by Ed McBain
“Come on, Felix,” he said then.
And he left without paying another bill.
20
Even The Wall Street Journal covered the arrest of the billionaire Rudolph Bickell. They also asked how the mysterious entrepreneur was able to make bail and flee the country within three hours of his arrest at the posh Peninsula Hotel in New York City. Bickell’s spokesperson in Toronto told reporters that the industrialist had no knowledge that the diamonds he was purchasing were stolen; that there was no law against acquiring the gemstones from the legal representative of a diamond dealer. Valerie Lox, who was in jail, was working for a man named Benny Lamarr who had died in an unrelated auto accident.
The Journal didn’t cover the murder of optical materials dealer Wayne Sacorliss. I had to read about that in the Metro Section of The New York Times. The police had no motive for the crime but they had not ruled out theft. It seemed that Sacorliss was known to carry large sums of cash.
No one connected Sacorliss with Lamarr.
There were no policemen waiting at my door either.
The next morning at five-fifty I was at the front desk of the Tessla building marveling bleary eyed at the saintliness of Joan of Arc.
“Mr. Orlean,” a young red-headed guard said.
“How do you know my name?”
“Mr. Lawless gave us a picture of you so that we’d know to let you in even if you came in after five fifty-five.”
He answered the door before I knocked. That morning he wore white overalls and a bloodred shirt. At his gesture I went into his office and sat on the tree trunk I’d used a few days before.
“What was it all about?” I asked him.
“That why you’re here, Felix?”
“Yes sir.”
“You want to know why,” he said with a smile. “It bothers you to sit alone in your room thinking that the papers might have gotten it wrong, that the police might be covering up a crime. It’s troubling that you can be exonerated from suspicion in a murder case with a few words over an expensive breakfast in midtown Manhattan. That’s not the world you thought you were living in.”
If I were superstitious I might have believed that he was a mind reader. As it was, I thought that he had incredible logical and intuitive faculties.
“Yes,” I said, “but there’s something else.”
“First,” he said, “let me tell you what I know.”
He sat back in his chair and brought his hands together in front of his face as if in Christian prayer.
“There was, in the works of Agineau Armaments, a shipment being readied for delivery in Ecuador at the end of next month. The company slated to receive the shipment is a dummy corporation owned by a conservative plantation owner in Venezuela. It’s not hard to see where the shipment is bound for and who will use the guns.”
“So Bickell is funding conservative guerrillas in Venezuela?” I asked.
“Bickell wanted the diamonds. Sacorliss wanted to fund the revolution.”
“Why?”
“That, my friend, is an argument that we will have over and over again. For my money Sacorliss is a well-trained operative of the United States government. His job was to plan a robbery set to fund our clandestine interests in South America. You probably believe that it isn’t such a far-reaching conspiratorial act. Only time, and blood, will tell.”
“What about Valerie Lox and Lana Drexel?”
“Lox was released from jail. She claimed that she knew nothing about stolen gems, that Lamarr had always been a reputable dealer. The prosecutors decided to believe her which makes me believe that she is also a government operative. I sent Drexel her money. She’s moving to Hollywood. I’ve been trying to decipher the code of Sacorliss’s computer. One day I’ll succeed and prove to you that I’m right. All we have to discuss now are the final terms of your employment.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “You don’t expect that I’m going to come work for you after what I’ve been through.”
“Sure I do.”
“Why?”
“Because of your aunt, of course. You’ll agree to work for me for a specified amount of time and I will agree to do what your father refused to do, free your aunt from jail.”
The hairs on the back of my neck rose up then. I hadn’t even considered this option until the middle of the night before. My face must have exposed my surprise.
“I need you, Felix,” Lawless said. “You complete a faulty circuit in my head. You give me the three years that your aunt has left on her sentence and I will make sure that she’s out of the joint by Sunday next.”
“I still won’t be involved in any crimes,” I said.
