by McBain, Ed
Crowbar action snapped lock from doorjamb, enabled men to force door open, cut down Scott from where he was hanging.
Those are the facts, ma'm.
Now if Joe Friday were here But he ain't.
There is only me. Steve Carella. And I am good and confused.
Let me see, let me see.
He walked over to the door and studied the bolt hanging loose from one screw. The doorjamb was badly marked; that crowbar had certainly done an excellent job. Old Roger had swept up enough splinters to start a toothpick factory. Carella closed the door. Sure enough, the door was weatherstripped, and, sure enough, you had to slam the damn thing and then pull on it hard in order to close it properly. He opened the door out into the corridor again, stepped outside, and closed it behind him.
Then he stooped down.
There was a half-inch of space between the bottom of the door and the sill of the room. Carella stuck his fingers under the door. He could feel the metal runner of the weatherstripping, starting about a quarter inch back from the corridor side of the door. He opened the door again. The weatherstripping lip was set into the door sill, slightly farther back, to catch the runner securely when the door was closed.
Again, he closed the door. And again he ran his fingers under the bottom edge, between door and sill. The metal seemed to be dented in one spot, but of course he couldn't be certain. Still, there seemed to be-to the touch at least-a sharp narrow valley at one point. He slid his fingers along the metal, smootp, smooth, smooth, and there! There it was. The sudden small dip.
"Lose something?" the voice behind him said.
Carella turned. Mark Scott was a tall man even if you were standing beside him.
When you were crouched on the floor as Carella was, Mark looked enormous. He was as blond as his brother David, broader in the shoulders, with the same huge bone structure. His face, in fact, despite three covering layers of skin, seemed to have been chiseled from raw bone. He -had a flat, hard fore head, and a flat, hard nose. His cheekbones sloped sharply downward to break the otherwise flat regularity of his features. His mouth was full, the lips thick. His eyes were gray, but in the dimness of the corridor, they were almost no-color, almost a colorless opaqueness beneath the bushy blond brows.
Carella got to his feet and dusted off his trouser knees.
"No," he said pleasantly.
"I didn't lose anything. But in a sense, I'm trying to find something."
"And what might that be?" Mark said, smiling.
"Oh, I don't know. A way into this room, I suppose."
"Under the door?" Mark asked, the smile still on his mouth.
"Have to be awfully thin, don't you think?"
"Sure, sure," Carella said. He opened the door again and stepped into the den. Mark followed behind him Carella tapped the hanging slip bolt with his finger setting it swinging.
"I understand this bolt was pretty hard ~ to close," he said.
"That right?"
"Yes. One generally had to pull in on the door and ~ then ram the bolt across with all one's strength. I spoke to Father about changing it, but he said it suited him fine.
Provided the exercise which was lacking in his life." Mark smiled again. His smile was a charming one, a sudden parting of the thick lips over dazzlingly white teeth.
"Just how hard did you have to pull on the door?" Carella asked.
"I beg your pardon?"
"When slipping the bolt."
"Oh. Very hard."
"Do you imagine your father's weight pulling against the doorknob whould have provided the pressure necessary to slip the bolt?"
"To hold the door shut, perhaps yes. But it took quite a bit of pressure to push the bolt across. You are thinking, are you not, of someone having managed it from the outside? With string or something?"
Carella sighed.
"Yeah, I was sort of thinking along those lines, yeah."
"Impossible. Ask any of my brothers.
Ask Christine. Ask Roger. That lock was impossible. Father should have had it changed, really. We discussed it many times."
"Ever argue about it?"
"With Father? Gracious, no. I made a point of never arguing with him. At least, not after I reached the age of fourteen. I remember making my decision at that time.
I made it, as I recall, with a good deal of horror."
"The dread Scott decision," Carella said.
"What? Oh. Oh, yes," Mark said, and he smiled.
"I decided when I was fourteen that there was no percentage in arguing with Father. Ever since that time, we got along very well."
"Mmm. Right up to now, huh?"
"Who discovered this door was locked, Mr. Scott?"
"Alan did."
"And who went for the crowbar?"
"I did."
"Why?"
"To force the door open. We'd been calling for Father, and he didn't answer."
"And did the crowbar work?"
"Yes. Of course it did."
"Who tried the door after you'd used the crowbar on it?"
"I did."
"And this time it opened?"
"No. There was still Father's weight banging against it. But we managed to open it a crack-using the crowbar again-and Alan stuck his arm in and cut the rope."
"Did any of you use the crowbar on the bottom of the door?" Carella asked.
"The bottom?"
"Yes. Down there. Near the sill."
