Ed McBain - Poison

For now, both men stood in the rain outside the office building.

The patrolman complained bitterly about the lousy weather.

Meyer kept watching the front door of the building. Only one way in or out. If Endicott left, he would have to come through those revolving doors.

"Keep your eye on the doors," he told the patrolman.

"Don't I know that?" the patrolman said.

Meyer wondered if he did.

At ten after twelve, the patrolman nudged Meyer.

The man coming through the revolving doors was tall and slender, with brown eyes and white hair. Endicott's description in the D.D. reports. The patrolman nodded, and Meyer took off. Endicott was wearing a Burberry raincoat, not a good thing for somebody following him. In this city, when it rained, Burberry raincoats sprouted like mushrooms.

He was a fast walker, Endicott was, and apparently he enjoyed the rain. Hatless, he bounded through it like Gene Kelly, mindlessly stepping in puddles, dashing across streets against the lights, a man in one hell of a hurry. Meyer did not like surveillances involving fast walkers. Meyer preferred stakeouts that took place in cozy liquor stores.

The man walked eight goddamn blocks in the pouring rain.

Meyer could swear he was whistling.

He turned off Jefferson Avenue at last, into a side street where the rain was blowing in sheets from north to south off the River Harb. Endicott plunged into the rain like a galleon under full sail, went halfway up the block, turned in under a red, white and green awning, opened a brass-studded wooden door, and disappeared from sight. The lettering on the awning identified the place as Ristorante Bonatti. Feeling very much like Popeye Doyle in The French Connection, Meyer hunched his shoulders against the wind and the rain and hoped Endicott's lunch would not be a long one.

The trouble with tailing your partner's girlfriend was that it made you feel like some kind of a shit. Carella had picked up Marilyn Hollis outside the building on Harborside Lane at ten-thirty this morning, had followed her to her hairdressing salon, was waiting outside for her when she emerged at twenty after twelve, and followed her on foot crosstown to the Stem where she hailed a taxi. He'd immediately flagged another taxi, identified himself to the driver, and told him not to lose that taxi up ahead. The cabbie did not appreciate driving a cop. Visions of getting stiffed danced through his head.

Marilyn's cab proceeded downtown, first on the Stem, then on Culver, then around Van Buren Circle and southward on Grover Park West, continuing southward to Hall Avenue, hanging a right, driving three blocks farther downtown, then hanging a left and pulling up in front of a building with a red, white and green awning. Marilyn got out of the cab, paid the driver, and walked swiftly toward a brass-studded door. Carella's cab pulled into the curb some two cars back. To the driver's enormous surprise, Carella tipped him generously and then stepped out into the rain.

The lettering on the awning read Ristorante Bonatti.

Meyer Meyer was standing outside the restaurant, peering through the plate glass window, his hands cupped to the sides of his face.

Carella came up beside him, and tapped him on the shoulder.

Meyer turned, surprised. "Well, well," he said.

"Enjoying the rain?" Carella asked.

"Oh, yes, very much, thank you."

"Is Endicott in there?"

"With a blonde who just joined him," Meyer said.

At four-fifteen that Monday afternoon, Arthur Brown relieved Carella on post outside the Hollis house. Carella told him the joke about the black penis, and Brown burst out laughing and then immediately wondered if it was a racist joke. He knew his customer well, though, and just as quickly decided it wasn't. Still laughing, he said, "Got to tell that to Caroline when I get home. Who's relieving me?"

"Delgado."

"Hope he's on time. I don't like standing around in the rain."

Carella had been standing around in the rain since ten this morning, give or take an hour or so for taxi rides around town, following Marilyn hither and yon and finally back here to the house.

"Fill me in," Brown said.

"Blonde white woman, twenty-four years old, five eight, weighing about a hundred and twenty, more or less. Her name's Marilyn Hollis."

"What are you looking for specifically?"

"She may be a killer. Maybe she'll make another move."

"Very nice," Brown said.

"I'll talk to you in the morning," Carella said, and walked off through the rain.

The first surprise Brown got was at four-thirty, when a car pulled up across the street from where he was standing under a tree in the park, and a man got out of the car, and locked it, and began walking toward 1211 Harborside Lane. The man was either Hal Willis or his double. The man climbed the low, flat steps to the front door, took a key from his pocket, inserted it into the latch, and let himself into the building.

Brown blinked.

Had that really been Willis?

It sure as hell looked like Willis.

But Carella hadn't mentioned Willis being in on the stakeout. Was that a skeleton key he'd let himself in with? He hadn't looked like a man messing with a ringful of skeleton keys. He'd looked like a man who had the key to the front door of a house occupied by a lady Carella thought might be a killer.

The second surprise Brown got was at twenty minutes past seven when the front door opened again and first out came the blonde Marilyn Hollis girl Carella had described, and next out came Willis, who pulled the door shut behind him, and then the girl took Willis's arm and they walked off up the street together, making a right turn on the corner, heading crosstown toward the Stem.

Brown wondered what the hell was going on here.

He followed them to the Stem, and then downtown on the Stem, the neon lights filtered by a fine, soft drizzle now, the sound of automobile tires swishing on the black asphalt, keeping a decent interval behind them because if Willis wasn't in on the stakeout, Brown didn't want to be made by an experienced cop. But if he wasn't in on this, then what the hell was he doing with a broad who maybe killed somebody?

Up ahead was a Chinese restaurant named Buddha's Feast.

Willis opened the door for the girl, and the girl went in, and Willis went in behind her.

Brown peeked in through the plate glass window, and that was when he got his third surprise.

Because sitting there in one of the booths was a person who looked very much like Bert Kling, who was in fact Bert Kling, and sitting with Kling was his girlfriend, Eileen Burke, who was also a working cop, and Willis and the Marilyn Hollis girl came over to the booth, and it looked as if Willis was introducing her to them, and then Willis and the girl sat down and Willis signaled to the waiter.

Man, Brown thought, this is a bigger stakeout than I figured! The whole damn police department is in on it!

Eileen Burke kept trying to hide her left cheek. The plastic surgery looked very good to Willis, you could hardly tell she'd been slashed not too long ago, even if you were looking for a scar. But Willis noticed that she kept bringing up her left hand to cover her cheek.

"Eileen does a lot of work with the Rape Squad," he told Marilyn.

"Really?" Marilyn said.

"As a decoy," Willis said.

"I'm not sure I'd like that kind of work," Marilyn said, and rolled her eyes.

Willis was sitting beside Kling on one side of the booth, Marilyn and Eileen opposite them on the other. Willis thought the two women looked very beautiful together, Eileen with her red hair and green eyes, Marilyn blonde and blue-eyed, one a big-boned, full-breasted woman, the other slender and pale and somehow fragile-looking. A nice combination.