by Ed McBain
“You fart in that neighborhood,” Rawles said, “they hear it three blocks away.”
“So they don’t hear two gunshots, huh?” Bloom said.
“Didn’t shoot her in the car, neither,” Rawles said. “Criminalistics didn’t find no bullets, no expelled cartridge cases.”
“Maybe she met him someplace,” I suggested. “Maybe she was afraid to go to his apartment.”
“Lots of lonely places in Calusa,” Bloom said, nodding. “Maybe she phoned him, said meet me at the beach or something, that’s a possibility. But why? If she knows the guy is after her, why hand herself over on a silver platter? It doesn’t make sense, I don’t buy it. And another thing,” he said to himself. “Let’s say Crowell is the killer, okay? Just for the sake of argument. What’s his motive? You see any motive, Coop? He knows about the pot farm, terrific—what’s the going rate for a bale of marijuana, Coop?”
“You mean the cheap Mexican and Jamaican shit?”
“How much is that running?”
“Five, six hundred bucks a pound. You get your better stuff from Colombia, California, and Hawaii, that’ll run you a thousand a pound.”
“How many pounds in a bale?”
“Depends whether it’s packed loose or tight. A hundred, a hundred and fifty.”
“So McKinney was figuring, say, six thousand a bale.”
“Nice little cottage industry,” Rawles said. “You know how many homegrown plants the DEA destroyed last year?”
“How many?” Bloom asked.
“More than two million. Close to two thousand tons of the stuff. Growing right here in the US of A.”
I had underestimated Jack McKinney. His first crop of marijuana would have made him an entrepreneur.
“So where’s the motive?” Bloom asked, circling back. “McKinney doesn’t even own the farm yet, he hasn’t planted seed one, so what does Crowell hope to get by killing him?”
“Maybe he went there looking for a piece of the action,” Rawles said. “Cut him in on the dope scheme, you dig? McKinney tells him to fuck off, and Crowell stabs him.”
“Sure,” Bloom said. “But you’re forgetting Burrill. Why would he kill Burrill?”
“That’s a question, all right,” Rawles said philosophically.
“Maybe...” I shook my head. “No, never mind.”
“Let’s hear it,” Bloom said.
“Well...let’s say he did go to McKinney, wanting a piece of the action. McKinney turned him down, so Crowell stabbed him and stole the thirty-six thousand—”
“Right, the money,” Bloom said.
“We were forgetting all about the money,” Rawles said.
“Love or money, those are the only two motives for murder,” Bloom said.
“How about hate?” Rawles asked.
“The same as love. The other side of the coin, that’s all.”
“How about your crazies?” Rawles asked.
“Crazies don’t have motives, that’s another thing entirely, your crazies.”
Shop talk, I thought.
“So he goes to Burrill,” Bloom said, “and now he’s got thirty-six grand in his hand...”
“Possible,” Rawles said, but he did not sound convinced.
“And he offers the money to Burrill, tells him McKinney’s dead now, and he wants to buy the land himself, take over McKinney’s brilliant scheme, so to speak, set himself up as a pot farmer. How does that sound, Coop?”
“Too smart,” Rawles said. “This Crowell kid is a dummy.”
“Einstein he ain’t,” Bloom said. “But this wouldn’t have taken any figuring. McKinney worked it all out already. This would’ve been a simple takeover.”
“Then why kill Burrill?” Rawles asked. “You don’t go killing the goose that’s about to lay a golden egg.”
“Maybe Burrill turned him down, too.”
“No,” I said, “that isn’t likely. He was too eager to sell that farm. He’d have sold it to anybody, believe me.”
“So if Crowell went there with thirty-six grand—”
“He’d have snapped it up in a minute. The bank was already holding four in escrow, and he was sure of getting at least that in default. If Crowell offered him another thirty-six, he’d be right where he wanted to be.”
“Home free,” Rawles said.
“So, okay, he wouldn’t have turned it down,” Bloom said.
