Widows

by Ed McBain

  Widows

  Ed Mcbain

  The only clues to the savage killing of a beautiful young woman in a lush penthouse apartment are a steamy collection of erotic letters and thirty-two separate knife wounds - clues are fewer still for her elderly lover, shot four times in the head.

  The dead man has left behind four other women: his ex-wife and their two daughters, and his present wife. Four mourners.

  Four suspects. For Detective Steve Carella it's a crime that

  strikes close to the heart - his own mother has just become a

  widow herself...

  "Angela," he said, "it's Steve."

  She'd been crying, her voice revealed that.

  "We just got back from the hospital," she said.

  "What happened?" he asked. "Was it his heart again?"

  "No, Steve. Not his heart."

  "Then what?"

  "We went there to make positive identification."

  For a moment he didn't quite understand. Or didn't choose to understand.

  "What do you mean?" he said.

  "We had to identify the body."

  "Why? Angela, what happened?"

  "He was killed."

  "Killed? What . . . ?"

  "In the bakery shop."

  "No."

  "Steve ..."

  "Jesus, what. . . ?"

  "Two men came in. Papa was alone. They cleaned out the cash register . . ."

  "Angela, don't tell me this, please."

  "I'm sorry," she said.

  And suddenly he was crying.

  WIDOWS

  Ed McBain

  First published in Great Britain 1991

  by William Heinemann Ltd

  This edition published 1992

  The city in these pages is imaginary.

  The people, the places are all fictitious.

  Only the police routine is based on

  established investigatory technique.

  1

  She'd been brutally stabbed and slashed more times than Carella chose to imagine. The knife seemed to have been a weapon of convenience, a small paring knife that evidently had been taken from the bartop where a bottle opener with a matching wooden handle sat beside a half-full pitcher of martinis, an ice bucket, and a whole lemon from which a narrow sliver of skin was missing.

  Someone had been drinking a martini. With a twist. Presumably the paring knife had been used to peel back the skin of the lemon before the knife was used on its victim. The martini was still on the coffee table alongside which she was lying. The lemon twist lay curled on the bottom of the glass. The paring knife was on the floor beside her. The blade was covered with blood. She was bleeding from what appeared to be a hundred cuts and gashes.

  "Natural blonde," Monoghan said.

  She was wearing a black silk kimono patterned with oversized red poppies. The kimono was belted at the waist, but it had been torn open to reveal her long, slender legs and the blonde pubic patch upon which Monoghan now based his clever deduction. Her blue eyes were open. Her throat had been slit. Her face had been repeatedly slashed, but you could still see she'd been a beauty. Nineteen, twenty years old, long blonde hair and startling blue eyes, wide open, staring at the ceiling of the penthouse apartment. Young, beautiful body

  under the slashed black kimono with poppies the color of blood.

  The men in suits and jackets stood around her, looking down at her, plastic-encased ID cards clipped to their coat collars. Monoghan and Monroe from Homicide North; Detective/Second Grade Steve Carella from the Eight-Seven; Detective/Third Grade Arthur Brown, same precinct. Nice little gathering here at a little past eight o'clock on a hot, muggy night late in July. Monoghan and Monroe kept staring down at the body as if pondering the mystery of it all. There were slash and stab marks on her breasts and her belly. Her wounds shrieked silently to the night. The insides of her thighs had been slashed. There was blood everywhere you looked. Torn white flesh and bright red blood. Shrieking. The men were waiting for the medical examiner to arrive. This weather, cars and people all over the streets, it took time to get anywhere. There was a pained look on Carella's face. Brown looked angry, the way he normally did, even when he was deliriously happy.

  "Girls like this, they can get in trouble, this city," Monroe said.

  Carella wondered Girls like what!

  "You get a young, pretty girl like this one," Monoghan said, "they don't know what this city is like."

  "What this city can do to you," Monroe said.

  "This city can do terrible things to young girls," Monoghan said.

