by Ed McBain
“All right, all right,” the man said in a thin, almost girlish voice, “nobody moves, nobody gets hurt.” His eyes darted. His hand was still shaking. Suddenly, he giggled. The giggle scared Eileen more than the gun in his hand did. The giggle was high and nervous and just enough off center to send a shiver racing up her spine. Her hand on the butt of the .38 suddenly began sweating.
“All I want is your money, all your money,” the man said. “And your—”
“I don’t have the combination to the safe,” the manager said.
“Who asked you for anything?” the man said, turning to him. “You just shut up, you hear me?”
“Yes, sir,” the manager said.
“You hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m talking to the ladies here, not you, you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So shut up.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You!” the man said, and turned to the woman with the baby strapped to her back, jerking the gun at her, moving erratically, almost dancing across the floor of the Laundromat, turning this way and that as though playing to an audience from a stage. Each time he turned, the woman with the baby on her back turned with him, so that she was always facing him, her body forming a barricade between him and the baby. She doesn’t know, Eileen thought, that a slug from that gun can go clear through her and the baby and the wall behind them, too.
“Your money!” the man said. “Hurry up! Your rings, too, give me your rings!”
“Just don’t shoot,” the woman said.
“Shut up! Give me your panties!”
“What?”
“Your panties, take off your panties, give them to me!”
The woman stared at him.
“Are you deaf?” he said, and danced toward her, and jabbed the gun at her. The woman already had a wad of dollar bills clutched in one fist and her wedding ring and engagement ring in the other, and she stood there uncertainly, knowing she had heard him say he wanted her panties, but not knowing whether he wanted her to give him the money and the jewelry first or—
“Hurry up!” he said. “Take them off! Hurry up!”
The woman quickly handed him the bills and the rings and then reached up under her skirt and lowered her panties over her thighs and down to her ankles. She stepped out of them, picked them up, handed them to him, and quickly backed away from him as he stuffed them into his pocket.
“All of you!” he said, his voice higher now. “I want all of you to take off your panties! Give me your money! Give me all your money! And your rings! And your panties, take them off, hurry up!”
The black woman sitting on the chair alongside Eileen kept staring at the man as though he had popped out of a bottle, following his every move around the room, her eyes wide, disbelieving his demands, disbelieving the gun in his hand, disbelieving his very existence. She just kept staring at him and shaking her head in disbelief.
“You!” he said, dancing over to her. “Give me that necklace! Hurry up!”
“Ain’t but costume jewelry,” the woman said calmly.
“Give me your money!”
“Ain’t got but a dollar an’ a quarter in change,” the woman said.
“Give it to me!” he said, and held out his left hand.
The woman rummaged in her handbag. She took out a change purse. Ignoring the man, ignoring the gun not a foot from her nose, she unsnapped the purse, and reached into it, and took out coin after coin, transferring the coins from her right hand to the palm of her left hand, three quarters and five dimes, and then closing her fist on the coins, and bringing her fist to his open palm, and opening the fist and letting the coins fall (disdainfully, it seemed to Eileen) onto his palm.
“Now your panties,” he said.
“Nossir.”
“Take off your panties,” he said.
“Won’t do no such thing,” the woman said.
“What?”
“Won’t do no such thing. Ain’t just a matter of reachin’ up under m’skirt way that lady with the baby did, nossir. I’d have to take off fust m’galoshes and then m’jeans, an’ there ain’t no way I plan to stan’ here naked in front of two men I never seen in my life, nossir.”
The man waved the gun.
“Do what I tell you,” he said.
“Nossir,” the woman said.
Eileen tensed.
She wondered if she should make her move now, a bad situation could only get worse, she’d been taught that at the academy and it was a rule she’d lived by and survived by all the years she’d been on the force, but a rule she’d somehow neglected tonight when this silly little son of a bitch walked through the door and pulled the cannon from his pocket, a bad situation can only get worse, make your move now, do it now, go for the money, go for broke, but now, now! And she wondered, too, if he would bother turning to fire at her once she pulled the gun from her handbag or would he instead fire at the black woman who was willing to risk getting shot and maybe killed rather than take off her jeans and then her panties in a room containing a trembling night man and an armed robber who maybe was or maybe wasn’t bonkers, make your move, stop thinking, stop wondering—but what if the baby gets shot?
