Ed McBain - Three Blind Mice

“Some mouth on her,” Bloom said.

“Some baloney ,” Matthew said. “Who was responsible for burying the story?”

“Not me,” Bloom said.

“I didn’t think you.”

“I didn’t even catch the squeal. Palmieri was on last night.”

“Was the body mutilated in the same way?”

“Identical.”

“To make sure we think copycat, right?”

“I do think copycat.”

“The murderer just happened to pick one of Demming’s witnesses, right?”

“No, he deliberately picked him.”

“Why?”

“Who knows why? Maybe because Trinh was related to the previous murders. Who knows what goes on in a copycat’s head, Matthew? These people are nuts , do you think they know what they’re doing? They don’t know what they’re doing, believe me. I had a copycat in Nassau, when I was working up there, he went around killing old ladies because some other poor lunatic had killed his eighty-year-old mother the week before. Made headlines all over New York. But the copycat picked only grey -haired ladies. Because his own mother had grey hair. So never mind the first guy’s mother had hair even blacker than yours. The copy cat’s mother had grey hair, so he went looking for grey-haired victims. A meshuggener ,” Bloom said.

“No motive, is that what you’re saying?”

“Fame maybe, Demming was right about that. A lot of them do it ’cause they think it’ll make them as famous as the guy they’re imitating.”

“How about this for a motive, Morrie? Trinh saw the license plate on the murderer’s car.”

“There’s no such plate in Florida,” Bloom said, and shook his head.

“I know. But do you think I’d have left it there? Do you think I wouldn’t have gone after him till he remembered what he saw?”

“I guess you would have,” Bloom said, and shrugged.

“And you don’t think the murderer realized that?”

“I don’t know what he did or didn’t realize, if it’s a he to begin with. Murderers don’t think the way you or I do. In murders, there’s nothing neat, take my word for it. Murders are messy. And the people who commit murders don’t read Agatha Christie. They’re not all crazy, Matthew, but this one is, believe me. This is a classic copycat murder. And the person responsible will do another one, and maybe another one after that, and he’ll keep doing them till we catch him. We’ll catch him, Matthew, wait and see. And he’ll be a copycat. And him and your man’ll be sitting together on death row.”

“I promised him otherwise,” Matthew said.

“You shouldn’t have,” Bloom said.

They were both drinking coffee and eating scrambled eggs and bacon in a Sabal Key joint called The Miami Deli. There was something wrong with the air conditioning today, the waitress explained. This meant that the temperature inside the place was something like a hundred and four Fahrenheit. Warren had wanted to leave at once, find another place, but Nick Alston said he didn’t mind the heat. A fat lady in pink shorts and a pink tube top sat near the windows, fanning herself with a laminated menu. On the road outside, an occasional car went by, heading north toward Sabal’s public beach. Alston was enjoying his eggs.

“What is it you want this time?” he asked.

“Computer work,” Warren said.

He had always operated on the theory that if you were going to ask a favor you asked it straight out, without doing a little tap dance around the mulberry bush. Saved a lot of time all around. And maybe generated a little respect. He had told Alston on the phone that he needed another favor. Alston had sourly agreed to meet him and had hinted that this time there’d be a price tag. But now, seeing the man, Warren wasn’t so sure he wanted to get down to business quite so fast.

Alston didn’t look too terrific.

He had never been what anyone would call handsome, but his brown eyes were now shot with red, and his craggy face looked puffy and bloated, and his straw-colored hair looked stringy, and there was a beard stubble on his face, and it was plain to see he’d already been drinking this morning. Only ten o’clock, and the smell of alcohol on his breath was overpowering. He had told Warren that today was his day off, but now Warren wondered if he drank even on the days he was working.

“How have you been, Nick?” he asked.

“What kind of computer work?” Alston said.

“You been all right?”

“Well, you know.”

He kept his eyes on his plate, cutting into the eggs with the edge of his fork, lifting the fork to his mouth, repeating the operation.

“There’s a new guy in Frank sector,” he said.

“How is he?”

“Okay, I guess.”

He kept eating. Warren signaled to the waitress for more coffee. She was a plain-looking blonde with spectacular legs. She wore her skirt very short, to show off the legs. Both Warren and Alston noticed the legs. It would have been impossible not to notice those legs.

“Throw a flag over her face,” Alston said, “fuck for Old Glory.”

An old joke, but Warren smiled.

“He’s the other car in the sector,” Alston said. “The car that used to be Charlie Macklin’s. We ride solo, you know. But there’s two cars in each sector, we can get pretty quick backup if we need it. I don’t know him too good yet, but he ain’t no Charlie Macklin, I can tell you that.”

“How long had you known Charlie?”

“Oh, Jesus, we go back for years.”

Present tense. As if he were still alive.

“Must be difficult,” Warren said. “Losing a partner.”

“Yeah. Well, you know, we really got along good together. I’da trusted Charlie with my life — well, hell, that’s exactly what I did do, more times’n I can count. It ain’t the same without him, Chambers, I can tell you that,” he said, and nodded, and picked up his coffee cup.

Warren watched him for a moment.

Go on, he thought, take a chance.

“You been drinking much?” he asked.

“A little,” Alston said.

“You should try to cut back.”

“What business is it of yours?”

“None.”

“Then butt out.”

“I thought maybe I could help,” Warren said.

Alston looked across the table at him.

“Come on,” he said.

“I’m serious. If there’s anything I can do to…”

“Come on, I hardly know you. Why should it matter to you?”

“I don’t like to see anyone in trouble.”

“I’m not in trouble.”

“You’ve been drinking already this morning, haven’t you?”

“Nothing to speak of. What are you, a minister?”

“I’d like to help, Nick. Call me, okay? You ever feel like talking, give me a call.”

“Come on,” Alston said, embarrassed.

“Instead of turning to the bottle,” Warren said.

“I guess I have been drinking some,” Alston said, and shrugged, and looked away. Across the room, the waitress was leaning over the fat lady’s table, refilling her coffee cup.

“You ever see wheels like that?” Alston asked.

“Never.”

“Competition-class wheels, those are.”

“Indeed,” Warren said.

“Man,” Alston said, and shook his head in admiration.

Both men were silent for several moments, looking at the girl’s long, splendid legs.

“It’s just I sometimes start thinking about what happened,” Alston said. “I didn’t think I’d miss him this much, you know? Charlie. I mean… we used to have breakfast together every morning before we went out in the cars… and we’d stop for coffee two, three times during the shift, and then grab a bite when the tour was over, and we’d… we’d talk about all different kinds of things. Women, the job, places we been, things we wanted to do, it was good to be able to talk to somebody like that. Because this job, you know, it gets to you after a while. All the stuff you see. All the stuff that goes down in this city, especially nowadays with drugs calling the tune. You read the papers this morning? What bullshit! The S.A. makes one lousy drug bust, he thinks that’s the end of it. He oughta come ride the sector with me some night, I’ll show him the end of nothing .”