Til Death

by Ed McBain

  “There’s no law against being afraid,” he said.

  “If there were,” Carella answered, “we’d all be in jail.”

  “Here it is,” Meyer Meyer called to the counter. “Donald Pullen, 131 Pondigo Street—no, wait, that’s the office. It’s 4251 Archer. That’s around here, isn’t it?”

  “Search me,” O’Brien said. “We’d better ask a cop. You looked up the number too fast, Meyer. I haven’t finished my coffee yet.”

  “Well, hurry up.”

  Patiently, Meyer waited for O’Brien to gulp down his coffee.

  “I’ve been thirsting for this cup of coffee all day,” O’Brien said. “I’ve got to work out that problem with Miscolo. Do you think maybe I can subtly hint that he change brands or something?”

  “I don’t think that’d work, Bob.”

  “No, I don’t think so, either.”

  “Why don’t you bring your own coffeepot to the office? And buy yourself a hot plate? One of those single-burner jobs.”

  “Gee, that sounds like a good idea,” O’Brien said. “Except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know how to make coffee.”

  “All right, come on, drink up.”

  O’Brien finished his coffee. Together, they walked out to the unmarked police sedan parked at the curb.

  “4251 Archer,” Meyer said. “We’ll ask the first traffic cop we see.”

  They did not see a cop for ten blocks. They pulled over to him and asked him where Archer Street was.

  “Archer Avenue, you mean?”

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “So say what the hell you mean. And pull over to the curb. You’re blocking traffic!”

  “We only want to know—”

  “I know what you want to know. You giving me an argument?”

  “No, sir,” Meyer said, and he pulled to the curb and waited while the cop directed the cars behind him. Finally, the cop walked over to the car.

  “Don’t you know better than to stop in the middle of the street?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t thinking, Officer,” Meyer said.

  “Sure. Now what was it you wanted to know?”

  “How to get to Archer Avenue.”

  “Two blocks down and turn right. What number did you want?”

  “4251,” Meyer said.

  “Another three blocks after you make the turn.” He glanced at the oncoming traffic. “Okay, go ahead.” As they pulled away, he shouted, “And don’t stop in the middle of the street no more, you hear me, mister?”

  “Nice fellow,” Meyer said.

  “Gives cops a bad name,” O’Brien said glumly.

  “Why? He helped us, didn’t he?”

  “Bad disposition,” O’Brien said, and Meyer made his right turn. “Three blocks from here, right?”

  “Right,” Meyer said. They drove up the street leisurely and stopped before 4251. “Here it is. Let’s hope he’s home.”

  4251 Archer, as were most of the dwellings in Riverhead, was a private house. Meyer and O’Brien went up the front walk and pulled the door knocker. A tall man in a white shirt and a red weskit answered the door.

  “Yes, gentlemen,” he said, “can I help you?”

  “Mr. Pullen?” Meyer said.

  “Yes?” Pullen studied his visitors. “Is it real estate, or insurance?”

  “We’d like to ask you some questions, Mr. Pullen. We’re from the police.”

  “Police?” Pullen went white in the space of two seconds. “Wh—wh—what…what did…?”

  “May we come in, Mr. Pullen?”

  “Yes. Yes, come in.” Hastily, Pullen glanced past them to make sure none of his neighbors were watching. “Come in.”

  They followed him into the house and into the living room. The room was done in heavy furniture covered with maroon mohair. It made the small interior seem hotter than it really was.

  “Sit down,” Pullen said. “What’s this all about?”

  “Have you been receiving or making phone calls to a Miss Oona Blake?”

  “Why, yes.” Pullen looked surprised, and then relieved. “Oh, it’s about her, isn’t it? Not me? Her?”

  “Yes, it’s about her.”

  “I knew she was a tough customer. I knew it the minute I laid eyes on her. A very flashy person. Very flashy. What is she? A prostitute?”

  “No, we don’t know what she is. We’d simply like to find out what the nature of her business with you was.”

  “Why, real estate,” Pullen said. “What did you think? She wanted to rent an apartment.”

