Ed McBain - Like Love

“Because I was embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed, Miss Tamid?”

“Yes, how would you feel? I knew he was in there. I could see his car in the garage. But he wouldn’t answer the doorbell. Well, no matter. It is finished.”

“What do you mean, finished? No, don’t answer that yet, Miss Tamid, we’ll come back to it. I want to get something else straight first. You’re saying that you lied to the police because your feelings were hurt? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Yes.”

“Suppose you tell me why you went there in the first place, Miss Tamid?”

“You are getting harsh with me,” Martha said, her eyes seeming to get larger and a little moist.

“I’m terribly sorry,” Hawes answered. “Why did you go there?”

Martha Tamid shrugged. “Because I do not like being ignored,” she said. “I am a woman.”

“Why did you go there, Miss Tamid?”

“To make love,” she answered simply.

Hawes was silent for several moments. Then he said, “But Amos Barlow wouldn’t open the door.”

“He would not. Of course, he did not know why I was coming there”

“Otherwise he most certainly would have opened the door, is that right?”

“No, he would not have opened the door, anyway. I know that now. But I thought I would mention to you anyway, that he did not know I was coming to make love.”

“Are you in love with Amos Barlow?” Hawes asked.

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

“Were you in love with him?”

“Certainly not!”

“But you nonetheless went there that Sunday to… to seduce him?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I am a woman.”

“Yes, you’ve already told me that.”

“I do not like to be ignored.”

“You’ve told me that, too.”

“Then? It’s simple, n’est-ce pas?” She nodded emphatically. “Besides, it’s finished now. I no longer care.”

“Why is it finished, Miss Tamid? Why do you no longer care?”

“Because he was here, and now I know, and now I do not feel unattractive anymore.”

“When was he here?”

“Four nights ago, five nights? I don’t remember exactly.”

“He came of his own accord?”

“I invited him.”

“And? What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.” Martha nodded. “I am a very patient woman, you know. My patience is endless. But, you know… I gave him every opportunity. He is simply… he is inexperienced… he knows nothing, but nothing. And there is a limit to anyone’s patience.”

“I’m not sure I follow you, Miss Tamid,” Hawes said.

“You cannot blame a person for being inexperienced. This is not the same thing as being inattentive, you know. So when I tried, and I realized he was… comment dit-on?

… simple? naïf? ingénu ? … what is there to do? He did not know. He simply did not know.”

“What didn’t he know, Miss Tamid?”

“What to do, how to do! He did not know.” She leaned forward suddenly. “I can trust you, can’t I? You are like a confesseur, isn’t that true? A priest who hears confession? I can tell you?”

“Sure,” Hawes said.

“I took off my own blouse,” Martha said, “because he was fumbling so with the buttons. But then… he did not know how to undress me. He simply did not know. He had never been with a woman before, do you understand? He is an innocent.” Martha Tamid sat back in her chair. “One cannot be offended by innocence,” she said.

The police who went through all those rooms were pretty much offended by all the rampant innocence. They searched Mary Tomlinson’s house from basement to attic, and they went through every inch of Michael Thayer’s apartment, and they covered Amos Barlow’s house like a horde of termites-but they didn’t turn up hide or hair of the film that had been stolen from Fred Hassler. They went through Mrs. Tomlinson’s tiny little Volkswagen, and through Michael Thayer’s blue Oldsmobile sedan, and through Amos Barlow’s tan Chevrolet, but they found nothing. They searched through Thayer’s small office in the Brio Building, and through Barlow’s mailing room at 891 Mayfair-but they did not find the film, and the merry-go-round was slowing to a halt again.

The next day, without realizing how close they’d come to grabbing the gold ring, the detectives held a meeting in the squadroom.

“What do you think?” Hawes asked, “have you got any ideas?”

“None,” Carella said.

“Meyer?”

Meyer shook his head.

“Bert?”

Kling hesitated a moment, and then said, “No.”

“So do we call it a suicide and close it out?” Hawes asked.

“What the hell else can we do?” Meyer asked.

“Let’s ask Pete for permission to leave it in the Open File,” Carella said.

“That’s the same thing as killing it,” Hawes said.

Carella shrugged, “Something may come up on it someday.”

“When?”

“Who knows? We’ve ran it into the ground. What else can we do?”

Hawes hesitated, unwilling to be the one who officially killed the case. “You want to vote on it?” he asked. The detectives nodded. “All those in favor of asking Pete to dump it in Siberia?” None of the men raised their hands.

“Meyer?”

“Dump it,” Meyer said.

“Bert?”

“Dump it.”

“Steve?”

Carella paused for a long time. Then he nodded reluctantly and said, “Dump it. Dump it.”

The request was placed on Lieutenant Peter Byrnes’ desk that afternoon. He glanced at it cursorily, picked up his pen, and then signed it, granting his permission. Before he went home that night, Alf Miscolo, filing a sheaf of papers he’d picked up from all the desks in the squadroom, went to the green cabinet marked OPEN FILE, slid out the drawer and dropped into it a manila folder containing all the papers on the Tommy Barlow-Irene Thayer case.

For all intents and purposes, the case was closed.

* * * *

The man was lying on his back in Grover Park.

They had already traced the outline of his body on the moist grass by the time Carella and Hawes arrived, and the man seemed ludicrously framed by his own ridiculous posture, the white powder capturing the position of death and freezing it. The police photographer was performing his macabre dance around the corpse, choreographing himself into new angles each time his flash bulb popped. The corpse stared up at him unblinkingly, twisted into the foolish grotesquery of death, one leg bent impossibly beneath him, the other stretched out straight. The sun was shining. It was May, and there was the heady aroma of newly mown grass in the park, the delicious fragrance of magnolia and cornelian cherry and quince. The man had a knife in his heart.

They stood around the body exchanging the amenities, men who were called together only when Death gave a party. The lab boys, the photographer, the assistant medical examiner, the two detectives from Homicide North, the two men from the 87th, they all stood around the man with the knife sticking out of his chest, and they asked each other how they were, and had they heard about Manulus over in the 33rd, got shot by a burglar night before last, what about this moon-lighting stuff, did they think the commissioner would stick to his guns, it was a nice day, wasn’t it, beautiful weather they’d been having this spring, hardly a drop of rain. They cracked a few jokes-the photographer had one about the first astronaut to reach the moon-and they went about their work with a faintly detached air of busyness. That was a dead man lying in the grass there. They accepted his presence only by performing a mental sleight of hand that in effect denied his humanity. He was no longer a man, he was simply a problem.