  They stood there with their hands in the pockets of their suit jackets, thumbs showing, identical navy-blue suits and white shirts and blue ties, looking down at the dead woman. Girl, they had called her. Nineteen, twenty years old at most. Carella wondered if she'd thought of herself as a woman. On all the subsequent reports, she would be labeled merely female. Generic labeling. No fine distinction for feminists to pursue, no quarrel over whether it should be girl or woman, no such bullshit once you became a victim. The minute you were dead, you became female, period.

  The pained look was still in his eyes,

  Dark brown eyes, slanting downward to give his face a somewhat Oriental look. Brown hair. Tall and slender. His nose was running, a summer cold. He took out his handkerchief, blew his nose, and looked toward the front door. Where the hell was the ME? The apartment felt sticky and damp, was there a window open someplace, diluting the air-conditioning? No window units here, everything hidden and enclosed, this was an expensive apartment. High-rise, high-rent condo here on what passed for the precinct's Gold Coast, such as it was, overlooking the River Harb and the next state. Two blocks south you had your tenements and your hot-bed hotels. Here, on the floor of the building's only penthouse apartment, a young woman in an expensive silk kimono lay torn and bleeding on a thick pile carpet, a martini in a stemmed glass on the coffee table behind her. Liquid silver in the glass. Yellow twist of lemon curling. Lipstick stain on the glass's rim. Enough still left in the pitcher on the bar to pour half a dozen more glasses like this one. Had she been expecting company? Had she voluntarily admitted her own murderer to the apartment? Or was there a window open?

  "They say it's gonna be even hotter tomorrow than it was today," Monoghan said idly, and turned away from the victim as though bored with her lifeless pose.

  "Who's theyV Monroe asked.

  "The weather guys."

  "Then why didn't you say so? Why do people always say they this, they that, instead of who the hell they is supposed to be?"

  "What's the matter with you tonight?" Monoghan asked, surprised.

  "I just don't like people saying they this, they that all the time."

  "I'm not people," Monoghan said, looking offended and hurt. "I'm your partner."

  "So stop saying they this, they that all the time."

  "I certainly will," Monoghan said, and walked over to where

  a second black leather sofa rested under the windows on the far side of the room. He glanced angrily at the sofa, and then heavily plunked himself down onto it.

  Brown couldn't believe that the M&Ms were arguing. Monoghan and Monroe? Joined at the hip since birth? Exchanging heated words? Impossible. But there was Monoghan, sitting on the sofa in a sulk, and here was Monroe, unwilling to let go of it. Brown kept his distance.

  "People are always doing that," Monroe said. "It drives me crazy. Don't it drive you crazy?" he asked Brown.

  "I don't pay much attention to it," Brown said, trying to stay neutral.

  "It's the heat's driving you crazy," Monoghan said from across the room.

  "It ain't the goddamn heat," Monroe said, "it's people always saying they this, they that."

  Brown tried to look aloof.

  At s
ix feet four inches tall and weighing two hundred and twenty pounds, he was bigger and in better condition than either of the two Homicide dicks. But he sensed that the argument between them was something that could easily turn against him if he wasn't careful. Nowadays in this city, a black man had to be careful, except with people he trusted completely. He trusted Carella that way, but he knew nothing at all about the religion or politics of the M&Ms, so he figured it was best not to get himself involved in what was essentially a family dispute. One thing he didn't want was a hassle on a hot summer night.

  Brown's skin was the color of rich Colombian coffee, and he had brown eyes and kinky black hair, and wide nostrils and thick lips, and this made him as black as anyone could get. Over the years, he had got used to thinking of himself as black - though that wasn't his actual color - but he was damned if he would now start calling himself African-American, which he felt was a phony label invented by insecure people who kept inventing labels in order to reinvent themselves. Inventing labels wasn't the way you found out who you were. The

  way you did that was you looked in the mirror every morning, the way Brown did, and you saw the same handsome black dude looking back at you. That was what made you grin, man.

