Ice

by Ed McBain

  “Needed?” Meyer said.

  “Need, I mean,” Asensio said, and looked at Roldan.

  “Well, Tony,” Meyer said, “Mike…assuming you are users, and assuming you do have a dealer, or did have a dealer, who is the dealer? Or was the dealer, as the case may be.”

  “Cocaine isn’t habit-forming,” Roldan said.

  “A sniff every now and then never hurt anybody,” Asensio said.

  “Ah, I know,” Meyer said. “It’s a shame it’s against the law, but what can you do? Who are you getting it from?”

  The two men looked at each other.

  “Something did happen to your dealer, huh?” Meyer said.

  Neither of them answered.

  “Were you getting it from Sally Anderson?” Meyer asked, taking a wild stab in the dark, and surprised when both men nodded simultaneously. “From Sally?” he said. The men nodded again. “Sally was dealing cocaine?”

  “Well, not what you’d call dealing,” Roldan said. “Would you call it dealing, Tony?”

  “No, I wouldn’t call it dealing,” Asensio said. “Besides, the coke had nothing to do with her murder.”

  “How do you know?” Meyer said.

  “Well, it wasn’t that big a deal.”

  “How big a deal was it?”

  “I mean, she wasn’t making any money from it, if that’s what you think,” Roldan said.

  “What was she doing?” Meyer asked.

  “Just bringing in a few grams a week, that’s all.”

  “How many grams?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. How many grams, Tony?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Asensio said.

  “By bringing it in—”

  “To the theater. For whichever of the kids needed it.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say needed it,” Roldan said. “Cocaine isn’t habit-forming, you know.”

  “Whoever wanted it, I should have said,” Asensio agreed, nodding.

  “How many people wanted it?” Meyer asked.

  “Well…Tony and I,” Roldan said. “And some of the other kids.”

  “How many other kids?”

  “Not many,” Asensio said. “Six or seven? Would you say six or seven, Mike?”

  “I’d say six or seven,” Roldan said. “Not including Sally herself.”

  “So what are we talking about here?” Meyer said. “A dozen grams a week, something like that?”

  “Something like that. Maybe two dozen.”

  “Two dozen grams,” Meyer said, nodding. “What was she charging?”

  “The going street price. I mean, Sally wasn’t making anything on the deal, believe me. She just picked up our stuff when she was getting her own. She may have even got a discount for a bulk purchase, who knows?”

  “I think, in fact,” Roldan said to Asensio, “that we were getting it cheaper than the going street price.”

  “Maybe so,” Asensio said.

  “How much were you paying?” Meyer said.

  “Eighty-five dollars a gram.”

  Meyer nodded. A gram of cocaine was the approximate equivalent of one twenty-eighth of an ounce. The going street price ranged from a hundred to a hundred and a quarter a gram, depending on the purity of the cocaine.

  “Who was she getting it from?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Roldan said.

  “I don’t know,” Asensio said.

  “Who’s Paco Lopez?” Meyer asked.

  “Who is he?” Roldan said.

  Asensio shrugged.

  “Are we supposed to know him?” Roldan said.

  “You don’t know him, huh?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “How about you, Tony?”

  “Never heard of him,” Asensio said.

  “Is he a dancer?” Roldan asked.

  “Is he gay?” Asensio asked.

  “He’s dead,” Meyer said.

  Rebecca Edelman was a woman in her late forties, splendidly tanned and monumentally grief stricken. The detectives had called her early this morning, eager to talk to her after her flight back from Antigua the night before, but they had been advised by a daughter-in-law that Marvin Edelman’s funeral would be taking place at 11:00 that morning, in keeping with the Jewish tradition of burying a person within twenty-four hours after his death. As it was, the funeral and burial had been delayed, anyway, by the mandatory autopsy required in any cases of traumatic death.

