by McBain, Ed
Wouldn't you do that, too?"
Teddy stood motionless.
"You would. I know you would. You're very pretty, Marcia. I was pretty once until they took my man away from me. A woman needs a man. Life's no good without a man. And mine is dead. And I'm going to kill the man who's responsible.
I'm going to kill a rotten bastard named Steve Carella."
The words hit Teddy with the force of a pitched baseball. She flinched visibly, and then she caught her lips between her teeth, and Virginia watched her in puzzlement and then said, "I'm sorry, honey, I didn't mean to swear. But I... this has been..." She shook her head.
Teddy had gone pale. She stood with her lip caught between her teeth, and she bit it hard, and she looked at the revolver in the hand of the woman at the desk, and her first impulse was to fling herself at the gun. She looked at the wall clock. It was 7:08. She turned toward Virginia and took a step forward.
"Miss," Byrnes said, "that's a bottle of nitroglycerin on the desk there." He paused.
"What I mean is, any sudden movement might set it off. And hurt a lot of people."
Their eyes met. Teddy nodded.
She turned away from Virginia and Byrnes, crossing to sit in the chair facing the slatted railing, hoping the lieutenant had not seen the sudden tears in her eyes.
CHAPTER I7
The clock read 7:10.
Teddy thought only, I must warn him.
Methodically, mechanically, the clock chewed time, swallowed it, spat digested seconds into the room. The clock was an old one, and its mechanism was audible to everyone but Teddy, whirr, whirr, and the old clock digested second after second until they piled into minutes and the hands moved with a sudden click in the stillness of the room.
7:11... 7:12 I must warn him, she thought. She had given up the thought of jumping Virginia and thought only of warning Steve now. I can see the length of the corridor from here, she thought, can see the top step of the metal stairway leading from below. If I could hear I would recognize his tread even before he came into view because I know his walk, I have imagined the sound of his walk a thousand times. A masculine sound, but lightfooted, he moves with animal grace, I would recognize the sound of his walk the moment he entered the building if only I could hear.
But I cannot hear, and I cannot speak. I cannot shout a warning to him when he enters this second floor corridor. I can only run to him. She will not use the nitro, not if she knows Steve is in the building where she can shoot him. She needs the nitro for her escape. So I'll run to him and be his shield, he must not die.
And the baby?
The baby, she thought. Hardly a baby yet, a life just begun, but Steve must not die. Myself, yes. The baby, yes. But not Steve. I will run to him. The moment I see him,
I will run to him, and then let her shoot.
But not Steve. She had almost lost him once, she could remember that Christmas as if it were yesterday, the painfully white hospital room, and her man gasping for breath. She had hated his occupation then, detested police work and criminals, abhorred the chance circumstances which had allowed her husband to be shot by a narcotics peddler in a city park. And then she had allowed her hatred to dissolve, and she had prayed, simply and sincerely, and all the while she knew that he would die and that her silent world would truly become silent. With Steve, there was no silence. With Steve, she was surrounded by the noise of life.
This was not a time for prayer.
All the prayers in the world would not save Steve now.
When he comes, she thought, I will run to him and I will take the bullet.
When he comes.... The clock read 7:13.
That isn't nitroglycerin, Hawes thought.
Maybe it is.
That isn't nitroglycerin.
It can't be. She handles it like water, she treats it with all the disdain she'd give to water, she wouldn't be so damn careless with it if it were capable of exploding.
It isn't nitroglycerin.
Now wait a minute, he told himself, let's just wait a minute, let's not rationalize a desire into a fact.
I want desperately for the liquid in that bottle to be water. I want it because for the first time in my life I am ready to knock a woman silly. I am ready to cross this room and, gun be damned, knock her flat on her ass and keep hitting her until she is senseless. That is the way I feel right now, and chivalry can go to Hell because that is the way I feel. I know it's not particularly nice to go around slugging women, but Virginia Dodge has become something less than a woman, or perhaps something more than a woman, she has become something inhuman and I no more consider her a woman than I would apply gender to a telephone or a pair of shoes.
She is Virginia Dodge.
And I hate her.
And I'm ashamed because I hate so goddamn deeply. I did not think myself capable of such hatred, but she has brought it out in me, she has enabled me to hate deeply and viciously. I hate her, and I hate myself for hating, and this causes me to hate deeper. Virginia Dodge has reduced me tLi an animal, a blind animal responding to a pain that is being inflicted. And the curious thing is that the pain is not my own.
