Бретт Холлидей - Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 46, No. 9, September 1982

He tossed the noodles into the boiling water and then poured out some scotch, ran a bit of tap water onto it and dropped in an ice cube. All these things he did randomly, as though his fatigued brain were set on automatic pilot. What his brain had been thinking all these last few hours was a single thought: that John Gideon had been carefully set up for a crime of rape — and that someone had planned for him to be the fall-guy all along.

Upon reflection, Siderman felt it was all the culinary wizardry that saved his life. He had just stepped back into the livingroom when the shots rang out, so many shots that he was able to put a number to them only after he’d dug the bullets from the wall and collected the one imbedded in the painting and the last from the floor. His drink flew up into the air as he made a graceless dive to the carpet. He watched the Venetian blinds at the front of the room dance like puppets as the bullets ricocheted off them. One bullet slammed into a painting of a collie dog protecting a lamb in the snowstorm, showering Siderman’s backside with broken glass. He listened for the laboring whine of an automobile engine as it revved to continue on up Dulanney. When there was no such roar, he knew the car had travelled down the hill, which meant its driver likely had fired through an open window on the passenger side from behind the wheel.

Siderman let five minutes pass before he got to his feet. Smoke was wafting from the kitchen and water was hissing as it boiled from a pot and fell onto a hot burner. Siderman removed both pans and turned off the burners. He was drenched in scotch whisky and the lobe of his left ear was bleeding from a glass cut and his right palm was seered. But he was still alive.

No cars were on the street and the laundramat was empty. Elvira Loudermilk, Siderman’s neighbor in the other half of the duplex, was away visiting a daughter in Palm Springs. It was so quiet out, a fleeting moment passed when Siderman thought the attack hadn’t happened at all.

But, of course, it had. He found and extracted nine bullets from the wall. He picked up a tenth from the floor and pried an eleventh from the painting. An automatic pistol, with the casings ejected. And something of the attack told Siderman his assailant didn’t want him dead, only scared. He had just been issued a stern warning to cease and desist.

For the time being, Siderman placed it all at the back of his mind, ate his charred steak and the vermicelli noodles, bandaged his hand and went to bed. He did not sleep soundly, but he slept, the series of naps merely a device to mark time until dawn.

In the morning he called a glass company and while he waited for them to arrive, placed a call to the parents of John Gideon. The boy’s father had already left for work, but his mother was home and told Siderman she was eager to cooperate with him if it meant her son stood a chance of exoneration.

Siderman had only a single question to ask.

“Mrs. Gideon, the evening John paid you a visit was a Thursday, the night of the incident for which he was later arrested.”

“Yes, Mr. Siderman, a Thursday.”

“Did John ever visit you on any other Thursdays?”

“Oh, every Thursday, Mr. Siderman. Ever since he moved in with Dick Rambowe and they started their management training together. Sometimes he brought laundry home — his shirts, you know. Sometimes he brought a girl and they would stay for dinner. Mr. Siderman, do you have something in mind by asking the question?”

“Only that someone may have known or learned about your son’s habit of visiting you, though for what reason and to what purpose still isn’t clear tome.”

An anxious pause fell across the line. Then, Mrs. Gideon said, “If John has to go to prison, it might spell the end for him. All those awful people, the murderers and robbers and all the others. And confinement, that would even be worse. John has always been a mild claustrophobic. He’s never been able to sleep without the bedroom door open and he refuses to ride in elevators. He’ll be an absolute bundle of neuroses when he gets out.”

“Well, let’s hope we’ll have him out of county jail before he’s even transferred.”

“But you can’t promise anything, can you, Mr. Siderman?”

“No,” he told her. “I can’t.”

The glass fitters arrived at ten a.m. and were gone by ten-thirty. While they were working, Siderman placed a toll call to the Driver’s License Division of the Department of Licensing. He was owed a favor and now seemed like a good time to collect on it. He needed some driver’s license information, he said, on men with two distinctly unusual last names whose birthdates were after 1950. Siderman waited on the line ten minutes while a computer was fed. It delivered data on only one name. The name did not come as a surprise to Siderman. And neither did the information.

By eleven o’clock he was downtown and on a hunch entered the basement garage of the Public Safety Building unseen. From its license plate he found the car he wanted and did what he knew he had to do. Vincent DiBiasi had been careless.

Upstairs in the Assault/Rape Division, DiBiasi couldn’t entirely hide his irritation at Siderman’s continuing bird-dogging.

“Siderman, for a guy who’s been getting most of his stories from the booking sheets the last twenty years, your sudden interest in the inner workings of the division is perplexing.”

“I need a minor favor,” Siderman said. “In lieu of getting an order from the court.”

“Is that a threat, Siderman?”

“Let’s just say you’re dealing with a man with options.”

The detective spent a moment staring the reporter down, perhaps thinking he stood to gain or lose a great deal by his decision.

“Ask your favor, Siderman.”

“I’d like to take a look at some rape investigations. Just the preliminary reports. The who, what, when, where and why.”

“Just the Offense Reports,” the detective said, with a faint lift of his bushy eyebrows. “Well, since it will take a man eight hours to separate the preliminaries from the rest of the collected data, we’ll just pull the files and sit you down at a desk. How far back into the archives do you wish us to go?”

“Eight months should be far enough,” Siderman answered. “About how many reported rapes or attempted rapes would that include?”

“Roughly two hundred, Siderman. We’re a very amorous city. Take that desk back in the corner there and I’ll have the files pulled.”

That DiBiasi was not showing more anxiety disappointed Siderman, but police detectives were good at hiding their emotions. Then, too, most cases of rape usually dead-ended themselves very quickly for lack of suspects, witnesses and hard evidence. But it was a weak trump card Vince DiBiasi was holding.

A detective brought in the files and placed them on the desk in front of Siderman in two one-foot stacks.

“They go back to August of last year,” the detective told him. “The assaults are mixed in with the rapes, so check the Crime Classification Section of the Offense Report if you’re shooting for one or the other.”

Siderman nodded. Then he removed his suitcoat, loosened his necktie, pulled down the topmost file from the left stack of manila folders and set to work.

To save time and eye-sight, he concentrated only upon rape cases, the physical description of the suspects in each case and the description of the vehicle where one was involved. He also paid attention to the location of each rape scene, keeping alert for locations which would seem to bear some relationship to the scene of the rape for which John Gideon had been convicted. As he read, he was struck surprised by the large number of rapes and assaults involving wives and their husbands and female employees and their male employers. He had always felt rape was an act done by one stranger to another, yet fully two-thirds of the offense forms named as principals those who were work associates, relatives or close friends. The day you didn’t learn something new was the day you didn’t get up.