Ed McBain - Fiddlers

Girls don’t know how long and how scary a room can seem when you’re walking across it to ask someone to dance. Alicia was sitting with two of her girlfriends at the very farthest end of the room, her legs crossed, she was wearing a yellow dress, kind of ruffled, her legs crossed, jiggling her foot, she had such gorgeous legs, I loved her to death. The room was so long, Ray Charles singing about lonesome times, Alicia with her hair long and blonde, thirteen years old, Ray Charles singing about dreams of yesterday, Alicia laughing, looking beautiful, I stopped in front of her, the laughter stopped. I held out my hand to her.

‘Would you care to dance?’ I said.

I can’t stop wanting you.

Alicia looked up at me.

‘Get lost, faggot,’ she said.

‘Let me get this straight, okay?’ Carella said. ‘You killed Alicia Hendricks because she wouldn’t dance with you…”

‘Yes.’

‘… when you were fourteen ?’

‘She called me a faggot!’

He was still Chuck at eighteen when a high school teacher refused to give him the A that would have kept him out of the Army…

‘But you promised…’

‘Promises, promises,’ she said.

‘You don’t understand, Miss Langston…”

‘Oh, yes, I understand quite well.’

On the field outside, the football team was running plays. I could hear the coach shouting. A whistle blew. I had turned eighteen in September. If I didn’t get into college…

‘If you give me a C, it’ll drag my average way down…’

‘Then ask one of your other teachers for an A.’

‘Please, Miss Langston, the college will turn me down!’

‘ Apply to another college .’

‘You promised me an A. You said if I…”

‘Oh, please don’t be ridiculous, Chuck. I was joking and you know it.’

‘Miss Langston, please. Christine, pl…’

‘Don’t you dare call me Christine!’

Her words snapping on the air like the cold November itself. Her eyes glinting pale blue in the bleak grayness of the afternoon.

‘They’ll send me to Vietnam,’ I said.

‘Pity,’ she said.

In the Army, he was Charlie…

‘We called the enemy Charlie, too,’ he told them. ‘That was the name we had for them at the time. Charlie. That was my name, too, at the time. While I was in Nam…”

The girl couldn’t have been more than nineteen.

I don’t know why the sergeant thought she might be a spy.

It was a very sunny day.

I remember the sun was shining very brightly.

I was twenty years old, and riding in an open Jeep on a bumpy road with an automatic rifle in my lap and a girl with a baby hanging on to the hood for dear life.

You know… they teach you to kill.

That’s the whole point of it.

You are trained to kill.

Even so…

The sergeant ordered her to put up her hands. This wasn’t logical. He was grinning. Told her to put her hands up over her head. The Jeep was bouncing along, she was hanging on to the baby, hanging on to the hood, how could she put up her hands!

‘Put up your hands!’ he yelled.

She couldn’t understand a word of English. She maybe didn’t even hear him, the wind, the sound of planes strafing the village, maybe she didn’t even hear him.

‘Get your hands up!’ he yelled.

Grinning.

He turned to me.

‘Blow her away,’ he said.

They teach you to kill, you know.

‘Blow her off the fuckin hood!’ he yelled.

* * * *

By six fifteen, they felt they had everything they needed for a grand jury. But Andy Parker still wasn’t satisfied.

‘Why’d you wait all this time?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Why’d you wait till now to go after them?’

‘Time was running out.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘I couldn’t let them get away with what they’d done to me. I had to get them before it was too late.’

‘You mean before they died natural deaths?’ Parker asked, referring to the advanced ages of the vies, grinning when he asked the question.

‘No,’ Purcell said. ‘Before the cancer killed me.’

‘Pancreatic cancer.

‘Was what I had.

‘The chemotherapy was Gemzar and Taxotere. It was the Taxotere that caused me to lose my hair. It’s only supposed to do that in eighty percent of the cases, but look at me. They told me my hair would grow back in six months. When we stopped the chemotherapy. Taxotere’s a synthetic now, but it originally came from the leaves of the yew tree. That sounds medieval, doesn’t it? Like doctors using leeches and such? Well, cancer, they’re really just guessing. But the recipe, the cocktail, whatever you want to call it, the mix of poisons, seemed to be helping, the tumors in the pancreas seemed to be shrinking. Then…”

He hesitated.

The video camera was fall on his face.

‘Then in May, the middle of May it was, we got the results of the next CAT scan, and… it had spread everywhere. The cancer. Everywhere. The stomach, the liver, the lymph nodes, the lungs… just everywhere. The doctor told me I had potentially two months to live. That was the word he used. “Potentially.”

‘I decided to live it up in those next two months. Took out a home equity loan on my house, they gave me two hundred thousand dollars, let them take the house, who cares, I’ll be dead. I recently leased a car, I’ll be dead before the first payment is due, who cares? I’m making up for what I never achieved in my lifetime. Never accomplished. What I might have accomplished if only… if only people hadn’t fiddled with me. So I decided to make them pay for what they’d done. The people who’d messed up my life. All of them. Do you understand? I killed them because they fiddled with my life!’

‘You fiddled with theirs, too,’ Nellie said. ‘Big time.’

‘Good. They deserved it.’

‘Sure, good,’ Nellie said, and nodded. ‘You won’t think it’s so good when they inject that valium in your vein.’

‘That’ll never happen,’ Purcell said. ‘I’ll be dead before then. By my count, I’ve got no more than a week. So who cares?’

‘Your fiancée might care,’ Nellie said.

Which was the only time any emotion crossed his face.

* * * *

It was 6:43 A.M. when the video guy wrapped up his equipment and told Nellie and the detectives he was on his way. By then, Charles Purcell was already on his way to the Men’s House of Detention downtown, for arraignment when the criminal courts opened. The video guy, who’d been interested in nothing more than the whodunit aspect of the case - this was, after all, merely a video, right? - could now pack up and go home.

For that matter, so could everyone else.

WHEN SHE OPENED the door at seven thirty that Tuesday morning, Paula Wellington was still in pajamas, her white hair loose around her face, no makeup. She looked fifty-one. She looked beautiful. She yawned, blinked out into the hallway at him.

‘Little early, isn’t it?’ she said.

I’ve been up all night,’ Hawes said.

‘Come in,’ she said.

She closed the door behind him, locked it.

‘I’m exhausted,’ he said. ‘I thought I might just sleep on the couch or something.’

‘That’s what you thought, I see.’

‘You think that might be all right? My just sleeping here?’