by McBain, Ed
“Maybe he changed his mind,” Hobbs said, and shrugged.
“Where’s that whiskey now?” Ollie asked.
Hobbs and Esther looked at each other.
“Come on, come on,” Ollie said impatiently.
“Esther and me split it between us,” Hobbs said. “I took the scotch and the blended whiskey and a bottle of cognac and—”
“Yeah, I don’t need an inventory,” Ollie said. “Where’s the whiskey now? Is any of it left?”
“Man only moved last Tuesday,” Hobbs said indignantly. “I want you to know I’m just a social drinker, there’s no way possible I could’ve drunk—”
“Where is it?” Ollie said. “I want to see those bottles.”
The hinge pins had been painted into the hinges.
Augusta had broken off one of the pegs on the clothes rack, and tried using that as a makeshift mallet, hoping to chip away the paint. But the peg wasn’t heavy enough, and however hard she struck at the hinge, the paint remained solidly caked to it. She had no idea what time it was, but she’d been working on just that single hinge for what seemed like hours. She had made no headway, and there were three hinges on the door, and he had told her he would be back in the apartment by 3:30. She picked up the clothes rack now, picked it up in both hands, and using it like a battering ram, she began smashing at the middle hinge on the door.
A chip of paint flaked off.
There are liquor stores that stick their own store labels someplace on the bottles of whiskey or wine they sell. The particular bottles in Jonah Hobbs’s possession carried stickers for Mercer’s Wine & Liquor on Fortieth and The Stem. Fortieth Street was more than a mile from the rooming house on Sixty-third—the city rule of thumb being that twenty blocks equaled one linear mile. For some mysterious reason, the city’s liquor stores seemed to proliferate more wildly than its bookstores, and there were perhaps half a dozen such booze emporiums within a four-block radius of the rooming house. Considering the proximity of so many juice joints, it seemed passing strange to Ollie and Carella that Baal would have traveled so far for his supply, especially when he didn’t plan to drink any of it. They both had a few ideas on the subject even before they went to Mercer’s Wine & Liquor. The store was owned and operated by a man named Lewis Mercer. They showed him the mug shot of Manfred Baal and asked if he’d ever been in the store.
“Oh yeah. Guy’s a steady customer,” Mercer said.
“How long has he been coming here?”
“Only the past few weeks,” Mercer said. “But he buys a lot.”
“How much does he buy?”
“At least a fifth every other day. Sometimes more. Like once he came in and bought a fifth of gin, and an orange liqueur. Guy must drink a lot. Well, I’ve seen heavier drinkers, that’s true. Guys who’ll knock off two quarts of the stuff each and every day. But those are your real rummies, they’re already seeing things coming out of the walls, you know what I mean? This guy just likes his booze, that’s all. Comes in, passes the time of day, walks around the shop making his choice—different kind of booze all the time.”
“What time did you say he comes in?”
“Same time every day. Twelve, twelve-thirty, something like that.”
Ollie looked up at the clock. “Mr. Mercer,” he said, “we think you’re being set up for a robbery.”
“What?” Mercer said.
“This man Baal has spent time in prison for armed robbery.”
“Yeah?” Mercer said, and shrugged. “He seems like a very nice person.”
“There are very nice persons in prison,” Ollie said philosophically, “who have murdered their wives and children. Mr. Mercer, was Mr. Baal in this store yesterday?”
“No, he wasn’t,” Mercer said.
“Was he here on Monday?”
“Yes.”
“You said he comes in every other day. That means he’ll be here today.”
“That’s right.”
“Mr. Mercer, we would like to wait for him. Is there a back room we can use?”
