Widows

by Ed McBain

  Carella smiled with the memory.

  "They say it's easier to kick heroin than nicotine," Angela said.

  "But you've already kicked it," Carella said. "Eight, nine months now, that's kicking it."

  "I still want a cigarette."

  "So do I."

  "And I'm gonna have one. As soon as the baby's born ..."

  "I wish you wouldn't," he said.

  "Why the hell not?" she asked.

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  And suddenly she was crying.

  "Hey," he said.

  She shook her head.

  "Hey, come on."

  Raised her hand in mild protest, still shaking her head, no, please leave me alone. He went to her, anyway. Put his arm around her. Handed her his handkerchief.

  "Here," he said. "Dry your eyes."

  "Thanks," she said.

  She dried her eyes.

  "Okay to blow in it?" she asked.

  "Since when do you ask?"

  She blew her nose. She sniffed some more. She dried her eyes again.

  "Thanks," she said again, and handed the handkerchief back to him.

  "Cigarettes mean that much to you, huh?"

  "Not cigarettes," she said, and shook her head.

  "Tell me," he said.

  "I just figured what the hell's the use? Smoke my brains out, die of cancer, who cares?"

  "Me, for one."

  "Yeah, you," she said. She seemed on the edge of tears again.

  "Why do you think Tommy's having an affair?" he asked.

  "Because I know he is."

  "How do you know?"

  "Just by the way he's been acting lately. I haven't found any handkerchiefs with lipstick on them, and he doesn't stink of perfume when he comes home, but..."

  "Yes, but what?"

  "I just know, Steve. He behaves differently. His mind is someplace else, he's got another woman, I just know it."

  "How is he behaving differently?"

  "He's just different. He tosses and turns all night long . . . as if he's thinking of someone else, can't get her out of his mind, can't fall asleep ..."

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  "What else?"

  "I'll be talking to him and his mind starts wandering. And I look at him and I just know he can't concentrate on what I'm saying because he's thinking of her."

  Carella nodded.

  "And he ... well, I don't want to talk about it."

  "Talk about it," Carella said.

  "No, really, I don't want to, Steve."

  "Angela ..."

  "All right, he doesn't want to make love anymore, all right?" she said. "Oh!" she said and suddenly grabbed for her belly. "Oh!" she said again.

  "Sis?" he said.

  "Oh!"

  "What is it?"

  "I think . . . oh!"

  "Is it the baby?"

  "Yes, I. . .oh! "she said, and clutched for her middle again.

  "Which hospital?" he said at once.

  From the squadroom, he'd have used the TDD on his desk, "talking" to Teddy directly, tapping out the letters of his message on the machine's keyboard, hitting the GA key for GO AHEAD, reading her message in return. But he was calling home from the hospital waiting room, and public telephones hadn't yet caught up with state-of-the-art technology. Fanny Knowles answered the phone.

  "Carella household," she said.

  He visualized her standing at the kitchen counter, fiftyish and feisty, hair tinted a fiery red, wearing a pince-nez and standing with one hand on her hip as if challenging whoever was calling to say this was police business that would intrude on the sanctity of the home.

  "Fanny, it's me," he said.

  "Yes, Steve," she said.

  "I'm at Twin Oaks, Teddy knows the hospital, it's where the twins were born."

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  "Yes, Steve."

  "Can you tell her to catch a cab and come on over? Angela's already in the delivery room."

  "Do you want me to call your mother?"

  "No, I'll do that now. Twin Oaks, the maternity wing."

  "I've got it."

  "Thank you, Fanny. Everything all right?"

  "Yes, fine. I'll tell her right now."

  "Thanks," he said, and hung up, and fished in his pocket for another quarter, and then dialed his mother's number.

  "Hello?" she said.

  Her voice the same dull monotone he'd heard ever since his father's death.

  "Mama, it's me," he said. "Steve."

  "Yes, honey."