  “Where?”

  “Well, she was very specific about it. She wanted an apartment either facing 831 Charles Avenue or else behind 831 Charles Avenue. That’s just a little ways from here. Charles Avenue.”

  “That rings a bell,” Meyer said. He thought for a moment. “Sure. That’s where Steve’s parents live. Did Miss Blake say why she wanted an apartment near that address?”

  “Said she had friends there.”

  “I see. Did you get an apartment for her?”

  “Nope. Not that one. But I was able to fill her other request. Yep, I gave her good service on that one.”

  “Which one was that?” O’Brien asked.

  Pullen smiled. “Why, the apartment she wanted near the photography studio.”

  “What a dinner!” Birnbaum said. “Tony, you outdid yourself. What a wedding, what a dinner!”

  “Birnbaum, have some champagne,” Tony said. “We got enough champagne here to start a France. Have some champagne, my friend.” He led Birnbaum to the ice mermaid and pulled a bottle from her frozen tub. Everywhere around him, champagne corks were popping, and each new pop filled Tony’s heart with joy. It really was getting to be a fine wedding. Maybe all the money those lousy Incorporated were getting would be worth it after all. He tore the gold foil from the neck of the bottle and then ripped the wire loose. Working the cork with his thumbs, he slowly edged it out of the bottle. Standing next to him, Birnbaum put his fingers in his ears. The cork moved out of the bottle neck.

  “POP!” Tony shouted, and the cork exploded from the bottle at the same instant, white bubbles following it out of the green neck, spilling onto Tony’s thick fingers. Birnbaum clapped Tony on the back, and they began laughing uproariously. The band was playing louder, and Jody Lewis was running all over the lawn popping his flash bulbs, capturing the bride and groom for posterity. He followed them to the long bridal table where the ancient and time-honored custom of collecting the connubial loot was about to take place. Angela made a beautiful hostess for the receiving line. Tommy sat beside her, grinning from ear to ear, and Jody Lewis kept the shutter clicking as the relatives filed past to kiss the bride and wish her luck, to shake hands with the groom and congratulate him. During the shaking of hands, a gratuity, a present, a ten-dollar bill or a twenty-dollar bill in an envelope was pressed into Tommy’s hand.

  “Congratulations,” the well-wishers said, slightly embarrassed by the handing over of money, a civilized gesture with all the inherent savagery of primitive times, the spoils offered to the newly crowned king. And Tommy, in turn, was embarrassed as he accepted the gifts because there is nothing more difficult to do than accept a gift with style, and Tommy was too young to have acquired style. “Thank you,” he muttered over and over again. “Thank you, thank you.”

  The champagne corks kept exploding.

  “The trouble with this stuff,” Birnbaum says, “is it makes you want to go to the bathroom.”

  “So go,” Tony said.

  “I will.”

  “Right upstairs. The bedroom at the end of the—”

  “No, no. Too crowded up there,” Birnbaum said. “I’ll run over to my own house.”

  “What? And miss the wedding?”

  “It’ll take a minute. It’ll be quick. Don’t worry, Tony, I’ll be back. Just try to keep me away.”

  “All right, Birnbaum. Hurry! Hurry!”

 
; Birnbaum cocked his head to one side and started off through the bushes to his house on the next lot.

  At the far end of the table, unobserved by either Angela or Tommy who were busy accepting gifts and good wishes, a pair of hands deposited a pair of small bottles filled with red wine. The bottles of wine were each tied with big bows. One bow was pink, the other was blue.

  The pink bow had attached to it a card that read:

  The blue bow had attached to it a similar card that, had Tommy seen it, might have struck a responsive chord. It is doubtful, however, that he would have recognized the handwriting as being identical with that on a card he’d received earlier in the day.

  The card attached to the blue bow read, simply:

  “Come with me,” Jonesy said to Christine.

