Ed McBain - Three Blind Mice

“Times three ,” Matthew said.

“Oh dear,” she said, “that’s right. There are three separate counts, aren’t there?”

As if just discovering this.

“But we can always stipulate that the sentences be served concurrently, can’t we?” she said, and smiled.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“Which would make him eligible in twenty-five, wouldn’t it? How does that appeal to you, Matthew?”

“What makes you think a judge would grant a proceeding waiver?”

“The State Attorney herself pleading clemency for the defendant ? Reeling off mitigating circumstances? No significant history of prior criminal activity… under the influence of extreme mental or emotional disturbance… oh, yes, it would fly, Matthew.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“I could make it fly, believe me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m good, Matthew.”

“And modest, too.”

“Tell your client, okay?”

“That you’re good?”

“No, that I’m offering him an opportunity to breathe fresh air again before he’s an old man.”

“In twenty-five years, he will be an old man.”

“Which is better than being a dead man.”

“Unless he’s innocent,” Matthew said.

Stephen Leeds was eating his dinner when Matthew got there that evening. In the Calusa jail, they served dinner at five-thirty. Lights-out was at nine.

“The routine gets to you more than anything else,” Leeds said.

He was moving some amorphous-looking stuff around on his tray. It stuck to his fork like glue. “You’d think in jail,” he said, “they’d figure since there’s nothing to do, they might as well let you go to bed late, sleep late in the morning. But, no, there has to be a routine. So they turn the lights out at nine, and they wake you up at six. On the farm, the only people who are up at that hour are the people who work for me. Look at this stuff, will you?”

He held up the fork.

The Thing From Another Planet clung to it tenaciously. It was green. It might have been spinach.

“One of the prisoners here, he’s been in and out of jail all his life,” Leeds said, “he told me they’re only allowed three dollars and sixty-five cents a meal. That’s what the city gives them to spend. What can you get for three sixty-five nowadays? Look at this stuff,” he said again, and put down the fork. It seemed to move across the tray of its own volition, but perhaps he’d only set it down crookedly.

“My stockbroker was here yesterday,” he said. “He comes every day, just the way I used to go to his office every day. Except that he can only come see me during visiting hours, which are from eleven to twelve in the morning and three to four in the afternoon. The routine again, right? You can come anytime you want, of course, but you’re my attorney. Bernie usually comes in the morning, before lunch. Lunch is at least edible. They get it from McDonald’s, there’s no way anyone can screw up a hamburger and fries. Breakfast isn’t bad, either. But dinner? Look at it,” he said again, and shook his head.

Matthew looked at it.

The fork seemed to be corroding.

But perhaps it had been rusty to begin with.

“Anyway, Bernie comes here, and we discuss my portfolio,” Leeds said. “But it isn’t the same as when I was going there every afternoon at two, two-thirty, it just isn’t the same. I sit there listening to him telling me how Motorola is doing now that they’re supplying telephones to Japanese car makers, and I wonder if I’ll ever make a call from a car telephone again. There’s a telephone in the Caddy, I had it installed after I had a flat out near Ananburg one night, not a garage open, not a phone booth anywhere on Timucuan, I figured the hell with this. Had a phone put in the next morning. Bernie sits there and tells me about car telephones, and I’m wondering if they’ll let me make a last call from the electric chair.”

“You’re not going to the electric chair,” Matthew said.

This would have been a good time to tell him about the deal Patricia Demming had offered, but he held back because his man was talking and he wanted to keep him talking. When they talked, they sometimes came up with something they hadn’t thought of earlier, information that often could blow the prosecution’s case out of the water. Matthew hoped Leeds would come up with that elusive something now. Let him talk, let him ramble, and meanwhile listen hard. Benny Weiss had taught him this. But that was before they’d become such fierce competitors.

“I keep forgetting things,” Leeds said. “From my real life. The routine here becomes a life in itself, you see. So you remember things from this life — wakeup at six, roll call at six-ten, showers at six-fifteen, breakfast at seven, exercise in the yard at eight, and so on — but you start to forget the important things, the things from your real life. I’ve been meaning to tell Jessie for the past three days now that my car is ready. The Caddy. It was supposed to be ready Monday morning, and this is already late Wednesday, three days have gone by. But I keep forgetting to tell her. Somebody’s got to pick it up, either her or Ned. I don’t want it sitting there at the garage, it might get banged up or vandalized. There’s a lot of that stuff going on in Calusa these days, there’s dope everywhere in America, and where there’s dope, there’s crime. Did you ever think it would come to this? Did you ever in a million years imagine an America that could sink so deep into the slime? It makes me ashamed. It makes me want to cry.”

He fell suddenly silent.

It seemed possible that he would, in fact, begin crying in the very next moment.

Keep them talking, Benny Weiss had advised Matthew.

And if they stop talking, prod them.

“I played that voice tape for Stubbs early this morning,” he said. “He told me it wasn’t the voice he’d heard on the telephone the night of the murders. Which confirms that someone else took your boat out. Or at least that someone else called to say he was taking the boat out.”

“Which still doesn’t distance me too very far from the chair, does it?” Leeds said. He was on the edge of tears now. Keep him talking, Matthew thought. Listen for that one sharp note sounding in the mist.

“Who knows where you keep your boat?” he asked.

“Dozens of people.”

“Tell me about each and every one of them.”

“All of our friends know the marina I use,” Leeds said. “Most of them have been on the boat with us. But none of them would set me up for murder.”

“How do you know?”

“A person knows his friends. They’re not his friends if he doesn’t know them.”

“I’ll want a list of their names anyway. Before I leave. All the people who’ve been on the boat or who know where you keep it.”

“Sure,” Leeds said. But there was total despair in his voice; he was thinking this would be a worthless exercise.

“My investigator tells me you can get into your house with a can opener. Correction. Even without a can opener. Were all the entrance doors locked on the night of the murders?”

“I don’t know.”

Again the sound of defeat. They were already strapping him into the chair. A man with a black hood over his head was standing near the wall, his arms folded across his chest, waiting to step into the other room where he would look through a glass panel and throw the switch.

“Do you normally lock the doors before you go to sleep?” Matthew asked.

“Not always. We’re in the country, there’s never been any trouble out there. Besides, Ned sleeps in the guesthouse just down the road, he’d hear anything that…”