by Ed McBain
A: I didn’t know if he was dead or not. When I read the paper later, it said he’d been killed.
Q: The Coroner’s report states that Mr. Craig was stabbed nineteen times.
A: I don’t know how many times I stabbed him. I was angry.
Q: But you didn’t know he was dead. You stabbed him nineteen times—
A: I told you I don’t know how many times.
Q: —yet you didn’t know he was dead.
A: That’s right, I didn’t.
Q: What’d you do then?
A: I took everything I could find. As partial payment of the debt. And then I washed the glasses we’d been drinking from, and I left the apartment.
Q: Why’d you wash the glasses?
A: Fingerprints. Don’t you think I know about fingerprints? Everybody knows about fingerprints.
Q: What happened when you left the apartment?
A: A woman saw me. I got through the lobby okay, but then this woman saw me on the street. I had blood on my clothes, I was running from the building, and she looked at me funny. I had the knife under my coat. I…I just took it out and stabbed her.
Q: Was this Marian Esposito?
A: I didn’t know who she was at the time.
Q: When did you learn who she was?
A: There was something in the newspaper. I figured it had to be her.
Q: Mr. Rawles, did you kill Daniel Corbett?
A: Yes.
Q: Why?
A: Because afterwards…you see, afterwards when I began thinking about it…well, I knew Corbett was his editor, and I’d given his name to the security guard, so I thought…what I thought was maybe there was some chance Corbett had heard the tapes. Maybe there was a possibility he knew this was really my story. And if that was the case, then maybe he’d tell the police about me, tell them Jack Rawles had a…well…a grudge against Craig and they’d come looking for me. So I went to see him.
Q: With the object of killing him.
A: Well…just to make sure.
Q: Make sure of what?
A: That he wouldn’t tell anyone about a possible connection between me and Craig. I had a hard time finding him. He isn’t listed in the telephone book, I didn’t know where he lived. So finally, I went to Harlow House and waited for him to come out after work…
Q: How did you know what he looked like?
A: There was a picture of him and Craig in People magazine. I knew what he looked like. I followed him home, and then I…I guess I killed him.
Q: And did you also try to kill Denise Scott?
A: I don’t know anyone named Denise Scott.
Q: Hillary Scott?
A: Hillary, yes.
Q: You tried to kill her?
A: Yes.
Q: Why?
A: For the same reason. I thought Craig might have mentioned me to her. I knew they were living together, she answered the phone sometimes when I called. I followed her from the apartment the day after I…the day after I killed Craig. She was there with these two police officers, I saw them coming out of the apartment together. She had another apartment in Stewart City, the name Scott was on the mailbox. I thought she might be dangerous, you see. I didn’t want anyone else to know about me. There was someone else who…
Q: Yes?
A: No, never mind.
Q: What were you about to say?
A: Only that someone else knew.
Q: Who was that?
A: Stephanie Craig. His ex.
Q: Mr. Craig’s former wife?
A: Yes.
Q: Knew what?
A: About the tapes. She heard the tapes one day. We were sitting there in his living room, playing them back, when she came to see him. The machine was going, she heard them.
Q: Why had she come to see him?
A: She was always stopping by. She was still carrying the torch for him.
Q: And she heard the tapes?
A: Yes. But I didn’t have to worry about her, you see. She drowned that very same summer.
All the way uptown from Buena Vista Hospital to Mercy General, where Meyer Meyer was recuperating, Carella thought about Jack Rawles’s statement. The motives for murder would never cease to amaze him, but discounting the murder of Marian Esposito—which, as he’d suspected from the start, was a murder of expedience—the motives for the killings of Gregory Craig and Daniel Corbett were complex and contradictory. Rawles had gone to see Craig because he wanted recognition, by way of payment, for his contribution to a phenomenal best seller. He had slain Craig because recognition had been denied him. And then he had killed Corbett and tried to kill Hillary because he had been afraid of the very thing he’d so desperately wanted earlier: recognition.