It occurred to her that maybe the black woman would actually succeed in staring down the little man with the penchant for panties, get him to turn away in defeat, run for the door, out into the cold and into the waiting arms of Detective Hal Willis— which reminds me, where the hell are you, Willis? It would not hurt to have my backup come in behind this guy right now, it would not hurt to have his attention diverted from me to you, two guns against one, the good guys against the bad guys, where the hell are you? The little man was trembling violently now, the struggle inside him so intense that it seemed he would rattle himself to pieces, crumble into a pile of broken pink chalk around a huge weapon—he’s a closet rapist, she thought suddenly, the man’s a closet rapist!
The thought was blinding in its clarity. She knew now, or felt she knew, why he was running around town holding up Laundromats. He was holding up Laundromats because there were women in Laundromats and he wanted to see those women taking off their panties. The holdups had nothing at all to do with money or jewelry, the man was after panties! The rings and the bracelets and the cash were all his cover, his beard, his smoke screen, the man wanted ladies’ panties, the man wanted the aroma of women on his loot, the man probably had a garageful of panties wherever he lived, the man was a closet rapist and she knew how to deal with rapists, she had certainly dealt with enough rapists in her lifetime, but that was her alone in a park, that was when the only life at stake had been her own, make your move, she thought, make it now!
“You!” she said sharply.
The man turned toward her. The gun turned at the same time.
“Take mine,” she said.
“What?” he said.
“Leave her alone. Take my panties.”
“What?”
“Reach under my skirt,” she whispered. “Rip off my panties.”
She thought for a terrifying moment that she’d made a costly mistake. His face contorted in what appeared to be rage, and the gun began shaking even more violently in his fist. Oh, God, she thought, I’ve forced him out of the closet, I’ve forced him to see himself for what he is, that gun is his cock as sure as I’m sitting here, and he’s going to jerk it off into my face in the next ten seconds! And then a strange thing happened to his face, a strange smile replaced the anger, a strange secret smile touched the corners of his mouth, a secret communication flashed in his eyes, his eyes to her eyes, their secret, a secret to share, he lowered the gun, he moved toward her.
“Police!” she shouted, and the .38 came up out of the bag in the same instant that she came up off the plastic chair, and she rammed the muzzle of the gun into the hollow of his throat and said so quietly that only he could hear it, “Don’t even think it or I’ll shoot you dead!” And she would remember later and remember alway
s the way the shouted word “Police!” had shattered the secret in his eyes, their shared secret, and she would always wonder if the way she’d disarmed him hadn’t been particularly cruel and unjust.
She clamped the handcuffs onto his wrists and then stooped to pick up the Magnum from where he’d dropped it on the Laundromat floor.
Carella could not fall asleep.
He kept thinking that too many people were involved. He kept thinking that even if the lieutenant was willing to put another man on the case, even then it would take them at least a week to question all those people in the show, that was if the lieutenant agreed to give him another man, fat chance he’d agree to that. Well, maybe he would. The death of Paco Lopez had gone by without a ripple, there weren’t many people who cared about a two-bit dealer biting the dust—“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” as Carella’s mother used to say when he was but a mere lad coming along in this city he loved. He often wondered where his mother had picked up the expressions that had been her favorites. “Ike and Mike, they look alike,” she would often say of him and his father. Or, whenever Carella managed to knock over a glass of milk at the dinner table, “Very good, Eddie.” Or, regarding his Aunt Clara, whom Carella had positively adored, “She dresses like Astor’s pet horse.” Or (speaking of horses), whenever anyone became insulted about something, Carella’s mother would describe it with the words, “He got on his high horse.” Were Ike and Mike comic strip characters? Who in the world was Eddie? Good riddance to bad rubbish—was there such a thing as good rubbish?
