Ed McBain - Doll

‘Watch it, she’s loaded!’ Meyer yelled, but the girl swung around swiftly, pointing the gun into the other room instead, aiming it at the floor. In the split second it took her to turn and extend her arm, Kling saw the man lying trussed near the radiator. The man was turned away from the door, but Kling knew instinctively it was Carella.

He fired automatically and without hesitation, the first time he had ever shot a human being in the back, placing the shot high between the girl’s shoulders. The Llama in her hand went off at almost the same instant, but the impact of Kling’s slug sent her falling halfway across the room, her own bullet going wild. She struggled to rise as Kling ran into the room. She turned the gun on Carella again, but Kling’s foot struck her extended hand, kicking the gun up as the second shot exploded. The girl would not let go. Her fingers were still tight around the stock of the gun. She swung it back a third time and shouted, ‘Let me kill him, you bastard!’ and tightened her finger on the trigger.

Kling fired again.

His bullet entered her forehead just above the right eye. The Llama went off as she fell backward, the bullet spanging against the metal of the radiator and then ricocheting across the room and tearing through the drawn window shade and shattering the glass behind it.

Meyer was at his side.

‘Easy,’ he said.

Kling had not cried since that time almost four years ago when Claire was killed, but he stood in the center of the neon-washed room now with the dead and bleeding girl against the wall and Carella naked and shivering near the radiator, and he allowed the hand holding the pistol to drop limply to his side, and then he began sobbing, deep bitter sobs that racked his body.

Meyer put his arm around Kling’s shoulders.

‘Easy,’ he said again. ‘It’s all over.’

The doll,’ Carella whispered. ‘Get the doll.’

The doll measured thirty inches from the top of her blonde head to the bottoms of her black patent-leather shoes. She wore white bobby sox, a ruffled white voile dress with a white nylon underslip, a black velveteen bodice, and a ruffled lace bib and collar. What appeared at first to be a simulated gold brooch was centered just below the collar.

The doll’s trade name was Chatterbox.

There were two D-size flashlight batteries and one 9-volt transistor battery in a recess in the doll’s plastic belly. The recess was covered with a flesh-colored plastic top that was kept in place by a simple plastic twist-lock. Immediately above the battery box there was a flesh-colored, open plastic grid that concealed the miniature electronic device in the doll’s chest. It was this device after which the doll had been named by its creators. The device was a tiny recorder.

The brooch below the doll’s collar was a knob that activated the recording mechanism. To record, a child simply turned the decorative knob counterclockwise, waited for a single beep signal, and began talking until the beep sounded again, at which time the knob had to be turned once more to its center position. In order to play back what had just been recorded, the child had only to turn the knob clockwise. The recorded message would continue to play back over and over again until the knob was once more returned to the center position.

When the detectives turned the brooch-knob clockwise, they heard three recorded voices. One of them belonged to Anna Sachs. It was clear and distinct because the doll had been in Anna’s lap when she’d recorded her message on the night of her mother’s murder. The message was one of reassurance. She kept saying over and over again to the doll lying across her lap, ‘Don’t be frightened, Chatterbox, please don’t be frightened. It’s nothing, Chatterbox, don’t be frightened,’ over and over again.

The second voice was less distinct because it had been recorded through the thin wall separating the child’s bedroom from her mother’s. Subsequent tests by the police laboratory showed the recording mechanism to be extremely sensitive for a device of its size, capable of picking up shouted words at a distance of twenty-five feet. Even so, the second voice would not have been picked up at all had Anna not been sitting very close to the thin dividing wall. And, of course, especially toward the end, the words next door had been screamed.

From beep to beep, the recording lasted only a minute and a half. Throughout the length of the recording, Anna talked reassuringly to her doll. ‘Don’t be frightened, Chatterbox, please don’t be frightened. It’s nothing, Chatterbox, don’t be frightened.’ Behind the child’s voice, a running counterpoint of horror, was the voice of Tinka Sachs, her mother. Her words were almost inaudible at first. They presented only a vague murmur of faraway terror, the sound of someone repeatedly moaning, the pitiable rise and fall of a voice imploring — but all without words because the sound had been muffled by the wall between the rooms. And then, as Tinka became more and more desperate, as her killer followed her unmercifully around the room with a knife blade, her voice became louder, the words became more distinct. ‘Don’t! Please don’t!’ always behind the child’s soothing voice in the foreground, ‘Don’t be frightened, Chatterbox, please don’t be frightened,’ and her mother shrieking, ‘Don’t! Please don’t! Please,’ the voices intermingling, ‘I’m bleeding, please, it’s nothing, Chatterbox, don’t be frightened, Fritz, stop, please, Fritz, stop, stop, oh please, it’s nothing. Chatterbox, don’t be frightened.’

The third voice sounded like a man’s. It was nothing more than a rumble on the recording. Only once did a word come through clearly, and that was the word ‘Slut!’ interspersed between the child’s reassurances to her doll, and Tinka’s weakening cries for mercy.

In the end, Tinka shouted the man’s name once again, ‘Fritz!’ and then her voice seemed to fade. The next word she uttered could have been a muted ‘please’, but it was indistinct and drowned out by Anna’s ‘Don’t cry, Chatterbox, try not to cry.’

The detectives listened to the doll in silence, and then watched while the ambulance attendants carried Carella out on one stretcher and the still-breathing Schmidt out on another.

‘The girl’s dead,’ the medical examiner said.

‘I know,’ Meyer answered.

‘Who shot her?’ one of the Homicide cops asked.

‘I did,’ Kling answered.

‘I’ll need the circumstances.’

‘Stay with him,’ Meyer said to Kling. ‘I’ll get to the hospital. Maybe that son of a bitch wants to make a statement before he dies.’

I didn’t intend to kill her.

She was happy as hell when I came in, laughing and joking because she thought she was off the junk at last.

I told her she was crazy, she would never kick it.

I had not had a shot since three o’clock that afternoon, I was going out of my head. I told her I wanted money for a fix, and she said she couldn’t give me money any more, she said she wanted nothing more to do with me or Pat, that’s the name of the girl I’m living with. She had no right to hold out on me like that, not when I was so sick. She could see I was ready to climb the walls, so she sat there sipping her goddamn iced tea. and telling me she was not going to keep me supplied any more, she was not going to spend half her income keeping me in shit. I told her she owed it to me. I spent four years in Soledad because of her, the little bitch, she owed it to me! She told me to leave her alone. She told me to get out and leave her alone. She said she was finished with me and my kind. She said she had kicked it, did I understand, she had kicked it!

Am I going to die?