Ed McBain_87th Precinct 48

by Nocturne

  “I’m just wonderin what really happened here, is all,” Ollie said. “Send me what you get the minute you get it, okay? The Eight-Eight. Oliver Weeks.”

  “Sure,” the technician said, and shrugged and went back to his vacuuming.

  “I think what happened here is what the kid says happened here,” Flaherty said.

  Sloat looked flattered.

  “They killed each other, right?” Ollie said. He was already beginning to go through the bag the technician had handed him. The clutch bag, excuse me all to hell. Looked like some more hundred-dollar bills in here …

  “Dude’s about to take a bath,” Sloat suggested, “he hears somebody coming in the apartment, he immediately grabs for a knife …”

  “I think the kid’s got it,” Flaherty said, and beamed approval again.

  Fuckin Homicide jackass, Ollie thought. Fourteen hundred in the bag, plus the five on the floor, came to nineteen. Money like that spelled dope or prostitution. More red tops on the bottom of the bag, looked more like a dope thing every minute. He fished out a driver’s license with a photo ID on it.

  “What’ve you got?” Flanagan asked.

  “Ohio driver’s license,” Ollie said.

  “Out-of-towner,” Sloat surmised.

  “Probably mugged her, one or the other of them, then got into a fight over the bag.”

  “When was this?” Ollie asked. “Before he turned the apartment upside down or after?”

  “What?”

  “Whoever got killed first. Give me the sequence, Wilbur.”

  He made the name sound like a dirty word.

  “Start with the muggin,” Flanagan said.

  “Cooper mugged her, brought the bag back to his apartment,” Sloat said.

  “Who’s Cooper?” Flaherty asked.

  “The one who drowned.”

  From the door, where he was putting on his hat, the M.E. called, “I didn’t say he drowned.”

  “If he drowned,” Sloat said.

  “For all I know, he was poisoned.”

  Yeah, bullshit, Ollie thought.

  “Good night, gentlemen,” the M.E. said, and headed downstairs to the snow and the wind.

  Ollie looked at his watch.

  A quarter to seven.

  “So let’s hear it, Wilbur,” he said.

  “I’ve got an even better idea,” Sloat said.

  “Even better than your first one?” Ollie said, sounding surprised.

  “They both mugged her.”

  “That’s very good,” Flaherty said appreciatively.

  “Came back here to celebrate. All these empty champagne bottles? They were drinking champagne.”

  “Got drunk, got wild, started throwing around clothes and stuff,” Flanagan suggested.

  “I like it,” Flaherty said.

  “A drunken party,” Sloat said. “Cooper goes in the bathroom to run a tub. Jamal comes in after him, and they start arguing about how to split the money.”

  “Better all the time,” Flaherty said.

  “Cooper pulls a knife, slashes Jamal. Jamal shoves out at him as he goes down. Cooper falls in the tub and drowns.”

  “Case closed,” Flaherty said, grinning.

  Assholes, Ollie thought.

  “Hey, you!” he yelled to the technician.

  The technician turned off his vacuum cleaner again.

  “I want the knife and the champagne bottles dusted. I want every fuckin surface in this dump dusted. I want comparison prints lifted from both those two black shits in the bathroom. I want comparison hairs from their heads, and comparison fibers from their clothes, and I want them checked against whatever you pick up with that fuckin noisy vacuum of yours. Where’d you buy that vacuum, anyway? From a pushcart in Majesta?”

  “It’s standard departmental issue,” the technician said, offended.

  “Stand on this awhile,” Ollie said, and clutched his own genitals with his right hand and then released them at once. “I want to know was there anybody else in this dump besides those two ugly bastards in the bathroom. Cause there’s nothing I’d like better than to nail another son of a bitch up here in Diamondback. You got that?”

  The technician was glaring at him.

  “I go off at a quarter to twelve,” Ollie said. “I want to know before then.”

  The technician was still glaring at him.

