Ed McBain - The House That Jack Built

“Twenty years too late,” Nick said, and shook his head.

“The other one, too,” Charlie said. “Long red hair, wearin’ clothes he picked outa some trash bin.”

“Fine pair of friggin’ hippie housebreakers,” Nick said.

“You said they were clocking traffic,” Warren said. “When do you figure they’ll make their move?”

“Hey, he’s askin’ us our advice,” Charlie said.

“I’ll be damned,” Nick said. “He’s askin’ the amateurs their advice.”

But both of them were smiling.

“If they sat out there from eleven-thirty…”

“Eleven-forty,” Charlie said.

“Eleven-forty till five o’clock…”

“Bit past five.”

“Then chances are that’s when they plan to hit, don’t you think? Say between noon and five o’clock?”

“Well, maybe so,” Charlie said.

He was still smiling.

“Between noon and five tomorrow, am I right?” Warren said.

“Could be,” Nick said.

He was smiling, too.

“So what’s funny?” Warren said.

“Well, what we figured…”

“This was before we knew they were gonna sit out there so long, but it still holds…”

“What we figured…”

“This was when I come in the back way to relieve Charlie, and we were both watchin’ that Honda from the upstairs window…”

“Without nobody makin’ us, Chambers, ‘cause we were usin’ the old Hole-in-the-Shade trick…”

“What we figured was if these two hippie assholes were watchin’ that house there with such great interest…”

“Sittin’ out there like they owned the friggin’ street…”

“Not scared anybody was gonna see them payin’ so much ‘tention to the premises there…”

“Why, what we figured was maybe they’d be so engrossed in they own activity, they wouldn’t notice nobody comin’ up the street behind the car and checkin’ out the license tag.”

“So when I relieved Charlie here, what he done was walk up the beach to Pelican Reef, and then come back down the street and glom the tag on the car…”

“Wrote it down later,” Charlie said.

“Checked it through Motor Vehicles, too,” Nick said.

“Wouldn’t you just know it?” Charlie said, grinning. “I come up with a name an’ a address for the man owns that car.”

“Registered in St. Pete,” Nick said.

“Which means they’re out-of-towners maybe staying in some motel down here…”

“Which means we got a shot at findin’ ‘em even if they don’t bust into the Parrish house…”

“Unless they’re sleepin’ on the beach, which judgin’ from the looks of them is a good possibility.”

“What’s his name?” Warren asked.

“Arthur Nelson Hurley,” Charlie said, “Now whether that’s the one all in black or the redheaded one, I couldn’t tell you.” His grin widened. “That’s ‘cause I’m juss a li’l ole amateur, you see.”

“Let’s call that li’l girl back here for some more beer,” Nick said.

There were forty-nine hotels and two hundred and sixteen motels listed in the yellow pages of the Calusa telephone directory. On Monday morning, February 8, two people working for the law firm of Summerville & Hope divided the yellow pages between them and began calling all those hotels and motels.

Twenty-four-year-old Andrew Holmes, who’d been graduated from law school in January and who would be taking his bar exams late in July, worked from the motel list. Andrew had a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Michigan; Summerville & Hope was paying him forty thousand dollars a year to work as a so-called “legal assistant.” Moreover, the firm had promised him an immediate raise to fifty thousand a year the moment he was accepted to the bar. If Andrew had chosen to work in New York City, he probably could have started at sixty, seventy thousand bucks. That was because he was an honor grad who’d also been editor of the Law Review . So here he was on a rainy Monday morning in Florida, repeatedly dialing a telephone and asking to speak to Arthur Nelson Hurley, please.

At her receptionist’s desk in the lobby outside, Cynthia Huellen worked the shorter hotel list, interrupting herself only to answer incoming calls. From where Cynthia sat, her splendid legs crossed, she could see through the long lobby windows to the street outside. Rain drilled the sidewalks, ran in the gutters, flooded the roadways. She had never seen so much rain in her life. She had been born and raised in Calusa, and she was now twenty-five years old, and never in her life had she seen such steady, torrential, incessant, interminable, shitty rain. Cynthia was a sun person. Usually, there was not a day that went by that did not find Cynthia sunning on a beach or a boat. But her tan was beginning to fade. She noticed this as she reached for the phone. Looked at her hand holding the phone. The back of it. Her tan was most definitely fading. She consulted the hotel list again, and was beginning to dial the number for the Crescent Edge Beach Club on Sabal Key when an incoming-call light flashed on her panel. She tapped a button.

“Summerville and Hope, good morning,” she said.

“Matthew Hope, please.”

“May I say who’s calling?”

“Hello?” Matthew said.

“Matthew?”

“Yes, Marcie.”

“It’s Marcie.”

“Yes, how are you?”

Marcie Franklin, who — until the middle of last month, at least — had considered Matthew the neatest thing ever; Marcie was thirty-three years old, but she sometimes sounded like a teenager. She had sounded like a teenager when she’d breathlessly revealed that she had just met and fallen madly in love with a sixty-year-old humanities professor at New College in Sarasota, and that this was why, although she’d tremendously enjoyed her brief (December 24 — January 13, but who was counting?) relationship with Matthew, she now felt they had to end it, okay?

Once upon a time, long ago — this past New Year’s Eve, as a matter of fact — Marcie had told him she loved him.

He wasn’t quite sure he’d believed her.

She had also told him he was devastatingly handsome.

That was nice of her, too.

At an even six feet tall and a hundred and eighty pounds, with dark hair and brown eyes, Matthew considered himself an average-looking man in a world more and more populated with spectacularly good-looking men. He went to Nautilus three times a week and most of the workout machines he used were set at ninety pounds. He was a B-level tennis player at best, with a lousy backhand and an even worse serve. He owned a nineteen-foot Grady-White bow-rider named Kicks , which he’d never once taken out into the Gulf. He was thirty-eight years old and slowing down, man, slowing down.

But in Marcie’s eyes…

He’d been faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound…

In Marcie’s eyes.

Marcie’s emerald-green eyes.

A memory now.

Just as the voice on the phone was almost a memory.

“Matthew,” she said, “the reason I’m calling, Jason doesn’t know about you and me…”

“Jason?”

“My fiancé.”

“Oh.”

He was already her fiancé. Terrific.

“He doesn’t know about us, the relationship we shared, and I was hoping, if you’re going to be at the Poseidon Ball this Saturday night, that you won’t reveal by word or gesture that you and I had known each other in anything more than a casual way. However briefly. Or, even, you know, look at me as if you knew me better than I would like Jason to think you knew me.”

“Marcie, I certainly would never reveal to your fiancé that you and I had known each other intimately.”