  Neither Kling nor Brown had ever witnessed a family sitting shiva before. The windows in the Edelman living room faced the river Harb. The sky beyond was still intensely blue, the light less golden than it might have been in that it was partially reflected from the icebound water below. There was a knife-edged clarity to the atmosphere that afternoon; Brown could make out in the sharpest detail the high-rises that perched atop the cliffs on the shore opposite, in the next state. Farther uptown, he could see the graceful curves of the Hamilton Bridge, its lacy outlines etched against the brilliant blue of the sky. In the living room, the family and friends of Marvin Edelman sat on wooden boxes and talked to each other in hushed voices.

  She led them into a small room she obviously used as a sewing room, a machine in one corner, a basket of brightly colored fabrics sitting left of the treadle. She sat in the chair before the machine. They sat on a small sofa facing her. Her brown eyes were moist in her tanned face. She kept wringing her hands as she spoke. The sun had not been kind to her. Her face was wrinkled, her hands were wrinkled, her lips looked parched without lipstick. She directed her entire conversation to Kling, even though Brown asked most of the questions. Brown was used to this; sometimes even the blacks turned to the white cop, as though he himself were invisible.

  “I told him he should come with me,” Mrs. Edelman said. “I told him he could use the vacation, he should be good to himself, am I right? But no, he said he had too much work to do just now, planning for his trip to Europe next month. He told me he’d take a vacation when he got back, in April sometime. Who needs a vacation in April? In April, we have flowers, even here in the city. So he wouldn’t come. Now he’ll never have another vacation, never,” she said, and turned her head away because tears were beginning to form in her eyes again.

  “What sort of work did he do, ma’am?” Brown asked. “Was he in the jewelry business?”

  “Not what you would call a regular jeweler,” Mrs. Edelman said, and took a paper tissue from her bag and dabbed at her eyes with it.

  “Because he was wearing this vest—” Brown started.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Edelman said. “He bought and sold gems. That’s what he did for a living.”

  “Diamonds?”

  “Not only diamonds. He dealt in all kinds of precious gems. Emeralds, rubies, sapphires—diamonds, of course. Precious gems. But he neglected the most precious thing of all. His life. If he’d come with me…” She shook her head. “A stubborn man,” she said. “God forgive me, but he was a stubborn man.”

  “Was there any special reason he wanted to stay here in the city?” Brown asked. “Instead of going with you to Antigua.” He pronounced the word “An-tee-gwa.”

  “It’s a hard g,” Mrs. Edelman said.

  “What?”

  “It’s the British pronunciation they use. An-tee-ga.”

  “Oh,” Brown said. He looked at Kling. Kling said nothing. “But in any event,” Brown said, “was there?”

  “Only the usual. Nothing he couldn’t have left for a week. So look what happens,” she said, and again dabbed at her eyes.

  “By the usual—” Brown said.

  “His usual business. Buying and selling, selling and buying.” She was still directing all of her conversation to Kling. Brown cleared his throat, to remind her he was here, too. It had no effect.

  Perhaps prompted by her steady gaze, Kling said, “Did he go very often to Europe?”

  “Well, when he had to. That’s the diamond center of the world, you know. Amsterdam. For emeralds, he went to South America. He could
run all over the world for his business, am I right?” she said. “But when it comes to flying only four, five hours away, for a week in the sun, this he can’t do. He has to stay here instead. So someone can shoot him.”

  “Do you have any idea who might have—”

  “No,” Mrs. Edelman said.

  “No enemies you can think of?” Brown said.

  “None.”

  “Any employees he might have—”

  “He worked alone, my husband. That’s why he could never take any time off. All he wanted to do was make money. He told me he wouldn’t be happy till he was a multimillionaire.”

  “Did the possibility exist in his business?” Brown said. “Making millions of dollars, I mean?”

  “Who knows? I suppose. We lived comfortably. He was always a good earner, my husband.”

  “But when you’re talking about millions of dollars—”

  “Yes, it was possible to make such money,” Mrs. Edelman said. “He had a very sharp eye for quality gems. He turned a very good profit on almost anything he bought. He knew what he was buying, and he drove very hard bargains. Such a dope,” she said. “If only he’d come with me, like I wanted him to.”