  “You got it?” Ollie said, glaring back.

  “I’ve got it,” the technician snapped. “You fat tub of shit,” he muttered, which he was lucky Ollie didn’t hear.

  Along about then, Steve Carella was just waking up.

  Georgie and Tony had a serious problem on their hands.

  “The thing is,” Georgie said, “the old lady probably didn’t even remember putting that money in the locker.”

  “An old lady, how old?” Tony asked. “How could she remember?”

  “You see the envelope it’s in?”

  The envelope was in the inside pocket on the right-hand side of his jacket. It bulged out the jacket as if he was packing, which he was not. Georgie only carried a gun when he was at the club protecting Priscilla. Carrying a gun was too dangerous otherwise. People would think you were an armed robber or something. Georgie preferred subtler ways of beating the System. Beating the System was what it was all about. But now, Priss Stetson had in some strange mysterious way become the System.

  “Even the envelope looks ancient,” Georgie said, lowering his voice.

  The men were in the bus terminal restaurant, eating an early dinner and trying to figure out what to do about this large sum of money that had come their way. The place wasn’t too crowded at a little past seven. Maybe a dozen people in all. Black guy and what looked like his mother sitting at a nearby table. Three kids in blue parkas, looked like college boys, sitting at another table across the room. Old guy in his sixties holding hands with a young blonde maybe thirty or forty, she was either his daughter or a bimbo. Two guys hunched over racing forms, trying to dope out tomorrow’s ponies.

  It had been snowing since two this afternoon. Beyond the restaurant’s high windows, sharp tiny flakes, the kind that stuck, swirled dizzily on the air, caught in the light of the streetlamps. There had to be six inches on the ground already, and the snow showed no sign of letting up. Inside the restaurant, there was the snug, cozy feel of people hunched over good food in a safe, warm place. Outside, buses came and went. The hundred thou in the yellowing envelope was burning a hole in Georgie’s pocket.

  “The question here,” he said, “is what is our obligation?”

  “Our moral obligation,” Tony said, nodding.

  “If the old lady forgot the money was there.”

  “My grandmother forgets things all the time.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “She says it, too. I mean, she knows it, Georgie. She says if her head wasn’t on her shoulders she’d forget where she put it.”

  “They forget things. They get old, they forget things.”

  “You know the story about the old guy in the nursing home?”

  “Yeah, you told us.”

  “No, not that one.”

  “Parkinson’s? You told us.”

  “No, this is another one. This old guy is in a nursing home, the doctor comes in his room, he says, ‘I’ve got bad news for you.’ The old guy says, ‘What is it?’ The doctor says, ‘First, you’ve got cancer, and second, you’ve got Alzheimer’s.’ The old guy goes, ‘Phew, thank God I don’t have cancer.’ ”

  Georgie looked at him.

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “The old guy already forgot,” Tony explained.

  “Forgot what?”

  “That he has cancer.”

  “How can a person forget he has cancer?’

  “Cause he has Alzheimer’s.”

  “Then how come he didn’t forget he has Alzheimer’s?”

  “Forget it,” Tony said.

  “No, you raised the question. If he can forget he ha
s one disease, how come he doesn’t forget he’s got the other disease?”

  “Cause then it wouldn’t be a joke.”

  “It isn’t a joke, anyway.”

  “A lot of people think it’s a joke.”

  “If it isn’t funny, how can it be a joke?”

  “A lot of people think it’s funny.”

  “A lot of people are pretty fuckin weird, too,” Georgie said, and nodded in dismissal.

  Both men sipped at their coffee.

  “So what do you want to do here?” Tony asked.

  “About the envelope?” Georgie asked, lowering his voice.

  “Yeah.”

  Both of them whispering now.

  “Let’s say the old lady put it there ten years ago, forgot it was there.”

  “Then why did she send Priss the key?”

