Nocturne
Copyright © 1997 by Hui Corporation
All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc.,
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
.
First eBook Edition: April 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56027-6
Contents
ALSO BY ED McBAIN
The 87th Precinct Novels
Cop Hater • The Mugger • The Pusher
(1956)
The Con Man • Killer’s Choice
(1957)
Killer’s Payoff • Killer’s Wedge • Lady Killer (1958) ’Til Death • King’s Ransom
(1959)
Give the Boys a Great Big Hand • The Heckler • See Them Die
(1960)
Lady, Lady, I Did It!
(1961)
The Empty Hours • Like Love
(1962)
Ten Plus One
(1963)
Ax
(1964)
He Who Hesitates
•
Doll
(1965)
Eighty Million Eyes
(1966)
Fuzz
(1968)
Shotgun
(1969)
Jigsaw
(1970)
Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here
(1971)
Sadie When She Died • Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man
(1972)
Hail to the Chief
(1973)
Bread
(1974)
Blood Relatives
(1975)
So Long as You Both Shall Live
(1976)
Long Time No See
(1977)
Calypso
(1979)
Ghosts
(1980)
Heat
(1981)
Ice
(1983)
Lightning
(1984)
Eight Black Horses
(1985)
Poison • Tricks
(1987)
Lullaby
(1989)
Vespers
(1990)
Widows
(1991)
Kiss
(1992)
Mischief
(1993)
And All Through the House
(1994)
Romance
(1995)
The Matthew Hope Novels
Goldilocks
(1978)
Rumpelstiltskin
(1981)
Beauty and the Beast
(1982)
Jack and the Beanstalk
(1984)
Snow White and Rose Red
(1985)
Cinderella
(1986)
Puss in Boots
(1987)
The House That Jack Built
(1988)
Three Blind Mice
(1990)
Mary, Mary
(1993)
There Was a Little Girl
(1994)
Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear
(1996)
Other Novels
The Sentries
(1965)
Where There’s Smoke • Doors
(1975)
Guns
(1976)
Another Part of the City
(1986)
Downtown
(1991)
AND AS EVAN HUNTER
Novels
The Blackboard Jungle
(1954)
Second Ending
(1956)
Strangers When We Meet
(1958)
A Matter of Conviction
(1959)
Mothers and Daughters
(1961)
Buddwing
(1964)
The Paper Dragon
(1966)
A Horse’s Head
(1967)
Last Summer
(1968)
Sons
(1969)
Nobody Knew They Were There
(1971)
Every Little Crook and Nanny
(1972)
Come Winter
(1973)
Streets of Gold
(1974)
The Chisholms
(1976)
Love, Dad
(1981)
Far From the Sea
(1983)
Lizzie
(1984)
Criminal Conversation
(1994)
Privileged Conversation
(1996)
Short Story Collections
Happy New Year, Herbie
(1963)
The Easter Man
(1972)
Children’s Books
Find the Feathered Serpent
(1952)
The Remarkable Harry
(1959)
The Wonderful Button
(1961)
Me and Mr. Stenner
(1976)
Screenplays
Strangers When We Meet
(1959)
The Birds
(1962)
Fuzz
(1972)
Walk Proud
(1979)
Teleplays
The Chisholms
(1979)
The Legend of Walks Far Woman
(1980)
Dream West
(1986)
This is for
Rachel and Avrum Ben-Avi
The city in these pages is imaginary.
The people, the places are all fictitious.
Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique.
T
he phone was ringing as Carella came into the squadroom. The clock on the wall read 11:45
p.m.
“I’m out of here,” Parker said, shrugging into his overcoat.
Carella picked up. “Eighty-seventh Squad,” he said. “Detective Carella.”
And listened.
Hawes was coming into the squadroom, blowing on his hands.
“We’re on our way,” Carella said, and hung up the phone. Hawes was taking off his coat. “Leave it on,” Carella said.
The woman was lying just inside the door to her apartment. She was still wearing an out-of-fashion mink going orange. Her
hair was styled in what used to be called finger waves. Silver-blue hair. Orange-brown mink. It was twelve degrees Fahrenheit
out there in the street tonight, but under the mink she was wearing only a flowered cotton housedress. Scuffed French-heeled
shoes on her feet. Wrinkled hose. Hearing aid in her right ear. She must have been around eighty-five or so. Someone had shot
her twice in the chest. Someone had also shot and killed her cat, a fat female tabby with a bullet hole in her chest and blood
in her matted fur.
The Homicide cops had got here first. When Carella and Hawes walked in, they were still speculating on what had happened.
“Keys on the floor there, must’ve nailed her the minute she come in the apartment,” Monoghan said.
“Unlocks the door, blooie,” Monroe said.
It was chilly in the apartment; both men were still wearing their outer clothing, black overcoats, black fedoras, black leather
gloves. In this city, the appearance of Homicide Division detectives was mandatory at the scene, even though the actual investigation
fell to the responding precinct detectives. Monoghan and Monroe liked to think of themselves as supervisory and advisory professionals,
creative mentors so to speak. They felt black was a fitting color, or lack of color, for professional Homicide Division mentors.
