Ed McBain - Lady Killer

'Has she given you a lot of trouble?'

'Only about the typing.'

'Do you like her?'

'Not particularly.'

'Do you hate her?'

'No. I hardly ever think about her, to tell the truth.'

'Bannister…'

'Yes?'

'A detective will probably follow you to the ballet tonight. He'll be with you when—'

'What do you mean? What am I supposed to have done?'

'—when you leave this apartment, and when you meet your mother, and when you take your seat. I'm telling you this in case—'

'What the hell is this, a police state?'

'—in case you had any rash ideas. Do you understand me, Bannister?'

'No, I don't. The rashest idea I have is buying Mother an ice-cream soda after the show,'

'Good, Bannister. Keep it that way.'

'Cops,' Bannister said. 'If you're finished, I'd like to get back to work.'

'I'm finished,' Hawes said. 'Thank you for your time. And remember. There'll be a cop with you.'

'Balls,' Bannister said, and he sat at his table and began typing.

Hawes left the apartment. He checked with the three other tenants on the floor, two of whom were willing to swear (like drunken sailors!) that Bannister's damn machine had been going at eight o'clock that morning. In fact, it had started going at six-thirty, and hadn't stopped since.

Hawes thanked them and went back to the squad.

It was 12.23.

Hawes was hungry.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Meyer Meyer had raised the shade covering the grilled window facing the park, so that sunshine splashed on to the desk near the window where the men were having lunch.

From where Carella sat at the end of the desk facing the window and the park, he could see out across the street, could see the greenery rolling away from the stone wall that divided the park from the pavement.

'Suppose this isn't a specific lady?' Meyer asked. 'Suppose we're on the wrong track?'

'What do you mean?' Carella asked, biting into a sandwich. The sandwich had been ordered at Charlie's Delicatessen, around the corner. It nowhere compared with the sandwiches Carella's wife, Teddy, made.

'We're assuming this nut has a particular dame on his mind,' Meyer said. 'A dame called The Lady. This may not be so.'

'Go ahead,' Hawes said.

'This is a terrible sandwich,' Carella said.

'They get worse all the time,' Meyer agreed. 'There's a new place, Steve. The Golden Pot. Did you see it? It's on Fifth, just off Culver Avenue. Willis ate there. Says it's pretty good.'

'Does he deliver?' Carella asked.

'If he doesn't, he's passing up a gold mine,' Meyer said. 'With all the fressers in this precinct.'

'What about The Lady?' Hawes asked.

'On my lunch hour he wants me to think, yet,' Meyer said.

'Do we need that shade up?' Carella asked.

'Why not?' Meyer said. 'Let the sunshine in.'

'Something's blinking in my eyes,' Carella said.

'So move your chair.'

Carella shoved back his chair.

'What about—' Hawes started.

'All right, all right,' Meyer said. 'This one is eager. He's bucking for commissioner.'

'He's liable to make it,' Carella said.

'Suppose you were pasting up this damn letter?' Meyer asked. 'Suppose you were looking through the New York Times for words? Suppose all you wanted to say was, "I'm going to kill a woman tonight at eight. Try and stop me." Do you follow me so far?'

'I follow you,' Hawes said.

'Okay. You start looking. You can't find the word eight , so you improvise. You cut out a Ballantine-beer thing, and you use that for a figure eight. You can't find the words I'm going , but you do find I will , so you use those instead. Okay, why can't the same thing apply to The Lady?'

'What do you mean?'

'You want to say a woman . You search through the damn paper, and you can't find those words. You're looking through the book section, and you spot the ad for the Conrad Richter novel. Why not? you say to yourself. Woman, lady, the same thing. So you cut out The Lady . It happens to be capitalized because it's the title of a novel. That doesn't bother you because it conveys the meaning you want. But it can set the cops off on a wild-goose chase looking for a capitalized Lady when she doesn't really exist.'

'If this guy had the patience to cut out and paste up every letter in the word tonight ,' Carella said,'then he knew exactly what he wanted to say, and if he couldn't find the exact word he created it.'

'Maybe, maybe not,' Hawes said.

'There are only so many ways to say tonight ,' Meyer said.

'He could have said this evening ,' Carella said. 'I mean, using your theory. But he wanted to say tonight , so he clipped out every letter he needed to form the word. I don't buy your theory, Meyer.' He moved his chair again. 'That damn thing is still blinking in the park.'

'Okay, don't buy it,' Meyer said. 'I'm just saying this nut may be ready to kill any woman, and not a specific woman called The Lady.'

Carella was pensive.

'If that's the case,' Hawes said, 'we've got nothing to go on. The victim could be any woman in the city. Where do we start?'

'I don't know,' Meyer said. He shrugged and sipped at his coffee. 'I don't know.'

'In the Army,' Carella said slowly, 'we were always warned about…'

Meyer turned to him. 'Huh?' he asked.

'Binoculars,' Carella said. 'Those are binoculars.'

'What do you mean?'

'In the park,' he said. 'The bunking. Somebody's using binoculars.'

'Okay,' Meyer said, shrugging it off. 'But if the victim is any woman, we've got about a chance in five million of stopping—'

'Who'd be training binoculars on the precinct?' Hawes asked slowly.

The men fell suddenly silent.

'Can he see into this room?' Hawes asked.

'Probably,' Carella said. Unconsciously, their voices had dropped to whispers, as if their unseen observer could also hear them.

'Just keep sitting and talking,' Hawes whispered. 'I'll go out and down the back way.'

'I'll go with you,' Carella said.

'No. He may run if he sees too many of us leaving.'

'Do you think—?' Meyer started.

'I don't know,' Hawes said, rising slowly.

'You can save us a lot of time,' Carella whispered. 'Good luck, Cotton.'

Hawes emerged into the alley that ran behind the precinct just outside the detention cells on the ground floor. He slammed the heavy steel door shut behind him, and then started through the alley. Idiotically, his heart was pounding.

Easy does it, he told himself. We've got to play this easy or the bird will fly, and we'll be left with The Lady again, or maybe Anywoman, Anywoman in a city teeming with women of all shapes and sizes. So, easy. Play it easy. Sprinkle the salt on to the bird's tail, and if the bastard tries to run, clobber him or shoot him, but play it easy, slow and easy, play it like a 'Dragnet' cop, with all the tune in the world, about to interrogate the slowest talker in the United States.

He ran to the alley mouth and then cut into the street. The sidewalk was packed with people sucking in fetid air. A stickball game was in progress up the street, and farther down toward the end of the block, a bunch of kids had turned on a fire hydrant and were romping in the released lunge of water, many of them fully clothed. Some of the kids, Hawes noticed, were wearing dungarees and striped tee shirts. He turned right, putting the stickball game and the fire hydrant behind him. What does a good cop do on the hottest day of the year? he wondered. Allow the kids to waste the city's water supply and cause possible danger should the fire department need that hydrant? Or use a Stillson wrench on the hydrant and force the kids back into a sweltering, hot inactivity, an inactivity that causes street gangs and street rumbles and possibly more danger than a fire would cause?