Ed McBain - Lady Killer

Both—unfortunately—belonged to Sergeant Dave Murchison.

Sam sighed. It was a crying shame. He always had to make his point the hard way.

Hawes took the call from Grossman in the Interrogation Room, where he had gone to study the photo of the letter. The call came at 11.17.

'Hawes?' Grossman said.

'Yes.'

'Sam Grossman at the lab. I've got a report on that letter. Since there's a time element on this, I thought I'd give it to you on the phone.'

'Shoot,' Hawes said.

'Not much help on the prints,' Grossman said. 'Only two good prints on the letter itself, and they're your desk sergeant's.'

'This is the front of the letter?'

'Yes.'

'How about the back?'

'Everything smeared. The letter was folded. Whoever folded it ran his bunched fist along the crease. Nothing there, Hawes. I'm sorry.'

'And the envelope?'

'Murchison's prints—and yours. Nothing else except some good prints left by a child. Did a child handle the envelope?'

'Yes.'

'Well, I've got a good batch of his prints, in case you need them for comparison. Want me to send them over?'

'Please,' Hawes said. 'What else have you got?'

'On the letter itself, we dug up a few items that might help you. The paste used was five-and-dime stuff put out by a company called Brandy's. They manufacture it in ajar and in a tube. We found a microscopic blue-metallic-paint scraping stuck to one corner of the letter. Their tube is blue, so chances are your letter writer used the tube. That's no help, though. He could have bought the paste anywhere. It's a common item. The paper, though…'

'Yes, what about that?'

'It's a good-rag-content bond, manufactured by the Cartwright Company in Boston, Massachusetts. We checked our watermark file. The catalogue number on the paper is 142-Y. It costs about five and a half bucks a ream.'

'But it's a Boston company, huh?'

'Yes, but distributed nationally. There's a distributor in this city. Want the name?'

'Please.'

'Eastern Shipping. That's on Gage Boulevard in Majesta. Want the phone number?'

'Yes.'

'Princeton 4-9800.'

Hawes jotted it down. 'Anything else?'

'Yes. We know where the letter writer got his words.'

'Where?'

'The tip-off was the T in the word tonight . That T is famous, Hawes.'

'It's the New York Times , isn't it?

'Exactly. Distributed here, as in every city in the country. I'll confess our newspaper and magazine file doesn't go back too far. But we try to keep abreast of the major dailies and all the big publications. We sometimes get parts of bodies wrapped in newspapers or portions of newspapers. Every once in a while it helps to have a file.'

'I see,' Hawes said.

'This time we were lucky. Using that New York Times was a springboard, we looked through what we had and pinpointed the sections of the Times he used, and the date.'

'And they were?'

'He used the magazine section and the book section of the Times for Sunday, June twenty-third. We've located enough of the words he's used to eliminate coincidence. For example, The Lady came from the book section. Snipped from an ad for the Conrad Richter novel. The word can was from an ad in the magazine section for Scandale. That's a woman's undergarment trade name.'

'Go ahead.'

The figure eight was obvious, again from the magazine section. An ad for Ballantine beer.'

'Anything else?'

'The word kill was easy. Not many advertisers use that word unless it's pertinent to their product. This ad said something about killing bathroom odours. "Kill bathroom odours with—" and the name of the product. In any case, there's no doubt in our minds. He used the June twenty-third Times'

'And this is July twenty-fourth,' Hawes said.

'Yeah.'

'In other words, he planned this thing as long as a month ago, made up his letter, and then held it until he'd decided on the date for the murder.'

'It would seem that way. Unless he used an old paper that was around.'

'It would also seem to eliminate a crank.'

'It looks legit to me, Hawes,' Grossman said. 'I was talking to our psychologist upstairs. He didn't seem to think a crank would wait a month between composing a letter and delivering it. He also feels the delivery of the letter was an act of compulsion. He thinks the guy wants to be stopped, and he further thinks the letter will give you a clue about how to stop him.'

'How?' Hawes asked.

'He didn't say.'

'Mmmm. Well, have you got anything else for me?'

'That's it. Oh, wait. The guy smokes cigarettes. There were a few grains of tobacco in the envelope. We tested them, but they could have come from any of the major brands.'

'Okay, Sam. Thanks a lot.'

'Don't mention it. I'll send that kid's prints over. So long.'

Grossman hung up. Hawes lifted his copy of the letter from the desk, opened the door, and started for Lieutenant Byrnes's office. It was then that he noticed the chaos in the squad-room.

It was the noise that first attracted him, the sound of shrill voices raised in protest, speculation, and wonder. And then his eyes were assailed with what seemed like an overly patriotic display, a parade for the dead-and-gone Fourth of July. The squad-room was bursting with red, white, and blue. Hawes blinked. Crowding the slatted rail divider, lined up against the desks and the file cabinets and the windows and the bulletin boards, slouched into every conceivable corner of the room, were at least eight thousand kids in blue dungarees and red-and-white-striped tee shirts.

'Shut up!' Lieutenant Byrnes shouted. 'Now, just knock off all this chatter!'

The room modulated slowly into silence.

'Welcome to the Grover Park Nursery School,' Carella said to Hawes, smiling.

'Jesus,' Hawes said, 'we sure as hell have an efficient bunch of patrolmen in this precinct.'

The efficient bunch of patrolmen had followed their orders to the letter, rounding up every ten-year-old kid wearing dungarees and a red-striped shirt. They had not asked for birth certificates, and so the kids ranged from seven to thirteen. The tee shirts, too, were not all tee shirts. Some of them sported collars and buttons. But the patrolmen had done their job, and a hasty count of the kids revised Hawes's earlier estimate of eight thousand. There were only seven thousand. Well, at least three dozen, anyway. Apparently there had been a run on red-striped tee shirts in the neighbourhood. Either that, or a new street gang was forming and they had decided upon this as their uniform.

'Which of you kids delivered a letter to this precinct this morning?' Byrnes asked.

'What kinda letter?' one kid asked.

'What difference does it make? Did you deliver it?'

'Naw,' the kid answered.

'Then shut up. Which one of you delivered it?'

Nobody answered.

'Come on, come on, speak up,' Byrnes said.

An eight-year-old kid, obviously impressed by the Hollywood effort, piped, 'I wanna call my lawyer.'

The other kids all laughed.

'Shut up!' Byrnes roared. 'Now, listen, you're not in any trouble. We're only trying to locate the man who gave you that letter, that's all. So if you delivered it, speak up.'

'What'd he do, this guy?' a twelve-year-old asked.

'Did you deliver the letter?'

'No. I just wanna know what he done, this guy.'

'Any of you deliver the letter?' Byrnes asked again. The boys were all shaking their heads. Byrnes turned to Murchison. 'How about it, Dave? Recognize one of them?'

'Hard to say,' Murchison said. 'One thing for sure, he was a blond kid. You can let all the dark-haired kids go. We've got a couple of redheads in there, too. They're no good. This kid was blond.'