Эд Макбейн: Lady, Lady, I Did It!

Like it was about murder.

Bert Kling arrived at the squadroom at 2:00 that Saturday afternoon, in time to see the report that had been delivered from Ballistics downtown. He was unshaven, a blond bristle covering his jowls and his chin. He was wearing the same suit and shirt he’d worn the night before, but he had taken off his tie, and his clothes looked as if he’d worn them to sleep. He accepted a few condolences in the corridor outside the squadroom, turned down the coffee Miscolo offered him, and went directly into the lieutenant’s office. He stayed with Byrnes for a half hour. When he came out into the squadroom again, Carella and Meyer had returned from the university, where a promising lead had turned as dead as ashes. He went to Carella’s desk. “Steve,” he said. “I’m working on it.” Carella looked up and nodded. “Think that’s a good idea?” “I just spoke to the lieutenant,” Kling said. His voice was curiously toneless. “He thinks it’ll be all right.”

“I just thought—”

“I want to work on it, Steve.”

“All right.”

“Actually, I... I was here when the squeal came in, so... so officially I...”

“It’s all right with me, Bert. I was only thinking of you.”

“I’ll be all right when we find him,” Kling said.

Carella and Meyer exchanged a silent glance.

“Well... well, then, sure. Sure. You... you want to see this Ballistics report?”

Kling took the manila envelope silently, and silently he opened it. There were two reports in the envelope. One described a .45-caliber automatic. The other described a .22. Kling studied each of the reports separately.

There is nothing very mysterious about determining the make of an unknown firearm when one possesses a sample bullet fired from it. Kling, as a working cop, knew this. At the same time, he found the process a little confusing, and he tried not to think about it too much or too often.

He knew that there was a vast working file of revolvers, pistols, and bullets in the Ballistics Bureau, and that all these were classified by caliber, by number of lands and grooves, and by direction of the rifling twist. In addition, he knew that all handguns in current use had rifled bores that put a fired bullet in rotation as it passed through the barrel. Lands, he had learned by rote, were the smooth surfaces between the spiral grooves in the barrel. Lands and grooves left marks upon a bullet.

When a spent bullet was recovered and sent to Ballistics, it was rolled on a sheet of carbon paper and then compared against the specimen cards in the file. If Ballistics tentatively made a bullet from the file cards, the suspect bullet was put under a microscope with a test bullet from another part of the file and both were accurately compared. Along about then, when twist and angle of twist entered the picture, Kling got a little confused.

That’s why he never thought much about it. He knew simply that the same make of pistol or revolver would always fire a bullet with the same number and width of grooves and the same spiral direction and twist. So he accepted the Ballistics reports unquestioningly.

“He used two different guns, huh?” Kling said.

“Yes,” Carella answered. “That explains the conflicting reports from our eyewitnesses. You didn’t see those, Bert. They’re in the file.”

“Under what?”

“Under...” Carella hesitated. “Under K... for Kling.”

Kling nodded briefly. It was difficult to tell what he was thinking in that moment.

“We figured he was after one of the four he got, Bert,” Meyer said. He spoke cautiously and slowly. One of the four had been Claire Townsend.

Kling nodded.

“We don’t know which one,” Carella said.

“We questioned Mrs. Land this morning, and she gave us what looked like a lead, but it fizzled. We want to hit the others today and tomorrow.”

“I’ll take one,” Kling said. He paused. “I’d rather not question Claire’s father, but any of the others...”

“Sure,” Carella said.

The men were silent. Both Meyer and Carella knew that something had to be said, and it had to be said now. Meyer was the senior of the two men — in age and in years with the squad — but he looked to Carella pleadingly, and Carella took the cue, cleared his throat, and said, “Bert, I think... I think we ought to get something straight.”

Kling looked up.

“We want this guy. We want him very bad.”

“I know that.”

“We’ve got almost nothing to go on, and that doesn’t make it easy. It’ll make it harder if—”

“If what?”

“If we don’t work this as a team.”

“We’re working as a team,” Kling said.

“Bert, are you sure you want in on this?”

“I’m sure.”

“Are you sure you can question somebody and listen to the facts of Claire’s death and be able to think of—”

“I can do it,” Kling said immediately.

“Don’t cut me off, Bert. I’m talking about a multiple murder in a bookstore, and one of the victims was—”

“I said I can do it.”

“—one of the victims was Claire Townsend. Now can you?”

“Don’t be a son of a bitch, Steve. I can do it, and I want to do it, and—”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I think so!” Kling said heatedly.

“You won’t even let me mention her name here in the squadroom, for Christ’s sake! What are you going to do when someone describes the way she was killed?”

“I know she was killed,” Kling said softly.

“Bert...”

“I know she’s dead.”

“Look, stay off it. Do me a favor and—”

“Friday the thirteenth,” Kling said. “My mother used to call it a hoodoo jinx of a day. I know she’s dead, Steve. I’ll be able to... to... I’ll work with you, and I’ll be thinking straight, don’t worry. You don’t know how much I want to catch this guy. You just don’t know how much I won’t be good for anything else until we get him, believe me. I won’t be good for another goddamn thing.”

“There’s the possibility,” Carella said evenly, “that the killer was after Claire.”

“I know.”

“There’s the possibility we may find out things about Claire you wouldn’t particularly like to know.”

“There’s nothing new I can find out about Claire.”

“Homicide opens a lot of closets, Bert.”

“Where do you want me to go?” Kling asked. “What do you want me to do?”

Carella and Meyer exchanged another long glance. “Okay,” Carella said at last. “Go home and shave and change your clothes. Here’s the address of Mrs. Joseph Wechsler. We’re trying to find out if any of the victims had any warnings or threats or — we want to find exactly who he was after, Bert.”

“All right.” Kling picked up the sheet of paper, folded it in two, and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He was starting out of the squadroom when Carella called to him.

“Bert?”

Kling turned. “Yeah?”

“You... you know how we feel about this, don’t you?”

Kling nodded. “I think I do.”

“Okay.”

The two men stared at each other for a moment. Then Kling turned and walked rapidly out of the room.

The city is a crazy thing of many parts that don’t quite fit together. You would think all the pieces would join, like the interlocking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but somehow the rivers and streams and bridges and tunnels separate and join areas that, in character and geography, could be foreign countries miles apart and not segments of the same sprawling metropolis.

Isola, of course, was the hub of the city, and the 87th Precinct was smack in the center of that hub, like a wheel within a wheel, turning. Isola was an island, aptly and literally named by an unimaginative Italian explorer who had stumbled upon America, long after his compatriot had found it and claimed it for Queen Isabella. Columbus notwithstanding, the latter-day adventurer had come upon this lovely island, had been struck speechless by its beauty, and had muttered simply, “Isola.” Not “Isola Bella” or “Isola Bellissima” or “Isola la piu bella d’Italia,” but merely “Isola.”