Evan Hunter - Candyland

"Yeah. She told me the reason Thorpe called her in the middle of the night was to apologize. Does that sound like somebody who'd just killed a girl?"

"Why not? Who knows with these guys? What time is it out there, anyway?"

"L.A.?" Emma looks at the LED on her answering machine. "Almost midnight," she says.

"I'm gonna give the L.A.P.D. another call. Ask them to run by his house again."

"I also talked to a girl named Cindy Mayes. She works up at the salon, says Cathy was involved with some guy who digs little girls."

"What do you mean involved?"

"In a bad relationship with him."

"The changed lock," Manzetti says at once.

"Could be, don't you think?"

"Likes little girls, huh?"

"Dressed her up like a school kid."

"That explains the cotton panties and starched white blouses."

"All the other kiddie clothes, too."

"Does she know who this guy is?"

"She isn't saying."

"But does she know?"

" Maybe."

"Doesn't much sound like Thorpe anymore, does it?"

"Still be nice to know where he is. Let me know what L.A. has to say. I'll be up a while."

"Yeah, me too," he says. "Talk to you," and hangs up.

The moment Emma gets another dial tone, she dials her father's number. His answering machine picks up after the fourth ring.

"Hello, this is Bryan Boyle, please leave a message of any length at the beep."

She tells him she called at five past three, and hangs up.

Now it's her turn to worry about him.

The upstairs bedroom is so located that none of the adjacent brownstones can look down into it. Neither is there any danger of anyone standing below and peering up into the windows; an eight-foot-high wooden fence encloses the garden.

Tonight, the fog seems to add an additional layer of security. It is as if a gray curtain has been drawn outside, offering further privacy and seclusion. And yet, standing at the French windows, looking down at the tendrils of haze that drift among the blooming azaleas and laurel, watching the mist as it rises past the purple lilacs bordering the fence, Emma imagines a figure darting across the yard in the shifting fog, a watcher outside, peering up at her, a rapist. She draws the drapes.

Slipping out of her shoes, she takes off her jacket and carries it to the closet where there's a bag for dry cleaning. Women with good legs take off their skirts before their blouses; she learned this in a course on behavioral patterns at John Jay College. So she guesses she must think she has good legs because she drops the linen skirt and then puts it into the same dry cleaning bag. Or maybe her legs are really lousy — no, they're not — but maybe they are, and it's just more convenient this way. As flat-footed as a ballerina, she stamps across the bedroom and into the bathroom, where the hamper for laundry is standing against the wall alongside the scale. She unbuttons her blouse, unclasps her bra, steps out of pantyhose and panties, drops all the clothing into the hamper, closes the lid—

What was that?

She is suddenly alert.

Was that a sound she heard downstairs?

She steps tentatively out of the bathroom.

"Hello?" she says.

Grabs a robe from the hook on the bathroom door, slips into it, belts it at the waist, stands stock still, silently listening. Her tote bag is across the room, on the bed.

"Hello?" she calls again.

Silence.

She listens, listens…

The sound of the doorbell is ear-shattering.

She is across the room to the bed in three single bounds, her hand dipping into the tote, closing around the butt of the.38 in its clamshell holster, a spring-assisted draw easing the piece into her hand. She whirls from the bed, pads swiftly across the room, hesitates only a moment, listening again, and then starts down the stairs to the entry level, her gun hand leading her.

"Who's there?" she shouts.

"For Christ's sake, Emma…"

What?

"… open the goddamn door!"

She lowers the gun.

"Dad?" she says.

And feels suddenly like a horse's ass.

Her father is wearing a rumpled seersucker suit over what she guesses is a yellow cotton T-shirt from Gap and soft white leather loafers from Gucci. No socks. His thinning white hair is combed with no attempt to disguise encroaching baldness. His pate and his face are sunburned a fiery red from the two weeks he just spent on Block Island with the woman he calls his "significant other," a Jewish lady named Myra Rifkin, who teaches Documentary Film Making at NYU, where he himself teaches Contemporary English Literature. Bryan Cameron Boyle has bright blue eyes he personally refers to as "twinkling" but which do not appear particularly twinkly at the moment.

"Where the hell have you been?" he asks.

"Dad," she says, "I'm a cop."

"Oh, is that a fact?" he says. "Ask me in."

"Come in," she says.

"I didn't get you out of bed, did I?" he asks.

"Almost," she says.

"Didn't you get my message?"

"I called you back."

"Must've been on my way."

"I'm not twelve, Dad."

"Oh, is that a fact, too?" he asks.

She should be flattered — she knows he was concerned about her — but somehow she's annoyed. She's been a cop for twelve years now, she can drop a cheap thief in his tracks at fifty paces from a dead draw, but here's her father worrying about her because she's not asleep in her own bed by midnight.

"I worry," he says, as if reading her mind.

"Worry about Myra," she says, and is immediately sorry.

"I do," he answers. "Are you going to offer me a drink?"

"Sure," she says.

They walk through the entrance hall into what Andrew used to call "the parlor," the large living room with its bay windows fronting the street. Emma is wearing the bulky terry cloth robe she bought the summer she and Andrew rented the house on Fire Island. That was before Jackie was born. That was before Andrew began playing around. As she lowers the shades, she thinks again that she sees a figure outside in the shifting fog, and then the image is gone, and the shades are down, and there is nothing to fear anymore. Besides, her revolver is now on the small round table in front of the bay windows. There is a lamp on the table, which she now turns on, and a lace doily under the lamp, and then the snub-nosed.38 sitting on the doily. She knows what her father drinks. She goes to the cabinet opposite the fireplace, takes from it a bottle of Tullamore Dew and pours a hefty shot of the whiskey into a Manhattan glass.

"Nothing for you?" he asks.

"I'll be working early."

"Always the job," he says.

"You sound like Andrew."

"Perish the thought. Cheers."

"Cheers, Dad."

The room is suddenly silent. Outside in the fog, she hears a car passing. She does not know what to say to her father. She watches him standing in front of the fireplace, sipping his whiskey.

"We had a suspect who was an extra on Saving Private Ryan and The Sixth Sense," she says.

"Did you now?"

Sounding very Irish. She hates when he sounds Irish. He does it mostly for his students, so they'll think he's Barry Fitzgerald. Or for Myra, so she'll think he's a hopeless old romantic, which she often calls him to his face. A hopeless old romantic. As if that's supposed to endear someone to a man.

"Briefly," she says.

"Pardon?"

"The suspect. The extra."

"Oh."

"He was only a suspect for a little while."

"You mean he was a suspect for only a little while, don't you?" he says.

"If you say so, Dad."

"Grammar is grammar," he says. And then, to take the edge off his reproach, he adds, "Just between you and I, anyway."

She pretends not to get it.

He shrugs. He knows she got it because it's a longstanding joke between them. Her patrol captain at the Three-Two used to say "Just between you and I, there's no shittier job than policing," avoiding the correct "you and me" as hopelessly lower-class while stepping into shit an instant later.