The Oxford Book of American Det (83 page)

But the next ring was on the doorbell, and Lieutenant MacDonald was not having any standing between. He strode in, snatched the glass from Steve, and began talking.

“This thing sticking out of my pocket,” he said, “is a warrant. Just so a mystery plot man like you gets all the gimmicks straight, we’ll brief it. You couldn’t make up your mind, could you? You kept quoting
How happy could I be with either...
Only there’s another quote that starts like that. It was Groucho Marx who said,
How happy I could
be with either of these women... if only both of them would go away!
And that’s the decision you reached. You were going to pieces; and what a nice simple life you could have if only you weren’t bothered with either Harriet or Lynn. No more problems, no decisions, no impingements... just you alone, in your insufficient self-sufficiency...!” Steve said, “If I had that glass back I could think better.”

“You don’t want things outside yourself, but you can’t live without them. You’ve found that out by now, haven’t you? OK, take the glass. And take the proof. There’s been too much written about poisoned chocolates. Nobody’d eat an anonymous gift nowadays—especially no one close to a gimmick-conscious man like you.
Unless
they were reassured. ‘Stupid of me, darling; I forgot to put in the card.’ And who’s the only person who, immediately or by phone, could reassure both Harriet and Lynn?

“And the best proof. Crime must have a stop. A full stop. The typewriter was almost certainly the one in your study, but that proved nothing. Anybody could’ve used it—

Miss McVeagh, your mother... But typing habits are something else. And typists are divided into those who do and do not put a period, a full stop, after abbreviations like
Mr.
and
Mrs.
I saw a letter of McVeagh’s; she wrote
Mr. Harriett
—M, R, period. I saw a note from your mother; she wrote
Mr. Noble
—M, R, period. I saw a note from you; you wrote
Dr Ferdinand Wahrschein
—D, R, no period. And the murder labels were both addressed
Mrs—
M, R, S,
no period.

“The D.A.’ll want to know where the strychnine came from. I’ll make a guess. Your mother’s a semi-invalid, I gather. Maybe heart-trouble? Maybe using strychnine?

Maybe missing a few tablets lately?”

Lieutenant MacDonald had never seen anyone wring her hands before, but there was no other description for what Mrs. Harnett was doing. “I have noticed,” she struggled to say, “twice recently, I’ve had to have a prescription refilled before I needed to.” Steve gulped and set his glass down. “Hitting it too hard, Don,” he choked out.

“Minute in the bathroom. Then you can...” He gestured at the warrant.

“You must understand, Lieutenant,” Mrs. Harnett began as Steve left. “It isn’t as if my Stephen were like other men. This isn’t an ordinary case. Of course I have to tell the truth when it comes to something like the strychnine, but—“ A dim fear clutched at Lieutenant MacDonald as he callously shoved past the old lady toward the bathroom. He threw open the unlatched door. Stephen Harnett stood there by the basin. MacDonald remembered McVeagh’s description
: His hands are shaking
and his eyes look like he’s going to cry.
His trembling fingers were unable to bring the razor blade functionally close to the veins of his wrist. The blade slipped from his hand and clattered into the bowl as he turned and surrendered to the law.

“He’ll never have to make another decision of his own,” MacDonald said to Nick Noble when he dropped into the Chula Negra after his testimony on the first day of the trial. “From now on it’s all up to his lawyers and the State. I think he likes it.

“Of course they’ve made that nonsensical double plea
: Not guilty
and
Not guilty by
reason of insanity.
In other words, I didn’t do it but if I did you can’t hurt me. It may stick; I think he’ll like it better if it doesn’t.”

“Is he?” Noble wondered into his glass.

“I don’t know. What’s sane? Like the majority of people? Then no murderer’s sane: the majority aren’t murderers. But the big trouble is with the people who are
almost
like the majority, the people you can’t tell from anybody else till the push comes which they can’t take. The people who could be the guy in the next apartment, the gal in the same bed... or me. So who’s sane? Who’s the majority? Maybe the majority is the people who haven’t been pushed...”

Nick Noble opened his pale blue eyes to their widest. “You’re growing up, Mac,” he said, and finished his sherry hopefully.

