Ed McBain_87th Precinct 48

by Nocturne

But then …

  Silence.

  After that concert thirty years ago, there was nothing more in the scrapbook. It was as if this glittering, illustrious artist had simply vanished from the face of the earth.

  Until now.

  When a woman the super knew as Mrs. Helder lay dead on the floor of a chilly apartment at half past midnight on the coldest night this year.

  They closed the scrapbook.

  The scenario proposed by Monoghan and Monroe sounded like a possible one. Woman goes down to buy herself a bottle of booze. Burglar comes in the window, thinking the apartment is empty. Most apartments are burglarized during the daytime, when it’s reasonable to expect the place will be empty. But some “crib” burglars, as they’re called, are either desperate junkies or beginners, and they’ll go in whenever the mood strikes them, day or night, so long as they think they’ll score. Okay, figure the guy sees no lights burning, he jimmies open the window—though the techs hadn’t found any jimmy marks—goes in, is getting accustomed to the dark and acquainted with the pad when he hears a key sliding in the keyway and the door opens and all at once the lights come on, and there’s this startled old broad standing there with a brown paper bag in one hand and a pocketbook in the other. He panics. Shoots her before she can scream. Shoots the cat for good measure. Man down the hall hears the shots, starts yelling. Super runs up, calls the police. By then, the burglar’s out the window and long gone.

  “You gonna want this handbag?” one of the techs asked.

  Carella turned from where he and Hawes were going through the small desk in the living room.

  “Cause we’re done with it,” the tech said.

  “Any prints?”

  “Just teeny ones. Must be the vic’s.”

  “What was in it?”

  “Nothing. It’s empty.”

  “Empty?”

  “Perp must’ve dumped the contents on the floor, grabbed whatever was in it.”

  Carella thought this over for a moment.

  “Shot her first, do you mean? And then emptied the bag and scooped up whatever was in it?”

  “Well … yeah,” the tech said.

  This sounded ridiculous even to him.

  “Why didn’t he just run off with the bag itself?”

  “Listen, they do funny things.”

  “Yeah,” Carella said.

  He was wondering if there’d been money in that bag when the lady went downstairs to buy her booze.

  “Let me see it,” he said.

  The tech handed him the bag. Carella peered into it, and then turned it upside down. Nothing fell out of it. He peered into it again. Nothing.

  “Steve?”

  Cotton Hawes, calling from the desk.

  “A wallet,” he said, holding it up.

  In the wallet, there was a Visa card with a photo ID of the woman called Svetlana Helder in its left-hand corner.

  There was also a hundred dollars in tens, fives and singles.

  Carella wondered if she had a charge account at the local liquor store.

  They were coming out into the hallway when a woman standing just outside the apartment down the hall said, “Excuse me?”

  Hawes looked her over.

  Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, he figured, slender dark-haired woman with somewhat exotic features spelling Middle Eastern or at least Mediterranean. Very dark brown eyes. No makeup, no nail polish. She was clutching a woolen shawl around her. Bathrobe under it. Red plaid, lambskin-lined bedroom slippers on her feet. It was slightly warmer here in the hallway than it was outside in the street. But only slightly. Most buildings in this city, the heat went off around midnight. It was now a quarter to one.

  “Are you the detectives?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Carella said.

  “I’m her neighbor,” the woman said.

  They waited.

  “Karen Todd,” she said.

  “Detective Carella. My partner, Detective Hawes. How do you do?”

  Neither of the detectives offered his hand. Not because they were male chauvinists, but only because cops rarely shook hands with so-called civilians. Same way cops didn’t carry umbrellas. See a guy with his hands in his pockets, standing on a street corner in the pouring rain, six to five he was an undercover cop.

  “I was out,” Karen said. “The super told me somebody killed her.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Carella said, and watched her eyes. Nothing flickered there. She nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “Why would anyone want to hurt her?” she said. “Such a gentle soul.”

  “How well did you know her?” Hawes asked.

  “Just to talk to. She used to be a famous piano player, did you know that? Svetlana Dyalovich. That was the name she played under.”

  Piano player, Hawes thought. A superb artist who had made the cover of Time magazine. A piano player.

  “Her hands all gnarled,” Karen said, and shook her head.

  The detectives looked at her.

  “The arthritis. She told me she was in constant pain. Have you noticed how you can never open bottles that have pain relievers in them? That’s because America is full of loonies who are trying to hurt people. Who would want to hurt her?” she asked again, shaking her head. “She was in so much pain already. The arthritis. Osteoarthritis, in fact, is what her doctor called it. I went with her once. To her doctor. He told me he was switching her to Voltaren because the Naprosyn wasn’t working anymore. He kept increasing the doses, it was really so sad.”

  “How long did you know her?” Carella asked.

  Another way of asking How well did you know her? He didn’t for a moment believe Karen Todd had anything at all to do with the murder of the old woman next door, but his mama once told him everyone’s a suspect till his story checks out. Or her story. Although the world’s politically correct morons would have it “Everyone’s a suspect until their story checks out.” Which was worse than tampering with the jars and bottles on supermarket shelves—and ungrammatical besides.