“Never.”
“So why’d Crowell kill him? If he killed him?”
“You’re dealing here with an asshole,” Rawles said. “Don’t forget that. The Crowell kid is a total nerd.”
“We’re dealing here with an asshole, maybe,” Bloom said, “but he’s an asshole with an alibi as long as his arm.”
We were back to square one. We were also approaching New Town. A former illustrious vice president of the United States once remarked that if you’d seen one slum, you’d seen them all. It later turned out that he and his immediate superior were wrong about a lot of things, including their assumptions that the American people would stand still for crooks occupying the highest offices in the land. But he’d been wrong about slums, too. Slums are as different, one from the other, as are warts. You cannot equate the squalor of Soweto with the desolation of New York’s South Bronx, you cannot equate the rat-infested brick tenements in Harlem with the clapboard shacks in California’s Venice. You can only compare those areas with what exists elsewhere in the same geographical location.
If you told a slum dweller on Chicago’s West Side that you were going to move him into New Town and you described it as a cluster of two-story stuccoed buildings surrounding a grassy compound planted with sabal palms, he’d have thought you were inviting him to a paradise on earth. When he got here, though, he might look around and discover for himself how other people were living in Calusa, and he would perhaps notice that more people were packed into the four square miles of New Town than were scattered over all of Calusa’s keys, and he might also notice that most of them weren’t white. Maybe that’s what the former vice president had in mind. Maybe he was saying that the color of slums was the same.
“I sure wish I was white,” Rawles said, as though reading my mind. Bloom pulled the car in to the curb outside Crowell’s building. “They hate black cops down here,” Rawles explained, and Bloom cut the ignition.
“You stay here in the car, Matthew,” he said. “This turns out to be real meat, I don’t want to lose him on a technicality.”
I did not stay in the car. I stepped outside the moment they went into the building, hoping for a breath of fresh air. It was almost two in the morning, but the citizens of New Town were out in force, similarly seeking relief from the contained heat of the day. They sat on their front stoops in shorts and undershirts, shorts and halter tops, and—in at least one instance—a bikini bathing suit. The air was redolent of that peculiar Florida aroma that lingers in the summertime, a mixture of mildew, salt, and blooming tropical plants. The stuccoed cinder-block walls of the buildings had been painted a pink that was already peeling and stained. The windows were wide open to whatever vagrant breeze stirred on the empty hours of the night. Somewhere a phonograph was playing loudly. No one seemed to mind. They sat whispering on their stoops, and the whispers somehow spoke more loudly than the sound of heavy metal.
I was still leaning against the fender of the police sedan when Crowell came out of the building. He came out at a gallop, barefoot and bare-chested, pushing his way through the handful of people cluttered on the front steps, almost falling over the lap of a woman who sat Haitian-style, her knees open, her dress tented down over her crotch. I heard him swear, and then I saw the gun in his right hand, and my first instinct was to duck behind the car, and then I heard Bloom’s voice from inside the building, bellowing out from the darkness of the stairwell—“Stop or I’ll shoot!”—and I pushed myself off the fender of the car and moved across the pavement to intercept Crowell, figuring Bloom was right behind him with his own gun, and never once
stopping to think about what might happen next.
What happened next was that Crowell shot me.
I had never in my life, before that moment, been shot. I don’t think most people have. It was not like in the movies or on television. I did not just fall down peacefully. I yelled like a son of a bitch when the bullet went through the meaty part of my shoulder. I yelled because it hurt. It hurt the way even a pointed stick hurts when it’s stuck into your body, but what was stuck into my shoulder was a metal bullet traveling at enormous velocity and trailing fire behind it. The fire hurt, and the force hurt, and the force spun me around and away from Crowell, still yelling, and knocked me flat on my back on the pavement, where I did not lie there quietly so the director could concentrate on his other actors, but instead thrashed and kicked in pain because it hurt, oh God how it hurt.
