Ed McBain - Sadie When She Died

“Oh.”

“But go ahead. It can wait.”

Cindy hesitated. Then, her voice very low, she said, “Bert, can I see you tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?” he said.

“Yes.” She hesitated again. “Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve.”

“I know.”

“I bought something for you.”

“Why’d you do that, Cindy?”

“Habit,” she said, and he suspected she was smiling.

“I’d love to see you, Cindy,” he said.

“I’ll be working till five.”

“No Christmas party?”

“At a hospital? Bert, my dear, we deal here daily with life and death.”

“Don’t we all,” Kling said, and smiled. “Shall I meet you at the hospital?”

“All right. The side entrance. That’s near the emergency . . .”

“Yes, I know where it is. At five o’clock?”

“Well, five-fifteen.”

“Okay, five-fifteen.”

“You’ll like what I got you,” she said, and then hung up. He was still smiling when he put his call through to the Identification Section. A man named Reilly listened to his request, and promised to call back with the information in ten minutes. He called back in eight.

“Kling?” he said.

“Yes?”

“Reilly at the I.S. I’ve got that packet on Frank Richmond. You want me to duplicate it or what?”

“Can you just read me his yellow sheet?”

“Well,” Reilly said, “it’s a pretty long one. The guy’s been in trouble with the law since he was sixteen.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Minor crap mostly. Except for the latest one.”

“When?”

“Two months ago.”

“What was the charge?”

“Armed robbery.”

Kling whistled, and then said, “Have you got the details there, Reilly?”

“Not on his B-sheet. Let me see if there’s a copy of the arrest report.”

Kling waited. On the other end, he could hear papers being shuffled. At last, Reilly said, “Yeah, here it is. Him and another guy went into a supermarket along about closing time, ripped off the day’s receipts. Got caught on the way out by an off-duty detective who lived in the neighborhood.”

“Who was the other guy?”

“Man named Jack Yancy. He’s doing time too. You want me to pull his folder?”

“No, that’s not necessary.”

“Third guy got off scot-free.”

“I thought you said there were only two of them.”

“No, there was an alleged wheel-man on the job, waiting in the parking lot near the delivery entrance. Caught him in the car with the engine running, but he claimed he didn’t know anything about what was going on inside. Richmond and Yancy backed him, said they’d never seen him before in their lives.”

“Honor among thieves?” Kling said. “I don’t believe it.”

“Stranger things happen,” Reilly said.

“What’s his name?”

“The wheel-man? Peter Brice.”

“Got an address for him?”

“Not on the report. You want me to hit the file again?”

“Would you?”

“I’ll get back,” Reilly said, and hung up.

When the phone rang ten minutes later, Kling thought it would be Reilly again. Instead, it was Arthur Brown.

“Bert,” he said, “the Orton woman just called Fletcher. Can you get in touch with Steve?”

“I’ll try. What’s up?”

“They made a date for tomorrow night. They’re going across the river to a place named The Chandeliers. Fletcher’s picking her up at seven-thirty.”

“Right,” Kling said.

“Bert?”

“Yeah?”

“Does Steve want me on this phone tap while they’re out eating? Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve, you know.”

“I’ll ask him.”

“Also, Hal wants to know if he’s supposed to sit in the truck all the while they’re out.”

“Steve’ll be in touch.”

“Because after all, Bert, if they’re over in the next state eating, what’s there to listen to in the apartment?”

“Right, I’m sure Steve’ll agree.”

“Okay. How’s everything up there?”

“Quiet.”

“Really?” Brown asked, and hung up.

15

T he detective who engaged the garage attendant in a bullshit conversation about a hit-and-run accident was Steve Carella. The lab technician who posed as a mechanic sent by the Automobile Club to charge a faulty battery was the same man who had wired Arlene Orton’s apartment.

Fletcher’s car was parked in a garage four blocks from his office, a fact determined simply by following him to work that morning of December 24. (Carella had already figured that Fletcher would park the car where he finally did park it because the pattern had been established in the earlier surveillance; a man who drove to work each day generally parked his car in the same garage or lot.)

On the sidewalk outside the garage, Carella asked invented questions about a damaged left fender and headlight on a fictitious 1968 Dodge, while upstairs the lab technician was installing his bug in Fletcher’s 1972 Oldsmobile. It would have been simpler and faster to put in a battery-powered FM transmitter similar to those he had installed in Arlene Orton’s apartment, but since batteries needed constant changing, and since access to any given automobile was infinitely more difficult than access to an apartment, he decided on wiring his bug into the car’s electrical system instead. With the hood open, with charge cables going to Fletcher’s battery from his own tow-truck battery, he busily spliced and taped, tucked and tacked. He did not want to put the bug under the dashboard (the easiest spot) because this was wintertime, and the car heater would undoubtedly be in use, and the sensitive microphone would pick up every rattle and rumble of the heater instead of the conversation in the car. So he wedged the microphone into the front cushion, between seat and back, and then ran his wires under the car rug, and up under the dashboard, and finally into the electrical system. Within the city limits, the microphone would effectively broadcast any sound in the car for a distance of little more than a block, which meant that Fletcher’s Oldsmobile would have to be closely followed by the monitoring unmarked police sedan. If Fletcher left the city, as he planned to do tonight when he took Arlene to The Chandeliers, the effective range of the transmitter on the open road would be about a quarter of a mile. In either case, the listener-pursuer had his work cut out for him.

On the sidewalk, Carella saw the technician drive out in his battered tow truck, abruptly thanked the garage attendant for his time, and headed back to the squadroom.

The holiday was starting in earnest and so, in keeping with the conventions of that festive season, the boys of the 87th Squad held their annual Christmas party at 4 P . M . that afternoon. The starting time for the party was entirely arbitrary, since it depended on when the squad’s guests began dropping in. The guests, unlike those to be found at most other Christmas parties in the city, were in the crime business, mainly because the hosts were in that same business. Most of the guests were shoplifters. Some of them were pickpockets. A few of them were drunks. One of them was a murderer.

The shoplifters had been arrested in department stores scattered throughout the precinct, the Christmas shopping season being a good time to lift merchandise, Christmas Eve being the last possible day to practice the art in stores still jammed to the rafters. The shoplifters plied their trade in various ways. A skinny lady shoplifter named Hester Brady, for example, came into the squadroom looking like a pregnant lady. Her pregnancy had been caused by stuffing some two hundred dollars worth of merchandise into the overlarge bloomers she wore under her dress, a risky procedure unless one is skilled at lift, grab, stuff, drop the skirt, move to the next aisle, advance in the space of twenty minutes from a sweet Irish virgin to a lady eight months along; such are the vagaries of birth control.