"Why no. Why would we want to do that?"
"I can't imagine. Are you gainfully employed. Mr. Scott?"
"What?"
"Do you have a job?"
"Well, I .
"Yes or no?"
"I've been training at one of the factories.
Preparing for an executive position. Father always felt that executives should learn from the bottom up."
"Did you agree with him?"
"Yes. Of course."
"Where were you ... ah ... training?"
"The New Jersey plant."
"For how long?"
"I'd been there for six months."
"How old are you, Mr. Scott?"
"Twenty-seven."
"And what did you do before you went into the New Jersey plant?"
"I was in Italy for several years."
"Doing what?"
"Enjoying myself," Mark said.
"When Mother died, she left me a little money. I decided to use it when I got out of college."
"When was that?"
"I was twenty-two when I graduated."
"And you've been in Italy since then?"
"No. The Government interfered with my graduation plans. I was in the Army for two years."
"And then you went to Italy, is that right?"
"Yes."
"You were twenty-four years old at the time?"
"Yes."
"How much money did you have?"
"Mother left me thirty thousand."
"Why'd you come back from Italy?"
"I ran out of money."
"You spent thirty thousand dollars in three years? In Italy?"
"Yes, I did."
"That's an awful lot of money to spend in Italy, isn't it?"
"Is it?"
"What I mean is, you must have lived rather grandly."
"I've always lived rather grandly, Mr.
Carella," Mark said, and he grinned.
"Mmm. This executive position you were training for.; What was it?"
"A sales executive."
"No title?"
"Just a sales executive."
"And what was the salary for the job?"
"Father didn't believe in spoiling his children," Mark said.
"He realized that the business would go to pieces if he simply put his sons in at ridiculously high salaries when they didn't know anything about running the business.
"So what was the starting salary?"
"For that particular job? Fifteen thousand."
"I see. And you live rat
her grandly. Ran through ten grand a year in Italy. I see."
"That was a starting salary, Mr. Carella.
Father fully intended Scott Industries to belong to his sons eventually."
"Yes, his will would seem to substantiate that. Did you know about his will, Mr.
Scott?"
"All of us did. Father talked of it freely."
"I see."
"Tell me, Mr. Carella," Mark said.
"Do you think I killed my own father?"
"Did you, Mr. Scott?"
"He committed suicide, isn't that right, Mr. Scott?"
"Yes, that's right." Mark Scott paused.
"Or do you think I crawled into the room under that crack in the door?"
CHAPTER I4
There she was – the city. All decked out for the pleasures of night, wearing her sleek black satin with a bright red sash. Clusters of jewels hung in her hair, the rectangles of all night offices blinking at the darkness in defiance of the stars, the shimmering haze in the air over the incredible skyline. A necklace of dazzling light hung from her slender throat, the reds and greens of traffic, the ambers of the street globes, the harsh bright overhead fluorescents of Detavoner Avenue. Her rounded fleshy shoulders rolled to the music of the night, her full breasts heaved ecstatically to the music of the night, mournful music that oozed from the cellar dives of Isola, pounded with the beat of a glittering G-string, music that came with mathematical precision from the cool bop bistros, music that bounced with the cornball rhythms of the supper clubs.
The highways glowed with reflected river light that molded the valleys of her waist, swept North and South over her wide hips, dropped over shapely legs to capture her ankles in neon slave bracelets, terminated in the re~ flection of pinpoint light glowing from high-heeled slippers on slick wet asphalt.
There she was-the city.
Rushing with the night and the sound of the night, sucking in wild air through parted lips, her eyes glowing bright, bright with the fever of the tempo, Friday night, and the city clasped the weekend to her breasts, held the weekend close in a desperate embrace.
A woman was the city, a beautiful woman with life in her loins and treachery '~ in her heart, an exciting woman with a dagger behind her back in long white fingers, a gentle woman who sang for4 - ~U~1LIIJLt. ~.~jiyuns, a woman if love and a woman of hate, a woman fondled by eight million people who had tasted the pleasures of her body and knew her well and hated her with a deep abiding love.
Fight million people.
Geoffrey Tamblin was a publisher.
He published textbooks. He had been in the racket for thirty-two years, and now-at the age of fifty-seven-he considered himself a knowledgeable guy who knew all the ins and outs of the racket.