  “I came here with someone, you know,” Christine said coyly. She was rather enjoying the game and, oddly because she had not wanted to come, she was enjoying the wedding, too. But particularly, she was enjoying the look of dismay that spread over Cotton’s face whenever he saw her dancing with Sam Jones. The look was priceless. She enjoyed it more than the music, and more than the champagne, and more than the exploding corks, and the wonderful free feeling of gaiety that pervaded the outdoor reception.

  “I know you came with someone. He’s bigger than me, too,” Jonesy said, “but I don’t care. Come on.”

  “Where are you taking me?” Christine said, giggling as Jonesy pulled her by the hand into the bushes at the side of the house. “Jonesy! Really now!”

  “Come, come, come,” he said. “I want to show you something.” He dragged her deeper into the bushes onto a path that had been stamped down through constant walking through the short grass.

  “What do you want to show me?”

  “Let’s get a little further away from the festivities first,” he said. His hand on hers was tight. He pulled her along the path as if urgently propelled. Christine was not frightened. She was, in truth, slightly excited. She thought she knew what was coming, and she thought she would not resist what was coming. It would serve Cotton right if a handsome young stranger dragged her into the bushes like a caveman and kissed her soundly and completely.

  No, she would not resist.

  There was something very nice about the attention Sam Jones had showered upon her all afternoon, something reminiscent of a time when she’d been very young, when outdoor parties were standard fare every weekend during the summer. Now, running over the short grass with him, she looked forward to the kiss she knew was coming. She felt very youthful all at once, a young girl running through a tree-shaded lane, her feet dancing over the sunlight-speckled trampled path at the far end of the lot.

  Jonesy stopped suddenly.

  “Here,” he said. “This should be far enough away, don’t you think?”

  “For what?” Christine asked. Oddly, her heart was pounding in her chest.

  “Don’t you know?” Jonesy said. He pulled her toward him, his back to the Carella property. Christine felt suddenly breathless. She lifted her mouth for his kiss, and someone suddenly screamed, and she felt goose pimples erupt over every inch of her body, and then she realized it was Jonesy who was screaming, screaming in a wildly masculine voice, and she pulled away from him and looked into his face and then turned to follow his glazed stare.

  Not seven feet from where they were standing, a man lay face downward on the path. The man’s back was covered with blood. The man was not breathing.

  “Oh my God!” Jonesy said. “It’s Birnbaum!”

  The telephone in the squadroom was ringing insistently.

  Hal Willis, alone, unbent from his doubled-over position alongside the water cooler and shouted, “All right, all right, for Christ’s sake! It never fails. A guy goes for a drink of water and— all right, I’m coming!” He threw water and paper cup into the trash basket and ran like hell for the phone, snatching it from the receiver.

  “Hello!” he shouted. “87th Squad!” he shouted. “Detective Willis speaking!” he shouted.

  “I can hear you, Mac,” the voice said. “I can almost hear you without the aid of the instrument, and I’m all the way down on High Street. Shall we try it again? Pizzicato this time?”

  “You mean diminuendo, don’t you?” Willis said softly.

  “Whatever I mean, I think we all get the idea. This is Avery Atkins at the lab. Somebody up there sent a note down to us. We’ve been working on it.”

  “What note?”

  “It says ‘For the groom.’ Familiar with it?”

  “Vaguely. What about it?”

  “What did you say your name was, friend?”

  “Willis. Hal Willis. Detective/third grade. Male, white, American.”

  “And pretty snotty,” Atkins said.

  “Listen, have you got information for me, or have you? I’m all alone here, and I’ve got a million things to do. So how about it?”

  “Here it is. Catch it, wise guy. Paper used was five-and-dime stuff, trade name Skyline, sold over the counter all over the city at twenty-five cents for a package of ten cards and ten little envelopes. Go chase that one down. Ink used was Sheaffer’s Skrip, number thirty-two, permanent jet black. Ditto over counters across the face of our fair city. You can chase that one down, too, wise guy. Which brings us to fingerprints. Two sets on the card, both lousy. One set belongs to a guy named Thomas Giordano. No record. Checked it through his service fingerprints, he was in the Army Signal Corps. The second set belongs to a guy named Stephen Louis Carella who, I understand, is a detective working for the magnificent 87th Squad. He ought to be careful where he lays his fat fingers. You had enough, smart guy?”