Manfred Baal did not come into the liquor store till 1:00 that afternoon. He walked directly to the counter behind which Lewis Mercer was standing, and was opening his mouth to say something when Ollie and Carella burst out of the back room. “Police officers,” Ollie said, and noticed at once that the two center buttons on Baal’s overcoat were unbuttoned. Baal’s hand moved into the opening and emerged an instant later holding a Smith & Wesson automatic. But by that time Ollie and Carella had both drawn their service revolvers, and Baal found himself staring into the muzzles of a pair of .38 Detective’s Specials. He undoubtedly decided that he was on the losing end of the arms race, and immediately threw his gun onto the floor.
“I came here to buy a bottle of whiskey,” he said in mildly accented English. “Ask the gentleman. I come in here every other day to buy whiskey.”
“We already asked the gentleman,” Ollie said.
“He will tell you,” Baal said.
“He already told us.”
“And I have a permit for the pistol,” Baal said.
“Let’s see it,” Carella said.
“I do not have it with me.”
“Is it carry or premises?” Ollie asked.
“It is a carry permit.”
“The law says you’ve got to have the permit on your person at all times. If you haven’t got it with you, that’s tough shit, you’re stuck with a gun violation.”
“Even so, you cannot charge me with armed robbery. I did not say anything to the gentleman. I was here to buy whiskey, and that is all.”
“Fine, we’ll talk about it in the squadroom,” Carella said.
“The gun violation is all,” Baal said.
“Fine,” Carella said.
They talked to him for close to two hours.
They lied outrageously. And so did he.
“We’ve had that joint staked out for close to a month now,” Ollie said. “When we saw you starting to come in regular, we knew you were setting up a hit.”
“I was merely buying whiskey,” Baal said.
“Sure. Were you merely buying whiskey today?”
“Yes.”
“Then why’d you have that piece in your belt?”
“This is a dangerous city. That is why I have a permit to carry a pistol.”
“Manny, you are full of shit,” Ollie said. “You’re a man who’s served time for armed robbery, you couldn’t get a pistol permit if you stood on your head.”
“Oh, you know about that,” Baal said.
“Are you a dimwit or something?” Ollie asked. “Don’t you know what precinct this is? Don’t you recognize this room? What the hell’s the matter with you, Manny? This is the Eight-Seven, this is where Detective Kling works. You know that name, Manny?”
“No, I don’t believe I do,” Baal said.
“He’s the man you threatened to kill ten years ago.”
“I never threatened to kill anyone in my life,” Baal said.
“You made the threat in a courtroom in front of a hundred goddamn witnesses,” Ollie said.
“If I made such a threat, it was an idle one,” Baal said.
“Where were you Sunday night?” Carella asked.
“Why do you want to know?”
“It’s important to us.”
“I do not have to talk to you at all,” Baal said. “I know my rights.”
“You ought to know your fuckin’ rights, you moron,” Ollie said. “We spent a half-hour explaining them to you.”
“I do know my rights.”
“And you said you’d talk to us without a lawyer here. Is that what you said, or isn’t it?”
“That’s when I thought we would be talking about the gun violation. If you want to talk about armed robbery, or about something that happened to this Detective Kling—”
“What do you know about that?” Carella said. “About something happening to Kling?”
“If something has happened to
him, I know nothing about it.”
“How about his wife?”
“What?”
“Something happening to his wife,” Ollie said.
“I will only talk about the gun violation,” Baal said. “That’s all you can charge me with. If you’re trying to hang anything else on me—”
“What else is there to hang on you?” Carella said.
“Armed robbery. Or attempted robbery. Whatever. I did not hold up that store, and I did not attempt to hold up that store.”
“Did you do anything to Detective Kling?”
“I have not seen Detective Kling since ten years now,” Baal said.
“Oh, you all at once remember him, huh?” Ollie said.
“I remember him now, yes. But if something happened to him on Sunday night, or to his wife, as you seem to be suggesting, I can tell you without hesitation that I was with a very close female acquaintance of mine on Sunday night, and we went to a movie together.”
“Who is this very close female acquaintance?” Ollie asked.
“Her name is Henrietta Leineweber.”