  “I met her when I moved in,” Karen said.

  “When was that?”

  “A year ago October. The fifteenth, in fact.”

  Birthdate of great men, Hawes thought, but did not say.

  “I’ve been here more than a year now. Fourteen months, in fact. She brought me a housewarming gift. A loaf of bread and a box of salt. That’s supposed to bring good luck. She was from Russia, you know. They used to have the old traditions over there. We don’t have any traditions anymore in America.”

  Wrong, Carella thought. Murder has become a tradition here.

  “She was a big star over there,” Karen said. “Well, here, too, in fact.”

  Bad verbal tic, Hawes thought.

  “She used to tell me stories of how she played for royalty all over the world, in fact. She had a lot of memories.”

  “When did she tell you these stories?”

  “Oh, in the afternoons. We had tea together every now and then.”

  “In her apartment?”

  “Yes. It was another tradition. Tea time. She had a lovely tea set. I had to pour because of her hands. We used to sit and listen to records she’d made when she was famous. And sip tea in the late afternoon. It reminded me of T. S. Eliot somehow.”

  Me, too, Hawes thought, but again did not say.

  “So when you said you knew her just to talk to,” Carella said, “you were including these visits to her apartment …”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “… when you listened to music together.”

  “Yes. Well, my apartment, too. Some nights, I invited her in. We had little dinner parties together. She was alone and lonely and … well, I didn’t want her to start drinking too early. She tended to drink more heavily at night.”

  “By heavily …?”

  “Well … she started drinking as soon as she woke up in the morning, in fact. But at night … well … she sometimes drank herself into a stupor.”

  “How do you kn
ow that?” Hawes asked.

  “She told me. She was very frank with me. She knew she had a problem.”

  “Was she doing anything about it?”

  “She was eighty-three years old. What could she do about it? The arthritis was bad enough. But she wore a hearing aid, you know. And lately, she began hearing ringing in her head, and hissing, like a kettle, you know? And sometimes a roaring sound, like heavy machinery? It was really awful. She told me her ear doctor wanted to send her to a neurologist for testing, but she was afraid to go.”

  “When was this?” Hawes asked.

  “Before Thanksgiving. It was really so sad.”

  “These afternoon teas,” Carella said, “these little dinner parties … was anyone else at them? Besides you and Miss Dyalovich?”

  Somehow he liked that better than Mrs. Helder. Cover of Time magazine, he was thinking. You shouldn’t end up as Mrs. Helder.

  “No, just the two of us. In fact, I don’t think she had any other friends. She told me once that all the people she’d known when she was young and famous were dead now. All she had was me, I guess. And the cat. She was very close to poor Irina. What’s going to happen to her now? Will she go to an animal shelter?”

  “Miss, he killed the cat, too,” Hawes said.

  “Oh dear. Oh dear,” Karen said, and was silent for a moment. “She used to go out early every morning to buy fresh fish for her, can you imagine? No matter how cold it was, arthritic old lady. Irina loved fish.”

  Her brown eyes suddenly welled with tears. Hawes wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her. Instead, he said, “Did she have any living relatives?”

  People to inform, Carella thought. He almost sighed.

  “A married daughter in London.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone here in this country?”

  “I think a granddaughter someplace in the city.”

  “Ever meet her?”

  “No.”

  “Would you know her name?”

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  “Did Miss Dyalovich ever mention any threatening phone calls or letters?”

  “No.”

  Run her through the drill, Carella was thinking.

  “Had she ever seen anyone lurking around the building …?”

  “No.”

  “Following her …?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know of any enemies she may have had?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone with whom she may have had a continuing dispute?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone she may have quarreled with?”

  “No …”

  “Even anyone on unfriendly terms with her?”

  “No.”

  “Did she owe anyone money?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Did anyone owe her money?”

  “She was an old woman living on welfare. What money did she have to lend?”

  Toast of six continents, Hawes thought. Ends up living on welfare in a shithole on Lincoln. Sipping tea and whiskey in the late afternoon. Listening to her own old 78s. Her hands all gnarled.

  “This granddaughter,” he said. “Did you ever see her?”

  “No, I never met her. I told you.”

  “What I’m asking is did you ever see her? Coming out of the apartment next door. Or in the hall. Did she ever come here to visit, is what I’m asking?”

  “Oh. No. I don’t think they got along.”

  “Then there was someone on unfriendly terms with her,” Carella said.

  “Yes, but family,” Karen said, shrugging it off.

  “Was it Miss Dyalovich who told you they didn’t get along?”

  “Yes.”

  “When was this?”

  “Oh, two or three months ago.”

  “Came up out of the blue, did it?”

  “No, she was lamenting the fact that her only daughter lived so far away, in London …”

  “How’d that lead to the granddaughter?”

  “Well, she said if only she and Priscilla could get along …”

  “Is that her name?” Hawes asked at once. “The granddaughter?”

  “Oh. Yes. I’m sorry, I didn’t remember it until it popped out of my mouth.”

  “Priscilla what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe it’ll come to you.”

