell did you think it was?"

  The thermostat was secured tightly to the wall. Hawes grasped it in one hand, and with a quick snap of his wrist raised the setting to its outermost reading.

  On one of the mildest days in October, the temperature in the squad room was now set for ninety-eight degrees.

  CHAPTER 9

  Sam Grossman was a detective, and a lieutenant, and a very thorough man." A less thorough man in charge of a police laboratory might have allowed his call to wait until the morning. It was, after all, three minutes to six, and Grossman did have a family waiting home to begin dinner. But Sam Grossman believed in laboratory work, and he believed in crime detection, and he believed that one went hand in hand with the other. Sam would never miss the opportunity to prove to his colleagues who did the actual legwork that the laboratory was a vital part of detection, and that they should use the lab as often as possible.

  "The M.E. gave us a look at the corpse, Pete," he said into the phone now.

  "What corpse?"

  "The old man. Jefferson Scott."

  "Oh, yes."

  "Carella working on that one?" Grossman said.

  "Yes."

  Byrnes glanced across to Virginia Dodge.

  She had sat up straighter in her chair at mention of Carella's name, and now she was listening intently to the conversation.

  "He's a good man," Grossman said.

  "Is he out there at the Scott house now?"

  "I don't know where he is," Byrnes said.

  "He might be. Why?"

  "Well, if he is, it might be a good idea to get in touch with him."

  "Why, Sam?"

  "The M.E. set the cause of death as strangulation. You familiar with the case, Pete?"

  "I've read Carella~s report."

  "Yeah, well, the old guy was found hanging. No broken neck or anything like that. Strangulation. Looked like suicide.

  Remember that Hemandez case a while back-where it looked like the kid had hanged himself, but it was really an overdose of heroin? Remember that one?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, we haven't got exactly the same thing here. This guy died of strangulation, all right" "Yes?"

  "But he wasn't strangled by the rope. He didn't hang himself" "What happened then?"

  "We've discussed this thoroughly with the MR, Pete, and we're pretty sure we're right. The bruises on the victim's throat indicate that he was strangled manually before that rope was placed around his throat.

  There are rope bruises and burns, too, but the majority of the bruises were left by human hands. We tried to get prints from the skin, but it didn't work. We're not always successful in getting prints from the skin of ..

  "Then you think Scott was murdered?"

  "Yeah," Grossman said flatly.

  "We also did some tests on that rope he was hanged with. Same as that Hernandez kid. The direction of the fibers on the rope show that he didn't jump down from that stool, the way it looked. He was hauled up. It's a homicide, Pete. No question about it."

  "Mmm. Well, thanks a lot, Sam."

  "The thing is," Grossman said, "if you think Carella's over at that Scott house, I'd contact him right away."

  "I don't know if he's there," Byrnes said.

  "Well, if he is. Because if he is, one of the people in that house is a murderer with pretty big hands. And I like Steve Carella."

  David Scott sat with his hands clenched in his lap. His hands were square and flat and covered with light bronze fuzz that curled along their backs. The same blondish bronze hair decorated the top of David's crewcut head.

  Behind him, far out on the river, the tugboats pushed their mournful night sound onto the air.

  It was 6:10 P.M.

  Before him sat Detective Steve Carella.

  "Ever argue with the old man?" Carella asked.

  "Why?" David said.
r />   "I'd like to know."

  "Christine has already told me a little about you and your ideas, Mr. Carella."

  "Has she?"

  "Yes. My wife and I keep no secrets from each other. She told me your mind is working along certain channels which I, for one, find pretty damn objectionable."

  "Well, I'm awfully sorry you find them objectionable, Mr. Scott. Do you find homicide objectionable, too?"

  "That's exactly what I meant, Mr.

  Carella. And I'd like to tell you this. We're the Scott family. We're not some slum foreigners living in a crawly tenement on Culver Avenue. We're the Scotts. And I don't have to sit here and listen to idle accusations from you because the Scotts have lawyers to take care of tin-horn detectives. So if you don't mind, I'd like to call one of those lawyers right now and "Sit down, Mr. Scott!" Carella barked.

  "Sit down, and get off that goddamn high horse! Because if you feel like calling one of those Scott lawyers you mentioned, you can damn well do it from the crawly squad room of the 87th Precinct, which is where I'll take you and your wife and your brothers and anybody else who was in this house when the old man allegedly hanged himself."

  "You can't ..

  "I can, and I will! Now sit down."

  "I

  "Sit down!"

  David Scott sat.

  "That's better. I'm not saying your father didn't hang himself, Mr. Scott. Maybe he did. Suicides don't always leave notes, so maybe your father is a legitimate suicide.

  But from what I've been able to gather from Roger-"

  "Roger is a servant who-" "Roger told me that your father was a very jolly man who was interested in life and living. He had not seemed depressed over the past few weeks, and in fact he's very rarely known him to be depressed.

  Your father was a wealthy man with a giant corporation going for him, and holdings in sixteen of the forty-eight states. He's been a widower for twelve years, so we can't assume his suicide was caused through remorse for his dead wife. In short, he seemed to be a happy man with everything in the world to live for. Now suppose you tell me why a man like that would want to take his own life."

