Ed McBain - Three Blind Mice

“Then the man saw wrong. Here in Florida, we use three letters, two numbers, and then a single letter. The computer chooses the letters and numbers at random, automatically eliminating any already designated sequence. You can have, oh, CDB 34L, or DGP 47N, or AFR 68M, or whatever. But what you can’t have is the sequence here on this paper.”

“You’re sure about that, huh?” Warren said.

“Am I sure that my unlisted phone number is 381-3645?” she asked, and arched her eyebrow again.

The police gym was the size of a good college gym, well equipped, air conditioned, and relatively empty at five o’clock that Tuesday afternoon. Save for Matthew and Bloom, there were only two other people in the vast, echoing room: a runner tirelessly circling the overhead track and a bare-chested man in blue trunks, pumping iron. Late-afternoon sunlight streamed through the long, high windows. It had not yet rained today. It had not rained at all yesterday. Everybody in Calusa was saying that the Russians were monkeying with the weather. This in spite of glasnost . Some ideas were slow to take hold in the state of Florida.

Bloom was wearing grey sweatpants and sweatshirt, the Calusa P.D. seal in blue on the front of it. Matthew was wearing black warmup pants and a white T-shirt. Both men were wearing sneakers. Bloom had an inch or so on Matthew, in height and in reach, and some forty pounds in weight. But he was here to teach him tricks that automatically rendered physical superiority meaningless.

“You put on some weight,” he said.

“Ten pounds,” Matthew said.

“That’s a lot. You got a little paunch, Matthew.”

“I know.”

“You ought to come here every afternoon, run the track.”

“I should.”

“Those two cowboys catch you with a paunch, they’ll roll you down 41 all the way to Fort Meyers.”

He was referring to Matthew’s private spectres, two Ananburg cowboys who’d once made chopped liver of him in a Calusa bar, and whom he’d later caught up with and all but crippled. His nightmare was that they would find him again one day and next time he wouldn’t be quite so lucky. Bloom kept telling him it wasn’t a matter of luck, it was skill. Knowing how to break the other guy’s head before he broke yours. Bloom said that learning to maim somebody was merely a matter of how much fear you had inside you. If you didn’t care whether two cowboys beat the shit out of you and maybe buggered you, then forget learning how to fight dirty. For Matthew, the personification of fear was Two Cowboys. This was fear incarnate. Beat the Two Cowboys, and you vanquished fear. But to beat them, you had to know how to gouge out an eye or crack a man’s spine.

“You want to dance around a little before we start?” Bloom asked.

The men moved onto the mat. Bloom was very fast for a man his size. Matthew, with his paunch — well, it wasn’t quite a paunch — was slower, and therefore more susceptible to the open-handed slaps Bloom kept landing. Puffing, out of breath, he danced around Bloom, caught him with a good left-handed slap to the jaw—

“Good,” Bloom said.

— and then followed up with a right-handed slap to Bloom’s biceps, which, had it been a punch, would have hurt him badly.

“So we’re on opposite sides again, huh?” Bloom said, moving away, feinting, and then slapping a fast one-two to Matthew’s face. The slaps stung. Matthew backed off, circling, circling.

“You took the Leeds case, huh?”

“I took it.”

“You’re getting a reputation,” Bloom said.

“For what?”

“Defending sure things.”

Bloom was smiling. This was a joke. The last three had been anything but sure things.

“We make these wonderful arrests we think’ll stick,” Bloom said, “and then you come along and knock us on our asses. Tell me, Matthew, why don’t you make my life simple?”

“How?”

“Run for State Attorney. Then we can work these cases together.”

“Oh?” Matthew said. “Is Skye quitting?”

Across the gym, the weight lifter had begun working out on the punching bag. A steady rhythmic background patter now accompanied their dance over the mat, both men moving around each other, constantly jabbing, slapping, moving in again, backing away, circling, great blots of sweat staining their shirts, rivulets of sweat running down their faces.

“Skye’s looking northward to Tallahassee,” Bloom said.

“What’s this big one he’s sitting on, Morrie?”

“What big one?” Bloom asked innocently.

“I hear something’s in the wind.”

“Who told you that?”

“A little yellow bird.”

“Me, I’m deaf, dumb, and blind,” Bloom said.

“Supposed to break in the paper. I’m still waiting.”

“Maybe we’re still waiting, too.”

“For what?”

“Ask your little yellow bird. You had enough of this?”

“Sure,” Matthew said.

They walked over to where they’d put their bags against the wall, took out towels, wiped their faces and necks. Both men were breathing hard.

“Can I ask you some questions?” Matthew said.

“Not about that.”

“No, about the Leeds arrest.”

“Sure.”

“Tell me what happened that morning.”

“Nothing. We went there with a wallet we found at the scene. Unmistakably Leeds’s. He was in his pajamas when we talked to him. He identified the wallet as belonging to him, and we asked him to come along. Interviewed him in the captain’s office, pulled Skye in when we figured we had real meat.”

“When was that?”

“You mean when we knew we had him?”

“Yes.”

“When we got the call from Tran Sum Linh.”

“Saying?”

“Saying he’d seen the man who’d murdered his friends.”

“And?”

“We ran a lineup for him. He identified Leeds as the man he saw going into the house that night.”

“When did you get your other witness?”

“The next day. After Leeds was already charged.”

“Wednesday.”

“Whenever.”

“The fifteenth.”

“I’m winging this, but the dates and times are pretty much okay,” Bloom said. “911 clocked the call in at six-fifty on the morning of the fourteenth, a Tuesday. From this guy whatever his name was, these fucking Vietnamese names drive me crazy, he’d gone over there to pick up his pals and drive them to work, found all three of them dead. They were working two jobs, the victims. A factory during the day, the restaurant at night. I guess you know that. Anyway, the dispatcher sent Charlie car over, which radioed back with a confirmed triple homicide. The captain called me at home, and I met Rawles over there, it must’ve been eight, a little after. The minute we found the wallet, we drove out to the Leeds farm. I didn’t know farmers were so rich, did you?”

“Some of them.”

“Mmm,” Bloom said, and picked up the life vest he’d carried into the gym with him. Orange, with orange ties, stamped across the back with the words property of u.s. coast guard. “Anyway, Tran identified him that same afternoon, and we zeroed in on the second witness the next day. So you’re right, it was Wednesday the fifteenth. You know why I’m putting on this life jacket?”

“Because the gym is about to sink,” Matthew said.

“That’s very funny,” Bloom said, but he didn’t laugh. “I’m putting this on because it’s padded around the shoulders and neck, and that’s where you’re going to hit me a lot.”

“Tell me something, Morrie. When you went out to the farm, did you see any signs of forced entry?”

“We weren’t looking for a burglar, Matthew.”

“But did you see any marks around any of the doors or windows?”