Ed McBain - The House That Jack Built

“Yes,” Warren said.

“Charles Abbott,” Lucy said, and nodded. “Yes, that sounds right.”

“Was it Mr. Abbott who took those pictures we talked about on the phone?”

“Oh, no.”

“You said a man had…”

“Yes, but not her husband. I thought it was her brother. The same coloring, you know. The blond hair and the blue eyes. Sometimes a woman will marry a man who looks just like her father or her brother, have you ever noticed that? I see a lot of it at the hospital. The girl’s father’ll come to visit, and he’s a dead ringer for the husband. It’s amazing.”

“This man who took the pictures… are you saying he resembled Charles Abbott?”

“No, no. Just that they were both blond and blue-eyed.”

“How old was he? ”

“The one who took the pictures?”

“Yes.”

“Young. Twenty? Twenty-one? Young.”

“When was this?”

“A few days after the baby was born, I think. She was nursing the baby, I remember. Which I thought was a little odd, even if he was her brother. I mean, her breast exposed and all. Very casual about it. The baby lying on her breast, nursing. I just came in on them, just checking, you know, making sure everything was all right in the room, and there he was with the camera to his eye, taking pictures. Baby on her mother’s breast, nursing, the cutest little thing, her little hand resting on the breast, the little bracelet on it. I told him to stop taking those pictures right that minute! I don’t know how many he’d taken by then, but he was using a flash attachment, and I thought it might harm the baby’s eyes or something. You can’t be too careful when they’re that young, you know. He was very nice about it, of course, a nice young man. He put the camera away, introduced himself, a perfect gentleman.”

“What was his name?”

“Jonathan Parrish. Same as I told that other fellow who was up here last month.”

“What other fellow?”

“Man named Arthur Hurley. He was very surprised to learn about those pictures.”

“I’ll b&t he was,” Warren said. “But you say the baby was wearing jewelry , huh?”

“No, no. Jewelry? What do you mean?”

“I thought you said she had…”

“Jewelry? How could a baby be wearing…?”

“You said there was a bracelet…”

“Oh. Yes.”

“On her…”

“Yes, her wrist. But that wasn’t jewelry .”

“A bracelet wasn’t…”

“Not jewelry at all.”

“Then what was it?”

“Identification.”

“Identification?”

“Yes. The baby’s name. Spelled out on the beads.”

“Beads?”

“Yes. They used to string these little beads and put them on a baby’s wrist.”

“What kind of beads?”

“Little white beads with blue letters on them. Nowadays they use a plastic strip with the name on it. But back then, it was beads. Ask your mama. I’ll bet she still has your baby beads.”

“I’ll bet she does,” Warren said.

He was thinking he could not wait to tell this to Matthew.

The moment Toots saw Leona getting out of her car, she knew she wasn’t going to lock it.

Most people — even down here in sunny Florida — if they parked the car in a parking lot outside a movie theater or a mall, or if they left it parked at the curb outside a restaurant or a store, they locked it. But rarely did they lock the car when they parked it outside the house of a friend or a relative. Parking outside these houses was cozy and safe. But if these people knew how many cars were stolen each year outside the safe, cozy house of a dear friend or a cherished relative they’d have locked the car fore and aft, top and bottom, and they’d have left a two-thousand-pound gorilla sitting behind the wheel growling.

Toots knew how to get into a locked car.

She even knew how to start one without a key.

But all that took time.

Besides which, she didn’t particularly feel like getting busted for a car thief. A car thief could spend a lot of time in jail. Judges in the state of Florida did not look kindly upon car thieves because a great many expensive Cadillacs and Mercedes and BMWs and Jags were stolen to order down here and then shipped up north for redistribution hither and yon across these United States. Toots shuddered when she thought of some redneck trooper from the Sheriffs Department cruising on up and saying, “Excuse me, Miss, but why are you working on that window with a wire hanger?”

She was glad that Leona had left the door unlocked.

Glad when she saw Leona walking away from the car without so much as a backward glance or a fond fare-thee-well.

The name on the mailbox outside the house was COLMAN.

The time on Toots’s dashboard clock was three minutes to eight.

The meeting of the League to Protect Florida Wildlife was scheduled to begin at eight o’clock.

Toots waited until a quarter past eight, and then she approached the green Jag, looked up and down the street, and swiftly opened the door on the driver’s side.

She reached under the dash at once, and pulled the hood release, lever.

She closed the car door, looked up and down the street again, walked to the front of the car. unsnapped the hood, and lifted it.

It took her three minutes to splice her wires into the car’s electrical system.

It took another three minutes to run them back to the panel behind the dash and feed them through into the car.

Her heart was racing.

Gently she lowered the hood, pressed firmly down on it to lock it, and then got back into the car.

She fished under the dashboard for the ends of her wires.

She attached them to the tiny microphone and fastened it in place under the center of the dash.

Unlike the FM transmitters she had planted m the Summerville house, the bug shed just planted would not require a battery change every day; the battery it used for its power was the cars own. In dense city traffic — which one sometimes ran into in Calusa at the height of the season — the effective transmitting range of the bug was a bit more than a block. On the open road. Toots could figure on at least a quarter of a mile.

She did not get a chance to test the equipment until a bit more than an hour later.

Leona Summerville left the meeting at nine thirty-seven by Toots’s dashboard clock. When she got into the Jag, the receiver in Toots’s car picked up the sound of the door closing. When she started the car, the receiver picked up this. too. Several seconds later, when Leona turned on her radio. Toots heard a disc jockey doing a commercial, his voice coming over sharp and clear. She smiled; the bug was working. She smiled again when the music began; the DJ was playing one of her favorite songs, the theme from The Summer of ’42 .

Leona seemed in a hurry to get someplace, driving far too fast for a residential neighborhood. Good. Toots thought. Let’s get there. When the Jag hit U.S. 41. Toots closed in behind it. She dropped back a bit when Leona pulled into the parking lot at Southway Mall. Kept driving through the lot to the very end, and then swung around to the back of the E.G. Daniels department store. Toots eased up on the accelerator. The store’s own lot back here. Not as well lighted as the main lot out front. Haifa dozen of the store’s huge delivery trucks angle-parked against the rear wall of the building. Near one of the trucks, parked in its shadow, a black Corvette.

Leona was parking her car.

Toots drove on by.

She caught just a glimpse of a man sitting at the wheel of the Corvette.

In the rearview mirror, she saw Leona running toward the Corvette, skirts flying.

She drove the Chevy around toward the front of the store, circled back, and picked up the Corvette just as it came around the side of the building. She did not close on it too quickly. Kept her distance. But she didn’t want to lose it, either.