  "I'm sure I don't know. Father wasn't much in the habit of confiding in me."

  "No? You never talked to him?"

  "Yes, of course I talked to him. But never intimately. Father was a cold person. Very difficult to know."

  "Did you like him?"

  "I loved him! He's my father, for God's sake."

  "Which might, in modern psychiatric terms, be a good reason for hating him."

  "I've been seeing a lay analyst for three years, Mr. Car eLla Pm well-acquainted with psychology. But I did not hate my father. And I certainly had nothing to do with his death."

  "Getting back ... Did you ever quarrel with him?"

  "Yes. Of course. Fathers and sons always have little squabbles, don't they?"

  "Ever been up in that den of his?"

  "Yes."

  "Were you up there yesterday afternoon?"

  "Not at all?"

  "No. Not until we discovered the door was locked," "Who discovered that?"

  "Alan. He went up to get the old man, and the old man didn't answer. He tried the door, and it was locked. Then he called the rest of us."

  "How did he know it was locked?"

  "It wouldn't budge. Not an inch. How else would we know it was locked? We all tried to open it, and it wouldn't move. Then we all tried together, and it still wouldn't move. Obviously, it was locked from the inside. And obviously, if you're hinting-with about the subtlety of a steam locomotive-at foul play, I should think you'd; take that locked door into consideration. It would have been impossible for anyone to have killed Father, got out of the room, and then locked the door from the outside. Absolutely impossible."

  "How do you know that?"

  "The door fits snugly into the Iamb. There is hardly any tolerance between door and jamb, Mr. Carella."

  "You seem to have made a study of the problem."

  "Only after it was discovered that Father was dead. I'll admit it crossed my mind that someone might have killed him. Not anyone in the family, you understand, but perhaps someone. And then I realized no one could have. Because the door could not have been locked from outside that room. It had to be locked from within, and there was no one in the room but Father. So that lets out murder."

  "Mr. Scott," Carella said, "would the tolerance between door and door jamb permit the pass~ige of a piece of strong cotton thread?"

  "Why do you ask?"

  "A piece of thread looped over the handle of the slip bolt and then pulled into the crack where door met jamb could be maneuvered from the outside so that the bolt could be pulled shut and then the thread removed. All from the outside."

  "That would have been impossible with this door and this jamb. Surely an observant detective such as you must have noticed."

  "Noticed what?"

  "There is a strong draft rushing through that upstairs corridor, coming from the window at the end of the hail. The den was rather uncomfortable when Father first had it finished. And so he storm proofed the door to the den in much the same way one would storm proof an exterior door."

  "And what way is that?"

  "A metal runner on the door and a metal lip on the door jamn. Runner fits into lip to seal the door snugly."

  "Not so snugly, I'll bet, that a piece of cotton thread couldn't pass through it."

  "Possibly not, Mr. Carella. But that's not my point."

  "What is your point?"

  "The weatherproofing made the door difficult to close. It was put on later, you see, after Father discovered ~how chilly the room was. The lock was put on first."

  "So?"

  "So, in order to bolt that door, you had to pull on it with all your weight-and Father was a heavy man-and then shove the bolt across, practically force it into the bracket set in the jamb. I know. I've been in the den many times when Father locked the door.

  Do you see what I'm driving at?"

  "Yes. If the bolt needed so much force, it would have been impossible to simply slide it closed from the outside using a piece of thread. I see what you mean."

  "So let's assume I hated my father, if you will-which I didn't. Let's assume I was hungry for my share of the estate-which I wasn't. Let's assumed we all wanted him dead-which we didn't The locked door still remains. The locked door with a slip bolt that needed all of a man's strength to close. No outside thread locked that door, Mr. Carella. It was locked from the inside.

  And knowing this to be the case, even you must admit that the only possible conclusion to be drawn is that my father committed suicide."

  Carella sighed heavily.

  The stores had closed at six, and Teddy Carella walked the streets now, debating whether or not she should stop for a cup of coffee. If she did, she might ruin her appetite. Steve had conjured visions of a sumptuous feast, and she was supposed to meet him at the squad at seven, and she certainly didn't want to spoil his plans simply be-cause she desired a cup of coffee.

  Besides, it was such a beautifully mild day, so marvelous for October.

  October, she supposed, was her favorite month, even when the weather was behaving as seasonally as it should. It was the one month which really proviclen a feast for the eye, there I'm being prejudiced, I'm eliminating my worthless ears-that sounds Oriental-in favor of my devouring eyes, well, I'm prejudiced, sue me.

  I wonder how I'll look in maternity clothes.

  Horrible.

  Fat.

  Will Steve love me?

  Of course he'll love me, what a silly thing to wonder. Just because a woman swells up like a balloon and loses her waistline and develops sagging breasts and a big wide bottom and Oh my God, he'll hate me!

  No. No, he'll love me. Love is enduring and love is good and love is would I love him if he suddenly weighed eight thousand pounds?

  Yes, I would love him if he suddenly weighed ten thousand pounds. But he likes my figure and maybe.
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