  “Who knows why old ladies do things? Maybe she had an apparition she was about to get knocked off.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter either way. The old lady’s dead, how can she tell Priss what was in that locker?”

  “Her note didn’t say anything about what was in the locker. All it said was go to the locker, that’s all.”

  “What it said exactly was go to locker number one thirty-six at the Rendell Road Bus Terminal.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What I’m saying,” Georgie said, “is if Priss knew there was a hundred large in that locker, you think she’d have trusted us to come for it?”

  “Us? She’d have to be out of her mind.”

  “Exactly the point.”

  “What you’re saying is she didn’t know.”

  “What I’m saying is she doesn’t know.”

  Silence. The clink of silverware against coffee cups and saucers. The trill of the black woman’s laughter at the nearby table. The buzz of conversation from the college boys on the other side of the room. Other voices. And the loudspeaker announcing the arrival of a bus from Philadelphia at gate number seven. At the center of all this, the core of Tony’s and Georgie’s thoughtful silence.

  “We’re the only ones who know,” Tony said at last.

  “So why should we turn it over to her?” Georgie asked.

  Tony merely smiled.

  The next bus back to school wouldn’t be leaving for an hour yet. This gave them plenty of time to work out what in the film industry was called a back story.

  What seemed perfectly apparent to them was that the only people with whom they’d had any contact after the bouncer tossed them out of the Jammer were all now dead. This was definitely in their favor. If they hadn’t even talked to anyone after telling the bouncer to go fuck himself, then there wasn’t anyone alive who could say they were uptown in Diamondback getting involved with three people who would later cause trouble for each other, the girl by refusing to mention she was suffocating, the two black drunks getting into a fight over her money and her stash, one of them ending up drowned, the other stabbed, boy.

  “What about the cabdriver?” Richard the Second asked.

  “Uh-oh, the cabbie,” Richard the Third said.

  “What about him?” Richard the First said. “He picked us up downtown, he dropped us off uptown. So what?”

  Two guys who looked like gangsters in a Martin Scorsese movie were walking past the table, on their way out of the restaurant. The boys lowered their voices, averted their eyes. In this city, it was best to be circumspect. Witness what had happened uptown when they’d got too chummily careless with three people who’d turned out to be unwholesome types.

  “See that bulge under his coat?” Richard the Third whispered as soon as the men pushed through the door into the terminal proper. Outside, despite the snow, buses kept coming and going. The two men disappeared in the swirling flakes.

  “How’d you like to meet one of those guys in a dark alley?” Richard the Second said.

  None of the Richards seemed to realize that they themselves were now prime candidates for guys you would not care to meet in a dark alley. Or anywhere else, for that matter. They had killed three people. They qualified. But the odd thing about what had happened was that it now seemed to be something they’d read about or watched on television or seen on a stage or in a movie theater. It simply did not seem to have happened to them.

  So as they discussed whether or not the cabdriver who’d driven them to Diamondback posed any kind of a threat, they dismissed from their reasoning the reason for their concern. They had been sitting in the back of a dark cab, he could not have seen their faces clearly. There had been a thick plastic partition between them and the driver’s seat, further obscuring vision. They had placed the fare and a reasonable tip into the little plastic holder that flipped out toward them. The only words that passed between them and the cabbie was when Richard the First told him their destination. Ainsley and North Eleventh, he’d said. The driver hadn’t even muttered acknowledgment.

  The way Richard the First figured it, and he told this to the other two Richards now, the camel jockeys in this city were involved solely with calculating how many more months they’d have to work here before they saved enough to go back home. This was why they never spoke to anyone. Never even nodded to indicate they’d heard you. Never said thank you, God forbid. They were too busy reckoning the nickels and dimes they’d need to build their shining palaces in the sand.

  “He won’t be a problem,” Richard the First said.