  "You get people saying things like 'They say there's gonna be another tax hike,'" Monroe said, gathering steam, "and when you ask them who they mean by they, they'll tell you the investment brokers or the financial insti..."

  "You just done it yourself," Monoghan said.

  "What'd I do?"

  "You said you ask them who they mean by they, they'll tell you the investment..."

  "I don't know what you're talking about," Monroe said.

  "I'm talking about you complaining about people saying they this and they that, and you just said they this yourself."

  "I said nothing of the sort," Monroe said. "Did I say that?" he asked Brown, trying to drag him into it again.

  "Hello, hello, hello," the ME said cheerily from the door to the apartment, sparing Brown an answer. Putting down his satchel, wiping his brow with an already damp handkerchief, he said, "It's the Sahara out there, I'm sorry I'm late." He picked up the satchel again, walked over to where the victim lay on the carpet, said, "Oh my," and knelt immediately beside her. Monoghan got off the sofa and came over to where the other men stood.

  They all watched silently as the ME began his examination.

  In this city, you did not touch the body until someone from the Medical Examiner's Office pronounced the victim dead. By extension, investigating detectives usually interpreted this regulation to mean you didn't touch anything until the ME had delivered his verdict. You could come into an apartment and find a naked old lady who'd been dead for months and had turned to jelly in her bathtub, you waited till the ME said she was dead. They waited now. He examined the dead woman as if she were still alive and paying her annual visit to his office, putting his stethoscope to her chest, feeling for a pulse, counting the number of slash and stab wounds - there were thirty-two in all, including those in the small of her back

  - keeping the detectives in suspense as to whether or not she was truly deceased.

  "Tough one to call, huh, Doc?" Monoghan asked, and winked at Monroe, surprising Brown.

  "Cause of death, he means," Monroe said, and winked back.

  Brown guessed they'd already forgotten their little tiff.

  The ME glanced up at them sourly, and then returned to his task.

  At last he rose and said, "She's all yours."

  The detectives went to work.

  The clock on the wall of the office read eight-thirty p.m. There was nothing else on any of the walls. Not even a window. There was a plain wooden desk probably salvaged from one of the older precincts when the new metal furniture started coming in. There was a wooden chair with arms in front of the desk, and a straight-backed wooden chair behind it. Michael Goodman sat behind the desk. Dr Michael Goodman. Who rated only a cubbyhole office here in the Headquarters Building downtown. Eileen Burke was singularly unimpressed.

  "That's Detective/Second, is it?" he asked.

  "Yes," she said.

  "How long have you been a detective?"

  She almost said Too long.

  "It's all there in the record," she said.

  She was beginning to think this was a terrible mistake. Coming to see a shrink recommended by another shrink. But she trusted Karin. She guessed.

  Goodman looked at the papers on his desk. He was a tall man with curly black hair and blue eyes. Nose a bit too long for his face, mustache under it, perhaps to cradle it, soften its length. Thick spectacles with rims the color of his hair. He studied the papers.

  "Put in a lot of time with Special Forces, I see," he said.

  "Yes."

  "Decoy work."

  6

  "Yes."

  "Mostly Rape Squad," he said.

  "Yes," she said.

  He'd get to the rape next. He'd get to the part that said she'd been raped in the line of duty. It's all there in the record, she thought.

  "So," he said, and looked up, and smiled. "What makes you think you'd like to work with the hostage team?"

  "I'm not sure I would. But Karin ... Dr Karin Lefkowitz ..."

  "Yes."

  "I've been seeing her for a little while now ..."

  "Yes."

  "At Pizzaz. Upstairs."

  Psychological Services Assistance Section. PSAS. Pizzaz for short. Cop talk that took the curse off psychological help, made it sound jazzier, Pizzaz. Right upstairs on the fifth floor of the building. Annie Rawles's Rape Squad office was on the sixth floor. You start with a Rape Squad assignment on the sixth floor and you end up in Pizzaz on the fifth, Eileen thought. What goes up must come down.

  "She suggested that I might find hostage work interesting."