Oh, the cheek, I've been hit harder before, the cheek doesn't matter. But what she did to Miscolo, and what she did to that Puerto Rican girl, and what she did to Meyer, these are things I cannot excuse, rationally or emotionally. These are pains inflicted on humans who have never done a blessed solitary thing to the non-human called Virginia Dodge. They were simply here and, being here, she used them, she somehow reduced them to meaningless ciphers.
And this is why I hate.
I hate because I... I and every other man in this room have allowed her to reduce humans to ciphers. She has robbed them of humanity, and by allowing her to rob one man of humanity, by allowing her to strip a single human being of all his godly dignity, I have allowed her to reduce all men to a pile of rubbish.
So here I am, Virginia Dodge.
Cotton Hawes is my name, and I am a one-hundred-percent white Protestant American raised by God-fearing parents who instilled in me a sense of right and wrong, and who taught me that women are to be treated with courtesy and chivalry and you have turned me into a jungle animal ready to kill you, hating you for what you've done, ready to kill you.
The liquid in that bottle is not nitroglycerin.
This is what I believe, Virginia Dodge.
Or at least, this is what I am on the road to believing. I do not yet fully believe it.
I'm working on it, Virginia. I'm wororking on it damn hard.
I don't have to work on the hatred. The hatred is there, and it's building all the time and God help you, Virginia Dodge, when I'm convinced, when I've convinced myself that your bottle of nitroglycerin is a big phony.
God help you, Virginia, because I'll kill you.
The answer came to him all at once.
Sometimes it comes that way.
He had left Alan Scott in the old mansion, had walked through the stillness of a house gone silent with death, into the huge entry hall with its cut-glass chandelier and its ornate mirror. He had taken his hat from the marble-topped table set in front of the mirror, wondering why he'd worn the hat, he very rarely wore a hat, and then realizing that he had not worn a hat yesterday, and then further realizing that the power of the rich is an intimidating one.
We mustn't be intolerant, he thought. We mustn't blame the very rich for never having experienced the sheer ecstasy of poverty.
Smiling grimly, he had faced the mirror, set his hat on his head, and then opened the huge oak door leading outside. Darkness covered the property. A single light burned at the far end of the walk. There was the smell of wood-smoke on the air.
He had started down the path, thinking of October, and woodsmoke, and burning leaves, and musing about this bit of Exurbia in the center of the city. How nice to be exurban, how nice to burn leaves. He glanced over his shoulder, toward the garage. A figure was silhouetted there against the star-filled sky, a giant of a man
, one of the brothers, no doubt, the smoke from the small fire trailing up past his huge body. One of the magnificent Scotts burning leaves, you'd think a job like that would be left to Roger, or the caretaker, no caretaker for the Scott estate? Tch, tch, no caretaker to burn the .
It came to him then.
Woodsmoke.
Wood.
And one of the brothers burning his own fire.
Wood. Wood! For Christ's sake, wood, of course, of course!
He turned suddenly and started back up the path to the garage.
How do you lock a door? he thought, and his thoughts mushroomed onto his face until he was grinning like an absolute idiot.
How do you lock it from the outside and let it seem it's been locked from the inside?
To begin with, you rip the slip bolt from the doorjamb, so that when the door is finally forced open, it looks as if the lock was snapped in the process. That's the first thing you do, and by Christ, that explains all the marks on the inside of the room, how the hell could the crowbar have got that far inside, why weren't you thinking, Carella, you moron?
So first you snap the lock.
You have already strangled the old man, and he is lying on the floor while you work on the slip bolt, carefully prying it loose so that it hangs from one screw, so that it will look very realistically snapped when the door is later forced.
Then you put a rope around the old man's neck, and you toss one end of it over the beam in the ceiling, and you pull him up so that he's several feet off the ground. He's a heavy man, but so are you, and you're working with extra adrenalin shooting through your body, and all you have to do is get him off the floor several feet. And then you back away toward the door and tie the rope around the doorknob.
The old man is dangling free at the other end of the room.
You shove on the door now. This isn't too difficult. It only has to open wide enough to permit you to slip out of the room. And now you're out, and the old man's weight pulls the door shut again. The slip bolt, on the inside, is dangling lodse from one screw.
And you are in the corridor, and the problem now is how to give the appearance of the door being locked so that you and your brothers can tug on it to no avail.
And how do you solve the problem?
By using one of the oldest mechanical devices known to mankind.
And who?
It had to be, it couldn't be anyone else but the first person to try the door after the crowbar was used on it, the first person to step close enough to "Who's there?" the voice said.
"Mark Scott?" Carella said.
"Yes? Who's that?"
"Me. Carella."
Mark stepped closer to the small fire. The smoke drifted up past his face. The flames, dwindling now, threw a flickering light onto his large features.