  Her eyes were misting with tears again. She dabbed at them with her crumpled tissue, and then reached into her bag for a fresh one.

  “Mrs. Edelman,” Kling said, “where was your husband’s place of business, can you tell us?”

  “Downtown. On North Greenfield, just off Hall Avenue. What they call the Diamond Mart, the street there.”

  “And he worked alone there, you said?”

  “All alone.”

  “In a street-level shop?”

  “No, on the second floor.”

  “Was he ever held up, Mrs. Edelman?”

  She looked at him in surprise.

  “Yes,” she said. “How did you know that?”

  “Well, being a diamond merchant—”

  “Yes, last year,” she said.

  “When last year?” Brown asked.

  “August, I think it was. The end of July, the beginning of August, sometime in there.”

  “Was the perpetrator apprehended?” Brown asked.

  “What?” Mrs. Edelman said.

  “Did they catch the man who did it?”

  “Yes.”

  “They did?”

  “Yes, two days later. He tried to pawn the gems in a shop three doors down from my husband’s, can you believe it?”

  “Would you remember the man’s name?”

  “No, I wouldn’t. He was a black man,” she said, and—for the first time during their visit—turned to look at Brown, but only fleetingly. Immediately, she turned her attention back to Kling again.

  “Can you be more exact about that date?” Kling asked. He had taken out his pad and was beginning to write.

  “Why? Do you think it was the same person? They told me nothing was stolen. He had diamonds in his vest, nobody touched them. So how could it be anybody who wanted to rob him?”

  “Well, we don’t know, really,” Kling said, “but we’d like to follow up on that robbery if you can give us a few more details.”

  “All I know is he was working late one night, and this black man came in with a gun and took everything from the work table. He didn’t bother with the safe, he just told my husband to dump everything from the work table into this little sack he had. The good stuff was in the safe, my husband was tickled to dea—”

  She cut herself short before she could finish the word. The tears began again. She busied herself with searching for another tissue in her bag. The detectives waited.

  “You say it was sometime toward the end of July, the beginning of August,” Kling said at last.

  “Yes.”

  “The last week in July, would that have been? The first week in August?”

  “I can’t say for sure. I think so.”

  “We can track it from the address,” Brown said to Kling. “It’ll be on the computer.”

  “Could we have the address, please?” Kling said.

  “621 North Greenfield,” Mrs. Edelman said. “Room 207.”

  “Was the man convicted, would you know?” Brown asked.

  “I think so, I don’t remember. My husband had to go to court to identify him, but I don’t know whether he was sent to jail or not.”

  “We can check with Corrections,” Brown said to Kling. “Mrs. Edelman, had you spoken to your husband at any time since you left for Antigua?” This time, he pronounced it correctly.

  “No. Do you mean, did we call each other? No. Antigua’s not around the corner, you know.”

  “Before you left, did he mention anything that might have been disturbing him? Threatening telephone calls or letters, quarrels with customers, anything like that? Was anything at all troubling him, that you know of?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Edelman said.

  “What?” Brown asked.

  “How he could make his millions of dollars,” Mrs. Edelman said to Kling.

  This time, the call came from Dorfsman himself.

  It came at twenty minutes past 4:00 that Monday, the day after Valentine’s Day, but Dorfsman apparently was still enjoying the influence of the brief lovers’ holiday. The first thing he said to Carella was, “Roses are red, violets are blue, wait’ll you hear what I’ve got for you!”

  Carella thought Dorfsman had lost his marbles; it happened often enough in the police department, but he had never heard of it happening to anyone in Ballistics.

  “What have you got for me?” he asked warily.

  “Another one,” Dorfsman said.

  “Another what?”

  “Another corpse.”

  Carella waited. Dorfsman sounded as if he was enjoying himself immensely. Carella did not want to spoil his fun. A corpse on the day of the observance of Washington’s Birthday, even if it was a week before Washington’s Birthday, was certainly amusing.

