Ed McBain: The House That Jack Built

Warren’s input:

Scratch Ishtar Kabul.

Annie Lowell was an eighty-two-year-old woman who lived in a luxurious house on Fatback Key. Annie was not a fag hag as the term was commonly understood in the trade. But Henderson was her stockbroker, and she had made a great deal of money through his kind and expert offices, and she saw no reason why she shouldn’t allow him to use the guest house behind the main house every now and then, no questions asked.

Yes, she knew he sometimes used the guest house to entertain male acquaintances. Listen, Annie was eighty-two years old and she didn’t care who did what to whom so long as it didn’t frighten the horses. Annie could remember when there wasn’t even television. Annie did not think that whatever Henderson and his male acquaintances did in the guest house could be any worse than what was on television these days.

Then the big question.

Yes, she knew the man Henderson had been with on the morning of the murder.

His name was Martin Fein.

Who, of course, was Ishtar Kabul.

Howard the Duck in Arabic.

Scratch Ishtar Kabul.

Warren’s further input:

Leona Summerville had left her house on Peony Drive at eight o’clock last night, had driven in her green Jaguar to the home of a woman later identified as Mrs. Shirlee Horowitz (from letters in the mailbox Warren had perused this morning) where she remained for two and a half hours, going directly home from there to arrive on Peony Drive again at a quarter to eleven. Unless the lady was having a lesbian affair with Mrs. Horowitz — an unlikely possibility in that Warren had subsequently learned the woman was seventy-one years old, the wife of a retired gynecologist named Marc Horowitz, the mother of two children and grandmother to three, and the secretary of the League to Protect Florida Wildlife — Leona Summerville was so far clean.

All this from Warren at ten minutes past ten on a cold, bleak, wet Saturday morning.

In December of last year — when Matthew was still regularly dating his former wife, Susan — she’d asked if he thought Leona Summerville was having an affair.

“ What?”

“ Leona. I think she’s having an affair.”

“ No.”

“ Or looking for one. ”

“ No, I don’t think so.”

“ She dresses like a woman sending out signals.”

Pillow talk. Former husband, former wife renewing vows of undying love while wondering aloud about Leona’s faithfulness. It had been raining that night. It was raining this morning, too. Maybe it always rained in Calusa. All water under the bridge anyway, rain down the gutters; he had not seen Susan since just before Christmas.

Another video.

Sudden.

Shocking in its clarity.

Leaping unbidden onto the screen of his mind.

Two or three years ago perhaps, one of Calusa’s many charity balls. They are going in the Summervilles’ car, they are on the way to pick up — had he been dating Dana O’Brien at the time? Had it been Dana? No matter. Leona is wearing a slinky green gown that matches exactly the color of her Jaguar. Frank, in dinner jacket and black tie, is driving. The windshield wipers snick at the rain, rain, go away. The tires hiss on wet black asphalt.

Leona has joined Matthew in the backseat, trying to help him with his tie as Frank negotiates the car around the twists and turns of the slippery road.

She looks stunning.

Green gown molding her body like a patina of tarnished brass.

Sculpted hair settled like a sleek black helmet on her head.

A green feather in her hair, over one ear.

Green eye shadow.

Dark lashes.

Brown eyes luminous under the Jag’s courtesy light.

Brown eyes intent on his black silk tie and the hands working it.

Long red fingernails on those hands.

The light casting a pearly glow on the sloping tops of breasts scarcely contained in the gown’s flimsy top.

Hands working.

Knees touching his.

The electric feel of silk over nylon.

Knees moving away at once.

“There,” she says.

A Carly Simon mouth, widening over even white teeth.

He wonders who is fucking her.

The mouth widens, widens…

Click.

The time on the Ghia’s dashboard clock was a quarter to eleven.

As he drove the car into the driveway of St. Benedict’s church on Whisper Key, he suddenly wondered whether all marriages eventually ended in adultery.

He got out of the car, grumbling at the rain, and then ran through the pelting downpour toward the rectory, up a crushed-gravel pathway past a large wooden cross on a berm planted with rain-stooped hibiscus bushes. The church — built in the Spanish-style architecture favored at the turn of the century — was situated directly on the Gulf of Mexico, dominating a point of land beyond which was an ominous gray sky and a roiling gray sea. The Parrish house was located not a hundred yards north of the church, occupying a much smaller plot of land, but facing the same turbulent sea; Matthew could see the house from where he stood in the pouring rain and lifted the knocker on the thick wooden door to the rectory behind the church. He was fifteen minutes early. He hoped Father Ambrose would answer the door before he dissolved.

The priest looked as if he had wandered out of The Name of the Rose .

He was wearing sandals and a brown caftan that could have passed for a cassock, a small polished wood-and-silver crucifix hanging on the front of it from a black silk cord. His shorn bald head was fringed with a halo of brown hair that matched his brown eyes. He had just finished shaving when he opened the door for Matthew; his face was littered with blood-stained scraps of toilet tissue. Matthew guessed he was in his late forties, but the bald head may have been misleading.

He offered Matthew a cup of coffee, which Matthew was immediately sorry he’d accepted; it tasted as if it had been laced with strychnine. Sitting in the snug, warm rectory lined with bookshelves containing theological works in dusty leather covers, a fire blazing in the small fireplace, the rain slithering along stained-glass windows, Father Ambrose told him what had happened on the morning of January thirtieth.

Rain.

The sound of rain drilling the cedar shakes on the rectory roof, awakening him long before dawn. In his narrow bed in his narrow cubicle, he listens to the sound of the rain and hopes it will end before tomorrow; attendance on Sundays always drops off when the weather is bad.

A gray dawn palely lights the small stained-glass window in his room.

He hears shouting.

Voices raised in shrill, shrieking anger.

He thinks at first — the shouting is so loud — he thinks it is coming from just outside his window, on the lawn someplace, or perhaps on the beach, teenagers sometimes drink beer on the beach and get rowdy. He stumbles out of bed in the near-gloom, slips into his sandals, throws on a Burberry raincoat over his under-shorts — he sleeps only in boxer undershorts — and goes out into the rectory proper, the room in which they are now sitting, moves directly to the front door, and throws it open to the howling storm.

He squints through the driving rain.

There is no one on the lawn.

No one on the beach, either.

But the voices persist, rising in renewed anger, drifting on the strong wind, slashing through the slashing rain.

The voices are coming from the Parrish house.

He knows a homosexual lives in that house. Sometimes, in fact, the midnight parties there get a bit loud. But this is something else again, this is not revelry he is hearing, this is rage . A rage as cold as the rain, he shivers at the sound of it. He cannot discern what the voices are saying, the words are tumbled on the wind, a jumble of accusation and denial, but even without a grasp of their meaning he can sense impending explosion in their force, and suddenly he crosses himself and mutters, “God save us.” For he knows with an immediate and frightening certainty that rage such as this can only terminate in violence greater than the violence of words alone.