“Agreed. I won’t knowingly put you in the position of breaking the law. You will write down everything of import that I say, regardless of your own opinions. I in turn will open your eyes to a whole new world. As a journalist you will learn more from me than from a thousand seminars.”
There was no reason for me to argue.
“Okay,” I said. “But I have two needs and one question.”
“And what might those be?”
“First is salary.”
“Forty-two thousand dollars a year payable from a fund set up by Auchschlous, Anterbe, and Grenell, the world’s largest insurers of rare gems. They prepared the account at my behest.”
“Two,” I said, “is that you agree not to lie to me. If I ask you a question you answer to the best of your ability.”
“Agreed,” Lawless replied, “depending upon circumstances. It might be that the truth would be giving away someone else’s secret and that I have no right to do.”
“Okay. Fine. Then I agree. Three years terminable if you decide I can’t do the job or if you break your word to me. All of course contingent upon the release of my aunt Alberta.”
“You had a question,” Lawless reminded me.
“Oh. Yeah. It didn’t have to do with our contract.”
“Ask anyway.”
“Who was the woman who came to your apartment door, the one in Harlem? I think she said her name was Maddie.”
“Oh. No one. She had nothing to do with our business.”
“But who was she?” I asked.
“My fiancée,” he said. “She’s been looking for me for a couple of years now.”
I’m still in school, still out of contact with my parents. My aunt Alberta was freed from jail on a technicality that a colleague of my father turned up. She’s coming to live in New York.
I work for the anarchist at least four days a week. We argue almost every day I’m there. I still think he’s crazy but I’ve learned that doesn’t always mean he’s wrong.
ED McBAIN
The word “prolific” had been used to describe Ed McBain many times, but there’s no denying that McBain—a.k.a. Evan Hunter (1926-2005)—had also amassed a body of work that stuns the senses when one sits down to reckon with it. That so much of it is excellent, that some of it is possessed of true genius, and that every single piece of it makes for enjoyable reading is a testament to the man’s amazing prowess as an author. Reading his work is like watching a world-class boxer at his peak; he knows all the moves. Because of such bestsellers as The Blackboard Jungle and A Matter of Conviction, his early fame was for his mainstream novels. But over the years he became better known for the 87th Precinct series. It’s impossible to choose the “best” of the 87th books—there are just too many good ones—but one might suggest a peek at He Who Hesitates, Blood Relatives, Long Time No See, and The Big Bad City. He wrote the screenplay of The Birds for Alfred Hitchcock and his powerful novel Last Summer became one of the seminal films of the seventies. Still writing every day until the very end, his last 87th Precinct novel was Fiddlers, along with his non-fiction memoir Let’s Talk, and the reissued pulp novel The Gutter and the Grave, which, along with his enormous body of work, will be read well into the twenty-second century and beyond.
MERELY HATE
Ed McBain
&nb
sp; A blue Star of David had been spray-painted on the windshield of the dead driver’s taxi.
“This is pretty unusual,” Monoghan said.
“The blue star?” Monroe asked.
“Well, that, too,” Monoghan agreed.
The two homicide detectives flanked Carella like a pair of bookends. They were each wearing black suits, white shirts, and black ties, and they looked somewhat like morticians, which was not a far cry from their actual calling. In this city, detectives from Homicide Division were overseers of death, expected to serve in an advisory and supervisory capacity. The actual murder investigation was handled by the precinct that caught the squeal—in this case, the Eight-Seven.
“But I was referring to a cabbie getting killed,” Monoghan explained. “Since they started using them plastic partitions … what, four, five years ago? … yellow-cab homicides have gone down to practically zip.”
Except for tonight, Carella thought.
Tall and slender, standing in an easy slouch, Steve Carella looked like an athlete, which he wasn’t. The blue star bothered him. It bothered his partner, too. Meyer was hoping the blue star wasn’t the start of something. In this city—in this world—things started too fast and took too long to end.
