Ed McBain - Lady Killer

Lady Killer

Ed McBain

Published: 1958. ISBN 0749005610

CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

CHAPTER ONE

Were you a crank this week????

A crank is a person who calls Frederick 7-8024 and says, 'I don't want to have to tell you about that Chinese laundry downstairs again. The owner uses a steam iron, and the hissing keeps me awake. Now, will you please arrest him?'

A crank is a person who addresses a letter to the 87th Precinct and writes: 'I am surrounded by assassins. I need police protection. The Russians know that I have invented a supersonic tank.'

Every police precinct in the world gets its share of crank calls and letters every day of the week. The calls and letters range from the sincere to the idiotic to the sublime. There are people who have information about suspected Communists, kidnappers, murderers, abortionists, forgers, and high-class whorehouses. There are people who complain about television comedians, mice, landlords, loud phonographs, strange ticking sounds in the walls, and automobile horns that play, 'I'll be down to getya inna taxi, honey.' There are people who claim to have been exhorted, extorted, duped, threatened, libelled, slandered, beaten, maimed, and even murdered. The classic call at the 87th was from a woman who claimed to have been shot dead four days ago, and why hadn't the police yet found her murderer?

There are, too, mysterious and anonymous calls that flatly and simply state, 'There is a bomb in a shoe box at the Avon theatre.'

Crank calls can be terrifying. Crank calls and letters cost the city a lot of time and expense. The trouble is, you see, that you can't tell a crank from a non-crank without a programme.

Were you a crank this week????

It was Wednesday, 24 July.

The city was hot, and the muster-room of the 87th Precinct was probably the hottest place in the city. Dave Murchison sat behind the high desk to the left of the entrance doorway and wished that his underwear shorts would stop riding up his buttocks. It was only eight o'clock in the morning, but the city had been building a blast-oven temperature all the preceding day, and the night had brought no relief. And now, with the sun barely up, the city was still wilted. It was difficult to imagine any further wilting, but Dave Murchison knew the muster-room would get hotter and hotter and hotter as the day wore on, and he knew the small rotating fan on the corner of the high desk would not help to cool the room, and he also knew his undershorts would continue to ride up his buttocks.

At 7.45 a.m., Captain Frick, the commanding officer of the precinct, had inspected the handful of uniformed policemen who had not relieved their colleagues on post. He had then sent them out into the streets and turned to Murchison.

'Going to be a scorcher, huh, Dave?' he had asked.

Murchison had nodded bleakly. He was fifty-three years old, and had lived through many a suffocating summer in his day. He had learned over the years that comments about the weather very rarely changed the weather. The thing to do was sit it out quietly. It was his own belief that all this heat was caused by those damn H-bomb explosions in the Pacific. Human beings had begun messing around with stuff best left to God, and this was what they got for it.

Surlily Dave Murchison tugged at his underwear.

He barely looked at the boy who mounted the stone steps before the station house and walked into the muster-room. The kid glanced at the sign requesting all visitors to stop at the desk. He walked to the sign and stood before it, laboriously working out the words.

'What do you want, sonny?' Murchison asked.

'You the desk sergeant?'

'I'm the desk sergeant,' Murchison said. He reflected on the virtues of a job that made it necessary to justify yourself to a snotnose.

'Here,' the kid said, and he handed Murchison an envelope. Murchison took it. The boy started out of the building.

'Just a second, kid,' Murchison said.

The kid didn't stop. He kept walking, down the steps, out onto the sidewalk, into the city, into the world.

'Hey!' Murchison said. Hastily he looked around him for a patrolman. He had never seen it to fail. There never was a cop around when you needed one.

Sourly he tugged at his undershorts and opened the envelope. He read the single page inside the envelope. Then he folded the page, put it back into the envelope, and shouted, 'Is there another damn cop in this building besides me on the ground floor?'

A patrolman poked his head from behind one of the doors.

'Something wrong, Sarge?' he asked.

'Where the hell is everybody?'

'Around,' the patrolman said. 'We're around.'

'Take this letter up to the squad-room,' Murchison said. He handed the envelope over the desk.

'A billet-doux ?' the patrolman asked. Murchison did not reply. It was too hot for half-assed attempts at humour. The patrolman shrugged and followed the pointing DETECTIVE DIVISION sign to the second floor of the building. He walked down the corridor, stopped at the slatted rail divider, pushed open the gate in the railing, walked to the desk of Cotton Hawes, and said, 'Desk sergeant said to bring this up here.'

'Thanks,' Hawes said, and he opened the letter. The letter read:

CHAPTER TWO

Detective Hawes read the letter, and then read it again. His first reaction was 'Crank'.

His second reaction was 'Suppose not?'

Sighing, he shoved back his chair and walked across squad-room. He was a tall man, six feet two inches in slipper socks, and he weighed one hundred and ninety pounds. He had blue eyes and a square jaw with a cleft chin. His hair was red, except for a streak over his left temple where he had once been knifed and where the hair had curiously grown in white after the wound healed. His straight nose was clean and unbroken, and he had a good mouth with a wide lower lip. His fists were huge. He used one of them now on the lieutenant's door.

'Come!' Lieutenant Byrnes shouted.

Hawes opened the door and stepped into the corner office. A rotating fan swept air across the lieutenant's desk. Byrnes sat behind the desk, a compact man in shirt sleeves, his tie pulled down, his collar open, the sleeves rolled up over his biceps.

'The newspapers say rain,' he said. 'Where the hell's the rain?' Hawes grinned. 'You bringing me trouble, Hawes?'

'I don't know. What do you think?' He put the letter on Byrnes's desk.

Byrnes read it rapidly. 'It never fails,' he said. 'We always get the cuckoos when the temperature's in the nineties. It drives them out of the woodwork.'

'Do you think it's a crank, sir?'

'How the hell do I know? It's either a crank, or it's legit.' He smiled. 'That's a phenomenal bit of deduction, isn't it? It's no wonder I'm a lieutenant.'

'What do we do?' Hawes asked.

'What time is it?'

Hawes looked at his watch. 'A little past eight, sir.'

'That gives us about twelve hours—assuming this is legit—to stop a potential killer from knocking off "the lady", whoever she is. Twelve hours to find a killer and a victim in a city of eight million people, with nothing more to go on than this letter. If it's legit.'

'It may be, sir.'

'I know,' Byrnes said reflectively. 'It may also be somebody's idea of a joke. Nothing to do? Time growing heavy on your hands? Write a letter to the cops. Send them off on a wild-goose chase. It could be that, Cotton.'