  “I’m still listening.”

  “Comes to the handwriting itself, and there’s a lot of crap here you don’t have to know about unless you come up with a sample for comparison. There’s only one thing you do have to know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Whoever sent this over asked us to run a handwriting comparison against the signature of one Martin Sokolin on whom we have a record at the IB. We did that. And one thing’s for sure.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Martin Sokolin didn’t write that love note.”

  The three detectives stood over the body of Joseph Birnbaum. There was no pain, no joy, no sorrow on their faces. Impassively, they stared at death and whatever they felt was rigidly concealed behind the masks they wore for society.

  Carella was the first to kneel.

  “Shot him in the back,” he said. “Bullet probably passed through to the heart. Killed him instantly.”

  “That’s my guess,” Hawes said, nodding.

  “How come we didn’t hear the shot?” Kling asked.

  “All those champagne bottles going off. This is quite a distance from the house. The shot probably sounded like just another cork going off. Take a look around, will you, Bert? See if you can find the spent cartridge.”

  Kling began thrashing through the bushes. Carella turned to Jonesy where he stood with Christine. His face was a pasty white. His hands, though he tried to control them, were trembling at his sides.

  “Pull yourself together,” Carella said harshly. “You can help us, but not the way you are now.”

  “I…I…I can’t help it,” Jonesy said. “I…I feel like I’m going to collapse. That’s why…why I sent Christine for you.”

  “Is that why?” Hawes asked.

  “I…I knew I couldn’t make it myself.”

  “Maybe it’s a good thing,” Carella said. “If you’d have erupted onto that lawn, you’d have busted up that wedding as sure as—”

  “What were you doing back here, anyway?” Hawes said, and he looked at Christine angrily.

  “We were taking a walk,” Jonesy said.

  “Why here?”

  “Why not?”

  “Answer my question, damnit!” Hawes shouted. “That man there is dead, and you’re the one who found the body, and I’d like to know just what the hell brou
ght you back here? Coincidence?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? What were you doing here?”

  “Walking with Christine.”

  “Cotton, we just—”

  “I’ll get to you, Christine,” Hawes said. “Why’d you choose this path for a walk, Jones? So that you’d have a witness when you discovered the body?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me!”

  “That’s…that’s prep—that’s preposterous!”

  “Is it? Then why’d you come back here?”

  “So I could kiss Christine,” Jonesy blurted.

  “And did you?” Hawes said venomously.

  “Cotton—”

  “Keep out of this, Christine. Did you kiss her?”

  “What’s this got to do with Birnbaum? What business is it of yours whether or not I—”

  “When did you see the body?” Carella interrupted, annoyed because Hawes was dragging his interrogation down into the muck of a private and not a police matter.

  “We were standing here,” Jonesy said. “And I happened to see it.”

  “You were just standing here?” Carella asked.

  “I…I was going to kiss Christine.”

  “Go on,” Carella said, and he watched Hawes’s fists close into hard balls at his sides.

  “I saw the body,” Jonesy said. “And I…I screamed. And then I recognized it was Birnbaum.”

  “Where does this path lead?” Hawes snapped.

  “To Birnbaum’s house. On the next lot.”

  Kling came thrashing through the bushes. “Here it is, Steve,” he said, and he held out the brass casing. Carella looked at it. The side of the casing was stamped “357 MAGNUM.” The back end of the casing had the lettering fixed in a circle:

  In any case, there was no doubt about what kind of a gun had fired this particular cartridge. Either a Colt or a Smith & Wesson Magnum revolver.

  “A Magnum,” Carella said. “A big gun.”

  “Not necessarily,” Hawes said. “Smith and Wesson puts out a Magnum with a short three-and-a-half-inch barrel.”

  “In any event, this casing lets out our friend Martino with his Iver Johnson .22.”

  “Yeah. What do we do now, Steve?”