Paco Lopez had been bad rubbish for sure, and no one had mourned his passing. But the Anderson girl’s death had made headlines in the city’s afternoon newspaper, and the muckraking journalists on that yellow sheet were beginning to clamor for a speedy arrest of the “maniac responsible.” So maybe the lieutenant would give Carella the additional man he planned to request, maybe Pete himself was getting some pressure from upstairs.
The newspapers did not yet know, nor did Carella plan to tell them, that a man named Paco Lopez, whose death had gone unnoticed, had been killed with the same gun. There was nothing the journalists would have liked better than a possible romantic link (a possibility that had crossed Carella’s mind) between a young blonde dancer and a Puerto Rican dope dealer. A story like that would make even the television newscasters jump for joy. There were, after all, two Puerto Rican dancers in the show—well, not necessarily Puerto Rican, Carella had asked only if there were any Hispanics in the show, and Tina Wong had told him there were two, so they could be anything, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Colombian, you name it, this city had it. Both of them faggots. Carella wondered if either of them was doing nose candy. Carella wondered if either of them had known Paco Lopez. That was the damn trouble. A hundred fourteen people involved with that show, one or more of whom may have been the connection between Sally Anderson and Paco Lopez, if there was any connection at all besides the .38 caliber gun that had killed them both.
Please don’t let it be a crazy, he thought. Please let it be a nice sensible murderer who killed both those people for a very good reason.
He kept staring up at the ceiling.
There were just too many people involved, he thought.
Willis was trying to explain why he hadn’t happened to notice the Dirty Panties Bandit when he entered the Laundromat. They had sent down for pizza, and now they sat in the relative 1:00 A.M. silence of the squadroom, eating Papa Joe’s really pretty good combination anchovies and pepperoni and drinking Miscolo’s really pretty lousy Colombian coffee; Detective Bert Kling was sitting with them, but he wasn’t eating or saying very much.
Eileen remembered him as a man with a huge appetite, and she wondered now if he was on a diet. He looked thinner than she recalled—well, that had been several years back—and he also looked somewhat drawn and pale and, well, unkempt. His straight blond hair was growing raggedly over his shirt collar and his ears, and the collar itself looked a bit frayed, and his suit looked unpressed, and there were stains on the tie he was wearing. Eileen figured he was maybe coming in off a stakeout someplace. Maybe he was supposed to look like somebody who was going to seed. And maybe those dark shadows under his eyes were all part of the role he was playing out there on the street, in which case he should get not only a commendation but an Academy Award besides.
Willis was very apologetic.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said, “I figured we didn’t have a chance of our man showing. Because on the other jobs, he usually hit between ten and ten-thirty, and it was almost eleven when this guy came running out of the bar—”
“Wait a minute,” Eileen said. “What guy?”
“Came running out of the bar next door,” Willis said. “Bert, don’t you want some of this?”
“Thanks,” Kling said, and shook his head.
“Yelling, ‘Police, police,’ ” Willis said.
“When was this?” Eileen asked.
“I told you, a little before eleven,” Willis said. “Even so, if I thought we had a chance of our man showing I’d have said screw it, let some other cop handle whatever it is in the bar there. But I mean it, Eileen, I figured we’d had it for tonight.”
“So you went in the bar?”
“No. Well, yes. But not right away, no, I got out of the car, and I asked the guy what the trouble was, and he asked me did I see a cop anywhere because there was somebody with a knife in the bar and I told him I was a cop and he said I ought to go in there and take the knife away before somebody got cut.”
“So naturally you went right in,” Eileen said, and winked at Kling. Kling did not wink back. Kling lifted his coffee cup and sipped at it. He seemed not to be listening to what Willis was saying. He seemed almost comatose. Eileen wondered what was wrong with him.
“No, I still gave it a bit of thought,” Willis said. “I would have rushed in immediately, of course—”
“Of course,” Eileen said.