  "I'm here with Angela at the hospital..."

  "Oh my God!" she said.

  "Everything's all right, she's in the delivery room now, do you want to . . .?"

  "I'll be right there," she said.

  "Twin Oaks Hospital, the maternity wing," he said. "Call a taxi."

  "Right away," she said, and hung up.

  He put the receiver back on the hook and went to sit next to a balding man who looked extremely worried.

  "Your first one?" the man asked.

  "It's my sister," Carella said.

  "Oh," the man said. "It's my first one."

  "It'll be all right, don't worry," Carella said. "This is a good hospital."

  "Yeah," the man said.

  "My twins were born here," Carella said.

  "Yeah," the man said.

  All those years ago, Carella thought. Meyer and Hawes pacing the floor with him, Meyer consoling him, telling him he'd been through it three times already, not to worry. Teddy

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  up there in the delivery room for almost an hour. Twins. Nowadays . . .

  "We're having a boy," the balding man said.

  "That's nice," Carella said.

  "She wanted a girl."

  "Well, boys are nice, too," Carella said.

  "What do you have?"

  "One of each," Carella said.

  "We're going to call him Stanley," the man said. "After my father."

  "That's nice," Carella said.

  "She wanted to call him Evan."

  "Stanley is a very nice name," Carella said.

  "I think so," the man said.

  Carella looked up at the clock.

  Up there for twenty minutes already. He suddenly remembered Tommy. Tommy should be here. Whatever problems they were having, Tommy should be here. He went to the phone again, took out his notebook, found the number for the room over the garage, and dialed it. He let it ring a dozen times. No answer. He hung up and went to sit with the worried balding man again.

  "What's she having? Your sister."

  "I don't know."

  "Didn't she have all the tests?"

  "I guess so. But she didn't tell me what..."

  "She should have had the tests. The tests tell you everything."

  "I'm sure she must have had them."

  "Is she married?"

  "Yes."

  "Where's her husband?"

  "I just tried to reach him," Carella said.

  "Oh," the man said, and looked at him suspiciously.

  Teddy got there some ten minutes later. The man watched them as they exchanged information in sign language, fingers moving swiftly. Signing always attracted a crowd. You could

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  get a crocodile coming out of a sewer in downtown Isola, it wouldn't attract as big a crowd as signing did. The man watched, fascinated.

  She was asking him if he'd called his mother.

  He told her he had.

  / could have picked her up on the way, she signed.

  "Easier this way," he said, signing at the same time.

  The man watched goggle-eyed. All those flying fingers had taken his mind off his worries about his imminent son Stanley.

  Carella's mother came into the waiting room a few minutes later. She looked concerned. She had come to this same hospital eleven days earlier, to identify her husband in the morgue. Now her daughter was here in the delivery room -and sometimes things went wrong in the delivery room.

  "How is she?" she asked. "
Hello, sweetie," she said to Teddy, and kissed her on the cheek.

  "She went up about forty minutes ago," Carella said, looking at the wall clock.

  "Where's Tommy?" his mother said.

  "I've been trying to reach him," Carella said.

  A look passed between him and Teddy, but his mother missed it.

  Teddy signed Forty minutes isn't very long.

  "She says forty minutes isn't very long," he repeated for his mother.

  "I know," his mother said, and patted Teddy on the arm.

  "Did Angela tell you what it would be?" Carella asked.

  "No. Did she tell you?"

  "No."

  "Secrets," his mother said, and rolled her eyes. "With her, everything's always a secret. From when she was a little girl, remember?"

  "I remember," he said.

  "Secrets," she said, repeating the word for Teddy, turning to face her so she could read her lips. "My daughter. Always secrets."

  Teddy nodded.

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  "Mr Gordon?"

  They all turned.

  A doctor was standing there in a bloodstained surgical gown.

  The worried balding man jumped to his feet.

  "Yes?" he said.