There were holes in the statement, there were always holes. Not anything that would prevent a conviction, no. Saperstein had done a good job nailing down all the facts, and Carella suspected the DA’s Office would have no trouble convincing a jury that Jack Rawles had indeed killed three people during the holiday season and tried to kill a fourth. But as he parked the car in the lot outside Mercy General, and as he took the elevator up to Meyer’s room on the sixth floor, he wondered about that odd collaboration three summers ago and wondered how Craig had finally convinced Rawles to surrender the one true recognition he should have insisted on: his name on the book. In many respects, Rawles was exactly what Hillary had labeled him, a ghost—in literary terms, at least. He had, in effect, already written the book for Craig the day he taped his experiences. And he had been denied the one thing that might have given him something more than ectoplasmic substance—a shared byline.
Carella wondered, too—and this bothered the hell out of him—about the drowning of Stephanie Craig. She had heard Rawles’s voice on those tapes, she undoubtedly knew that Craig was writing a book, and if psychics were to be believed, she had threatened to reveal that the material was stolen, that Craig’s book was not really his own but instead another man’s. But had she truly threatened Craig with exposure, or was that only a figment of Hillary Scott’s vivid psychic imagination? Because if she had threatened him and if Craig was indeed responsible for her drowning, then he had begun planning the theft way back then when the book was still in progress, with no intention of ever honoring his contract with Rawles.
Sighing, Carella went down the corridor to Meyer’s room.
Meyer was sitting up in bed, reading. He put the book aside the moment Carella came into the room, and extended his hand, and listened while Carella told him first about how the case had been wrapped by a patrolman named Tack Fujiwara and then about Rawles’s statement and the questions it had left unresolved.
“It bothers me that I don’t have all the answers,” Carella said.
“Listen,” Meyer said, “if you had all the answers, you’d be God.”
Carella smiled. Meyer returned the smile. The two men shook hands again and wished each other a happy new year, and then Carella went home to Riverhead. Fanny had already left for her sister’s house in Calm’s Point. They allowed the twins to stay up till midnight and even permitted them to have a sip of champagne when they toasted the new year. Later, after they had put the children to sleep, they made love, a tradition they had honored since the first year of their marriage because—as Teddy put it—she believed in starting each new year with a bang.
In the middle of the night Carella woke up and sat staring into the room, still troubled by the realization that he would never know for sure whether Gregory Craig had killed his former wife. And then he went back to sleep because he wasn’t God after all, and maybe in the greater scheme of things there were answers he never dreamed of.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photograph (c) Dragica Hunter
Ed McBain was one of the many pen names of the successful and prolific crime fiction author Evan Hunter (1926-2005). Born Salvatore Lambino in New York, McBain served aboard a destroyer in the US Navy during World War II and then earned a degree from Hunter College in English and psychology. After a short stin
t teaching in a high school, McBain went to work for a literary agency in New York, working with authors such as Arthur C. Clarke and P.G. Wodehouse, all the while working on his own writing on nights and weekends. He had his first breakthrough in 1954 with the novel The Blackboard Jungle, which was published under his newly legal name Evan Hunter and based on his time teaching in the Bronx.
Perhaps his most popular work, the 87th Precinct series (released mainly under the name Ed McBain) is one of the longest running crime series ever published, debuting in 1956 with Cop Hater and featuring over fifty novels. The series is set in a fictional locale called Isola and features a wide cast of detectives including the prevalent Detective Steve Carella.
McBain was also known as a screenwriter. Most famously he adapted a short story from Daphne Du Maurier into the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). In addition to writing for the silver screen, he wrote for many television series, including Columbo and the NBC series 87th Precinct (1961-1962), based on his popular novels.
McBain was awarded the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in 1986 by the Mystery Writers of America and was the first American to receive the Cartier Diamond Dagger award from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. He passed away in 2005 in his home in Connecticut after a battle with larynx cancer.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