ED McBAIN (b. 1926)

He was born Salvatore A. Lombino in an impoverished New York City neighbourhood, but he has written under the names Ezra Hannon, Richard Marstan, Evan Hunter, and Ed McBain—the last two of which made him famous. McBain studied at both the New York City Art Students League and Cooper Union Art School on scholarships, but even then his love was writing. After service on a destroyer during World War II, he switched to Hunter College to earn a degree in English and membership in
Phi Beta Kapa.

McBain worked as a lobster salesman and a substitute teacher, among other jobs, and published scores of short stories and three novels before
The Blackboard Jungle,
written as Evan Hunter, brought him financial success in 1954. Remarkably prolific, he also has written two plays, four film scripts, two television plays, and a number of books for children. But his fame and his reputation rest principally on his Eighty-seventh Precinct series, which began in 1956 with the publication of
Cop Hater.

These novels—many of which feature Steve Carela, the precinct’s chief detective, but often focus on other members of the force—won for McBain the 1986 Grand Master award of the Mystery Writers of America and a reputation among his peers as the pre-eminent creator of the police-procedural form. His plots focus on the crime and on the exhausting work required of lawmen to catch the criminal. McBain makes his policemen human, with lives outside their duty, and he peoples the streets with minor characters who are interesting because he makes them real.

The Eighty-seventh Precinct works, with their multiple story lines, require the length of the novel form. But a similar atmosphere is depicted in many of McBain’s short stories. While it does not use the characters who made the Eighty-seventh Precinct famous,
Small Homicide
is illustrative of McBain’s keen knowledge of the details of police work and of the human misery that lies behind so many crimes. It stands as the prime example of a police procedural that induces an overwhelming sensation of pity in the reader.

Small Homicide

Her face was small and chubby, the eyes blue and innocently rounded, but seeing nothing. Her body rested on the seat of the wooden bench, one arm twisted awkwardly beneath her. The candles near the altar flickered and cast their dancing shadows on her face. There was a faded, pink blanket wrapped around her, and against the whiteness of her throat were the purple bruises that told us she’d been strangled.

Her mouth was open, exposing two small teeth and the beginnings of a third.

She was no more than eight months old.

The church was quiet and immense, with early-morning sunlight lighting the stained-glass windows. Dust motes filtered down the long, slanting columns of sunlight, and Father Barren stood tall and darkly sombre at the end of the pew, the sun touching his hair like an angel’s kiss.

“This is the way you found her, Father?” I asked.

“Yes. Just that way.” The priest’s eyes were a deep brown against the chalky whiteness of his face. “I didn’t touch her.”

Pat Travers scratched his jaw and stood up, reaching for the pad in his back pocket.

His mouth was set in a tight, angry line. Pat had three children of his own. “What time was this, Father?”

“At about five-thirty. We have six o’clock mass, and I came out to see that the altar was prepared. Our altar boys go to school, you understand, and they usually arrive at the last moment. I generally attend to the altar myself.”

“No sexton?” Pat asked.

“Yes, we have a sexton, but he doesn’t arrive until about eight every morning. He comes earlier on Sundays.”

I nodded while Pat jotted the information in his pad. “How did you happen to see her, Father?”

“I was walking to the back of the church to open the doors. I saw something in the pew, and I... well, at first I thought it was just a package someone had forgotten.

When I came closer, I saw it was... was a baby.” He sighed deeply and shook his head.

“The doors were locked, Father?”

“No. No, they’re never locked. This is God’s house, you know. They were simply closed. I was walking back to open them. I usually open them before the first mass in the morning.”

“They were unlocked all night?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I see.” I looked down at the baby again. “You... you wouldn’t know who she is, would you, Father?”

Father Barron shook his head again. “I’m afraid not. She may have been baptized here, but infants all look alike, you know. It would be different if I saw her every Sunday.

But...” He spread his hands wide in a helpless gesture.

Pat nodded, and kept looking at the dead child. “We’ll have to send some of the boys to take pictures and prints, Father. I hope you don’t mind. And we’ll have to chalk up the pew. It shouldn’t take too long, and we’ll have the body out as soon as possible.” Father Barron looked down at the dead baby. He crossed himself then and said, “God have mercy on her soul.”

