Ed McBain - Like Love

He came down the street heavily, feeling like Lee J. Cobb minus one sample case. He wondered whether he’d sell any more brushes today; he needed three more sales before he filled his quota, who the hell wanted to buy hairbrushes when Spring was holding a dance in the street? Sighing, he climbed the stoop of the nearest tenement, passing a pimply-faced sixteen-year-old blond girl wearing dungarees and a white blouse, and wondering whether she knew how to hula. He entered the dim and foul-smelling vestibule, walking past the mail-boxes with their broken locks and hanging front flaps, and then past the open and miraculously intact frosted-glass inner door. Garbage cans were stacked alongside the staircase wall on the ground floor. They were empty, but their stench permeated the hallway. He sniffed in discomfort, and then began climbing the steps toward the natural light coming from the air-shaft window on the first floor.

He had three minutes to live.

The sample case was heavier when you climbed. The more you climbed, the heavier it got. He had noticed that. He was a particularly astute human being, he felt, intelligent and observant, and he had noticed over the years that there was a direct correlation between the physical act of climbing and the steadily increasing weight of his sample case during the ascent. He was pleased when he gained the first-floor landing. He put the sample case down, reached for his handkerchief, and mopped his brow.

He had a minute and a half to live.

He folded the handkerchief carefully and put it back into his pocket. He looked up at the metal numerals on the door ahead of him. Apartment IA. The A was hanging slightly askew. Time was running out.

He located the bell button set into the door jamb.

He reached out with his forefinger.

Three seconds.

He touched the button.

The sudden blinding explosion ripped away the front wall of the apartment, tore the salesman in half, and sent a cascade of hairbrushes and burnt human flesh roaring into the air and down the stairwell.

Spring was really here.

* * * *

Detective 2nd/Grade Cotton Hawes had served aboard a P.T boat during the last great war for democracy, and his battle experience had therefore been limited to sea engagements alone. He had, to be fair, once participated in the shore bombardment of a tiny Pacific island, but he had never seen the results of his vessel’s devastating torpedo attack on a Japanese dock installation. Had he been a foot soldier in Italy, the chaos in the tenement hallway would not have surprised him very much. But he had had a clean bed to sleep in, and three squares a day, as the saying goes, and so the ruin confronting him just inside the vestibule door was something of a shock.

The hallway and the staircase were littered with plaster, lath, wallpaper, wooden beams, kitchen utensils, hairbrushes, broken crockery, human flesh, blood, hair, and garbage. A cloud of settling plaster dust hovered in the air, pierced the afternoon sunlight which slanted through the airshaft window. The window itself had been shattered by the explosion, a skeleton of its former self, with broken glass shards covering the first-floor landing. The walls surrounding the window and the staircase were blackened and blistered. Every milk bottle resting in the hallway outside the other two apartments on the landing had been shattered by the blast. Fortunately, the seductress Spring had lured the other first-floor tenants into the street, and so the only loss of human life that April afternoon had been in the hallway and in apartment IA itself.

Following a coughing, choking patrolman up the littered staircase, Hawes covered his face with a handkerchief and tried not to realize he was climbing past the blood-soaked squishy remains of what had once been a human being. He followed a trail of hairbrushes to the shattered wall and demolished doorway of the apartment; it had rained hairbrushes that day, it had rained hairbrushes and blood. He entered the apartment. Smoke still billowed from the kitchen, and there was the unmistakable aroma of gas in the Mr. Hawes had not thought he would need the mask which had been pressed into his hand by the patrolman downstairs, but one whiff of the stench changed his mind. He pulled the face piece over his head, checked the inlet tube connected to the cannister, and followed the patrolman into the kitchen, cursing the fact that the glass eyeholes on the mask were beginning to fog up. A man in overalls was busily working in the kitchen behind the demolished stove, trying to cut off the steady leakage of illuminating gas into the apartment. The explosion had ripped the stove from the wall, severing its connection with the pipes leading to the main, and the now steady flow of gas into the apartment threatened a build-up which could lead to a second explosion. The man in overalls-undoubtedly sent by either the Department of Public Works or the Gas and Electric Company-didn’t even look up when Hawes and the patrolman entered the room. He worked busily and quickly. There had been one explosion, and he damn well didn’t want another, not while he was on the premises. He knew that a mixture of one part carbon monoxide to one-half part of oxygen, or two-and-a-half parts air was enough to cause an explosion in the presence of a flame or a spark. He had opened every window in the joint when he’d arrived-even the one in the bedroom where what was on the bed didn’t particularly appeal to his esthetic sense. He had then gone immediately to work on the bent and twisted pipes, trying to stop the flow of gas. He was a devout Catholic, but even if the Pope himself had walked into that kitchen, he would not have stopped work on the pipes. Hawes and the patrolman didn’t even rate a nod.

Through the fogged eyepieces of his mask, Hawes watched the man working on the pipes and then glanced around the demolished kitchen. It did not take a mastermind to determine that this was the room where the explosion had taken place. Even without the presence of the upended stove and the stench of illuminating gas, the room itself was a shambles-it had to be the nucleus of the blast. Every pane of glass had been shattered, every pot and pan hurled through the air and peppered with holes. The curtains had gone up in instant flame-happily, there had not been a major conflagration. The table and chairs had been tossed into the room closest to the kitchen, and even in that room, the sofa had been blasted out of place and rested upended against one damaged wall.

The bedroom, in contrast to the other two rooms, had been almost untouched. The window had been opened by the gasman, and the spring breeze touched the curtains, played idly with them. The blanket had been drawn back to the foot of the bed. There were two people lying on the clean white bedsheet. One was a man, the other was a woman; that’s the way it is in the spring. The man was wearing undershorts and nothing else. The undershorts were striped in blue. The woman was wearing only her panties.

They were both dead.

Hawes did not know very much about pathology, but the man and woman on the bed-even when viewed through his fogging mask-were both a bright cherry-red color, and he was willing to bet his shield they had died of acute carbon monoxide poisoning. He was further willing to speculate that the death was either accidental or suicidal. He was too good a cop to rule out homicide immediately, but he nonetheless began a methodical search for a suicide note.

He did not have to look very far.

The note was on the dresser opposite the bed. It had been placed flat on the dresser top, and then a man’s wrist watch had been put on top of it to hold it down. Without touching either the wrist watch or the note, Hawkes bent over to read what had been written.

The note had been typed. He automatically glanced around the room to see if he could locate the machine and saw it resting on a small end table near the bed. He turned his attention back to the note.