“To disarm that guy…who by the way turned out to be a girl…but I was worried about you being all alone there in the Laundromat in case Mr. Bloomers did decide to show up.”
“Mr. Bloomers!” Eileen said, and burst out laughing. She was still feeling very high after the bust, and she wished that Kling wouldn’t sit there like a zombie but would instead join in the general post mortem celebration.
“So I looked through the window,” Willis said.
“Of the bar?”
“No, the Laundromat. And saw that everything was still cool, you were sitting there next to a lady reading a magazine and this other lady was carrying about seven tons of laundry into the store, so I figured you’d be safe for another minute or two while I went in there and settled the thing with the knife, especially since I didn’t think our man was going to show anyway. So I went in the bar, and there’s this very nicely dressed middle-class-looking lady wearing eyeglasses and her hair swept up on her head and a dispatch case sitting on the bar as if she’s a lawyer or an accountant who stopped in for a pink lady on the way home and she’s got an eight-foot-long switchblade in her right hand and she’s swinging it in front of her like this, back and forth, slicing the air with it, you know, and I’m surprised first of all that it’s a lady and next that it’s a switchblade she’s holding, which is not exactly a lady’s weapon. Also, I do not wish to get cut,” Willis said.
“Naturally,” Eileen said.
“Naturally,” Willis said. “In fact, I’m beginning to think I’d better go check on you again, make sure the panties nut hasn’t shown up after all. But just then the guy who came out in the street yelling, ‘Police, police,’ now says to the crazy lady with the stiletto, ‘I warned you, Grace, this man is a policeman.’ Which means I now have to uphold law and order, which is the last thing on earth I wish to do.”
“What’d you do?” Eileen asked.
She was really interested now. She had never come up against a woman wielding a dangerous weapon, her line of specialty being men, of sorts. Usually she
leveled her gun at a would-be rapist’s privates, figuring she’d threaten him where he lived. Tonight, she had rammed the gun into the hollow of the man’s throat. The barrel of the gun had left a bruise there, she had seen the bruise when she was putting the cuffs on him. But how do you begin taking a knife away from an angry woman? You couldn’t threaten to shoot her in the balls, could you?
“I walked over to her and I said, ‘Grace, that’s a mighty fine knife you’ve got there, I wonder if you’d mind giving it to me.’ “
“That was a mistake,” Eileen said. “She might’ve given it to you, all right, she might’ve really given it to you.”
“But she didn’t,” Willis said. “Instead, she turned to the guy who’d run out of the bar—”
“The ‘Police, police’ guy?”
“Yeah, and she said, ‘Harry,’ or whatever the hell his name was, ‘Harry, how can you keep cheating on me this way?’ and then she burst into tears and handed the knife to the bartender instead of to me, and Harry took her in his arms—”
“Excuse me, huh?” Kling said, and got up from behind the desk, and walked out of the squadroom.
“Oh, God,” Willis said.
“Huh?” Eileen said.
“I forgot,” Willis said. “He probably thinks I told that story on purpose. I’d better go talk to him. Excuse me, okay? I’m sorry, Eileen, excuse me.”
“Sure,” she said, puzzled, and watched while Willis went through the gate in the slatted rail divider and down the corridor after Kling. There were some things she would never in a million years understand about the guys who worked up here. Never. She picked up another slice of pizza. It was cold. And she hadn’t even got a chance to tell anyone about how absolutely brilliant and courageous and deadly forceful she’d been in that Laundromat.
And whenever he couldn’t sleep, Carella found himself thinking about Kling. Found himself wondering what Kling was doing at that moment. And to keep his mind off Kling, he started thinking about the case again, whichever case it happened to be, there was always some case or other he was working, some case or other that was driving him slowly crazy. And when he couldn’t find an opening in the case, when he’d poked and pried and shaken the damn thing trying to find that one seam in the fabric that he could tear open with his hands—let some light in, climb in there inside the case, find out what the hell was making the case tick—when the case refused to yield he began thinking about Kling again, wondering about Kling, hoping that Kling would not decide to eat his own gun one night.