Bloom burst out of the building like a hand grenade. He shoved his way through the people who were no longer sitting on the stoop but who had jumped to their feet at the sound of the first shot and were still too shocked to scatter. He fired a shot into the air the moment he was clear of the steps, and Crowell must have taken this not as a warning that he was in imminent danger but instead as a signal to do something and do it fast. What he did was turn with his gun hand extended, and what he did next was fire a shot that missed Bloom by a mile, but that sent everyone rushing off the front stoop of the building, rushing inside, rushing off onto the patchy lawn with its scrubby palm trees, some of them yelling the way I was still yelling, though none of them had been shot.
Crowell fired again, directly at Bloom this time, who swerved on the concrete path and then stopped cold in his tracks and leveled his pistol in both hands, the way they must have taught him at the Police Academy years ago. He could have shot Crowell dead on the spot. He was well within his rights, and his target was motionless now. Instead, he shot him in the leg. I wondered about that, but only for a moment, because somehow I passed out.
9
* * *
WHAT HAD happened was this.
I learned all about it in the hospital.
I was in the hospital for six days, and Bloom came to see me a lot during that time, and told me all about the little visit he and Rawles had made to Crowell’s apartment. He also told me that the reason he was coming to see me so often was that he felt guilty as hell about my getting shot, confirming my partner Frank’s surmise that Jews and Italians are the most guilt-ridden people on the face of the earth. Bloom said I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. In the second place, I should have stayed in the car. In the third place, I shouldn’t have tried to intercept Crowell; I should have run in the opposite direction instead. In his eagerness to explain the enormous guilt he was feeling, Bloom made me feel guilty. We both sat there feeling guilty in my hospital room. And he told me all about what had happened in the fifteen minutes preceding my “accident,” as he insisted on calling it.
He and Rawles had approached suspect’s apartment—a bit of police vernacular crept into Bloom’s recital every now and then—had listened outside the door and ascertained that suspect was in the company of another person, most likely female, had announced themselves flanking the door, since, if this was a killer inside there, they could possibly expect a fusillade of shots. No shots had come. Through the door, Crowell had asked them to wait a minute, please, and then he had opened the door wearing only a pair of pants, no shirt and no shoes, and he had asked the police what they wanted at this hour of the morning. Bloom—in accordance with regulations—had asked if they could please come in, and Crowell said, “Sure, but like I have company.”
The company to whom Crowell referred was the selfsame black woman named Letitia Holmes who’d been there the last time Bloom had paid a nighttime visit, her shower apparently still not repaired. She went into great detail about the inconvenience of having to come here all the time to Jackie’s apartment to take a shower, indignantly telling Bloom the police should do something about getting the Housing Authority on the ball instead of knocking on people’s doors at two in the morning. She was getting dressed while she talked, seemingly oblivious to the presence of Bloom and Rawles as she stepped into her panties and pulled a striped shift over her head and then slipped into a pair of sandals, and was about to leave the apartment when Rawles said, “Hold it right there, sister,” and she told Rawles he was no fucking brother of hers, but she sat on the edge of the bed anyway, muttering about her broken shower and about black men who chose to become cops, until Rawles told her to shut the fuck up, they were here on business.
Bloom started by asking where Crowell had been between the hours of six-thirty and eight-thirty last night, and Crowell seemed confused at first, wanting to know if Bloom was talking about last night between six-thirty and eight-thirty, or tonight between six-thirty and eight-thirty. Did Bloom mean tonight, Friday night, or did he mean last night, Thursday night? Bloom informed him that it was now two o’clock in the morning, which made it Saturday already, August the twenty-seventh, to be exact, and he was referring to last night, Friday night, August the twenty-sixth, between the hours of six-thirty and eight-thirty.
“Oh,” Crowell said, and then went on to explain that last night, Friday night (which of course was when Sunny McKinney had been killed and dumped in my pool), he had been right here in the apartment with Lettie, who’d come over to take a shower since her shower was still busted and all.
