by Ed McBain
Tal Simms carefully lowered the hammer of his weapon, replaced it in his holster and began running down the path.
“Excuse me, you were standing where?”
Tal ignored Greg LaTour’s question and asked them both one more time, “You’re okay? You’re sure?”
The bearded cop persisted. “You were on that hill. Way the fuck up there?”
Mac told Tal that she was fine. He instinctively put his arm around her. Covey too said that he was unhurt, though he added that, as a heart patient, he could do without scares like that one.
Margaret Ludlum’s gun had fired but it was merely a reflex after Tal’s bullet had struck her squarely in the chest. The slug from her pistol had buried itself harmlessly in the ground.
Tal glanced at her body, now covered with a green tarp from the Medical Examiner’s Office. He waited to feel upset, or shocked or guilty, but he was only numb. Those feelings would come later, he supposed. At the moment he was just relieved to find that Mac and Robert Covey were all right—and that the final itch in the case had been alleviated: The tough Irish girl, Margaret, was the missing link.
They must’ve hired muscle or used somebody in the foundation for the dirty work.
As the Crime Scene techs picked up evidence around the body and looked through the woman’s purse, LaTour persisted. “That hill up there? No fucking way.”
Tal glanced up. “Yeah. Up there by the concession stand. Why?”
The bearded cop glanced at Mac. “He’s kidding. He’s jerking my chain, right?”
“No, that’s where he was.”
“That’s a fucking long shot. Wait . . . how big’s your barrel?”
“What?”
“On your service piece.”
“Three inch.”
LaTour said. “You made that shot with a three-inch barrel?”
“We’ve pretty much established that, Greg. Can we move on?” Tal turned back to Mac and smiled, feeling weak, he was so relieved to see her safe.
But LaTour said, “You told me you don’t shoot.”
“I didn’t say that at all. You assumed I don’t shoot. I just didn’t want to go the range the other day. I’ve shot all my life. I was captain of the rifle team at school.”
LaTour squinted at the distant concession stand. He shook his head. “No way.”
Tal glanced at him and asked, “Okay, you want to know how I did it? There’s a trick.”
“What?” the big cop asked eagerly.
“Easy. Just calculate the correlation between gravity as a constant and the estimated mean velocity of the wind over the time it takes the bullet to travel from points A to B—that’s the muzzle to the target. Got that? Then you just multiply distance times that correlated factor divided by the mass of the bullet times its velocity squared.”
“You—” The big cop squinted again. “Wait, you—”
“It’s a joke, Greg.”
“You son of a bitch. You had me.”
“Haven’t you noticed it’s not that hard to do?”
The cop mouthed words that Mac couldn’t see but Tal had no trouble deciphering.
LaTour squinted one last time toward the knoll and exhaled a laugh. “Let’s get statements.” He nodded to Robert Covey and escorted him toward his car, calling back to Tal, “You get hers. That okay with you, Einstein?”
“Sure.”
Tal led Mac to a park bench out of sight of Margaret’s body and listened to what she had to say about the incident, jotting down the facts in his precise handwriting. An officer drove Covey home and Tal found himself alone with Mac. There was silence for a moment and he asked, “Say, one thing? Could you help me fill out this questionnaire?”
“I’d be happy to.”
He pulled one out of his briefcase, looked at it, then back to her. “How ‘bout dinner tonight?”
“Is that one of the questions?”
“It’s one of my questions. Not a police question.”
“Well, the thing is I’ve got a date tonight. Sorry.”
He nodded. “Oh, sure.” Couldn’t think of anything to follow up with. He pulled out his pen and smoothed the questionnaire, thinking: Of course she had a date. Women like her, high-ranking members of the Four Percent Club, always had dates. He wondered if it’d been the Pascal-sex comment that had knocked him out of the running. Note for the future: Don’t bring that one up too soon.
Mac continued, “Yeah, tonight I’m going to help Mr. Covey find a health club with a pool. He likes to swim but he shouldn’t do it alone. So we’re going to find a place that’s got a lifeguard.”
