Ed McBain - King's Ransom

“Okay, get in the kitchen. When this phone rings, get the operator to work right away.”

“Right!” Cameron said, and he rushed out of the room again.

Reynolds came down the steps, a defeated expression on his face. “I can’t find that address book anywhere, sir,” he said. “I’m sorry. I looked through the telephone table, but…”

“I’ll get it,” Diane said. With a visible effort, she pulled back her shoulders, moved away from King, and started for the steps. As she passed the front door, it burst open suddenly, startling her.

“Were you calling me, Mom?” Bobby King said.

She blinked her eyes in disbelief. “Bobby?” she said. And then the name bubbled into her throat with certainty—“Bobby, Bobby, Bobby!”—and she ran to him and dropped to her knees and pulled him close.

“Hey, what’s the matter?” Bobby said.

King looked at his son in puzzlement. “How…” he started, and then he turned toward the phone and pointed a menacing finger at it and shouted, “Why, that rotten lying…”

“I don’t want to play with Jeff any more, Mom,” Bobby said. “I went up a tree like Daddy told me, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t see him anywhere.”

“What do you mean?” King said and there was sudden fresh alarm in his voice. He glanced at the phone sharply. “What do you mean, you couldn’t see him? Where is he?”

“I’ll bet he left the woods,” Bobby said. “I looked all over, behind every rock. I don’t want to play with him any more. He’s not anywhere around. I don’t know where he is!”

There was a moment of stunned silence. The name was on everyone’s lips, the truth was in everyone’s mind, but it was the boy’s father who finally spoke the word, the single word, the name that summed up simply and explicitly everything that had taken place in the woods outside, the name that explained the phone call from a stranger.

“Jeff,” Reynolds said, and the name emerged from his lips as a thin whisper.

In the distance, they could hear a siren coming closer and closer to the cloistered sanctuary that was Smoke Rise.

* * * *

5

If there were two things that gave Steve Carella the willies, those two things were cases involving extreme wealth and cases involving children. He was not a product of the city’s slums and so he couldn’t attribute his money willies to a childhood of deprivation. His baker father, Antonio, had always earned a decent living, and Carella had never known the bite of a cold wind on the seat of a pair of threadbare pants. And yet, in the presence of luxury that screamed of wealth, in the drawing rooms and sitting rooms and studies to which his work sometimes took him, Carella felt uneasy. He felt poor. He was not poor, and he’d never been poor, and even if he’d had no money at all, he still wouldn’t have been poor, but sitting in the Douglas King living room, facing the man who could afford a layout like this one, Steve Carella felt penniless and destitute and somewhat intimidated.

And to top it all off, this looked like a bona fide kidnaping. Even if Carella were not the father of a pair of twins which his wife Teddy had delivered to him this past summer, even if he were not experiencing the first joys of fatherhood, a kidnaping was a damn frightening thing and he wanted no part of it.

Unfortunately, he had no choice.

He sat in the King living room, intimidated, troubled, and he asked his questions while Meyer Meyer looked through the window facing the River Harb, his back to the room.

“Let me get this straight, Mr. King,” he said. “The boy who was kidnapped is not your son, is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“But the ransom demand was made to you, is that also right?”

“Yes.”

“Then, when the demand was made, the kidnaper thought he was in possession of your son.”

“It would seem so, yes.”

“Were there any further calls?”

“No.”

“Then he may still believe he has your son?”

“I don’t know what he believes,” King said angrily. “Is there really any necessity for all these questions? I am not the boy’s father, and I—”

“No, but you’re the one who spoke to the kidnaper.”

“That’s true.”

“And he asked for five hundred thousand dollars, is that right, Mr. King?”

“Yes, yes, yes, Mr. Caretta, that’s right.”

“Carella.”

“I’m sorry. Carella.”

“This was a man? The person who called.”

“It was a man.”

“When he spoke to you, did he say ‘I have your son’ or ‘We have your son’? Would you remember?”

“I don’t remember. And I don’t see why it’s important. Somebody has Reynolds’ boy, and all this damn semantic—”

“That’s exactly it, Mr. King,” Carella said. “Somebody has the boy, and we’d like to find out who that somebody is. You see, we have to find out if we’re to get the boy back safely. Now that’s pretty important to us. Getting the boy back safely, I mean. I’m sure it’s just as important to you.”

“Of course it is,” King snapped. “Why don’t you call in the F.B.I., for God’s sake? You people aren’t equipped to deal with something like this! A boy is kidnaped and…”

“Seven days have to elapse before the F.B.I, can enter the case,” Carella said. “We’ll notify them at once, of course, but they can’t step in before then. In the meantime, we’ll do our best to—”

“Why can’t they come in sooner? I thought kidnaping was a Federal offense. Instead of a bunch of local Keystone cops, we could—”

“It’s a Federal offense because after seven days have elapsed they can automatically assume a state line has been crossed. Up until that time, it remains in the jurisdiction of the state in which the crime was committed. And in this state, in this city, the local precinct handles the crime. That goes for kidnaping, assault, murder, or what have you.”

“Am I to understand then,” King said, that we’re going to treat a kidnaping, where a boy’s life is in danger, the same way we’d treat a… a… a fifty-cent item stolen from Woolworth’s?”

“Not exactly, Mr. King. We’ve already phoned back to the squad. Lieutenant Byrnes himself is on the way over. As soon as we know a little bit more about—”

“Excuse me, Steve,” Meyer said. “If we’re gonna get a teletype out, I’d better get a description from the boy’s father.”

“Yeah,” Carella said. “Where is Mr. Reynolds, Mr. King?”

“In his apartment. Over the garage. He’s taking this pretty badly.”

“Want me to handle it, Meyer?”

“No, no, that’s all right.” Meyer glanced significantly at King. “You seem to have your hands full right here. Where’s the garage, Mr. King?”

“On the side of the house. You can’t miss it.”

“I’ll be there if you need me, Steve.”

“Okay,” Carella answered. He turned his attention back to King as Meyer went out of the house. “Did you notice anything peculiar about this man’s voice, Mr. King? A lisp, a noticeable accent, a dialect, or…”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Caretta,” King said, “but I refuse to play this little game any longer. I honestly don’t see what—”

“It’s Carella, and what little game were you referring to, Mr. King?”

“This cops-and-robbers nonsense. Now what the hell difference could it possibly make whether or not the man lisped or spoke in beautifully cultured English or babbled like a moron? How is that going to get Jeff Reynolds back to his father?”

Carella did not raise his eyes from his notebook. He kept staring at the page upon which he’d been writing, and he kept telling himself it would not seem fitting for a police officer to get up and punch Mr. Douglas King in the mouth. Softly, evenly, he said, “What do you do for a living, Mr. King?”