“And I suppose she’ll confirm that you were with her,” Carella said.
“I am sure she will confirm it,” Baal said, and nodded.
At ten minutes past 3:00 they took Baal down to the muster desk and booked him for violation of Section 265.05 of the Penal Law, a Class D felony punishable by three-to-seven years’ imprisonment. They would have loved nothing better than to have booked him for attempted robbery. In fact, had they been patient an instant longer in the liquor store, Baal might have pulled the gun and said in his accented English, “This is a stickup.” But they hadn’t been expecting a robbery and had only wanted to question him about where he’d been on Sunday night, and so they’d missed out on the best kind of bust, the unexpected arrest. Even before they called Henrietta Leineweber, they knew that Baal had had nothing to do with Augusta’s abduction. But they went through the routine, anyway, and of course Miss Leineweber ascertained that she and Baal had been together on Sunday night, and that was that. They were happy to be sending Baal back to jail because there was no doubt at all in their minds that he’d have robbed the liquor store that afternoon if they hadn’t been on the premises waiting to talk to him. They were only sorry they couldn’t be sending him back for a longer period of time.
At a quarter past 3:00 that afternoon, Manfred Baal was escorted to a detention cell in the basement of the building, to await transportation to the Criminal Courts Building downtown. By that time Augusta had worked all three pins out of their hinges, and was struggling to lift the storage-room door out of its frame.
She stepped out of the storage room into a narrow corridor painted white. She turned to her left and walked into a kitchen similarly painted white, its single window slanting wintry sunlight onto the white vinyl-tile floor. There was a swinging door at the opposite end of the kitchen, just to the right of the refrigerator, and she walked to that now, and pushed it open, and that was when the sterile whiteness ended.
She almost backed away into the kitchen again.
She was inside a shrine.
The entire apartment was a shrine. Augusta was the wallpaper and Augusta was the floor covering and Augusta was the ceiling decoration and Augusta obliterated any light that ordinarily might have filtered through the windows because Augusta covered all the windows as well. It was impossible to look anywhere without seeing Augusta. Standing there in the corridor just outside the kitchen door, she felt as though she were being reflected by thousands upon thousands of mirrors, tiny mirrors and large ones, mirrors that threw back images in color or in black and white, mirrors that caught her in action or in repose. The corridor, and the living room beyond that, and the bedroom at the far end of the hall together formed a massive collage of photographs snipped from every magazine in which she’d ever appeared, some of them going back to the very beginning of her career. She could not possibly estimate how many copies of each edition of each magazine had been purchased and scrutinized and finally cut apart to create this cubistic monument. There were photographs everywhere. Those on the walls alone would have sufficed to create an overwhelming effect, meticulously pasted up to cover every inch of space, forming an interlocking, overlapping, overflowing vertical scrapbook. But the pictures devoured the walls, and then consumed the ceilings and dripped onto the floors as well, photographs of Augusta running rampant overhead and below, and flanking her on every side. Some of the photographs were duplicates, she saw, triplicates, quadruplicates, so that the concept of a myriad reflecting mirrors now seemed to multiply dangerously—there were mirrors reflecting other mirrors and Augusta stood in the midst of this visual reverberating photographic chamber and suddenly doubted her own reality, suddenly wondered whether she herself, standing there at the center of an Augusta-echoing-Augusta universe, was not simply an echo of another Augusta somewhere on the walls. The entire display had been shellacked, and the artificial illumination in the apartment cast a glow onto the shiny surfaces, pinpoint pricks of light seeming to brighten a photographed eye as she moved past it, hair as dead as the paper upon which it was printed suddenly seeming to shimmer with life.
There was a king-sized bed in the bedroom. It was covered with white sheets; there were white pillowcases on the pillows. A white lacquered dresser was against one wall, and a chair covered with white vinyl stood against the adjoining wall. There was no other furniture in the bedroom. Just the bed, the dresser, and the chair—stark and white against the photographs that rampaged across the floor and up the walls and over the ceiling.
