Ed McBain: Driving Lessons

He remembered all of it now.

Visualized it all over again. The woman going up into the air, legs and arms wide, as if she were trying to fly, arms going up into the air...

The handbag.

Yes.

Flying out of her hands, going up, up...

He suddenly knew where it was.

Newell’s attorney didn’t get to Raleigh Station until almost ten o’clock that night. His name was Martin Leipman; a smart young man Carl had met on several prior occasions, usually while testifying in court. He was wearing a shadow-striped black suit with a white shirt and a maroon tie that looked like a splash of coagulated blood. He had no objection to Carl reading Miranda to his client — as why would he? — and he listened silently while Carl ascertained that Newell had understood everything he’d explained, and was ready to proceed with answering the questions put to him. Since this had got so serious all of a sudden, Carl had also requested a police stenographer to record whatever Newell might have to say about the accident.

‘You understand we can call this off anytime you say, don’t you?’ Leipman asked him.

‘I do,’ Newell said.

‘Just so you know. Go ahead, Detective.’

Carl said, ‘Do you remember anything that happened on Grove and Third this afternoon?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Newell said.

‘You don’t remember the automobile striking that woman?’

‘I don’t.’

‘You don’t remember the responding police officers asking you your name?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Do you remember taking any drug that would have put you in this altered state?’

‘No.’

‘Tell me what you do remember?’

‘Starting when?’

‘Starting when you got into that car.’

‘That was after school. I teach Art Appreciation at Buckley High, and I give driving lessons after classes, twice a week. Rebecca Patton is one of my students. She had a lesson today, at ten minutes to three. I don’t know who’s on the schedule until I see the chart posted in the Driver’s Ed office. I go there after my last class, look at the chart and then go out to the trainer car. I was waiting in the Ford at a quarter to three, behind the area where the busses pull in. She knew where to go. She began taking lessons with me over the summer vacation, started at the beginning of August actually...’

... actually, he’s known Rebecca since the term before, when she and her father moved from Washington, D.C. to River Close. Art Appreciation is what is known as a crap course at Buckley High, a snap course if one wishes to be politically correct, but Rebecca takes it more seriously than many of the other students do, going to the public library on her own to take out books on the old masters, copying pictures from them by hand...

‘I’m certain she would have gone to a museum if River Close had one, but of course we don’t...’

... so the library had to suffice. She brings her drawings in every week — the class meets only once a week — and asks specific questions about composition and perspective, and color and design, but especially about tension, playing back to him his theory that all works of art are premised on the tension the artist generates within the prescribed confines of the canvas, the painting tugging at the frame in all directions to provide the thrill a spectator feels in the presence of genius.

‘I got to know her a little better in August,’ Newell said, ‘when we began the driving lessons. She told me she wanted to do something creative with her life. She didn’t know quite what, whether it’d be music, or art, or even writing, but something. She’d just turned sixteen, but she already knew that she didn’t plan to spend her life as a bank teller or a telephone operator, she had to do something that required imagination. She told me I’d been responsible for that. My class. What I taught in my class.’

‘How’d you feel about that, Mr Newell?’ Carl asked.

‘I was flattered. And I felt... well, that I’d done my job. I’d inspired a young mind to think creatively. That’s important to me. When I’m teaching art, I always ask my students “What do you see?” I want them to scrutinize any given painting and tell me in detail what they’re seeing. That’s how I forge a link between my students and the artist, by asking them to actually see what the artist saw while he was executing the work. I try to expand their horizons. I teach them to dare. I teach them to...’

‘Let’s get back to this afternoon, shall we?’ Carl said.

‘We’ve already covered this afternoon,’ Leipman said. ‘Unless you’ve got something new to add.’

‘Counselor, I still don’t know what your client took.’

‘I told you...’

‘He told you...’

‘Then how’d he get in the condition he was in?’

A knock sounded discreetly on the door.

‘Come in,’ Carl said.

Johnny Bicks, the third man on the squad’s afternoon shift, poked his head around the door. ‘Talk to you a minute?’ he asked.

‘Sure,’ Carl said, and went out into the hall with him.

‘Some guy just came in with what he claims is the victim’s handbag,’ Johnny said.

‘Where is he?’

‘Downstairs, at the desk. I already told Katie.’

‘Thanks,’ Carl said. He opened the door to the lieutenant’s office, leaned into the room and said, ‘Excuse me a moment, I’ll be right back,’ and then closed the door and headed for the steps leading downstairs.

The man standing with Katie at the muster desk was telling her that he’d found the bag in one of the trees on Frank Pollack’s lawn; his neighbor’s lawn. Caught in like one of those forks in the branches, you know? Hard to see because it was red and so were the leaves all around it. Besides, the police officers had been searching the ground, you know? Nobody had thought to look up in the trees.

Katie asked the desk sergeant if he had any gloves back there, and he reached under the desk and handed her a pair of somewhat filthy white cotton gloves that had been used in accepting evidence two or three times before, she guessed. As she pulled on the gloves, she realized Mr Bisogno here had already handled the bag but no sense adding insult to injury.

‘How do you know it’s the victim’s?’ Carl asked.

‘I saw her carrying it,’ Bisogno said. ‘I’m the one told the officers she was carrying a red handbag.’

Katie was reaching into the bag for the woman’s wallet.

‘You witnessed the accident?’ Carl asked.

‘I did.’

Katie opened the wallet.

The phone on the muster desk was ringing.

‘Raleigh Station, Sergeant Peters.’

Katie pulled out the woman’s driver’s license.

‘Just a second,’ Peters said. ‘Katie, for you. It’s somebody at Gardner General.’

She took the phone.

‘Detective Logan,’ she said.

‘This is Dr Hagstrom in the Emergency Room at Gardner,’ a man’s voice said.

‘Yes, Dr Hagstrom?’

‘The Jane Doe we received at three fifty this afternoon?’

‘Yes?’

‘She’s dead,’ Hagstrom said.

‘Thank you,’ Katie said, and handed the phone back to Peters. ‘We’ve got a homicide,’ she told Carl.

Carl nodded.

Katie looked at the license in her hand.

The name on it was Mary Beth Newell.

The State Attorney who came to Raleigh Station that night at twenty to eleven was dressed in blue tailored slacks and jacket, no blouse under it, a Kelly green silk scarf at her throat picking up the virtually invisible shadow stripe of the suit. Alyce Hart was wearing blue French-heeled shoes as well, no earrings, no make-up except lipstick. Her brown hair was cut in a wedge that gave a swift look to her angular face, as if she were a schooner cutting through the wind. Katie liked everything about her but the way she chose to spell her first name. Carl liked her because he felt she thought like a man, which Alyce might have considered a dubious compliment. The three of them had worked together before; this was a small town.