  “I haven’t even called Kling yet,” Dorfsman said. “You’re the first one I’m calling.”

  “Kling?” Carella said.

  “Kling,” Dorfsman said. “Don’t you guys ever talk to each other up there? Kling caught the squeal Saturday night. Sunday morning, actually. Two o’clock Sunday morning.”

  “What are you talking about?” Carella asked.

  “A homicide on Silvermine Oval. Guy named Marvin Edelman, two slugs pumped into his head.” Dorfsman still sounded as if he was smiling. “I’m calling you first, Steve,” he said.

  “So I gather. How come?”

  “Same gun as the other two,” Dorfsman said cheerfully.

  It was beginning to look like they had a crazy on their hands.

  Crazies make police work difficult.

  When you’ve got a crazy on your hands, you might just as well throw away the manual and work the case by the seat of your pants, because that’s the way the crazy is working his case. There were a lot of crazies in this city, but thankfully most of them were content to walk up and down Hall Avenue carrying signs about doomsday or else muttering to themselves about the Mayor and the weather. The crazies in this city seemed to think the Mayor was responsible for the weather. Maybe he was.

  Detective Lieutenant Peter Byrnes seemed to think his squad was responsible for the lack of communication on what now appeared to be three linked murders. Byrnes, when apprised of what Dorfsman had said on the telephone, agreed emphatically with him: Didn’t the guys up here ever talk to each other?

  “You get a murder last Tuesday night and another one on Saturday night, Sunday morning, whenever it was,” Byrnes said. “The first one is on Culver Avenue, and the next one is on Silvermine Road, just a few blocks away! Both of them are gunshot murders, but does it ever occur to you masterminds to do an in-house cross-check? I’m not even mentioning the little girl who got killed downtown on Friday night, I wouldn’t dream of mentioning a third gunshot murder to sleuths of such remarkable perception,” Byrnes said, gathering steam, “but does anyone up h
ere even glance at the activity reports, which is why we keep activity reports in the first place, so that every cop in this precinct, uniformed or plainclothes, will know what the hell is going on up here!”

  In the squadroom outside, Miscolo and a handful of uniformed patrolmen were milling about apprehensively, listening to Byrnes’s angry voice from behind the frosted glass door to his office, and knowing that someone in there was getting chewed out mightily. Actually, there were four someones in there, but none of the squadroom eavesdroppers knew that because the detectives had been called at home early that Tuesday morning and asked to report at the crack of dawn (well, 7:30 A.M.) and the uniformed force hadn’t begun trickling in until 7:45 A.M., when roll call took place every morning in the muster room downstairs. The four plainclothes someones were, in alphabetical order, Detectives Brown, Carella, Kling, and Meyer. They were all looking at their shoes.

  Byrnes’s rage comprised one part pressure from “rank” downtown and one part sheer indignation over the stupidity of men he had hoped, after all these years, could do their jobs with at least a modicum of routine efficiency. Secretly, he suspected Kling was more at fault than any of the others because of the clamlike posture he had developed after his divorce. But he did not want to single out Kling as the sole perpetrator here because that would only serve to embarrass him and perhaps cause disharmony among four detectives who now seemed fated to work together on solving three separate murders. So Byrnes ranted and raved about simple procedures, which—if only followed to the letter—would dispel confusion, eliminate duplication, and (“A consummation devoutly to be wished,” he actually said) maybe solve a case every now and then around here.

  “All right,” he said at last, “that’s that.”

  “Pete…,” Carella started.

  “I said all right, that’s the end of it,” Byrnes said. “Have a piece of candy,” he said, shoving the half-depleted box across the desk toward his surprised detectives. “Tell me what you’ve got.”

  “Not much,” Carella said.

  “Is this a crazy we’re dealing with here?”

  “Maybe,” Brown said.

  “Have you got a line on that .38 yet?”