Like two stout giant penquins, shoulders hunched, heads bent, they stood peering down at the dead old woman on the worn carpet.
Carella and Hawes, coming into the apartment, had to walk around them to avoid stepping on the corpse.
“Look who’s here,” Monoghan said, without looking up at them.
Carella and Hawes were freezing cold. On a night like tonight, they didn’t feel they needed either advice or supervision,
creative or otherwise. All they wanted to do was get on with the job. The area just inside the door smelled of whiskey. This
was the first thing both cops registered. The second was the broken bottle in the brown paper bag, lying just out of reach
of the old woman’s bony arthritic hand. The curled fingers seemed extraordinarily long.
“Been out partying?” Monoghan asked them.
“We’ve been here twenty minutes already,” Monroe said petulantly.
“Big party?” Monoghan asked.
“Traffic,” Hawes explained, and shrugged.
He was a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing a woolen tweed overcoat an uncle had sent him from London this past Christmas.
It was now the twentieth of January, Christmas long gone, the twenty-first just a heartbeat away—but time was of no consequence
in the 87th Precinct. Flecks of red in the coat’s fabric looked like sparks that had fallen from his hair onto the coat. His
face was red, too, from the cold outside. A streak of white hair over his left temple looked like glare ice. It was the color
his fear had been when a burglar slashed him all those years ago. The emergency room doctor had shaved his hair to get at
the wound, and it had grown back white. Women told him they found it sexy. He told them it was hard to comb.
“We figure she surprised a burglar,” Monroe said. “Bedroom window’s still open.” He gestured with his head. “We didn’t want
to touch it till the techs got here.”
“
They
must be out partying, too,” Monoghan said.
“Fire escape just outside the window,” Monroe said, gesturing again. “Way he got in.”
“Everybody’s out partying but us,” Monoghan said.
“Old lady here was planning a little party, that’s for sure,” Monroe said.
“Fifth of cheap booze in the bag,” Monoghan said.
“Musta gone down while the liquor stores were still open.”
“It’s Saturday, they’ll be open half the night,” Monroe said.
“Didn’t want to take any chances.”
“Well, she won’t have to worry about taking chances anymore,” Monroe said.
“Who is she, do you know?” Carella asked.
He had unbuttoned his overcoat, and he stood now in an easy slouch, his hands in his trouser pockets, looking down at the
dead woman. Only his eyes betrayed that he was feeling any sort of pain. He was thinking he should have asked Who
was
she? Because someone had reduced her to nothing but a corpse afloat on cheap whiskey.
“Didn’t want to touch her till the M.E. got here,” Monroe said.
Please, Carella thought, no par—
“
He’s
probably out partying, too,” Monoghan said.
Midnight had come and gone without fanfare.
But morning would feel like night for a long while yet.
To no one’s enormous surprise, the medical examiner cited the apparent cause of death as gunshot wounds. This was even before
one of the crime scene techs discovered a pair of spent bullets embedded in the door behind the old woman, and another one
in the baseboard behind the cat. They looked like they might be thirty-eights, but not even the creative mentors were willing
to guess. The tech bagged them and marked them for transport to the lab. There were no latent fingerprints on the windowsill,
the sash, or the fire escape outside. No latent footprints, either. To everyone’s great relief, the tech who’d been out there
came back in and closed the window behind him.
The coats came off.
The building superintendent told them the dead woman was Mrs. Helder. He said he thought she was Russian or something. Or
German, he wasn’t sure. He said she’d been living there for almost three years. Very quiet person, never caused any trouble.
But he thought she drank a little.
This was what was known as a one-bedroom apartment. In this city, some so-called one-bedrooms were really L-shaped studios,
but this was a genuine one-bedroom, albeit a tiny one. The bedroom faced the street side, which was unfortunate in that the
din of automobile horns was incessant and intolerable, even at this early hour of the morning. This was not a particularly
desirable section of the city or the precinct. Mrs. Helder’s building was on Lincoln Street, close to the River Harb and the
fish market that ran dockside, east to west, for four city blocks.
The team had relieved at a quarter to twelve and would in turn be relieved at seven forty-five
a.m
. In some American cities, police departments had abandoned what was known as the graveyard shift. This was because detective
work rarely required an immediate response except in homicide cases, where any delay in the investigation afforded the killer
an invaluable edge. In those cities, what they called Headquarters, or Central, or Metro, or whatever, maintained homicide
hotlines that could rustle any detective out of bed in a minute flat. Not this city. In this city, whenever your name came
up on the rotating schedule, you pulled a month on what was accurately called the
morning
shift even though you worked all through the empty hours of the night. The graveyard shift, as it was familiarly and unaffectionately
called, threw your internal clock all out of whack, and also played havoc with your sex life. It was now five minutes past
midnight. In exactly seven hours and forty minutes, the day shift would relieve and the detectives could go home to sleep.
Meanwhile, they were in a tiny one-bedroom apartment that stank of booze and something they realized was cat piss. The kitchen
floor was covered with fish bones and the remains of several fish heads.