Widows

by Ed McBain

  Outside the old gray stone Headquarters Building downtown on High Street, Kling waited on the sidewalk in front of the low flat steps, watching the homeward-bound troops coming out of the building; invariably, they looked up at the sky the moment they came through the big bronze doors at the top of the steps. Karin Lefkowitz emerged at twenty minutes past the hour. She did not look up at the sky. She was carrying one of those small folding umbrellas and probably didn't give a damn what the weather did. She was also carrying a shoulder bag in which she'd undoubtedly placed her Ree-boks; in their place, she was wearing high-heeled blue leather pumps to match her blue linen suit. He fell into step beside her.

  "Hi," he said.

  She turned to him in surprise, hand tightening on the umbrella as if she were getting ready to swing it.

  "Oh, hi," she said, recognizing him. "You startled me."

  "Sorry. Have you got time for a cup of coffee?"

  She looked at him.

  "Mr Kling ..." she said.

  "Bert," he said, and smiled.

  "Does this have to do with the meeting we had on Wednesday?"

  "Yes, it does."

  "Then I'd prefer two things. One, whatever this is, I'd like to discuss it in my office ..."

  "Okay, wherever you . . ."

  "... and I'd like Eileen to be present."

  "Well, I came down here alone because I didn't want Eileen to be present."

  "Discussing anything that concerns Eileen ..."

  "Yes, it does concern ..."

  "... would be inappropriate."

  "Is it inappropriate for you and Eileen to discuss we?"

  "You're not my client, Mr Kling."

  "I just want to tell my side of it."

  She looked at him again.

  "A cup of coffee, okay?" he said. "Ten minutes of your time."

  "Well..."

  "Please," he said.

  "Ten minutes," she said, and looked at her watch.

  Carella had been waiting outside the bank since three o'clock, wondering if and when it would rain, and it was now six-thirty but it still hadn't rained. He hadn't expected Tommy to come out at three, because Tommy was an executive who went to meetings that sometimes lasted well into the night. Tommy's job was trying to rescue loans the bank had made. If the bank made a three-million-dollar loan to someone who ran a ballbearing company in Pittsburgh, and the guy started to miss his payments, Tommy got sent out to see how they could help the guy make good on the loan. The bank didn't want to own a ball-bearing company; the bank was in the money business. So if they could work something out with the guy, everybody

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  r would be happy. That was Tommy's job, and it took him all ' over the country, sometimes even to Europe. Carella could see how such a job might allow for the opportunity to fool around, if a man was so-inclined to begin with.

  Tommy came out of the bank at twenty minutes to seven. There was a woman with him, an attractive brunette who appeared to be in her late twenties, smartly dressed in a tailored suit and high-heeled pumps, and carrying a briefcase. From across the street, Carella could not tell whether she was the same woman who'd been in the car last night. He gave them a lead, and then began following them, staying on the opposite side of the street, walking parallel and almost abreast of them.

  They seemed to have nothing to hide. Carella guessed she was a business associate. They walked past the subway kiosk up the street; neither of them was planning to take a train anyplace. They continued on up the street toward a parking garage, and then walked past that as well, and continued walking some several blocks until they came to a second garage. The woman turned in off the sidewalk, Tommy at her side. She opened her handbag and handed him a yellow ticket. Carella immediately hailed a taxi.

  He got in and showed the driver his shield.

  "Just sit here," he said.

  The driver sighed heavily. Cops, he was thinking.

  Tommy was at the cashier's booth, paying to retrieve the parked car. He came back to where the woman was standing, and the two fell into conversation again. From the backseat of the taxi across the street, Carella watched.

  Some two minutes later a red Honda Accord came up the ramp.

  It was the same car Tommy had got into last night.

  In this area of courthouses and state and municipal buildings, there were not many eating establishments that stayed open beyond five, six o'clock, when the streets down here became as deserted as those in any ghost town. But there was a

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  delicatessen on the cusp of the area, closer to a genuine neighborhood, and it had a sign in its window that announced it was open till 9:00 p.m.

