by Ed McBain
The room, the apartment, seemed to Carella to be the intricately cluttered design for a comedy of manners. Hank must have been as out of place here as a plumber at a literary tea.
Not so Mrs. Bush.
Mrs. Bush lounged on a heavily padded chartreuse love seat, her long legs tucked under her, her feet bare. Mrs. Bush belonged in this room. This room had been designed for Mrs. Bush, designed for femininity, and the Male Animal be damned.
She wore black silk. She was uncommonly big-busted, incredibly narrow-waisted. Her hip bones were wide, flesh-padded, a woman whose body had been designed for the bearing of children—but somehow she didn't seem the type. He could not visualize her squeezing life from her loins. He could only visualize her as Hank had described her—in the role of a seductress. The black silk dress strengthened the concept. The frou-frou room left no doubt. This was a stage set for Alice Bush.
The dress was not low-cut. It didn't have to be.
Nor was it particularly tight, and it didn't have to be that, either.
It was not expensive, but it fitted her figure well. He had no doubt that anything she wore would fit her figure well. He had no doubt that even a potato sack would look remarkably interesting on the woman who had been Hank's wife.
"What do I do now?" Alice asked. "Make up beds at the precinct? That's the usual routine for a cop's widow, isn't it?"
"Did Hank leave any insurance?" Carella asked.
"Nothing to speak of. Insurance doesn't come easily to cops, does it? Besides . . . Steve, he was a young man. Who thinks of things like this? Who thinks these things are going to happen?" She looked at him wide-eyed. Her eyes were very brown, her hair was very blond, her complexion was fair and unmarred. She was a beautiful woman, and he did not like considering her such. He wanted her to be dowdy and forlorn. He did not want her looking fresh and lovely. Goddamnit, what was there about this room that suffocated a man? He felt like the last male alive, surrounded by bare-breasted beauties on a tropical island surrounded by man-eating sharks. There was no place to run to. The island was called Amazonia or something, and the island was female to the core, and he was the last man alive.
The room and Alice Bush.
The femaleness reached out to envelop him in a cloying, clinging embrace.
"Change your mind, Steve," Alice said. "Have a drink."
"All right, I will," he answered.
She rose, displaying a long white segment of thigh as she got to her feet, displaying an almost indecent oblivion to the way she handled her body. She had lived with it for a long time, he supposed. She no longer marveled at its allure. She accepted it, and lived with it, and others could marvel. A thigh was a thigh, what the hell! What was so special about the thigh of Alice Bush?
"Scotch?"
"All right."
"How does it feel, something like this?" she asked. She was standing at the bar across from him. She stood with the loosehipped stance of a fashion model, incongruous because he always pictured fashion models as willowy and thin and flat-chested. Alice Bush was none of these.
"Something like what?"
"Investigating the death of a colleague and friend."
"Weird," Carella said.
"I'll bet."
"You're taking it very well," Carella said.
"I have to," Alice answered briefly.
"Why?"
"Because I'll fall all to pieces if I don't. He's in the ground, Steve. It's not going to help for me to wail and moan all over the place."
"I suppose not."
"We've got to go on living, don't we? We can't simply give up because someone we love is gone, can we?"
"No," Carella agreed.
She walked to him and handed him the drink. Their fingers touched for an instant. He looked up at her. Her face was completely guileless. The contact, he was sure, had been accidental.
She walked to the window and looked out toward the college. "It's lonely here without him," she said.
"It's lonely at the house without him, too," Carella said, surprised. He had not realized, before this, how really attached he had become to Hank.
"I was thinking of taking a trip," Alice said, "getting away from things that remind me of him."
"Things like what?" Carella asked.
"Oh, I don't know," Alice said. "Like . . . last night I saw his hair brush on the dresser, and there was some of that wild red hair of his caught in the bristles, and all at once it reminded me of him, of the wildness of him. He was a wild person, Steve." She paused. "Wild."
The word was female somehow. He was reminded again of the word portrait Hank had drawn, of the real portrait before him, standing by the window, of the femaleness everywhere around him on this island. He could not blame her, he knew that. She was only being herself, being Alice Bush, being Woman. She was only a pawn of fate, a girl who automatically embodied womanhood, a girl who . . . hell!
"How far have you come along on it?" she asked. She whirled from the window, went back to the love seat and collapsed into it. The movement was not a gracious one. It was feline, however. She sprawled in the love seat like a big jungle cat, and then she tucked her legs under her again, and he would not have been surprised if she'd begun purring in that moment.
He told her what they thought they knew about the suspected killer. Alice nodded.
"Quite a bit to go on," she said.
"Not really."
"I mean, if he should seek a doctor's aid."
"He hasn't yet. Chances are he won't. He probably dressed the wound himself."
"Badly shot?"
"Apparently. But clean."
"Hank should have killed him," she said. Surprisingly, there was no viciousness attached to the words. The words themselves bore all the lethal potential of a coiled rattler, but the delivery made them harmless.
"Yes," Carella agreed. "He should have."
"But he didn't."
"No."
"What's your next step?" she asked.