  Less threatening was what she'd actually said.

  "How did she mean? Interesting?"

  Zeroing right in. Smarter than she thought.

  "I've been under a considerable amount of strain lately," Eileen said.

  "Because of the shooting?" Goodman asked.

  Here it comes, she thought.

  "The shooting, yes, and complications arising from ..."

  "You killed this man when?"

  Flat out. You killed this man. Which, of course, was what she'd done. Killed this man. Killed this man who'd murdered three prostitutes and was coming at her with a knife. Blew him to perdition. Her first bullet took him in the chest, knocking him backward toward the bed. She fired again almost at once, hitting him in the shoulder this time, spinning him

  I around, and then she fired a third time, shooting him in the I back, knocking him over onto the bed. At the time, she I couldn't understand why she kept shooting into his lifeless I body, watching the eruptions of blood along his spine, saying I over and over again, "I gave you a chance, I gave you a ¦ chance," until the gun was empty. Karin Lefkowitz was helping her to understand why.

  "I killed him a year ago October," she said.

  "Not this past October ..."

  "No the one before it. Halloween night," she said.

  Trick or treat, she thought.

  I gave you a chance.

  But had she?

  "Why are you seeing Dr Lefkowitz?"

  She wondered if he knew her. Did every shrink in this city know every other shrink? If so, had he talked to her about what they'd been discussing these past several months?

  "I'm seeing her because I'm gun-shy," she said.

  "Uh-huh," he said.

  "I don't want to have to kill anyone else," she said.

  "Okay," he said.

  "And I don't want to do any more decoy work. Which is a bad failing for a Special Forces cop."

  "I can imagine."

  "By the way," she said, "I don't particularly like psychiatrists."

  "Lucky I'm only a psychologist," he said, and smiled.

  "Those, too."

  "But you do like Karin."

  "Y
es," she said, and paused. "She's been helpful."

  Big admission to make.

  "In what way?"

  "I have other problems besides the job."

  "First tell me what your problems with the job are."

  "I just told you. I don't want to be placed in another situation where I may have to shoot someone."

  "Kill someone."

  8

  "Shoot, kill, yes."

  "You don't see any difference?"

  "When someone's coming at you and you've got three seconds to make a decision, there's no difference, right."

  "Must have been pretty frightening."

  "It was."

  "Are you still frightened?"

  "Yes."

  "Just how frightened are you, Miss Burke?"

  "Very frightened."

  She could admit this now. Karin had freed her to do this.

  "Because you killed this man?"

  "No. Because I was raped. I don't want to get raped again, I'd kill anyone who tried to rape me again. So I don't want to be ... to be constantly put in situations where someone may try to rape me, which frightens the hell out of me, and where I'll . . . I'll have to kill him, which . . . which also frightens me, I guess. Having to kill someone again."

  "Sort of a vicious circle, isn't it?"

  "If I stay with Special Forces, yes."

  "So you're thinking of the hostage team."

  "Well, Karin thought I should come up here and talk to you about it. See what it was all about."

  "It's not about killing people, that's for sure," Goodman said, and smiled again. "Tell me about these other problems. The ones that aren't related to the job."

  "Well, they're personal."

  "Yes, well, hostage work is personal, too."

  "I understand that. But I don't see what my personal problems have to do with ..."

  "I just interviewed a detective who's been with Narcotics for the past ten years," Goodman said. "I've been interviewing people all day long. There's a high burnout rate on the team, lots of stress. If the inspector and I can keep a good negotiator for eight months, that's a long time. Anyway, this detective hates drug dealers, would like to see all of them dead. I asked him what he'd do if we were negotiating with a hostage-taker

  9

  r

  who was a known drug dealer. He said he'd try to save the lives of the hostages. I asked him who he thought was more important, the hostages or the drug dealer. He said he thought the hostages were more important. I asked him if he'd kill the drug dealer to save the hostages. He said yes, he would. I told him I didn't think he'd be right for the team."