  But none of them acknowledged the events that had followed that fateful ride uptown. None of them even whispered the possibility that they may have been seen by someone as they entered black Richard’s building in the company of that unfortunate girl who’d later been too timid or stupid to mention or even indicate that she was having trouble breathing. Acknowledging the cause of their concern would concede implication.

  No.

  The boys were clean.

  Their bus would leave in forty-five minutes.

  They would be back at school in an hour and forty-five minutes.

  Everything there would be white and still and clean.

  “Nothing happened,” Richard the First said aloud.

  “Nothing happened,” the other two Richards said.

  “Swear,” Richard the First said, and placed his clenched fist on the tabletop.

  “I swear,” Richard the Second said, and covered the fist with his hand.

  “I swear,” Richard the Third said, and likewise covered the fist.

  The loudspeaker announced final boarding of the seven-thirty-two bus to Poughkeepsie.

  The boys ordered another round of milk shakes.

  Two pieces of significant information came into the squad-room in the final hour of the night shift. Detective Hal Willis, sitting in his shirtsleeves in the overheated room, watching the snowflakes swirling outside, took both calls. The first came at a quarter past eleven. It was from a detective named Frank Schulz who asked to speak to either Carella or Hawes, and then settled for Willis when he said he’d give them the information.

  Schulz was one of the technicians who’d examined the Cadillac registered to Rodney Pratt. He informed Willis, by the way, that the limo had already been returned to the owner, receipt in Schulz’s possession, did Willis want it faxed over or could Schulz drop it in the mail, the receipt? Willis told him to mail it.

  “What we got was a lot of feathers,” Schulz said. “Now, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the difference between down and contour feathers …”

  “No, I’m not,” Willis said.

  “Then I won’t bother you with an explanation because we’re both busy men,” Schulz said, and then went on to give a long, erudite dissertation on feather sacks and quills and shafts and barbs and barbules and booklets and knots, all of which differed in various orders of birds, did Willis happen to see the movie Alfred Hitchcock wrote?

  Willis didn’t think Hitchcock had written it.

  “The determination of which feathers came from what order of bird is importa
nt in many investigations,” Schulz said.

  Like this one, Willis thought.

  “I don’t know whether the Caddy was being used for any illegal activity, but that’s not my domain, anyway.”

  Domain, Willis thought.

  “Suffice it to say,” Schulz said, “that the feathers we recovered from the backseat of the car were chicken feathers. The shit is anybody’s guess.”

  “Chicken feathers,” Willis said.

  “Pass it on,” Schulz said.

  “I will.”

  “I know you’re busy,” Schulz said, and hung up.

  The second call came from Captain Sam Grossman some ten minutes later. He told Willis that he’d examined the clothing of the murder victim Svetlana Dyalovich and had come up with nothing of any real significance except for what he’d found on the mink.

  Willis hoped he was not about to hear a dissertation on the pelts of slender-bodied, semiaquatic, carnivorous mammals of the genus Mustela. Instead, Grossman wanted to talk about fish. Willis braced himself. But Grossman got directly to the point.

  “There were fish stains on the coat. Which in itself is not unusual. People get all sorts of stains on their garments. What’s peculiar about these stains is their location.”

  “Where were they?” Willis asked.

  “High up on the coat. At the back, inside and outside, near the collar. From the location of the stains, it would appear that someone had held the coat in both hands, one at either side of the collar, thumbs outside, fingers inside.”

  “I can’t visualize it,” Willis said, shaking his head.

  “Have you got a book handy?”

  “How about the Code of Criminal Procedure?”

  “Fine. Pick it up with both hands, palms over the spine, fingers on the front cover, thumbs on the back.”

  “Let me put down the phone.”

  He put down the phone. Picked up the book. Nodded. Put down the book and picked up the phone again.

  “Are you saying there are fingerprints on the coat?”

  “No such luck,” Grossman said. “But the stains at the back are smaller, which might’ve been where the thumbs gripped it near the collar. And the larger ones inside the coat could have been left by the fingers of each hand.”