“That right?” Rawles asked her. “You been here since six-thirty last night?”
“Right here,” Lettie said.
“Long shower,” Rawles said.
“Either of you leave the apartment during that time?” Bloom asked.
“We were both here,” Crowell said. “Right, Lettie?”
Lettie nodded.
“I wonder if you’d mind we looked around a little,” Rawles said.
“What for?” Crowell said.
“Did you know Jack McKinney was buying a snapbean farm?” Bloom asked.
“See if we can find anything,” Rawles said.
“Like what?” Crowell said. “Sure.”
“You don’t mind if we look around?”
“No, I mean sure, I knew Jack was buying a farm.”
“Did you know what he planned to do with it?”
“Grow beans on it, I guess.”
“How about a little pot?” Rawles said.
“You got some, I wouldn’t mind some,” Lettie said, making a joke to a cop.
Rawles didn’t even smile.
“McKinney was planning to grow marijuana on that land,” Bloom said.
“Wow,” Crowell said.
“You didn’t know that, huh?”
“First I’m hearing of it,” Crowell said. “Wow.”
Which meant nothing. Either Crowell really didn’t know a thing about Jack McKinney’s plan to grow grass, or else Sunny had told him all about it and he was lying. In either case, Bloom asked, “Where do you think Sunny went?”
“I don’t know,” Crowell said, and shrugged.
“Who’s Sunny?” Lettie asked.
“Girl I used to know,” Crowell said.
Rawles had meanwhile begun roaming the premises as if he were searching for something specific, though he didn’t dare open a drawer or a closet without a warrant. Crowell watched him from the corners of his eyes. Rawles pretended he didn’t know he was being watched. He just kept prowling the place like a suspicious rhinoceros.
“Reason I ask,” Bloom said, “is we’re really eager to find her.”
“I wish I could help you,” Crowell said.
Rawles opened the bathroom door and peeked inside. A big bath towel was on the floor; maybe Lettie had come here to take a shower, after all. Without turning from the bathroom, Rawles said, “We figure she maybe killed her brother, is why.”
“You think so, huh?” Crowell said.
“Nice girls you hung around with,” Lettie said.
“’Cause otherwise,” Bloom said, “why would she�
��ve run?”
“Yeah,” Crowell said.
“The way we figure it,” Rawles said, and turned from the bathroom door and said, “These your panties in here, miss? On the shower rod?”
“My panties are right here under my dress,” Lettie said, and looked at Crowell.
“Wonder whose they are,” Rawles said, and shrugged. “The way we figure it is she went to see him that night...”
“Sunny,” Bloom said. “The night her brother got killed.”
“To ask him for a piece of the pot action,” Rawles said.
“But he turned her down cold.”
“So she knifed him.”
Lettie looked at Crowell again.
“White trash,” Rawles said to her in explanation. “This girl we’re talking about.” He winked at her, as though they shared together a great ancient African wisdom that took into account white girls who murdered people and then left their panties on shower rods. Lettie did not wink back. Lettie was listening very hard to everything that was being said, and trying to understand it, but she didn’t trust Rawles as far as she could throw him. Rawles knew this. So did Bloom. But she was Crowell’s alibi for the hours between six-thirty and eight-thirty last night, and they were doing this soft-shoe dance for her benefit as well as Crowell’s.
“She didn’t come here yesterday afternoon, did she?” Bloom asked.
“Who do you mean?” Crowell asked.
“Sunny.”
“No. I just told you, Lettie’s been here since six-thirty.”
“Who said anything about six-thirty?” Rawles asked.
“You said you wanted to know where I was between—”
“Yeah, but who said anything about Sunny coming here at six-thirty?”
“I thought you said—”
“What we said was did she come here yesterday afternoon, that’s what we said.”
“You mean this afternoon?”
“Take it any way you want,” Rawles said. “You want to keep thinking today is yesterday, that’s fine with us. We’re talking about Friday afternoon, yesterday afternoon, August twenty-sixth.”
