Ed McBain - Goldilocks

We were waiting outside the room used for photographing and fingerprinting prisoners. I could see inside to where a camera was mounted on a makeshift wooden frame to which a spotlight was fastened above. On the wall opposite the camera, there was a chair and above the chair there was a combination electric clock and digital day-date indicator. The hands of the clock read 4:38. The date read MAR 1, the day read MON. Presumably Michael had been sitting in that chair just a short while ago, his picture being taken below a pair of instruments that recorded the day, the time, and the place, and assigned to him a number besides.

“Detective Di Luca had a chance to talk to a Miss Louise Verhaagen, if that’s how she pronounces it,” Ehrenberg said. “She’s one of the nurses working for Dr. Purchase. I’ll tell you what I was doing, Mr. Hope. I was operating on the theory that a man who lies about why he left a poker game and where he went afterwards is a man who’s got a little bimbo he’s keeping someplace. Do you remember when I asked Dr. Purchase was he fooling around outside the marriage? Well, he told me he was very happily married but he didn’t exactly answer my question. So Di Luca talked to Miss Verhaagen this afternoon, shortly after you left here, and whereas she didn’t precisely confirm my suspicion that the doctor was playing around, she didn’t deny it either. In fact, she stated right out that there were a great many phone calls from a woman named Catherine Brenet, who it happens is not a patient, and who it further happens is a married lady who herself has a doctor for a husband. Well, okay, that doesn’t mean Dr. Purchase went home and killed his wife and two daughters, it doesn’t necessarily mean that at all. It could only mean he was out fooling around with this Mrs. Brenet while the murders were taking place, in which case I’m going to have to talk to the lady herself to find out if he was.”

“Why?” I said.

“Why? What do you mean ‘why’?”

“You’ve got a confession from the boy.”

“Yes, I have, that’s true. But there’re some blanks in it that don’t sit right with me. Whether you believe this or not, Mr. Hope, I’m not eager to send that young boy to the electric chair just on his say-so. Not with his mother and father both giving me alibis I can drive a truck through. We canvassed the mother’s neighborhood like exterminators looking for bugs. House across the street from her is up for sale, no one there to see her coming or going. None of the neighbors saw any lights on that night, but she says she was watching television at the back of the house, so okay. But most of them seem to think the garage door was closed the whole day long. So I’ve got to ask was she home all day or was she out all day? I’m only speculating, Mr. Hope, but let’s say she had it in her head to do murder, couldn’t she have left the house five, six in the morning, spent the day doing God knows what, and then gone home two, three the next morning, without anyone being the wiser? I just don’t know. I’m not finished with her yet, not by a long shot. Nor with the doctor, either. As for the boy... there’re things make it sound like he did it, and things make it sound like he didn’t. I still don’t know why he suddenly reached up for that knife, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Sitting there at the kitchen table, having a nice chat, when all of a sudden he grabs a knife and chases her in the bedroom. Can’t give a reason for it.” Ehrenberg shook his head, “That sounds peculiar to me, doesn’t it to you?”

“Yes.”

“At the same time, he starts stammering and stuttering about why he’s afraid to go to the police, afraid of what they might think. Well, that makes me wonder did he sexually abuse that woman, and those two girls. Which might explain why he killed them. He’s got no explanation for why he did it, you see. Now, there’s plenty of cases where somebody blanks out, they just kill in a rage, they don’t know why afterwards. But I still think this is peculiar, I really do. Unless he, you know, raped them. Or tried to rape them. He says he embraced the woman and the older daughter both, I just don’t know what that means in terms of this case. You got any ideas?”

“No, I haven’t,” I said. I did not tell him that Michael had received a phone call at eleven-thirty last night, just before he’d gone to his father’s house. That was what I was here to talk to Michael about.

“Because if he didn’t sexually abuse them, why was he afraid the police would think so? I mean, if he’d killed somebody, for Christ’s sake, why would he be worried about hugging them? You think he’d be more worried the police would say he’d done murder, am I right? I just don’t understand it.” Ehrenberg sighed heavily. “I’m going to have a talk with this Brenet woman — she owns and operates a flower shop here on South Bayview. See if the doctor really was with her last night. If he was, I can understand why he lied to me. Be some can of worms to open, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, it would.”

“But it still wouldn’t explain why the boy is lying. Well, I don’t mean lying, I mean withholding the complete truth. There’s a difference. Don’t you get the feeling he’s not telling the whole truth?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” Ehrenberg said, and looked at his watch. “They’re doing the autopsies now at Calusa Memorial, we’ll know in a little while whether there was any injury to the genital organs, or any sperm inside the woman or the girls. The clothes we sent to Tallahassee’ll be checked for vaginal stains might’ve come from the woman, I just don’t know about this damn case. There’re too many things—”

The jailer reappeared just then, apologizing for having kept us waiting so long. As he went down the corridor, he explained that his wife had called with a washing-machine problem. When we got to the steel door at the end of the corridor, he lifted a ring of keys from his belt, and fitted a key that was color-coded red into the keyway. He twisted it, and swung open the heavy door. There were suddenly bars. Bars multiplying one beyond the next, as in the mirrors of a funhouse. I was looking at a large cage with dividing bars that formed a series of cages within, each equipped with cots, sinks, and toilets.

“This’s the bull pen,” the jailer said. “For the trusties.”

We walked parallel to the bars, down a narrow corridor, made an abrupt right turn and came into a cul-de-sac at the end of which was a pair of cells. Michael was in the cell closest to the bend in the hallway. The jailer used the same color-coded key to open the door, red into red the color of blood. Michael was wearing prison clothing. Dark blue trousers, pale blue denim shirt, black shoes and socks. He was sitting on the single cot in the cell, his hands between his knees, just as he’d been sitting when first I saw him in his blood-stained garments in the captain’s office. On the wall just inside the barred door, there was a white porcelain sink with two push-button faucets. Just beyond that was the toilet bowl, no seat on it, just the white porcelain bowl and a roll of toilet paper sitting on the neck of the bowl where it was fastened to the wall. On the mustard-colored wall to the right, a prisoner had penciled the words I NEED MENTAL REHABILATATION, misspelling the last word. Another prisoner had scratched his name onto the wall and alongside it had drawn a rectangle divided down the middle with a single line, perhaps as an intended replica of the twin cells here at the end of the hall. There was only an uncovered and extremely dirty foam rubber mattress on the wall-fastened cot. I stepped into the cell and felt immediately confined when the jailer locked the door behind me.