Ed McBain: King's Ransom

“Steve,” Meyer said. “I just had a guy in here who—”

“Shhh, shhh,” Carella said, as he continued banging away at the machine until he finished his paragraph. Then he looked up.

“Okay?” Meyer said.

“Shoot.”

“I just had a guy in here who—”

“Why don’t you sit down? You want some coffee? Let’s get Miscolo to make some coffee.”

“No, I don’t want any coffee,” Meyer said patiently.

“This isn’t a social visit?”

“No. I just had a guy in here who owns a radio parts store on Culver Avenue.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. So the store was broken into twice in a row. The first time the thief stole an oscillator, whatever the hell that is, and the second time just a bunch of loose junk hanging around. Now it seems to me I remember…”

“Yeah, how about that?” Carella said. He shoved the typing cart away from the desk and opened his bottom drawer. Dumping a sheaf of papers on the desk top, he began rifling through them hurriedly.

“A whole bunch of radio store burglaries, weren’t they?” Meyer said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Carella answered. “Where the hell’s that list?” He continued scattering papers over the desk top. “Look at this. More junk in this damn drawer. This guy was caught and is already serving his time at Castleview. Now where’s that… ? Jewelry stores… bicycles… Why doesn’t somebody add these to the stolen-bikes file?… Here it is. This the thing you were referring to?”

Meyer looked at the typewritten sheet.

“That’s it,” he said. “Pretty strange, don’t you think?”

There was, in truth, nothing strange about the list. It simply enumerated the amount of equipment that had been stolen from several different radio parts stores over the past several months. Both men bent over the list and studied it more closely.

“What do you make of it?” Meyer said.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you must have thought there was something fishy, or you wouldn’t have scribbled that note to the lieutenant.”

“Yeah,” Carella said.

“What did Pete have to say about it?”

“Not a hell of a lot. Figured it was some kids, I think.”

“What was the mo., Steve? Do you remember?”

“A window at the back of the shop was forced in each case. And in each case, only one large item or a few small items were stolen.”

“Why do you suppose the thief did that?”

“Maybe he figured a small theft wouldn’t be reported. Or perhaps not even missed. Assuming this was the same thief on each job.”

“Well, it sure as hell looks that way to me,” Meyer said.

‘Mmm. In any case, it’s not very serious.”

“I suppose not. Here. You’d better add these new ones to your list.” Meyer paused and scratched his bald head. “You suppose we’re dealing with a Russian spy or something here?”

“Either that or a member of the I.R.A.”

“I mean, why else would anybody want all these parts?”

“We may be dealing with a ham who can’t afford his hobby,” Carella said.

“Yeah, so why doesn’t he switch his hobby?”

“One thing I stopped worrying about the minute I became a detective,” Carella said, “is motive. If you try to figure out what motivates a crook, you go nuts.”

“You’re destroying a boy’s faith in detective fiction,” Meyer said. “The Means, the Motive, and the Opportunity. Everybody knows that.”

“Except me. I just do my job,” Carella said.

“Yeah,” Meyer said.

“It always comes out in the wash, anyway. One day, all the mysterious pieces click together. And they’re never what you thought they were going to be. To figure out motivation, you have to be a psychiatrist.”

“Still,” Meyer said, “all that equipment. And the thief hit seven times to get it. That’s a big chance to take for a hobby. What does it add up to, Steve?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” Carella said, and he began typing again.

* * * *

3

Diane King was not a beautiful woman.

She was, however, an attractive woman.

Her attractiveness was directly attributable to the bone structure of her face, which, while not adding up to the Hollywood or Madison Avenue concept of beauty, nonetheless provided an excellent foundation upon which to build. Her attractiveness, too, was indirectly attributable to a number of things like: (a) the various concoctions offered by the myriad beauty-preparation firms, (b) a life of comparative ease and luxury, (c) ready access to the hairdresser’s, and (d) an innate good taste in the selection of clothes to complement a figure unendowed with a movie star’s mammillary overabundance.

Diane King was attractive. Diane King, in fact, was damned attractive.

She stood just inside the entrance foyer of her luxurious home, a woman of thirty-two wearing black tapered lounging slacks and a long-sleeved white blouse open at the throat. A towel was draped over the neck and shoulders of the blouse. Her hair echoed the ebony black of the slacks, except for a fresh silver streak which rose from a widow’s peak and spread like mercury to a point somewhere on the top of her head. A silver-studded belt circled her narrow waist. Her green eyes fled from the entrance doorway to Pete Cameron’s face, and again she asked, “What did they do to Doug?”

“Nothing,” Cameron said. He looked at her hair. “What’d you do to your hair?”

Distractedly, Diane’s hand went up to the silver streak.

“Oh, it was Liz’s idea,” she said. “What was all the shouting about, Pete?”

“Is Liz still here?” Cameron asked, and there was an undeniable note of interest in his voice.

“Yes, she’s still here. Why’d Doug come steaming upstairs like the Twentieth Century? I hate these damn high-power meetings. He didn’t even see me up there, Pete, do you know that?”

“He saw me,” a voice said, and Liz Bellew came down the steps and into the living room. Whatever Diane King lacked in the way of beauty, Liz Bellew possessed. She was born with blond hair that needed no hairdresser’s magic, blue eyes fringed with thick lashes, an exquisitely molded nose and a pouting sultry mouth. She had acquired over the years a figure which oozed S-E-X in capital letters in neon, and had overlaid—if you’ll pardon the expression—her undeniable beauty with a polish as smooth and as hard as baked enamel. Even dressed for casual life in Smoke Rise, as she was now, wearing simple sweater and skirt, suede flats, and carrying a suede pouch-like bag, sex dripped from her curvaceous frame in bucketfuls, tubfuls, vatfuls. She wore only one piece of jewelry, a huge diamond on her left hand, a diamond the size of a malignant cancer.

“I’ll be damned if I’ll let any man rush past Liz Bellew without saying hello,” she said, obviously referring to her encounter with King upstairs.

“So hello,” Cameron said.

“I was wondering when you’d notice me.”

“I understand you’ve turned beautician in your spare time,” Cameron said.

“Diane’s hair! Isn’t it stunning?”

“I don’t like it,” Cameron said. “Forgive my honesty. I think she’s quite beautiful without any gilding of the lily—”

“Oh, hush, monster,” Liz said. “The streak gives her glamour. It emancipates her.” She paused. Underplaying the next line, she said, “Besides, she can wash it out if she doesn’t like it.”

“Well, I’ll see what Doug thinks first,” Diane said.

“Darling, never ask a man what he thinks about any part of your body. Am I right, Pete?”

Cameron grinned. “Absolutely.”

Diane glanced toward the steps nervously. “What’s he doing up there?”