Ed McBain - Like Love

Dear God, forgive us for this terrible thing. We are so much in love, and the world is all against us. There is no other way. Now we can end the suffering of ourselfs and others. Please understand.

Tommy and Irene

Hawes nodded once, in silent understanding, and then made memo to pick up both note and wrist watch as soon as the photographers were finished with the room. He walked across the room and filled out a tag which he would later affix to the typewriter for delivery to the laboratory where Lieutenant Sam Grossman’s boys would perform their comparison tests.

He walked back to the bed.

The man and woman appeared to be in their early twenties. The man had involuntarily soiled himself, probably after sinking into a deep coma once the gas had really taken hold. The woman had vomited into her pillow. He stood at the foot of the bed and wondered what they had thought it would be like. A nice quiet peaceful death? Something like going to sleep? He wondered how they had felt when the headache appeared and they began to get drowsy and faint and unable to move themselves off that bed even if they’d changed their minds about dying together. He wondered how they’d felt just when their bodies had begun to twitch, just before they passed into a stupor where vomiting and evacuation were things beyond their control. He looked at this dead man and woman in their early twenties-Tommy and Irene-and he shook his head and thought, You poor stupid boobs, what did you hope to find? What made you think a painful death was the answer to a painful life?

He turned his eyes away from the bed.

Two empty whisky bottles were on the floor. One of them had spilled alcohol onto the scatter rug on the woman’s side of the bed. He didn’t know whether or not they had drunk themselves into insensibility after turning on the gas jet, but that seemed to be a standard part of the gas-pipe routine. He knew there were people who felt that suicide was an act of extreme bravery, but he could never look upon it as anything but utter cowardice. The empty whisky bottles gave conviction to his thoughts. He made out the tags for each bottle, again postponing the actual tagging until photographs had been made.

The woman’s clothes were hung over the back and resting on the seat of a straight-backed chair alongside the bed. Her blouse was hanging, and her brassiere was folded over it; her skirt, garter belt, nylons, and leather belt were folded on the seat. A pair of high-heeled black leather pumps were neatly placed at the foot of the chair.

The man’s clothes were over and on an easy chair at the other end of the room.

Trousers, shirt, undershirt, tie, socks, and belt. His shoes were placed to one side of the chair. Hawes made a note to have the technicians pick up the clothing, which they would place in plastic bags for transmission to the laboratory. He also noted the man’s wallet, tie clip, and loose change lying on the dresser top, together with the woman’s earrings and an imitation pearl necklace.

By the time he’d finished his search of the apartment, the gas leak had been plugged, the laboratory boys, police photographers, and assistant medical examiner had arrived, and there was nothing to do but go downstairs again and talk to the patrolman who had reported the explosion to the precinct. The patrolman was new and green and terrified. But he had managed to pull his wits together long enough to find a charred and tattered wallet in the hallway rubble, and he turned this over to Hawes as if he were very anxious to get rid of it. Hawes almost wished the patrolman hadn’t found it. The wallet gave an identity to the remains of a human being that had been spattered down the staircase and over the walls.

He called on the salesman’s wife later that day, after he had spoken to the lab. The salesman’s wife said, “Why did it have to be Harry?”

He explained that the lab’s supposition was that her husband had probably approached the door of apartment IA and pressed the buzzer and this in turn had caused an electrical spark which had precipitated the explosion.

“Why did it have to be Harry?” the salesman’s wife asked.

Hawes tried to explain that these things happened some times, that they were nobody’s fault, that her husband was simply doing his job and had no idea the apartment behind that door was full of illuminating gas. But the woman only stared at him blankly and said again, “Why did it have to be Harry?”

He went back to the squadroom with a weary ache inside him. He barely said hello to Carella who was at his own desk typing up a report. Both men left the squadroom at eight-fifteen that night, two-and-a-half hours after they were officially relieved. Carella was in a rotten mood. He ate a cold supper, snapped viciously at his wife, didn’t even go in to peek at the sleeping twins, and went straight to bed where he tossed restlessly all night long. Hawes called Christine Maxwell, a girl he had known for a long time, and asked her to go to a movie with him. He watched the screen with interesting annoyance because something was bugging him about that apparent suicide and he couldn’t quite figure out what.

* * * *

Dead people do not sweat.

It was very warm in the morgue, and a light sheen of perspiration covered the faces of Carella and Hawes, clung to the upper lip of the man with them, stained the armpits of the attendant who looked at the three men bleakly for a moment and then pulled out the drawer.

The drawer moved almost soundlessly on its rollers. The girl Irene lay naked and dead on the slab; they had found her in her panties, but these had been shipped immediately to the lab, and she lay naked and cool and unsweating while the attendant and the three men looked down at her. In a little while, she would be shipped to another part of the hospital, where an autopsy would be performed. For now, her body was intact. All it lacked was life.

“Is that her?” Carella asked.

The man standing between the two detectives nodded. He was a tall, thin man with pale blue eyes and blond hMr. He wore a gray gabardine suit, and a white button-down shirt with a striped tie. He did not say anything. He simply nodded, and even the nod was a brief one, as if motion were an extravagance.

“And she’s your wife, sir?” Hawes asked.

The man nodded again.

“Could you give us her full name, sir?”

“Irene,” the man said.

“Middle name?”

“That is her middle name.”

“What do you mean?”

“Her name is Margaret Irene Thayer.” The man paused. “She didn’t like the name Margaret, so she used her middle name.”

“She called herself Irene, is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“And your address, Mr. Thayer?”

“1134 Bailey Avenue.”

“You were living there with your wife?”

“Yes.”

Carella and Hawes glanced at each other. Homicide at its best stinks to high heaven because everyone walking this earth has a closet he’d prefer leaving closed and homicide rarely knocks before entering. The girl Margaret Irene Thayer had been found on a bed wearing only her panties, and she’d been lying alongside a man in his undershorts. The man who had just positively identified her was named Michael Thayer, and he was her husband, and one of those little closets had just been opened, and everyone was staring into it. Carella cleared his throat.

“Were… er… you and your wife separated, or… ?

“No,” Thayer said.

“I see,” Carella answered. He paused again. “You know, Mr. Thayer, that… that your wife was found with a man.”

“Yes. Their pictures were in the paper. That’s why I called the police. I mean, when I saw Irene’s picture in the paper. I figured it was some kind of mistake. Because I thought… you see, she’d told me she was going out to visit her mother and I never suspected… so you see, I thought it was a mistake. She was supposed to be spending the night at her mother’s, you see. So I called her mother, and her mother said no, Irene hadn’t been there, and then I thought… I don’t know what I thought. So I called the police and asked if I could… could see… could see the body of the girl they’d… found.”