Ed McBain - Fiddlers

‘I guess,’ he said.

Over dessert, she told him that she’d been married for six years when her husband was called up from the National Guard to serve in the first Gulf War. He was killed in action a month after he arrived in Saudi Arabia. She’d been working at the time as an interior decorator, had since held a job at a house-and-garden-type magazine, and then in a department store’s design section, and was now working for a small art gallery in downtown Isola. Hawes told her he’d never been married. He told her he’d been in the Navy during his particular war. He told her he liked police work most of the time. He promised he would not bore her with tales of the cases he was working, though at the moment…

And they both laughed when he started telling her about the four unrelated murder victims they were now investigating.

When their laughter ebbed, she said, ‘Cotton?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m old enough to have been at Woodstock,’ she said.

‘I thought we promised

‘I’m making a different point. Back then, I ran around in beads and feathers, no bra. Back then, I went to bed with a lot of different guys. This was the sixties. That’s what we did. Said hello and jumped right into bed.’

He was listening.

‘I’m not that impetuous nowadays,’ she said.

‘Okay.’

‘What I’m saying is, we’re not going to bed with each other tonight.’

‘Okay.’

She sipped at her coffee. He sipped at his. ‘Are you angry?’ ‘Disappointed,’ he said. ‘Me, too,’ she said.

FIRST THING MONDAY morning, right after the blues had mustered downstairs and filed out to their cars or their foot posts, Captain John Marshall Frick called Byrnes into his corner office, and read him the riot act.

‘I just got a call from the Commish,’ he said. ‘He is not pleased. He is definitely not pleased.’

Byrnes thought Frick should have retired long ago. He suspected that all the Captain did was sit at his computer all day long, e-mailing Old Fart jokes to other Old Fart captains in precincts all over the city. Not that Frick was truly old. What was he, after all? Sixty, sixty-five, in there? It was just that he was truly an old fart.

‘Not pleased at all,’ he said, putting it yet another way. “He wants some immediate results on these Glock Murders. Immediate. He thinks we’re fiddling around up here. He wants us to quit fiddling around up here.’

‘Fiddling around?’ Byrnes said. ‘I’ve got the whole damn squad working twenty-four/seven, the whole damn squad’s on overtime, he calls that fiddling? We’re dealing with a case where maybe the motives go back centuries, you’re telling me we’re fiddling around?’

‘I’m telling you what the Commish told me. He wants us to quit fiddling around and bring him some results. Immediate results. He’s cut us enough slack, is what he said. He knows he owes us on the terrorist bust, but we can’t ride on past glory forever, is what he said. We’ve got five vics so far, and Christ knows if this lunatic is done yet, and he wants results, immediate results, is all I can tell you! The papers and television are screaming!’

‘You’re the one who’s screaming, John,’ Byrnes said softly.

‘I don’t like getting bawled out by the Commish.’

‘And I don’t like getting bawled out by you,’ Byrnes said.

‘Then stop fiddling around and bring me some results!’

* * * *

At a quarter past nine that Monday morning, Hawes spoke to the young priest who’d arranged for Helen Reilly’s funeral, and her burial yesterday. His name was Father Kevin Ryan.

‘After the terrible tragedy three years ago,’ he said, and crossed himself, ‘there really were no surviving relatives.’

‘You mean the gang shooting,’ Hawes said.

‘Well, what appeared to be a gang shooting, at any rate. One never knows the truth of such matters, does one? And they never apprehended the shooter, did they? Martin’s sister discounts the gang theory entirely. She and Helen didn’t get along, you know.’

‘Oh?’

‘Or so some of the parishioners told me. In any event, she didn’t come to Helen’s funeral, so I guess there’s some truth to it.’

‘Why didn’t they get along?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Lucy Hamilton.’

‘Where does she live, would you happen to know?’

* * * *

Martin Reilly’s younger sister was seventy-four years old…

Everybody involved in this case already had one foot in the grave…

… and she still believed her late, unlamented sister-in-law had something to do with Martin’s murder.

‘I never for a minute believed this big love affair of theirs,’ she said, clasping her hands to her bosom in a mock swoon. ‘Tristan and Isolde, Eloise and Abelard, baloney. She was in an unhappy marriage she wanted to get out of, and my poor brother became her hapless victim.’

Hawes knew when to shut up.

Lucy Hamilton was just gathering steam. A widow herself, she had no sympathy whatever for her brother’s recent widow. Described her as a barmaid with no education and no manners…

“… deliberately ensnared Martin, abandoned her husband and children the moment she saw greener pastures. I didn’t like her the first time Martin brought her around, and I never did get to like her.’

‘Tell me more about these children,’ Hawes said.

‘What?’

‘You said she abandoned…”

‘Oh. Well, that’s what I deduced. Wouldn’t you?’

‘How do you know there were children?’

‘My brother mentioned it one night. Married woman with a pair of kids. When he was telling me, for the thousandth time, how much Helen loved him. Said she’d adored him so much that she’d been willing to leave her husband and two kids for him.’

‘Boys or girls? These kids?’

‘He just said “kids.” I didn’t press him, I didn’t give a damn. When he met Helen, she was twenty-two years old, married, with two kids, and sleeping around with every man in sight. So Martin brings her home. And in the end, he gets shot coming down from a train station.’

‘You see these two events as linked, do you?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘You think Helen somehow had something to do with your brother’s murder?’

‘That’s what I told the detectives.’

‘What did you tell them, Mrs. Hamilton?’

‘Told them she probably started sleeping around again. Told them my brother had become an inconvenience, just like her first husband.’

‘After almost fifty years of marriage, whatever? A seventy-year-old woman? Sleeping around?’

‘A leopard doesn’t change spots, Detective Hawes.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I sensed it.’

‘You sensed that what they called their great love was really…”

‘A sham,’ Lucy said, and nodded.

‘I see,’ Hawes said.

‘Which is why she got her most recent boyfriend to shoot my brother on the way home from the city.’

‘And this “recent” boyfriend. Any idea who he might have been?’

‘You don’t advertise something like that.’

‘But we know she was living alone at the time of her murder.’

‘Appearances are sometimes deceptive.’

‘You think she might have been living with someone, is that it?’

‘The boyfriend,’ Lucy said, and nodded again.

Hawes figured he was wasting his time here.

* * * *

You can change your telephone number as often as you change your underwear. You can change your street address every fifty years or so, even more frequently if you happen to be upwardly or downwardly mobile. Every time you buy a new car, you can change your license plate number. And it’s a simple matter to change your credit card numbers whenever you so desire. But if you live in the United States of America, there is one set of numbers that sticks with you for your entire life.