"Oh, I don't know. Homicide North is up a tree on these killings, and I guess we are, too. I've got a few ideas kicking around, though."
"A lead?" she asked.
"No. Just ideas."
"What kind of ideas?"
"They'd bore you."
"My husband's been killed," Alice said coldly. "I assure you I will not be bored by anything that may lead to finding his killer."
"Well, I'd prefer not to air any ideas until I know what I'm talking about."
Alice smiled. "That's different. You haven't touched your drink."
He raised the glass to his lips. The drink was very strong.
"Wow!" he said. "You don't spare the alcohol, do you?"
"Hank liked his strong," she said. "He liked everything strong."
And again, like an interwoven thread of personality, a personality dictated by the demands of a body that could look nothing but blatantly inviting, Alice Bush had inadvertently lighted another fuse. He had the feeling that she would suddenly explode into a thousand flying fragments of breast and hip and thigh, splashed over the landscape like a Dali painting.
"I'd better be getting along," he said. 'The City doesn't pay me for sipping drinks all morning."
"Stay a while," she said. "I have a few ideas myself."
He glanced up quickly, almost suspecting an edge of double entendre in her voice. He was mistaken. She had turned away from him and was looking out the window again, her face in profile, her body in profile.
"Let me hear them," he said.
"A cop hater," she replied.
"Maybe."
"It has to be. Who else would senselessly take three lives? It has to be a cop hater, Steve. Doesn't Homicide North think so?"
"I haven't talked to them in the past few days. That's what they thought in the beginning, I know."
"What do they think now?"
"That's hard to say."
"What do you think now?"
"Maybe a cop hater. Reardon and Foster, yes, a cop hater.
But Hank... I don't know."
"I'm not sure I follow you."
"Well, Reardon and Foster were partners, so we could assume that possibly some jerk was carrying a grudge against them. They worked together . . . maybe they rubbed some idiot the wrong way."
"Yes?"
"But Hank never worked with them. Oh, well maybe not never. Maybe once or twice on a plant or something. He never made an important arrest with either of them along, though. Our records show that."
"Who says it has to be someone with a personal grudge, Steve? This may simply be some goddamned lunatic." She seemed to be getting angry. He didn't know why she was getting angry because she'd certainly been calm enough up to this point. But her breath was coming heavier now, and her breasts heaved disconcertingly. "Just some crazy, rotten, twisted fool who's taken it into his mind to knock off every cop in the 87th Precinct. Does that sound so far-fetched?"
"No, not at all. As a matter of fact, we've checked all the mental institutions in the area for people who were recently released who might possibly have had a history of ..." He
shook his head. "You know, we figured perhaps a paranoiac, somebody who'd go berserk at the sight of a uniform. Except these men weren't in uniform." "No, they weren't. What'd you get?"
"We thought we had one lead. Not anyone with a history of dislike for policemen, but a young man who had a lot of officer trouble in the Army. He was recently released from Bramlook as cured, but that doesn't mean a goddamned thing. We checked with the psychiatrists there, and they felt his illness would never break out in an act of violence, no less a prolonged rampage of violence."
"And you let it drop?"
"No, we looked the kid up. Harmless. Alibis a mile long."
"Who else have you checked?"
"We've got feelers out to all our underworld contacts. We thought this might be a gang thing, where some hood has an alleged grievance against something we've done to hamper him, and so he's trying to show us we're not so high and mighty. He hires a torpedo and begins methodically putting us in our places. But there's been no rumble so far, and underworld revenge is not something you can keep very quiet."
"What else?"
"I've been wading through F.B I. photos all morning. Jesus, you'd never realize how many men there are who fit the possible description we have." He sipped at the scotch. He was beginning to feel a little more comfortable with Alice. Maybe she wasn't so female, after all. Or maybe her femaleness simply enveloped you after a while, causing you to lose all perspective. Whatever it was, the room wasn't as oppressive now.
'Turn up anything? From the photos?"
"Not yet. Half of them are in jail, and the rest are scattered all over the country. You see, the hell of this thing is ... well..."
"What?"
"How'd the killer know that these men were cops? They were all in plainclothes. Unless he'd had contact with them before, how could he know?"
"Yes, I see what you mean."
"Maybe he sat in a parked car across from the house and watched everyone who went in and out. If he did that for a while, he'd get to know who worked there and who didn't."
"He could have done that," Alice said thoughtfully. "Yes,
he could have." She crossed her legs unconsciously. Carella looked away.
"Several things against that theory, though," Carella said. "That's what makes this case such a bitch." The word had sneaked out, and he glanced up apprehensively. Alice Bush seemed not to mind the profanity. She had probably heard enough of it from Hank. Her legs were still crossed. They were very good legs. Her skirt had fallen into a funny position. He looked away again.
"You see, if somebody had been watching the house, we'd have noticed him. That is, if he'd been watching it long enough to know who worked there and who was visiting ... that would take time. We'd surely have spotted him."
"Not if he were hidden."
"There are no buildings opposite the house. Only the park."
"He could have been somewhere in the park . . . with binoculars, maybe."