  Kling urged Karin to have something to eat.

  The smells coming from the kitchen were hugely tempting.

  She admitted that she was starving and said it would take her an hour or more to get home; she lived across the river, in the next state.

  Kling suggested the hot pastrami.

  She told him she loved hot pastrami. She said that when she was a kid her mother used to take her for walks around the neighborhood . . .

  "I'm Jewish, you know."

  "Gee, really?"

  "... past all these wonderful delis. But she wouldn't let me eat anything they served, I was only allowed to stand outside and smell the food. 'Take a sniff,' she would say, 'take a good sniff, Karin.'"

  She smiled with the memory now, though to Kling it seemed like extraordinarily cruel and unusual punishment.

  "So what'U it be?" he asked.

  She ordered the hot pastrami on rye. He ordered it on a seeded roll. They both ordered draft beer. There was a big bowl of sour pickles on the table. They sat eating their sandwiches. Reaching for pickles. Sipping beer. There was only a handful of other diners in the place, men in short-sleeved shirts, women wearing summer dresses. The air was hushed with the expectation of rain.

  "So why'd you want to see me?" Karin asked.

  "I don't like what happened on Wednesday," he said.

  "What didn't you like?"

  "You and Eileen ganging up on me."

  "Neither of us . . ."

  "Because it just isn't true, you see. That whatever happened to Eileen is all my fault."

  "No one says it was, Mr Kling ..."

  "And I wish to hell you'd call me Bert."

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  "I don't think that would be appropriate."

  "What do you call Eileen?"

  "Eileen."

  "Then why isn't it appropriate to call me Bert?"

  "I told you. Eileen is my client. You're not. And whereas it may not be true that you were responsible for ..."

  "Never mind the buts. It isn't true."

  "I'm not suggesting it was. I'm saying that Eileen perceived it as the truth. Which, by the way, she no longer does."

  "Well, I hope not. If she wants to think of herself as some kind of damsel in dis ..."

  "I'm sure she doesn't. In fact, she never did."

  "I think she did, where it concerns that night, where it concerns her having to put that guy away. Damsel in distress, woman in jeopardy, whatever you want to call it. When the plain truth of the matter is she was a cop in a showdown with a serial killer. It was her job to put him away. She was only doing her goddamn job."

  "It would be nice if it were that simple," Karin said, and bit into her sandwich again. "But it isn't. Eileen was raped. And unfortunately, the rapist resembled you. So when you later step into a situation that..."

  "I didn't know that."

  "He had blond hair. The rapist. Like yours."

  "I really didn't know."

  "Yes. And he was armed with a knife ..."

  "Yes."

  ". . . was threatening her with a knife. Cut her, in fact. Thoroughly terrified her."

  "Yes, I know."

  "So now there's a second man with a knife, coming at her again, and she's alone with him because you caused her to lose her backups."

  "I didn't deliberately..."


  "But you did. This isn't merely her perception, it's reality. If you had stayed home that night, Eileen would have had two capable and experienced detectives following her, and chances

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  are she wouldn't have found herself in a confrontational situation with a serial killer. But there she was. Because of you."

  "Okay. I'm sorry it happened. But. . ."

  "And you're wrong when you say she had to put him away. She didn't have to. Her perception - and, again, the reality as well - was that this man was going to cut her if she didn't stop him, she was going to get cut again if she didn't stop this man. But she didn't have to kill him in order to stop him. The man was armed only with a knife, and she had her service revolver - a .44-caliber Smith & Wesson - plus a .25-caliber Astra Firecat in a holster strapped to her ankle, and a switchblade knife in her handbag. She certainly did not have to kill him. She could have shot him in the shoulder or the leg, wherever, anything of the sort would have effectively stopped him. The point is she wanted to kill him."

  Kling was shaking his head.