“Really? Good for him.” He looked up from Question 1.
“But I’m free Saturday,” Mac said.
“Saturday? Well, I am too.”
Silence. “Then how’s Saturday?” she asked.
“I think it’s great. . . Now how ‘bout those questions?”
A week later the Lotus Research Foundation case was nearly tidied up—as was Tal’s office, much to his relief—and he was beginning to think about the other tasks awaiting him: the SEC investigation, the statistical analysis for next year’s personnel assignments and, of course, hounding fellow officers to get their questionnaires in on time.
The prosecutor still wanted some final statements for the Farley and Sheldon trials, though, and he’d asked Tal to interview the parents who’d adopted the three children born following the in vitro fertilization at the foundation.
Two of the three couples lived nearby and he spent one afternoon taking their statements. The last couple was in Warwick, a small town outside of Albany, over an hour away. Tal made the drive on a Sunday afternoon, zipping down the picturesque roadway along the Hudson River, the landscape punctuated with blooming azaleas, forsythia, and a billion spring flowers, the car filling with the scent of mulch and hot loam and sweet asphalt.
He found both Warwick and the couple’s bungalow with no difficulty. The husband and wife, in their late twenties, were identically pudgy and rosy skinned. Uneasy too, until Tal explained that his mission there had nothing to do with any challenges to the adoption. It was merely a formality for a criminal case.
Like the other parents they provided good information that would be helpful in prosecuting Farley and Sheldon. For a half hour Tal jotted careful notes and then thanked them for their time. As he was leaving he walked past a small, cheery room decorated in a circus motif.
A little girl, about four, stood in the doorway. It was the youngster the couple had adopted from the foundation. She was adorable—blond, gray-eyed, with a heart-shaped face.
“This is Amy,” the mother said.
“Hello, Amy,” Tal offered.
She nodded shyly.
Amy was clutching a piece of paper and some crayons. “Did you draw that?” he asked.
“Uh-huh. I like to draw.”
“I can tell. You’ve got lots of pictures.” He nodded at the girl’s walls.
“Here,” she said, holding the sheet out. “You can have this. I just drew it.”
“For me?” Tal asked. He glanced at her mother, who nodded her approval. He studied the picture for a moment. “Thank you, Amy. I love it. I’ll put it up on my wall at work.”
The girl’s face broke into a beaming smile.
Tal said good-bye to her parents and ten minutes later he was cruising south on the parkway. When he came to the turnoff that would take him to his house and his Sunday retreat into the world of mathematics, though, Tal continued on. He drove instead to his office at the County Building.
A half hour later he was on the road again. En route to an address in Chesterton, a few miles away.
He pulled up in front of a split-level house surrounded by a small but immaculately trimmed yard. Two plastic tricycles and other assorted toys sat in the driveway.
But this wasn’t the right place, he concluded with irritation. Damn. He must’ve written the address down wrong.
The house he was looking for had to be nearby an
d Tal decided to ask the owner here where it was. Walking to the door, Tal pushed the bell then stood back.
A pretty blonde in her thirties greeted him with a cheerful, “Hi. Help you?”
“I’m looking for Greg LaTour’s house.”
“Well, you found it. Hi, I’m his wife, Joan.”
“He lives here?” Tal asked, glancing past her into a suburban home right out of a Hollywood sitcom. Thinking too: And he’s married?
She laughed. “Hold on. I’ll get him.”
A moment later Greg LaTour came to the door, wearing shorts, sandals, and a green Izod shirt. He blinked in surprise and looked back over his shoulder into the house. Then he stepped outside and pulled the door shut after him. “What’re you doing here?”
“Needed to tell you something about the case. . . .” But Tal’s voice faded. He was staring at two cute blond girls, twins, about eight years old, who’d come around the side of the house and were looking at Tal curiously.
One said, “Daddy, the ball’s in the bushes. We can’t get it.”
“Honey, I’ve got to talk to my friend here,” he said in a singsong, fatherly voice. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Okay.” They disappeared.