“Trip sheet looks routine,” Monroe said, looking at the clipboard he’d recovered from the cab, glancing over the times and locations handwritten on the sheet. “Came on at midnight, last fare was dropped off at one-forty. When did you guys catch the squeal?”
Car four, in the Eight-Seven’s Adam Sector, had discovered the cab parked at the curb on Ainsley Avenue at two-thirty in the morning. The driver was slumped over the wheel, a bullet hole at the base of his skull. Blood was running down the back of his neck, into his collar. Blue paint was running down his windshield. The uniforms had phoned the detective squadroom some five minutes later.
“We got to the scene at a quarter to three,” Carella said.
“Here’s the ME, looks like,” Monoghan said.
Carl Blaney was getting out of a black sedan marked with the seal of the Medical Examiner’s Office. Blaney was the only person Carella knew who had violet eyes. Then again, he didn’t know Liz Taylor.
“What’s this I see?” he asked, indicating the clipboard in Monroe’s hand. “You been compromising the crime scene?”
“Told you,” Monoghan said knowingly.
“It was in plain sight,” Monroe explained.
“This the vic?” Blaney asked, striding over to the cab and looking in through the open window on the driver’s side. It was a mild night at the beginning of May. Spectators who’d gathered on the sidewalk beyond the yellow CRIME SCENE tapes were in their shirt sleeves. The detectives in sport jackets and ties, Blaney and the homicide dicks in suits and ties, all looked particularly formal, as if they’d come to the wrong street party.
“MCU been here yet?” Blaney asked.
“We’re waiting,” Carella said.
Blaney was referring to the Mobile Crime Unit, which was called the CSI in some cities. Before they sanctified the scene, not even the ME was supposed to touch anything. Monroe felt this was another personal jab, just because he’d lifted the goddamn clipboard from the front seat. But he’d never liked Blaney, so fuck him.
“Why don’t we tarry over a cup of coffee?” Blaney suggested, and without waiting for company, started walking toward an all-night diner across the street. This was a black neighborhood, and this stretch of turf was largely retail, with all of the shops closed at three-fifteen in the morning. The diner was the only place ablaze with illumination, although lights had come on in many of the tenements above the shuttered shops.
The sidewalk crowd parted to let Blaney through, as if he were a visiting dignitary come to restore order in Baghdad. Carella and Meyer ambled along after him. Monoghan and Monroe lingered near the taxi, where three or four blues stood around scratching their asses. Casually, Monroe tossed the clipboard through the open window and onto the front seat on the passenger side.
There were maybe half a dozen patrons in the diner when Blaney and the two detectives walked in. A man and a woman sitting in one of the booths were both black. The girl was wearing a purple silk dress and strappy high-heeled sandals. The man was wearing a beige linen suit with wide lapels. Carella and Meyer each figured them for a hooker and her pimp, which was profiling because for all they knew, the pair could have been a gainfully employed, happily married couple coming home from a late party. Everyone sitting on stools at the counter was black, too. So was the man behind it. They all knew this was the Law here, and the Law frequently spelled trouble in the hood, so they all fell silent when the three men took stools at the counter and ordered coffee.
“So how’s the world treating you these days?” Blaney asked the detectives.
“Fine,” Carella said briefly. He had come on at midnight, and it had already been a long night.
The counterman brought their coffees.
Bald and burly and blue-eyed, Meyer picked up his coffee cup, smiled across the counter, and asked, “How you doing?”
“Okay,” the counterman said warily.
“When did you come to work tonight?”
“Midnight.”
“Me, too,” Meyer said. “Were you here an hour or so ago?”
“I was here, yessir.”
“Did you see anything going down across the street?”
“Nossir.”
“Hear a shot?”
“Nossir.”
“See anyone approaching the cab there?”
“Nossir.”
“Or getting out of the cab?”
“I was busy in here,” the man said.
“What’s your name?” Meyer asked.
“Whut’s my name got to do with who got aced outside?”
“Nothing,” Meyer said. “I have to ask.”
“Deaven Brown,” the counterman said.