She wondered suddenly what time it was.
She had lost all track of time while working on the door, but she surmised it was a little past noon now. She went quickly to the front door, ascertained that the lock on it was a key-operated deadbolt, and then went immediately into the kitchen. The unadorned white of the room came as a cool oasis in a blazing desert. She was moving toward the wall telephone when she saw the clock above the refrigerator. The time came as a shock, as chilling as the touch of the scalpel had been on her throat. She could not possibly imagine the hours having gone by that swiftly, and yet the hands of the clock told her it was now 3:25…Was it possible the clock had stopped? But no, she could hear it humming on the wall, could see the minute hand moving almost imperceptibly as she stared at it. The clock was working; it was 3:25 and he’d told her he would return at 3:30.
She immediately lifted the telephone receiver from the hook, waited for a dial tone, and then jiggled the bar impatiently when she got none. She put the phone on the hook again, lifted it again, listened for a dial tone again, and got one just as she heard the lock turning in the front door. She dropped the phone, reached for the latch over the kitchen window, and discovered at once that the window was painted shut.
She turned, moved swiftly to the kitchen table, pulled a chair from under it, lifted the chair, and was swinging it toward the window when she heard his footsteps coming through the apartment. The glass shattered, exploding into the shaftway and cascading in shards to the interior courtyard below. He was running through the apartment now. She remembered his admonition about screaming, remembered that it made him violent. But he was running through the apartment toward her, and he had promised her a wedding ceremony, and a nuptial consummation, and a slit throat—and at the moment she couldn’t think of anything more violent than a slit throat.
She screamed.
He was in the kitchen now. She did not see his face until he pulled her from the window and twisted her toward him and slapped her with all the force of his arm and shoulder behind the blow. His face was distorted, the blue eyes wide and staring, the mouth hanging open. He kept striking her repeatedly as she screamed, the blows becoming more and more fierce until she feared he would break her jaw or her cheekbones. She cut off a scream just as it was bubbling onto her lips, strangled it, but he kept striking her, his arm flailing as though he were no longer conscious of its action, the hand swin
ging to collide with her face, and then returning to catch her backhanded just as she reeled away from the earlier blow. “Stop,” she said, “please,” scarcely daring to give voice to the words lest they infuriate him further and cause him to lose control completely. She tried to cover her face with her hands, but he yanked first one hand away and then the other, and he kept striking her till she felt she would lose consciousness if he hit her one more time. But she did not faint, she sank deliberately to the floor instead, breaking the pattern of his blows, crouching on all fours with her head bent, gasping for breath. He pulled her to her feet immediately, but he did not strike her again. Instead, he dragged her out of the kitchen and across the corridor into the living room, where he hurled her angrily onto the floor again. Her lip was beginning to swell from the repeated blows. She touched her mouth to see if it was bleeding. Standing in the doorway, he watched her calmly now, and took off his overcoat, and placed it neatly over the arm of the sofa. There was only one light burning in the room, a standing floor lamp that cast faint illumination on the shellacked pictures that covered the walls, the ceiling, and the floor. Augusta lay on her own photographs like a protectively colored jungle creature hoping to fade out against a sympathetic background.
“This was to be a surprise,” he said. “You spoiled the surprise.”
He made no mention of the fact that she had broken the window and screamed for help. As she had done earlier, she insisted now on bringing him back to reality. “You’d better let me go,” she said. “While there’s still time. This may be the goddamn city, but someone’s sure to have heard—”
“I wanted to be with you when you saw it for the first time. Do you like what I’ve done?”
“Somebody’s going to report those screams to the police, and they’ll come busting in here—”
“I’m sorry I struck you,” he said. “I warned you about screaming, though. It truly does make me violent.”
“Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, you’re saying someone will have heard you.”
“Yes, and they’ll come looking for this apartment, and once they find you—”