  “No, I don’t think I ever knew it.”

  “The obit will tell us,” Carella said. “Later this morning.”

  It was now exactly one a.m.

  The man who owned the liquor store told them Saturdays were his biggest nights. Made more in the hour before closing on Saturday nights than he did the rest of the entire year. Only thing bigger was New Year’s Eve, he told them. Even bigger than that was when New Year’s Eve fell on a Saturday night. Couldn’t beat it.

  “Biggest night of the year,” he said. “I could stay open all night New Year’s Eve and sell everything in the store.”

  This was already Sunday, but it still felt like Saturday night to the guy who owned the store. It must have still felt like Christmas, too, even though it was already the twenty-first of January. A little Christmas tree blinked green and red in the front window. Little cardboard cutouts, hanging across the ceiling, endlessly repeated happy holidays. Gift-packaged bottles of booze sat on countertops and tables.

  The store owner’s name was Martin Keely. He was maybe sixty-eight, sixty-nine, in there, a short stout man with a drunkard’s nose and wide suspenders to match it. He kept interrupting their conversation, such as it was, to make yet another sale. This hour of the night, he was selling mostly cheap wine to panhandlers who straggled in with their day’s take. This became a different city after midnight. You saw different people in the streets and on the sidewalks. In the bars and clubs that were open. In the subways and the taxicabs. An entirely different city with entirely different people in it.

  One of them had killed Svetlana Dyalovich.

  “What time did she come in here, would you remember?” Hawes asked.

  “Around eleven o’clock.”

  Which more or less tied in. Man down the hall said he heard the shots at about eleven-twenty. Super called 911 five minutes after that.

  “What’d she buy?”

  “Bottle of Four Roses.”

  Exactly the brand that had dropped to the floor when someone shot her.

  “How much did it cost?”

  “Eight dollars and ninety-nine cents.”

  “How’d she pay for it?”

  “Cash.”

  “Exact?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did she hand you exactly eight dollars and ninety-nine cents.”

  “No, she handed me a ten-dollar bill. I gave her change.”

  “Where’d she put the change?”

  “In this little purse she was carrying. Took a ten out of the purse, handed it to me. Gave her one dollar and one cent in change. Put that in the purse.”

  “The dollar was in change, too?”

  “No, the dollar was a bill.”

  “And you say she put the change in her handbag?”

  “No, she put it in this purse. A little purse. A change purse. With the little snaps on top you click open with your thumb and forefinger. A purse, you know?” he said, seeming to become inappropriately agitated. “You know what a purse is? A purse ain’t a handbag. A purse is a purse. Doesn’t anybody in this city speak English anymore?”

  “Where’d she put this purse?” Carella asked calmly.

  “In her coat pocket.”

  “The pocket of the mink,” he said, nodding.

  “No, she wasn’t wearing a mink. She was wearing a cloth coat.”

  The detectives looked at him.

  “Are you sure about that?” Hawes asked.

  “Positive. Ratty blue cloth coat. Scarf on her head. Silk, I think. Whatever. Pretty. But it had seen better days.”

 
“Cloth coat and a silk scarf,” Carella said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re saying that when she came in here at eleven o’clock last night …”

  “No, I’m not saying that at all.”

  “You’re not saying she was wearing a cloth coat and a silk scarf?”

  “I’m not saying she came in at eleven last night.”

  “If it wasn’t eleven, what time was it?”

  “Oh, it was eleven, all right. But it was eleven yesterday morning.”

  They found the change purse in the pocket of a blue cloth coat hanging in the bedroom closet.

  There was a dollar and a penny in it.

  2

  In the year 1909, there used to be forty-four morning newspapers in this city. By 1929, that figure had dropped to thirty. Three years later, due to technological advances, competition for circulation, standardization of the product, managerial faults, and, by the way, the Great Depression, this number was reduced to a mere three. Now there were but two.

  Since there was a killer out there, the detectives didn’t want to wait till four, five a.m., when both papers would hit the newsstands. Nor did they think a call to the morning tabloid would be fruitful, mainly because they didn’t think it would run an obit on a concert pianist, however famous she once may have been. It later turned out they were wrong; the tabloid played the story up big, but only because Svetlana had been living in obscurity and poverty after three decades of celebrity, and her granddaughter—but that was another story.

  Hawes spoke on the phone to the obituary editor at the so-called quality paper, a most cooperative man who was ready to read the full obit to him until Hawes assured him that all he wanted were the names of Miss Dyalovich’s surviving kin. The editor skipped to the last paragraph, which noted that Svetlana was survived by a daughter, Maria Stetson, who lived in London, and a granddaughter, Priscilla Stetson, who lived right here in the big bad city.

  “You know who she is, don’t you?” the editor asked.

  Hawes thought he meant Svetlana.

  “Yes, of course,” he said.

  “We couldn’t mention it in the obit because that’s supposed to be exclusively about the deceased.”

  “I’m not following you,” Hawes said.

  “The granddaughter. She’s Priscilla Stetson. The singer.”

  “Oh? What kind of singing does she do?”