“You’ve got two kids?”
“Four kids.”
“How long you been married?”
“Eighteen years.”
“But I thought you were single. You never mentioned family. You didn’t wear a ring. Your office, the biker posters, the bars after work. . .”
“That’s who I need to be to do my job,” LaTour said in a low voice. “That life—” He nodded vaguely in the direction of the Sheriff’s Department. “—and this life I keep separate. Completely.”
That’s something else . . .
Tal now understood the meaning of the phrase. It wasn’t about tragedies in his life, marital breakups, alienated children. And there was nothing LaTour was hiding from Tal. This was a life kept separate from everybody in the department.
“So you’re mad I’m here,” Tal said.
A shrug. “Just wish you’d called first.”
“Sorry.”
LaTour shrugged. “You go to church today?”
“I don’t go to church. Why?”
“Why’re you wearing a tie on Sunday?”
“I don’t know. I just do. Is it crooked?”
The big cop said, “No it’s not crooked. So. What’re you doing here?”
“Hold on a minute.”
Tal got his briefcase out of the car and returned to the porch. “I stopped by the office and checked up on the earlier suicides Sheldon and Farley arranged.”
“You mean from a few years ago?”
“Right. Well, one of them was a professor named Mary Stemple. I’d heard of her—she was a physicist at Princeton. I read some of her work a while ago. She was brilliant. She spent the last three years of her life working on this analysis of the luminosity of stars and measuring blackbody radiation—”
“I’ve got burgers about to go on the grill,” LaTour grumbled.
“Okay. Got it. Well, this was published just before she killed herself.” He handed LaTour what he’d downloaded from the Journal of Advanced Astrophysics Web site:
THE INFINITE JOURNEY OF LIGHT:
A NEW APPROACH TO MEASURING
DISTANT STELLAR RADIATION
BY PROF. MARY STEMPLE, PH.D.
He flipped to the end of the article, which consisted of several pages of complicated formulae. They involved hundreds of numbers and Greek and English letters and mathematical symbols. The one that occurred most frequently was the sign for infinity: ∞
LaTour looked up. “There a punch line to all this?”
“Oh, you bet there is.” He explained about his drive to Warwick to interview the adoptive couple.
And then he held up the picture that their daughter, Amy, had given him. It was a drawing of the earth and the moon and a spaceship—and all around them, filling the sky, were infinity symbols, growing smaller and smaller as they receded into space.
Forever. . .
Tal added, “And this wasn’t the only one. Her walls were covered with pictures she’d done that had infinity signs in them. When I saw this I remembered Stemple’s work. I went back to the office and I looked up her paper.”
“What’re you saying?” LaTour frowned.
“Mary Stemple killed herself five years ago. The girl who drew this was conceived at the foundation’s clinic a month after she died.”
“Jesus. . .” The big cop stared at the picture. “You don’t think. . . Hell, it can’t be real, that cloning stuff. That doctor we talked to, he said it was impossible.”
Tal said nothing, continued to stare at the picture.
LaTour shook his head. “Naw, naw. You know what they did, Sheldon or that girl of his? Or Farley? They showed the kid pictures of that symbol. You know, so they could prove to other clients that the cloning worked. That’s all.”
“Sure,” Tal said. “That’s what happened. . . . Probably.”
Still, they stood in silence for a long moment, this trained mathematician and this hardened cop, staring, captivated, at a clumsy, crayon picture drawn by a cute four-year-old.
“It can’t be,” LaTour muttered. “Germ’s ass, remember?”
“Yeah, it’s impossible,” Tal said, staring at the symbol. He repeated: “Probably.”
“Daddy!” Came a voice from the backyard.
LaTour called, “Be there in a minute, honey!” Then he looked up at Tal and said, “Hell, as long as you’re here, come on in. Have dinner. I make great burgers.”
