Ed McBain - Fat Ollie's Book

“Was there anyone with him?”

“No. He was alone.”

“Okay, so it’s now ten-fifteen or so…what happened?”

“Well, Mr. Henderson was rehearsing his entrance…”

…striding on from stage left toward the podium, the follow spot on him all the way, raising his arm in greeting the way he would do it tonight, stopping when he reached the podium, starting to turn to face out front when the shots came. Six shots in a row, bam, bam, bam, and Henderson was falling, it almost looked like slow motion, the follow spot on him as he went down to the stage. Mastroiani yelled, “Kill the spot!” and when the guy in the booth was too slow to do that, he yelled again, “Kill that fuckin’ spot!” and the light went off. Alan yelled, “Stop him! Get him!,” something like that, and went running off the stage to the right…

“He didn’t tell us that.”

“Yes, he went running off with Mastroiani and some of his crew following him. I went downstairs the minute I realized what had happened. By the time I got on the stage, Alan and the others were already coming back. The shooter had got away clean.”

“Where’d they look for him?”

“In the building, I guess. Wherever. I really don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

“Younever got a look at the shooter, did you?”

“I didn’t even know from which side of the stage the shots had come from.”

“Well, it was stage right,” Carella said, “we know that. You didn’t see anyone standing there in the wings shooting, did you?”

“Not a soul. I was watching the audio guy behind the mike.”

“What happened then?”

“Pandemonium. Everyone yelling at once. Alan told me to call the cops, which I’d already done, by the way…”

“You’re the one who placed the call to the Eight-Eight?”

“Well, no, I didn’t know what precinct we were in. I just dialed nine-one-one.”

“When was that?”

“The minute I got downstairs and realized Mr. Henderson was dead. I called from my cell phone.”

“Where were the others?”

“Still out in the hall, chasing whoever had shot him. In fact…”

Coogan hesitated, shook his head.

“Yes?” Carella said.

“Alan was pissed off that I’d placed the call without first consulting him. I mean, the guy is laying there dead, his sweater all covered with blood, I’m supposed to wait forclearanceto call the police?”

“What’d he say?”

“He said this was a delicate matter, I shouldn’t have taken the initiative on my own. I told him I didn’t know what to do, there’s a dead man here, I assumed we’d want the police notified at once. Anyway, it was academic. By the time he finished yelling at me, the police were already there.”

“He was yelling at you?” Kling asked.

“He was upset, let’s put it that way. He’d just gone running all over the building trying to find whoever had done the shooting, and now an insubordinate little twerp had taken action on his own.”

“Is that what he called you?” Carella asked. “An insubordinate little twerp?”

“No, those are my words. But that’s probably what he was thinking.”

“Did you talk to the responding officers?”

“Just to tell them I was the one who’d made the call to nine-oneone. Most of the time, they were shmoozing with Alan. Till all the detectives got there, anyway.” He hesitated a moment and then said, “I assume you never got anything more from that witness. Right?”

“What witness?” Carella asked at once.

“The old bum.”

“What old bum?”

“The one the blues were joking about.”

“Joking? About awitness?” Carella said.

“Well, they were telling Alan about this drunk they’d talked to outside the building.”

“Yeah, what about him?”

“The guy said he’d seen someone running out of the alley.”

“Hewhat?”

“He saw some…”

“Awitnesssaw someone running out of the alley?”

“That’s what the blues were saying, anyway. But he couldn’t have.”

“What do you mean he couldn’t have? Why not?”

“Because the alley he saw the guy coming out of was on the wrong side of the building. Alan told them straight off this was impossible. He’d just finished chasing the killer all over theotherside of the building.”

Carella was thinking that the gun had been found on the wrong side of the building, too. He was thinking that maybe the killer was a magician. Or maybe stage right and stage left were meaningless when it came to murder.

“Thank you,” he said, “we appreciate your time.”

OFFICER PATRICIA GOMEZkept wondering how somebody who’d shot somebody from the stage-right wings of the auditorium could have dropped the murder weapon in a sewer in the alley outside stage left. Wouldn’t this person have had tocrossthe stage in order to do that? And wouldn’t someone in the auditorium haveseenhim crossing the stage?

Patricia stood now in the alley outside stage right, where the killershouldhave come out of the auditorium if reason had followed logic. The trouble with police work, however, was that very often nothing seemed logical or reasonable. She had been a cop for only four months so far, and in that amount of time she had seen and heard so many totally illogical and unreasonable things that sometimes she wished she’d become a fire fighter instead, which had been one of the options open to a Puerto Rican girl growing up in the Riverhead section of the city.

Patricia’s first day on the job, walking her beat in her spanking new tailor-made blues, an eleven-year-old girl eating a jelly apple had stepped out of a bodega and onto the sidewalk just as two gangs disputing the same dope-dealing corner opened fire on each other. The girl had been caught in the crossfire. When Patricia came onto the scene, the girl’s blood was staining the freshly fallen snow under her, and her grandmother was holding her in her arms and screaming, “Adelia, no! Adelia! Adelia!” But the girl was already dead.

Patricia found this unreasonable and illogical.

Her sergeant told her, “You get used to it.”

In the ensuing months, she’d seen a man with four big holes in his face where his wife had shot him when she found him in bed with the woman next door; she’d seen a baby whose face had been chewed to ribbons by rats after her mother left her alone in her crib while she went out to the movies with a girlfriend; she’d seen a woman trapped in a car that had crashed into a Mickey D’s, and had watched while the ES guys scissored the car open and lifted the woman out all bleeding and broken and crushed, and she had thought this is unreasonable, this is illogical.

And only two weeks ago, she had thought the same thing when a man of seventy-five had had his throat slit by someone they still hadn’t caught, who had also cleaned out the man’s wallet and thrown it into the gutter where his blood was still running red when Patricia knelt beside him, and said, “You’ll be okay, hang on,” but he was dead, of course, and there was no hanging on, and it was all so totally fucking unreasonable and illogical.

She stood alone in the alleyway now, trying to understand what it might have been like to shoot somebody and then run from the scene of the crime. You shoot from stage right, you run away stage right. You don’t cross a crowded auditorium, and exit stage left, and drop the weapon in a sewer on the opposite side of the building. You do not do that. I have seen too many illogical and unreasonable things in these past four months, but I have to tell you I would not do that if I had just shot and killed a man.

So whatwouldI do? she asked herself.

I would come out through the doors there, and because I would have the murder weapon in my hand, I would immediately dump it in the most convenient place. Which would be the sewer right there under the drain pipe. But no. The killer had gone to theotherside of the building and dumped the gun there. It didn’t make sense. The gun should have been onthisside of the building.