Ed McBain: Fat Ollie's Book

The place had a ghostly silence to it, not unusual at the scene of a murder, but somehow more resolute because of the cavernous space. The stage was still partially hung with bunting and balloons, American flags and banners proclaiming the councilman’s name. But the job hadn’t been quite finished because someone had inconsiderately shot Henderson while he and his people were still setting things up. Like a woman who was dressed for a ball, but who hadn’t yet put on her earrings or her lipstick, the stage sat only partially adorned, forlornly incomplete. The two men stood at the rear of the hall, looking toward the stage, outwardly appearing to be sharing the same thoughts and feelings, but actually experiencing quite different emotions. For Carella, there was only a sense of loss, the same pain he felt whenever he looked down at a torn and bleeding corpse on the sidewalk. Ollie looked at the stage and saw only a puzzle that needed to be solved. Perhaps that was the essential difference between the two men.

Silently, they walked down the center aisle. There were empty seats on either side of them, adding to the sense of an incomplete act, a performance postponed. Carella stopped midway toward the stage, turned, and looked up at the balcony. It seemed a hell of a long way for .32-caliber bullets to have traveled.

“Had to be the wings, don’t you think?” Ollie asked, reading his mind.

“Maybe.”

“Thing is, nobodysawanything. Pierce and yourpaisan”—and again, the knowing leer—“were standing right next to him. Workmen are all over the place. Bam, bam, somebody drops Henderson and disappears. Nobody seen nothing.”

“Workmen doing what?”

“Putting up the flags and stuff.”

They were standing on the stage now, the flags and stuff hanging above them. A podium behind which Henderson would never stand was under a huge banner that statedLESTER MEANS LAW. Neither of the detectives knew what that meant.

“How many workmen?” Carella asked.

“A dozen or so. I have the list.”

“None of themsawanything?”

“I got some of my people out talking to them now. But I doubt we’ll get lucky.”

“But they were all there working when he got shot, is that it?”

“They were all on the stage here, putting up things, testing mikes, whatever they do.”

“Nobody in the wings?”

“Just the shooter.”

“Let me get this straight…”

“Sure.”

“Henderson is onstage with his people and a dozen workmen…”

“Is the way I got it.”

“…when six shots are fired.”

“Two of them taking him in the chest. Four went wild.”

“And by the time anyone reacts, the shooter is gone.”

“That’s the long and the short of it,” Ollie said.

HE TOLD THEuniformed guard in the gate house booth that he was here to see Mrs. Henderson, and the guard checked his clipboard list, and then picked up the phone when he didn’t see Carella’s name on it. Apparently Pamela Henderson gave the okay; the guard told him it was the first house on the right on Prospect Lane, and then waved him on through.

It was a lovely spring day.

Carella drove on winding roads past men and women in white playing tennis under clear blue skies, boys and girls on the fields behind stolid Smoke Rise Academy, playing soccer and baseball in their gray-and-black uniforms, their vibrant voices oddly recalling a youth he thought he’d long forgotten. The Henderson house was a vast stone structure set on a good two acres of wooded land. He parked the car in the gravel driveway, walked to the front door, and pressed the bell under a brass escutcheon that read simply “26 Prospect.” A uniformed housekeeper answered the door and told him she would fetch Mrs. Henderson.

Pamela Henderson was a woman in her mid-forties, Carella guessed, tall and slender and exuding the sort of casual confidence women of wealth and influence often did. But she was not an attractive woman, he realized, her eyes somehow too small for her face, her nose a trifle too large. Newspaper reports would undoubtedly describe her as “handsome,” the death knell for any woman who aspired to beauty.

Poised and polite, already wearing black—albeit jeans and a cotton turtleneck—she greeted Carella at the door, and led him into the living room of her home perched on the river, afternoon sunlight streaming through French doors, a glimpse of the Hamilton Bridge in the near distance, the cliffs of the adjoining state bursting with the greenery of spring. Her eyes were as green as the faraway hills. She wore no makeup. A simple oversized gold cross hung on the front of the black cotton turtleneck.

“I understood from the newspapers that a…different detective was investigating the case,” she said, hesitating slightly before the word “different,” as if disapproving of either the false information in the papers or the unexpected turn the investigation had taken.

There was a certain formality here, a strict observance of the rules of sudden death and subsequent grief. Here were the stunned widow and the sympathetic but detached investigator, together again for the first time, with nothing to talk about but what had brought them to this juncture on this bright spring afternoon. A man had been robbed of his life. To Carella, Lester Henderson was a vague political figure in a city teeming with strivers and achievers. To Pamela Henderson, he had been husband, father, perhaps friend.

“Would you care for some coffee?” she asked.

“Thank you, no,” he said.

She poured coffee from a silver urn resting on a table before sheer saffron colored drapes. She added cream and two lumps of sugar.

“What are the chances?” she asked. “Realistically.”

“Of?”

“Of catching whoever killed him.”

“We’re hopeful,” he said.

What do you say to a widow? We lose as many as we catch? Sometimes we get lucky? What do you say when you can see that all her outward calm is vibrating with an almost palpable inner tenseness? Her hand on the saucer was shaking, he noticed. Tell her the truth, he thought. The truth is always best. Then you never have to remember what you lied about.

“There were a dozen or so people onstage with him when he was shot,” he said. “Detective Weeks and his colleagues at the Eight-Eight are questioning them more fully now. They’re also doing a canvass of the area around the Hall, trying to locate any…”

“What do you mean by questioning them more fully?”

“They already had a first pass at them.”

“And?”

“No one saw anything. The shots were described as coming from different sections of the hall. This is common. Eye witnesses are notoriously…”

“Is it possible there were two shooters?”

He noticed the word “shooters.” Everyone watches television these days, he thought.

“We’re still waiting for reports from the ME and Ballistics.”

“When will you have those?”

“It varies.”

Tell her the truth. Always the truth. In this city, with the number of homicides committed here every day of the week, any kind of report could sometimes take a week or ten days to get back to you. “We’re hoping, given the magnitude of the case, it’ll be sooner rather than later,” he said.

“The magnitude of the case,” she said, and nodded.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Meaning my husband was important.”

“The case is attracting attention, yes, ma’am.”

“What do I tell the children?” she asked, and was suddenly weeping. She put down the coffee cup. She groped for a tissue in the box on the table, found the tag end of one, yanked it free, and brought it to her eyes. “I kept them home from school today, I don’t know what to tell them. My son was supposed to have baseball practice. My daughter’s on her soccer team. What do I tell them? Your father’s dead? They think he’s still upstate. What do I tell them?”