  "Yes," Karin said. "She wanted to kill him. Even though he wasn't the man she really wanted to kill. The man she really wanted to kill was the man who'd raped her and cut her, and who -1 say 'unfortunately' again - looked somewhat like you. If it weren't for the blond rapist, she wouldn't have to kill this man. If it weren't for you. . ."

  Shaking his head, no, no, no.

  "Yes, this is what her mind was telling her. If it weren't for you, she wouldn't have to kill this man. I gave you a chance, she told him, meanwhile pumping bullets into his back, I gave you a chance. Meaning she gave you a chance. To prove yourself, to show you still believed in her ..."

  "I did believe in her, I do believe in her."

  "But you didn't. You followed her to the Canal Zone ..."

  "Yes, but only . . ."

  "Because you didn't trust her, Bert, you didn't think she could take care of herself. It was your failure of confidence that caused the mixup, caused the confrontation, and eventually caused the murder."

  "It wasn't murder, it was self ..."

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  r

  "It was murder." "Justified then." "Perhaps."

  There was the soft sound of rain pattering the sidewalk outside. They both looked up. "Rain," he said. "Yes," she said.

  "Heading uptown," the cab driver said.

  "Stay with them," Carella said.

  Windshield wipers snicked at the lightly falling rain. Tires hissed against the pavement. Up ahead, the red Honda Accord moved steadily through the gray curtain of drizzle and dusk. Carella leaned over the back of the front seat, peering through the windshield.

  "Pulling in," the driver said.

  "Go past them to the corner."

  He turned his head away as they passed the other car and then he looked back through the rear window to keep the car in sight. The woman was maneuvering it into the curb now, across the street from a playground where children stood under the trees looking out at the rain.

  Carella paid and tipped the driver, got out of the cab, and ducked into a doorway just as Tommy climbed out of the Accord on the passenger side. A moment later, the woman joined him on the sidewalk. Together, they ran through the rain to a brownstone some twenty feet up from where she'd parked the car. Carella watched them entering the building. He walked up the street.

  He was copying down the address on the brownstone when his beeper went off.

  Brown was waiting for him in the rain.

  The woman lay on the sidewalk under the trees. Blood seeping from her, mingling with the rain, diluted by the rain, running in rivulets into the gutter. Long blonde hair fanned out around her head. Raindrops striking her wide-open blue

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  eyes. When Carella's father was taken to the hospital with his heart attack three years ago, it was raining. One of the nurses walking alongside the stretcher as he came out of the ambulance said, "He doesn't like it." The other nurse said, "It's raining on his face," and tented a newspaper over it. His father had always recounted that story with amusement. The idea that he was suffering a massive heart attack and the nurses were discussing rain in his face. Big Chief Rain in the Face, he'd called himself.

  Lying on her back with her blonde hair spread on the slick gray pavement and her blood-drenched face shattered by the impact of the bullets that had entered it, Margaret Schumacher wasn't concerned about the rain in her face.

  "When?" Carella asked.

  "Boy One called it in an hour ago."

  "Who found her?"

  "Kid over there under the awning."

  Carella looked up the street to where a white sixteen-year-old boy was standing with the doorman.

  "He saw the whole thing," Brown said, "yelled at the perp, got shot at himself. He ran inside the building, got the doorman to call nine-one-one. Boy One responded."

  "Homicide here yet?"

  "No, thank God," Brown said, and rolled his eyes.

  "Let's talk to him some more," Carella said.

  They walked through the rain to where the doorman was counseling the kid on how to handle interviews with cops. This was the same doorman who'd been on duty the night Arthur Schumacher and his dog were killed. Now Schumacher's wife was lying dead on the sidewalk in almost the identical spot; it was getting to be a regular epidemic. Carella introduced himself and then said, "We'd like to ask a few more questions, if that's all right with you."

  He wasn't talking to the doorman, but the doorman immediately said, "I called nine-eleven the minute he ran in here."

  "Thanks, we appreciate it," Carella said, and then to the kid, "What's your name, son?"

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  "Penn Halligan," the kid said.

  "Can you tell us what happened?"