  "Everything's fine," the doctor said.

  "Yes?"

  "Your wife's fine . . ."

  "Yes?"

  "You have a fine, healthy boy."

  "Thank you," the man said, beaming.

  "You'll be able to see them both in ten minutes or so, I'll send a nurse down for you."

  "Thank you," the man said.

  Angela's doctor came down half an hour later. He looked very tired.

  "Everything's fine," he said.

  They always started with those words . . .

  "Angela's fine," he said.

  Always assured you about the mother first ...

  "And the twins are fine, too."

  "Twins?" Carella said.

  "Two fine healthy little girls," the doctor said.

  "Secrets," his mother said knowingly. And then, to Carella, "Where's Tommy?"

  "I'll try to find him," Carella said.

  He drove first to the house Tommy had inherited when his parents died. No lights were showing in the room over the garage. He climbed the steps, anyway, and knocked on the door. It was only a quarter past eleven, but perhaps Tommy was already in bed. There was no answer. Carella went back down to the car, thought for a moment before he started the engine, and then started the long drive downtown.

  He hoped Tommy would not be with his girlfriend on the night his twin daughters were born.

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  The playground across the street from the brownstone was deserted. Raindrops plinked on the metal swings and slides. This was an alternate-side-of-the-street parking zone. Water ran in sheets off the streamlined surfaces of the cars lining the curb that bordered the fenced-in playground. Carella found a spot dangerously close to a fire hydrant, threw down the visor with its police department logo, locked the car, and began running up the street in the rain.

  He'd been a cop too long a time not to have noticed and recognized at once the two men sitting in a sedan parked across the street from the brownstone. He went over to the car, knocked on the passenger-side window. The window rolled down.

  "Yeah?" the man sitting there said.

  "Carella, the Eight-Seven," he said, showing his shield, shoulders hunched against the rain. "What's happening?"

  "Get in," the man said.

  Carella opened the rear door and climbed in out of the rain. Rain beat on the roof of the car. Rainsnakes trailed down the windows.

  "Peters, the Two-One," the man behind the wheel said.

  "Macmillen," his partner said.

  Both men were unshaven. It was a look detectives cultivated when they were on a plant. Made them look overworked and underpaid. Which they were, anyway, even without the beard stubble.

  "We got cameras rolling in the van up ahead," Peters said, nodding with his head toward the windshield. Through the falling rain, Carella could make out a green van parked just ahead of the car. The words hi-hat dry cleaning were lettered across the back panel, just below the painted-over rear window.

  "Been sitting the building for a week now," Macmillen said.

  "Which one?"

  "The brownstone," Peters said.

  "Why? What's going on over there?" Carella asked.

  "Cocaine's going on over there," Macmillen said.

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  10

  It was Monday morning, and all the Monday-morning quarterbacks were out. Or at least one of them. His name was Lieutenant Peter Byrnes, and he was telling his assembled detectives what he hoped they should have known by now.

  "When you're stuck," he said, "you go back to the beginning. You start where it started."

  He was sitting behind his desk in the corner office he warranted as commander of the 87th Squad, a compact man with silvering hair and no-nonsense flinty-blue eyes. There were six detectives in the office with him. Four of them had already given him rundowns on the various cases they were investigating. The big case had waited patiently in the wings till now. The big case was multiple murder, the tap-dancing, singing, piano-playing star of this here little follies. Like a network television executive lecturing six veteran screenwriters on basics like motivation and such, the lieutenant was telling his men how to conduct their business.

  "This case started with the dead girl," he said.

  Susan Brauer. The dead girl. Twenty-two years old, a girl for sure, though Arthur Schumacher had considered her a woman for sure.

  "And that's where you gotta start all over again," Byrnes said. "With the dead girl."

  "You want my opinion," Andy Parker said, "you already got yourperp."

  Carella was thinking the same thing.

  "Your perp's the hippie daughter," Parker said.