I was sipping at my hot coffee when the buzzer on my desk sounded. I pushed down the toggle and said, “Levine here.”

“Dave, want to come into my office a minute? This is the lieutenant.”

“Sure thing,” I told him. I put down the cup and said, “Be right back,” to Pat, and headed for the Skipper’s office.

He was sitting behind his desk with our report in his hands. He glanced up when I came in and said, “Sit down, Dave. Hell of a thing, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m holding it back from the papers, Dave. If this breaks, we’ll have every mother in the city telephoning us. You know what that means?”

“You want it fast.”

“I want it damned fast. I’m pulling six men from other jobs to help you and Pat. I don’t want to go to another precinct for help because the bigger this gets, the better its chances of breaking print are. I want it quiet and small, and I want it fast.” He stopped and shook his head, and then muttered, “Goddamn thing.”

“We’re waiting for the autopsy report now,” I said. “As soon as we get it, we may be able to—“

“What did it look like to you?”

“Strangulation. It’s there in our report.”

The lieutenant glanced at the typewritten sheet in his hands, mumbled, “Uhm,” and then said, “While you’re waiting, you’d better start checking the Missing Persons calls.”

“Pat’s doing that now, sir.”

“Good, good. You know what to do, Dave. Just get me an answer to it fast.”

“We’ll do our best, sir.”

He leaned back in his leather chair. “A little girl, huh?” He shook his head. “Damn shame. Damn shame.” He kept shaking his head and looking at the report, and then he dropped the report on his desk and said, “Here’re the boys you’ve got to work with.” He handed me a typewritten list of names. “All good, Dave. Get me results.”

“I’ll try, sir.”

Pat had a list of calls on his desk when I went outside again. I picked it up and glanced through it rapidly. A few older kids were lost, and there had been the usual frantic pleas from frantic mothers who should have watched their kids more carefully in the first place.

“What’s this?” I asked. I put my forefinger alongside a call clocked in at eight-fifteen.

A Mrs. Wilkes had phoned to say she’d left her baby outside in the carriage, and the carriage was gone.

“They found the kid,” Pat said. “Her older daughter had simply taken the kid for a walk. There’s nothing there, Dave.”

“The Skipper wants action, Pat. The photos come in yet?”

“Over there,” He indicated a pile of glossy photographs on his desk. I picked up the stack and thumbed through it. They’d shot the baby from every conceivable angle, and there were two good close-ups of her face. I fanned the pictures out on my desk top and phoned the lab. I recognised Caputo’s voice at once.

“Any luck, Cappy?”

“That you, Dave?”

“Yep.”

“You mean on the baby?”

“Yeah.”

“The boys brought in a whole slew of stuff. A pew collects a lot of prints, Dave.”

“Anything we can use?”

“I’m running them through now. If we get anything, I’ll let you know.”

“Fine. I want the baby’s footprints taken and a stat sent to every hospital in the state.”

“Okay. It’s going to be tough if the baby was born outside, though.”

“Maybe we’ll be lucky. Put the stat on the machine, will you? And tell them we want immediate replies.”

“I’ll have it taken care of, Dave.”

“Good. Cappy, we’re going to need all the help we can get on this one. So...”

“I’ll do all I can.”

“Thanks. Let me know if you get anything.”

“I will. So long, Dave. I’ve got work,”

He clicked off, and I leaned back and lighted a cigarette. Pat picked up one of the baby’s photos and glumly studied it.

“When they get him, they should cut off his...”

“He’ll get the chair,” I said. “That’s for sure.”

“I’ll pull the switch. Personally. Just ask me. Just ask me and I’ll do it.” The baby was stretched out on the long white table when I went down to see Doc Edwards. A sheet covered the corpse, and Doc was busy typing up a report. I looked over his shoulder:

POLICE DEPARTMENT

City of New York

Date: June 10, 19S3

From: Commanding Officer, To: Chief Medical Examiner SUBJECT: DEATH OF

Baby girl

Charlss E. Brandon, 77th Pot.

Please furnish information on items checked below in connection with the death of the above named. Body was found on June 12, 1959

Church of the Holy Mother,