Tal considered the invitation but his eyes were drawn back to the picture, the stars, the moon, the infinity signs. “Thanks but think I’ll pass. I’m going back to the office for a while. All that evidence we took out of the foundation? I wanta look over the data a little more.”
“Suit yourself, Einstein,” the homicide cop said. He started back into the house but paused and turned back. “Data plural,” he said, pointing a huge finger at Tal’s chest.
“Data plural,” Tal agreed.
LaTour vanished inside, the screen door swinging shut behind him with a bang.
LAWRENCE BLOCK
_________
There are two kinds of stylists: the show-off who wants to be congratulated every time he turns a nice phrase and the kind who quietly turns a nice phrase but just gets on with the story. Lawrence Block is one of the latter. Even at the outset of his career, when he was turning out books at a furious pace, he managed to bring elegance and taste to even minor assignments, particularly with a knowing, wry take on the relationships and interactions between his characters: men with women, men with men, fathers and sons, husbands and wives. His hard work paid off. Not only is he one of the premier crime novelists of our time—with two bestselling series: the Matt Scudder novels (dark), including Eight Million Ways to Die, The Devil Knows You’re Dead, and the Edgar-winning A Dance at the Slaughterhouse; and the Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries (humorous), including The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart and The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams—he is also one of our most accomplished short story writers. No wonder the Mystery Writers of America hailed him as one of the Grand Masters. Recently he turned to editing books, with seven stellar anthologies published: Masters Choice, Vol. 1 and 2, Opening Shots, Vol. 1 and 2, Speaking of Lust and Speaking of Greed, and the MWA anthology Blood on Their Hands. His latest novels are the acclaimed ode to New York City after 9/11, Small Town, and another Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery, The Burglar on the Prowl.
KELLER’S ADJUSTMENT
Lawrence Block
Keller, waiting for the traffic light to turn from red to green, wondered what had happened to the world. The traffic light wasn’t the problem. There’d been traffic lights for longer than he could remember, longer than he’d been alive. For almost as long as there had been automobiles, he supposed, although the automobile had clearly come first, and would in fact
have necessitated the traffic light. At first they’d have made do without them, he supposed, and then, when there were enough cars around for them to start slamming into one another, someone would have figured out that some form of control was necessary, some device to stop east-west traffic while allowing north-south traffic to proceed, and then switching.
He could imagine an early motorist fulminating against the new regimen. Whole world’s going to hell. They ‘re taking our rights away one after another. Light turns red because some damn timer tells it to turn red, a man’s supposed to stop what he’s doing and hit the brakes. Don’t matter if there ain’t another car around for fifty miles, he’s gotta stop and stand there like a goddam fool until the light turns green and tells him he can go again. Who wants to live in a country like that? Who wants to bring children into a world where that kind of crap goes on?
A horn sounded, jarring Keller abruptly from the early days of the twentieth century to the early days of the twenty-first. The light, he noted, had turned from red to green, and the fellow in the SUV just behind him felt a need to bring this fact to Keller’s attention. Keller, without feeling much in the way of actual irritation or anger, allowed himself a moment of imagination in which he shifted into park, engaged the emergency brake, got out of the car and walked back to the SUV, whose driver would already have begun to regret leaning on the horn. Even as the man (pig-faced and jowly in Keller’s fantasy) was reaching for the button to lock the door, Keller was opening the door, taking hold of the man (sweating now, stammering, making simultaneous threats and excuses) by the shirtfront, yanking him out of the car, sending him sprawling on the pavement. Then, while the man’s child (no, make it his wife, a fat shrew with dyed hair and rheumy eyes) watched in horror, Keller bent from the waist and dispatched the man with a movement learned from the Burmese master U Minh U, one in which the adept’s hands barely appeared to touch the subject, but death, while indescribably painful, was virtually instantaneous.
Keller, satisfied by the fantasy, drove on. Behind him, the driver of the SUV—an unaccompanied young woman, Keller now noted, her hair secured by a bandana, and a sack of groceries on the seat beside her—followed along for half a block, then turned off to the right, seemingly unaware of her close brush with death.