  The kid was handsome enough to appear delicate, almost feminine, large brown eyes fringed with long black lashes, a high-cheekboned porcelain face with a cupid's bow mouth, long black hair hanging lank with rain on his forehead. Tall and slender, he stood under the awning with the doorman and the detectives, hands in the pockets of a blue nylon wind-breaker. He was visibly trembling; he'd had a close call.

  "I was coming home from class," he said. "I take acting lessons."

  Carella nodded. He was thinking Halligan was handsome enough to be a movie star. Though nowadays that certainly wasn't a prerequisite.

  "On The Stem," he said, gesturing with his head. "Upstairs from the RKO Orpheum. I go every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons. Five o'clock to seven o'clock. I was on my way home when ..." He shook his head. The memory caused him to shiver again.

  "Where do you live?" Brown asked.

  "Just up the block. 1149 Selby."

  "Okay, what happened?"

  "I was coming around the corner when I saw this guy running across the street from under the trees there," he said, turning to point. "There was this blonde lady walking toward me on this side of the street, and the guy just crossed sort of diagonally, running from under the trees to where the blonde was walking, like on a collision course with her. I was just coming around the corner, I saw it all."

  "Tell us everything you saw," Carella said. "Don't leave anything out."

  "I was walking fast because of the rain ..."

  Head ducked against the rain, a gentle rain but you can still get pretty wet if you're coming from eight blocks away on Stemmler. He has walked all the way down to Butterworth and is continuing on down the four blocks to Selby, and is turning the corner onto his own street when he sees this

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  blonde lady walking toward him. Tall good-looking blonde wearing a short, tight mini and rushing through the rain even though she's got this bright orange-and-white umbrella over her head, one of these huge things that looks like it should be covering a hot-dog stand. High heels clicking on the sidewalk, rain pattering everywhere around her, he's thinking here comes a sexy young mother, which he's been told is the most passionate woman you can find, a young mother
. . .

  Carella suddenly wonders if the kid's delicate good looks have ever raised questions about his masculinity. Else why the gratuitous comment about a woman lying dead on the sidewalk not twenty feet away?

  . . . coming at him in the rain, long legs flying through the rain, when all of a sudden he sees this movement from the corner of his eye, on his left, just a blur at first, almost a shadow, a black shadow moving from the deeper black shadow of the trees across the street, flitting across the wet black pavement merging with the blackness of the asphalt and the grayness of the rain, there is a gun in the man's hand.

  The man is dressed entirely in black, wearing like black mechanic's overalls, you know? Like what you see mechanics wearing all covered with grease, except it's entirely black, and he's wearing black socks and shoes, running shoes, and a black woolen hat pulled down over his forehead, almost down onto his eyes, he's got the gun sticking out ahead of him, did you ever see Psycho? Do you remember when Tony Perkins comes out of that doorway upstairs with the big bread knife raised high over his head, just rushes out in the hallway to stab Marty Balsam? He's in drag, do you remember, we're supposed to think it's his crazy mother rushing out, but it's the knife held high over his head in that stiff-armed way that scares you half to death. Well, this guy all in black . . .

  And Carella suddenly knows it's a woman this kid saw.

  ... is rushing across the street with the gun already pointing at the blonde, the arm straight out and stiff, the gun like following the blonde's progress, like tracking her on radar, like a compass needle or something, rushing across the street

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  in the rain, with the gun zeroing in on her. She doesn't see the guy, he's moving very fast, like a dancer, no, like a bullfighter, I guess, more like a bullfighter . . .

  And Carella is positive now that this is a woman the kid is talking about . . .

  . . . coming at her, she's under the orange-and-white umbrella, she doesn't even see him. I'm the only one who sees them both, the blonde coming toward me where I'm already around the corner, the guy rushing across the street with this gun in his hand, I'm the only one who knows what's about to happen, I'm like the camera, you know, I'm like seeing this through the wide-angle viewfinder on a camera. My first reaction is to yell . . .