“We’ve got a detective named Arthur Brown up the Eight-Seven,” Meyer said, still smiling pleasantly.
“That right?” Brown said indifferently.
“Here’s Mobile,” Carella said, and all three men hastily downed their coffees and went outside again.
The chief tech was a Detective/First named Carlie …
“For Charles,” he explained.
… Epworth. He didn’t ask if anyone had touched anything, and Monroe didn’t volunteer the information either. The MCU team went over the vehicle and the pavement surrounding it, dusting for prints, vacuuming for fibers and hair. On the cab’s dashboard, there was a little black holder with three miniature American flags stuck in it like an open fan. In a plastic holder on the partition facing the back seat, there was the driver’s pink hack license. The name to the right of the photograph was Khalid Aslam. It was almost four A.M. when Epworth said it would be okay to examine the corpse.
Blaney was thorough and swift.
Pending a more thorough examination at the morgue, he proclaimed cause of death to be a gunshot wound to the head—
Big surprise, Monroe thought, but did not say.
—and told the assembled detectives that they would have his written report by the end of the day. Epworth promised likewise, and one of the MCU team drove the taxi off to the police garage where it would be sealed as evidence. An ambulance carried off the stiff. The blues took down the CRIME SCENE tapes, and told everybody to go home, nothing to see here anymore, folks.
Meyer and Carella still had four hours to go before their shift ended.
“Khalid Aslam, Khalid Aslam,” the man behind the computer said. “Must be a Muslim, don’t you think?”
The offices of the License Bureau at the Taxi and Limousine Commission occupied two large rooms on the eighth floor of the old brick building on Emory Street all the way downtown. At five in the morning, there were only two people on duty, one of them a woman at another computer across the room. Lacking population, the place seemed cavernous.
“Most of the drivers nowadays are Muslims,”
the man said. His name was Lou Foderman, and he seemed to be close to retirement age, somewhere in his mid-sixties, Meyer guessed.
“Khalid Aslam, Khalid Aslam,” he said again, still searching. “The names these people have. You know how many licensed yellow-cab drivers we have in this city?” he asked, not turning from the computer screen. “Forty-two thousand,” he said, nodding. “Khalid Aslam, where are you hiding, Khalid Aslam? Ninety percent of them are immigrants, seventy percent from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. You want to bet Mr. Aslam here is from one of those countries? How much you wanna bet?”
Carella looked up at the wall clock.
It was five minutes past five.
“Back when I was driving a cab,” Foderman said, “this was during the time of the Roman Empire, most of your cabbies were Jewish or Irish or Italian. We still got a couple of Jewish drivers around, but they’re mostly from Israel or Russia. Irish and Italian, forget about it. You get in a cab nowadays, the driver’s talking Farsi to some other guy on his cell phone, you think they’re planning a terrorist attack. I wouldn’t be surprised Mr. Aslam was talking on the phone to one of his pals, and the passenger shot him because he couldn’t take it anymore, you said he was shot, correct?”
“He was shot, yes,” Meyer said.
He looked up at the clock, too.
“Because he was babbling on the phone, I’ll bet,” Foderman said. “These camel jockeys think a taxi is a private phone booth, never mind the passenger. You ask them to please stop talking on the phone, they get insulted. We get more complaints here about drivers talking on the phone than anything else. Well, maybe playing the radio. They play their radios with all this string music from the Middle East, sitars, whatever they call them. Passengers are trying to have a decent conversation, the driver’s either playing the radio or talking on the phone. You tell him please lower the radio, he gives you a look could kill you on the spot. Some of them even wear turbans and carry little daggers in their boots, Sikhs, they call themselves. ‘All Singhs are Sikhs,’” Foderman quoted, “‘but not all Sikhs are Singhs,’ that’s an expression they have. Singhs is a family name. Or the other way around, I forget which. Maybe it’s ‘All Sikhs are Singhs,’ who knows? Khalid Aslam, here he is. What do you want to know about him?”