"I thought you'd gone long ago," he said.
He heici a rake in his hands, and he poked at the embers with it now so that the fire leaped up in renewed life, tinting his face with a yellow glow.
"No, I'm still here."
"What do you want?" Mark said.
"You," Carella said simply.
"I don't understand."
"I'm taking you with me, Mark," Carella said.
"What for?"
"For the murder of your father."
"Don't be ridiculous," Mark said.
"I'm being very sensible," Carella said.
"Did you burn it?"
"Burn what? What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about the way you locked that door from the outside."
"There's no outside lock on that door," Mark said calmly.
"What you used was just as effective as a lock. And the more a person tugged against it, the more effective it became, the tighter it locked that door."
"What are you talking about?" Mark said.
"I'm talking about a wedge," Carella said, "a simple triangle of wood. A wedge..
"I don't know what you mean," Mark said.
"You know what I mean, damnit. A wedge, a simple triangular piece of wood which you kicked under the door narrow end first. Any outward pressure on the door only pulled it toward the wide end of the triangle, tightening it."
"You're crazy," Mark said.
"We had to use a crowbar on that door. It was locked from the inside. It..
"It was held closed by your wooden wedge which, incidentally, put a dent in the weatherstripping under the door. The crowbar only splintered a lot of wood which fell to the floor. Then you stepped up to the door. You, Mark. You stepped up to it and fumbled with the doorknob and-in the process-kicked out the wedge so that the door, for all intents and purposes, was now unlocked. And then, of course, you and your brothers were able to pull it open, despite your father's weight hanging against ..
"This is ridiculous," Mark said.
"Where'd you..
"I saw Roger sweeping up the debris in the hallway. The splintered wood, and your wedge. A good camouflage, that splintered wood. That's what you're burning now, isn't it? The wood? And the wedge?"
Mark Scott did not answer. He began moving even before Carella had finished his sentence. He swung the rake back over his shoulder and then let loose with it as if he were swinging a baseball bat, catching Carella completely by surprise. The blow struck him on the side of the neck, three of the rake's teeth entering the flesh and drawing blood. Mark pulled the rake back again. Carella, dizzy, stepped forward with his hands outstretched, and again the rake fell, this time on the forearm of Carella's outstretched right arm.
His arm dropped, numb. He tried to lift it, tried to reach for the Police Special in his right hip pocket, but the arm dangled foolishly, and he cursed its inability to move and then noticed that the rake was back again, ready for another swing, and he knew that this swing would do it, this swing would knock his head clear into the River Harb.
He lunged forward, inside the swing, as the rake cut the air. He grasped with his left hand, reaching for a grip on Mark's clothing, catching the tie knotted loosely around his throat. Mark, off balance from his swing, pulled back instantly, and Carella moved forward with the movement of the bigger man, shoving him backward, and then suddenly tugging forward again on the tie.
Mark fell.
He dropped the rake and spread his hands out to cushion the fall, and Carella went down with him, knowing he must not come into contact with the bigger man's hand shand which had already strangled once.
Silently, grotesquely, they rolled on the ground toward the fire, Mark struggling for a grip at Carella's throat, Carella holding to the tie as if it were a hangman's noose.
They rolled over the fire, scattering sparks onto the lawn, almost extinguishing it. And then Carella dropped the tie, and leaped to his feet and, his right hand useless, his left lacking any real power, brought his foot hack and released it in a kick that caught Mark on the left shoulder, spinning him back to the ground.
Carelia closed in.
Again he kicked, and again, using his feet with the precision of a boxer. And then, backing off, he reached behind him with his left hand in a curious inverted draw, and faced Mark Scott with the .38 in his fist.
"Okay, get up," he said.
"I hated him," Mark said.
"I've hated him ever since I was old enough to walk. I've wanted him dead ever since I was fourteen."
"You got what you wanted," Carella said.
"Get up." Mark got to his feet.
"Where are we going?" he asked.
"Back to the squad," Carella said.
"It'll be a little more peaceful there."
CHAPTER I8
"Where is he?" Virginia Dodge said impatiently. She looked up at the clock.
"It's almost seven thirty Isn't he supposed to report back here?"
"Yes," Byrnes said.
"Then where the hell is he?" She slammed her left fist down on the desk top.
Hawes watched. The bottle of nitro, jarred, did not explode.
It's water, Hawes th
ought. Goddamnit, it's water!
"Have you ever had to wait for anything, Marcia?" Virginia said to Teddy.
"I feel as if I've been in this squad room all my life."
Teddy watched the woman, expressionless.
"You ron bitch," Angelica Gomez said.
"You should wait in Hell, you dirtee bitch."