Ed McBain - Driving Lessons

‘I sometimes think I’ll never get in another car again,’ Rebecca said.

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Katie said.

‘It wasn’t his, either.’

‘Tell me something. When you said...’

‘I don’t want to say anything that will hurt Mr Newell.’

‘His negligence killed someone,’ Katie said flatly.

‘You don’t know he was drugged. Maybe he had a stroke or something. Or a heart attack. Something. It didn’t have to be drugs. You just don’t know for sure.’

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out.’

‘He must be heartbroken, his own wife !’

‘It doesn’t matter who it was, he—’

‘ I was the one driving! Why should Mr Newell...?’

‘You were in his custody.’

‘I was driving !’

‘And he was stoned !’ Katie said sharply. ‘His responsibility was to—’

‘Please, please, don’t.’

‘Rebecca, listen to me!’

‘What?’

Her voice catching. She’s going to start crying again, Katie thought.

‘Did you know he was drugged?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Then you’re not culpable, can you understand that? And protecting him would be a horrible mistake. I want you to answer one question.’

‘I can’t, please, I—’

‘You can, damn it!’

Her voice crushed the autumn stillness. Leaves fell like colored shards of broken glass. In the distance there was the rumble of the big yellow busses pulling away from the school.

‘You told me Andrew Newell didn’t drink anything while you were driving,’ Katie said. ‘Is that still your recollection?’

Silence.

‘Rebecca?’

The girl hugged her schoolbooks to her chest, head bent, blonde hair cascading on either side of her face. The sounds of the busses faded. Leaves fell, twisted, floated. They stood silently, side by side, in a stained-glass cathedral of shattered leaves. Gray woodsmoke drifted on the air from somewhere, everywhere. Katie suddenly remembered all the autumns there ever were.

‘We stopped for a Coke,’ Rebecca said.

‘This was right after the lesson began,’ Katie told Carl. They were sitting side by side at wooden desks in the squadroom. Most of the furniture here went back to the early forties when River Close first established a detective division. Until that time, any big case here, the chief had to call in detectives from the county seat up Twin River Junction. ‘Say five after three, Rebecca didn’t check her watch. Newell said he was thirsty, and directed her to the drive-in on Olive and High. They ordered a Coke for him at the drive-in window, and were on their way in five seconds flat. Newell kept sipping the Coke as they drove.’

‘Did Rebecca see him popping any pills?’

‘No.’

‘So all we’ve got is the tech’s guess.’

‘Plus Newell stoned at the scene some fifteen minutes later.’

Both of them fell silent.

At four this afternoon, Newell had finally been arraigned, and they’d got their court order for blood and urine tests. They were waiting for the results now. Meanwhile, they had statements from all the various witnesses, but that was all they had.

It was now a quarter past five and dusk was coming on fast.

At six thirty, just as Katie and Carl were packing it in, the phone on her desk rang. It was Alyce Hart, calling to say that Newell’s blood had tested positive for secobarbital sodium.

‘Brand name’s Seconal,’ she said. ‘Not often prescribed as a sedative these days. From what the lab tells me, fifty milligrams is the sedative dose. For Newell to have presented the effects he did at the scene, he had to’ve ingested at least three times that amount.’

‘A hundred and fifty mills.’

‘Right. That’s the hypnotic dose for a man of his weight. Full hypnotic effect of the drug usually occurs fifteen to thirty minutes following oral or rectal administration.’

‘Think somebody shoved it up his ass?’

‘Unlikely. Effects would’ve been very similar to alcoholic inebriation. Imperfect articulation of speech, failure of muscular coordination, clouded sen-sorium.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Sensorium? State of consciousness or mental awareness. I had to ask, too.’

Which was another thing Katie liked about Alyce.

‘How long would these effects last?’ she asked.

‘Three to eight hours.’

‘Fits Newell, doesn’t it?’

‘Oh, doesn’t it just?’

‘Think he was an habitual user?’

‘Who cares? We’ve got a case now, Katie.’

‘We’ve also got what he washed the pills down with.’

‘Oh?’

Katie told her about Newell stopping to buy a Coke just before the accident. She also mentioned that she’d been to Our Lady of Sorrows and had learned that Mary Beth Newell had taken her problems to the priest there, seeking spiritual guidance.

‘Problems. What kind of problems?’

‘He wouldn’t say. But Our Lady of Sorrows isn’t her parish.’

‘What is her parish?’

‘St Matthew’s.’

‘How far away?’

‘Ten blocks.’

‘Mm,’ Alyce said, and was silent for a moment. ‘What are you thinking, Katie?’

‘Well... if Newell knew his wife was troubled about something, his lawyers might claim her state of mind was such that she caused the accident herself.’

‘Yeah, go ahead.’

‘By not paying attention to where she was going. Or even by deliberately stepping into the car’s path.’

‘It’s a defense, yes,’ Alyce said thoughtfully.

‘So, what I was thinking is maybe we should try to find out exactly what was bothering her. Before the defense does. In fact, I thought I might drop in on her sister tomorrow morning.’

‘OK, but don’t expect too much. This may turn out to be nothing. Everybody has problems, Katie. Don’t you have problems?’

‘Me?’ Katie said. ‘Not a worry in the world.’

Thing she used to do when she and Stephen were still a proper man and wife, would be to ask him questions. ‘Stephen, what does “irony” mean, exactly?’ And, of course, he would tell her. He’d been telling her things ever since she was sixteen. Anything she wanted to know, she’d ask Stephen and he would tell her. So what she wanted to do now was pick up the phone and call him. Say, ‘Hi, Stephen, I hope I’m not interrupting you and your bimbo at... what time is it, anyway? My oh my, is it really one fifteen in the morning? I certainly hope I’m not intruding. But someone used the word “irony” in my presence, and it occurred to me that although I often use that word myself, or even its sister word “ironic” I’ve never been really quite sure what either of those words mean exactly. So, Stephen, if it’s not too much trouble, I wonder...’

But no.

Because you see, she and Stephen were no longer proper man and wife, she and Stephen were separated, that was the irony of it, that was what was so very damn ironic about the situation. So she got out of bed in her pajamas and padded barefoot to the little room Stephen had used as a study when he still lived here, and went to the bookshelves behind what used to be his desk and found the dictionary and thumbed through it till first she found ‘iron’ and then ‘ironclad’ and ‘iron hand’ and finally, bingo, there it was, ‘ironic’. And guess what the definition was? The definition, according to Mr Webster himself, was: ‘meaning the contrary of what is expressed.’

Huh? she thought.

How does that...?

She ran her finger down the page and found the word ‘irony’, and its first definition seemed to echo what she’d just learned about ‘ironic’. In which case, she wondered, what’s so damn ironic about them not being able to question Newell after he was arraigned? But hold it, kiddies, not so fast, here came the second definition. Katie took a sip of Scotch. ‘Irony,’ she read out loud. ‘A result that is the opposite of what might be expected or considered appropriate.’