Geoffrey Tamblin never called it "the publishing game." To Tamblin, it was "the racket," and he hated it passionately. The thing he particularly despised about the racket was the publishing of books about mathematics. These he detested. His rancor probably went back to a high-school course in Geometry conducted by an old poop named Dr. Fanensel. He was unable to decide, at the age of seventeen, whether he hated Geometry more than Dr. Fanensel, or vice versa. Now, forty years later, his hatred had grown admirably to include all mathematics and all teachers and students of mathematics. Plane Geometry, Analytic Geometry, Algebra, Differential Calculus, and even Long and Short Division fell into the sphere of Tamblin's hatred.
And the terrible part of it all was that his firm published a great many mathematics texts. In fact, the largest percentage of his list was devoted to books about mathematics. Which was why Geoffrey Tamblin had three ulcers.
One day, Tamblin thought, I will stop publishing textbooks, and especially mathematics texts. I'll bring out slim volumes of poetry or criticism. Tamblin Books will begin to mean beautiful books.
No more "Given X equals 10, and Y equals 12, what then does / A equal?" No more "Log C equals Log D, therefore ..." No more ulcers.
He felt a twinge even thinking about his ulcers.
Poetry, he thought. Slim beautiful volumes of poetry. Ah, that would be wonderful. I'll move to the suburbs and run the firm from there. No more subways. No more rushing. No more schedules. No more crumby editors fresh from Harvard with Phi Beta Kappa keys hanging on their weskits.
No more disgruntled artists drawing triangles when they want to be drawing mines. I no more doddering professors bringing their creaky goddamn texts into my office. Only beautiful slim volumes of poetry written by young slim girls with golden hair. Ahhhhhh.
Geoffrey Tamblin lived on Silvermine Road at the outer fringes of the 87th Precinct. Every evening, he walked from his office on Hall Avenue in midtown Isola to the subway a block north. He rode the subway up to, Sixteenth, disembarked, and then walked toward his apartment house through a neighborhood which had once been beautiful and quite elite. Now, the neighborhood was going, everything was going, it was the fault of mathematics. The world was reducing everything to simple formulas, there was no reality any more except the reality of mathematics. X times infinity equals a hydrogen explosion. The world would not end in fire-it would end in mathematical symbols.
The neighborhood even smelled bad now.
Empty lots strewn with rubble, garbage thrown from windows, street gangs wearing bright silk jackets and committing murder while the policemen slept, gangsters, all gangsters who were more interested in the mathematics of a crossword puzzle than in human decency. I've got to get out of this, ~ poetry, where is all the poetry in the world?
I'll walk past the park tonight, he thought.
The thought excited him. There was a time, before he'd become involved with a world of X's and Y's, when Geoffrey Tamblin could walk the paths of Grover Park and stare up at an orange ball of moon and know with certainty that the city was a place of romance and mystery. Now-with three ulcers-he thought only that he could not walk through the park because of potential muggers, he would have to walk past it-on Grover, Avenue. And still, the thought excited him.
He walked rapidly, thinking of poetry, noticing the ~ mathematical precision of the green globes hanging outside the police station across the street. 87. Figures. ~ Always figures.
There were three boys walking ahead of him. Juvenile delinquents, gangsters? No, they looked like college boys, potential nuclear physicists, mathematicians. What were' they doing up her'~, all the way uptown?
Listen to them sing, Tamblin thought. Did I ever sing? Wait until they come face to face with the unbending reality of plus and minus. Let's hear them sing then, let's hear them.
Geoffrey Tamblin broke his stride.
His shoe was sticking to the pavement.
Disgustedly, he pulled it loose and examined the sole. Chewing gum! Damnit, when would people learn to be clean, throwing gum all over the sidewalk where a man could step on it.
Swearing under his breath, he looked around for a scrap of paper, wishing he had one of Dr. Fanensel's texts to tear up.
He spotted the blue rectangle of paper lying next to the curb, hobbled over to it, and picked it up. He did not even glance at it. It was probably a throwaway from one of the supermarkets, full of this week's specials, prices, prices, figures, figures, where was all the poetry in the world?
Wadding the blue sheet, he rubbed viciously at the gum on his shoe. Then, pure again, he crumpled the paper into a mathematical ball and threw it down the sewer.
It was probably just as well.
Meyer Meyer's message would have made an exceedingly slim volume of poetry.
""The sun is a-shining to welcome the day,"" sang Sammy, "'and it's hi-ho, come to the fair!"" ""To the fair, to the fair, to the fair,"" Bucky sang.
"How does the rest go?" Sammy asked.
""To the fair, to the fair, to the fair,"" Bucky sang.
"Let's sing a college song," Jim said.
"Screw college songs," Sammy said.
"Lets sing "Minnie the Mermaid."" "I don't know the words."
"Who needs words? It's
emotion that counts, not words."