Ed McBain: Kiss

"Good," Carella said. "What's his name?”

Martin Bowles was a man in his late thirties, tall and slender, with thick dark hair, deep brown eyes, and the solid build of someone who worked out regularly. Every New Year's Eve, he wore a dinner jacket. Didn't matter where they were going, big party, small one, private home, restaurant, didn't even matter if they were going anywhere at all. They could be staying home, just the two of them, enjoying a quiet candlelit dinner, Bowles would nonetheless put on a dinner jacket. To him, New Year's Eve was an occasion. To Emma, it was like any other day of the year. She therefore found it mystifying that her husband went through the ritual of dressing up each year, and she was somewhat amused by the way he preened before a mirror each time he put on his ruffled shirt and black tie.

His posturing might have appeared foolish on any other man, but he was truly strikingly handsome, and never as good-looking as when he was wearing formal attire. Tonight, he looked spectacularly elegant.

"I've hired a private detective," he said.

She was sitting at the bedroom vanity, fastening a pearl earring to her ear. She almost dropped it.

"A private detective?" she said. "What for?”

"To get to the bottom of this," he said.

She looked at him. He had to be kidding. The bottom of this was Roger Turner Tilly, the man who used to drive him to and from work. Once the police found him ...

"The police don't seem to be doing anything about this," he said. "A man pushes you off a subway platform, and the same man ...”

"Well, yes," she said. "But I know who he is, I told you who he ...”

"Well, you don't know for certain," he said.

"But I do know," she said. "It was Tilly.”

"The thing is, the police are treating these two incidents ...”

"Incidents?" she said. "He tried to kill me.”

"I know that. Why do you think I'm so concerned?

The thing is, they're treating attempted murder like any ordinary occurrence. When was the first time? How long ago was that?”

"The twelfth.”

"Exactly. And again last week. So what have they done, Emma? Nothing. Man tries to push you under a subway train," he said, and shook his head in disbelief. "Same man tries to run you over. Well, I don't want to wait for a third attempt. I've hired a private detective.”

"I really don't think we need ...”

"Man named Andrew Darrow, supposed to be excellent.”

"A private detective," she said, and shook her head. "Really, Martin, let's leave this to the police, okay? The man I spoke to up there seemed ...”

"The police are underpaid and overworked," Bowles said, as if quoting from an editorial - he'd read. "I don't want to trust your life to them.”

"That's very sweet of you, darling, really," she said, and stood up and turned to him. "But ...”

"You look beautiful," he said.

She was wearing a shimmering white gown cut low over her breasts. Her long blonde hair was piled on top of her head. Drop pearl earrings dangled from her ears.

"Thank you," she said. "But, Martin, what would this man do? I mean ...”

"Stay with you. Protect you. Try to get to the bottom of this.”

"Let's go on a vacation instead," she said.

"Use the money you're paying him ...”

"We can do both," he said. "Soon as we resolve this thing, we'll take a nice long trip to the Caribbean, how does that sound?”

"I can taste it," she said.

Smiling, he put his arm around her and walked her out to the entrance foyer. He took her mink from the closet, helped her into it, put on his own coat, and draped a white silk scarf around his neck.

"I don't want anything to happen to you," he said.

"Nothing will happen to me," she said.

"I love you too much.”

"I love you, too.”

"He'll be starting next week," Bowles said. "Case closed.”

The intercom buzzer sounded from the lobby downstairs. He went to the wall speaker, pressed the TALK button.

"Yes?”

"Your car's here, Mr. Bowles.”

"Thank you," he said. "We'll be right down.”

"The car," he said, and came back to her and took her in his arms, and offered her his lips.

"Kiss?" he said.

When Carella was a kid, his mother used to serve lentils shortly after midnight on New Year's Day. It had something to do with an Italian tradition her grandparents had brought over from the Old Country. Louise Carella didn't know what the tradition was-"Something to do with good luck," she explained to her son with a shrug -and neither did Carella's father. For that matter, Carella's grandparents couldn't - remember, either. His mother and father, his grandparents on both sides of the family, had all been born here; the ties to forebears who had arrived at the turn of the century were already dim and uncertain. But after midnight, when the New Year was scarcely minutes long and everyone had already banged away to his heart's content on pots and pans at open windows, his mother used to serve cold lentils. She didn't know why they had to be cold, either. Cold lentils with a little olive oil. "For good luck,”

she said.

And on New Year's Day, they would all go over to Grandma's house for the big feast prepared by all the women in the family. There'd be Grandpa and Grandma and his mother's sister Josie and her husband Mike, and his mother's brother Salvatore, whom everybody called Salvie, and his wife Dorothy, whom Carella loved to death. And the kids, all Carella's cousins, and sometimes Uncle Freddie who lived in Las Vegas and who was a casino dealer who occasionally came East on the holidays and who once gave Carella a silver ring with a turquoise stone, which he said he'd won from a wild Apache Indian in a poker game. This was the old neighborhood -Carella's parents had already moved out of it to Riverhead, but Grandma and Grandpa refused to leave, even though more and more often you saw signs announcing BODEGA or LECHERÍA rather than SALUMERIA or PASTICCERIA.

Carella's father used to bring the pastry.

Baked in his own shop.

The meal would start with antipasto-sweet red peppers his grandmother had roasted over the gas jets on the kitchen stove, and ripe black olives, and anchovies and eggplant and crisp celery stalks and imported olive oil into which you dipped the crusty bread his grandfather sliced from a big round loaf. And then there was the pasta, always with a delicate tomato sauce, either spaghetti or rigatoni or penne, which he loved to smother with the grated Parmesan cheese he spooned from the bowl passed around the table-"Take a little more cheese, Stevie," his grandmother used to say sarcastically, scowling at him with a smile, he always wondered how she managed that trick.

And then there'd be the roast chicken and the roast beef and the potatoes and the green beans and the fresh peas he'd seen the women shelling in the kitchen, the Italian part of the meal magically seguing - into what was essentially American, the way the immigrants had magically segued into their new lives here, I pledge allegiance. And there'd be fruit and cheese and coffee-and the pastries his father had baked in his own shop and carried downtown in little white thin cardboard boxes fastened with white string.

His Uncle Salvie was a great storyteller.

He used to drive a cab all over the city, and he had a thousand stories about all the crazy passengers he carried. Grandma kept saying he should have been a writer. Salvie used to shrug this aside, though Carella suspected this was really a secret ambition of his, the stories he told.

It was Carella's sister, Angela, who was always scribbling away. She seemed to have more homework than anybody in the entire world. Any holiday they spent at Grandma's house, Angela had books with her. All the cousins would be running around the apartment chasing each other and yelling at each other and laughing, and Angela would be curled up in a chair in the living room, reading a book, and then writing into her notebooks. "The Homework Kid," Uncle Mike called her.