  Exactly, Carella thought.

  Looking at Parker in his rumpled suit, wrinkled shirt, and stained tie, his cheeks and jowls unshaven, Carella remembered for the hundredth time the two cops planted outside that brownstone downtown. He still hadn't talked to his brother-in-law because he hadn't yet figured out how the hell to handle this. Nor had he yet told Angela that her husband's sudden behavioral changes had nothing whatever to do with sex with a perfect stranger, but were instead attributable to what most cocaine addicts considered far more satisfying than even the best sex. He was hoping neither Peters nor Macmillen had pictures of Tommy marching in and out of a house under surveillance for drugs; how could he have been so goddamn dumb?

  "... the will for a quarter of the estate to begin with," Parker was saying. "Reason enough to kill the old ..."

  "That isn't starting with the dead girl," Byrnes reminded him.

  "The dead girl was a smoke screen, pure and simple," Parker said breezily and confidently.

  "Was she in the will?" Kling asked. "The dead girl?"

  His mind was on Eileen Burke. On Monday mornings, it was sometimes difficult to get back to the business at hand, especially when the business happened to be crime every day of the year.

  "No," Brown said. "Only people in the will are the two daughters, the present wife ..."

  "Now dead herself," Parker said knowingly.

  ". . . the vet, and the pet-shop lady," Brown concluded.

  "For how much?" Hawes asked. "Those two?"

  "Ten grand each," Carella said.

  Hawes nodded in dismissal.

  "The point is," Parker said, "between them, the two kids are up for fifty percent of the estate. If that ain't a good-enough motive ..."

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  "How much did you say?" Hawes asked again. "The estate?"

  "What the hell are you this morning?" Parker asked. "An accountant?"

  "I want to know what the estate was, okay?" Hawes said.

  "Supposed to be a lot of money," Carella said. "We don't have an exact figure."

  "Whatever it is," Parker said, and again nodded
knowingly, "it's enough to get the hippie daughter salivating."

  This was a big word for him, salivating. He looked around as if expecting approval for having used it.

  "What's this about she knew four bullets did the wife?" Willis asked.

  "Yeah," Carella said.

  "Was that in the papers?"

  "No, but it was on one of the television shows."

  "Who gave it out?" Byrnes asked.

  "We're trying to find out now," Brown said. "It might've been the M&M's. Or anybody from Homicide, for that matter."

  "Homicide," Byrnes said, and shook his head sourly.

  "That don't mean she didn't put those four slugs in the wife herself," Parker said. "Get rid of her, too, make it a clean sweep. She kills the old man to get her quarter of the pot..."

  "Assuming she knew that," Byrnes said.

  "She knew it, Pete."

  "From when she was on her mother's knee," Parker said.

  "Well, both daughters were grown at the time of the divorce, this was only two years ago. But they knew they were in the will for a quarter."

  "Who gets the wife's share of the estate?" Kling asked. "Now that she's dead."

  "Her will leaves it to a brother in London."

  "Sole heir?"

  "Yeah. But we called him and that's where he is, London. Hasn't visited the States in four years."

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  "Forget him," Parker said, "London's a million miles away. The hippie daughter was after the money, case closed."

  "Then why'd she kill the other two?" Kling asked.

  "Hatred, pure and simple," Parker said.

  "You should hear the way she says ''Mrs Schumacher,'" Carella said.

  "The first wife, too," Brown said. "She says it the same way. Mrs Schumacher. She hated both of them. The old man, the new wife ..."

  "So'd the hippie daughter," Parker said, defending his case.

  "No, wait a minute, don't let go of that so fast," Willis said. "The old lady hates Schumacher ..."

  "Right," Kling said, nodding.

  "So she not only wipes out him, but also all the women in his life."

  "Kills two birds with one stone," Kling said. "Gets the mistress and the present wife ..."

  "Three birds," Hawes corrected. "When you count Schumacher himself."