"Sure. But how could he tell the detectives from the patrolmen, then?"
"What?"
"He killed three detectives. Maybe it was chance. I don't think so. All right, how the hell could he tell the patrolmen from the detectives?"
"Very simply," Alice said. "Assuming he was watching, he'd see the men when they arrived, and he'd see them after muster when they went out to their beats. They'd be in uniform then. I'm talking about the patrolmen."
"Yes, I suppose." He took a deep swallow of the drink. Alice moved on the love seat.
"I'm hot," she said.
He did not look at her. He knew that his eyes would have been drawn downward if he did, and he did not want to see what Alice was unconsciously, obliviously showing.
"I don't suppose this heat has helped the investigation any," she said.
"This heat hasn't helped anything any."
"I'm changing to shorts and a halter as soon as you get out of here."
"There's a hint if ever I heard one," Carella said.
"No, I didn't mean . . oh hell, Steve, I'd change to them now if I thought you were going to stay longer. I just thought you were leaving soon. I mean . . ." She made a vague motion with one hand. "Oh, nuts."
"I am leaving, Alice. Lots of photos to look through back there." He rose. "Thanks for the drink." He started for the door, not looking back when she got up, not wanting to look at her legs again.
She took his hand at the door. Her grip was firm and warm. Her hand was fleshy. She squeezed his hand.
"Good luck, Steve. If there's anything I can do to help ..."
"We'll let you know. Thanks again."
He left the apartment and walked down to the street It was very hot in the street.
Curiously, he felt like going to bed with somebody.
Anybody.
Chapter NINETEEN
"Now here's what I call a real handsome one," Hal Willis said. Hal Willis was the only really small detective Carella had ever known. He passed the minimum height requirement of five/eight, of course, but just barely. And contrasted against the imposing bulk of the other bulls in the division, he looked more like a soft shoe dancer than a tough cop. That he was a tough cop, there was no doubt. His bones were slight, and his face was thin, and he looked as if he would have trouble swatting a fly, but anyone who'd ever tangled with Hal Willis did not want the dubious pleasure again. Hal Willis was a Judo expert.
Hal Willis could shake your hand and break your backbone in one and the same motion. Were you not careful with Hal Willis, you might find yourself enwrapped in the excruciating pain of a Thumb Grip. Were you even less careful, you might discover yourself hurtling through space in the fury of either a Rugby or a Far-Eastern Capsize. Ankle Throws, Flying Mares, Back Wheels, all were as much a part of Hal Willis' personality as the sparkling brown eyes in his face.
Those eyes were amusedly turned now toward the F.B.I, photo which he shoved across the desk toward Carella.
The photo was of a man who was indeed a "real handsome one." His nose had been fractured in at least four places. A scar ran the length of his left cheek. Scar tissue hooded his eyes. He owned cauliflower ears and hardly any teeth. His name, of course, was "Pretty-Boy Krajak."
"A doll," Carella said. "Why'd they send him to us?"
"Dark hair, six feet two, weighing one-eighty-five. How'd you like to run across him some dark and lonely night?"
"I wouldn't. Is he in the city?"
"He's in L.A.," Willis said.
"Then we'll leave him to Joe Friday," Carella cracked.
"Have another Chesterfield," Willis countered. "The only living cigarette with 60,000 filter dragnets."
Carella laughed. The phone rang. Willis picked it up.
"87th Squad," he said. "Detective Willis."
Carella looked up.
"What?" Willis said. "Give me the address." He scribbled something hastily on his pad. "Hold him there, we'll be right over
." He hung up, opened the desk drawer and removed his holster and service revolver.
"What is it?" Carella asked.
"Doctor on 35th North. Has a man in his office with a bullet wound in his left shoulder."
A squad car was parked in front of the brownstone on 35th North when Carella and Willis arrived.
"The rookies beat us here," Willis said.
"So long as they've got him," Carella answered, and he made it sound like a prayer. A sign on the door read, "DOCTOR IS IN. RING BELL AND PLEASE BE SEATED."
"Where?" Willis asked. "On the doorstep?"
They rang the bell, opened the door, and entered the office. The office was situated off the small courtyard on the street level of the brownstone. A patrolman was seated on the long leather couch, reading a copy of Esquire. He closed the magazine when the detectives entered and said, "Patrolman Curtis, sir."
"Where's the doctor?" Carella asked.
"Inside, sir. Country is asking him some questions."
"Who's Country?"
"My partner, sir."
"Come on," Willis said. He and Carella went into the doctor's office. Country, a tall gangling boy with a shock of black hair snapped to attention when they entered.
"Goodbye, Country," Willis said drily. The patrolman eased himself toward the door and left the office.
"Dr. Russell?" Willis asked.
"Yes," Dr. Russell replied. He was a man of about fifty, with a head of hair that was silvery white, giving the lie to his age. He stood as straight as a telephone pole, broad-shouldered, immaculate in his white office tunic. He was a handsome man, and he gave an impression of great competence. For all Carella knew, he may have been a butcher, but he'd have trusted this man to cut out his heart.