Эд Макбейн - Lady, Lady, I Did It!

“I appreciate it.”

“I don’t run a cat house here, but I don’t bother my people either. Privacy’s a tough thing to find in this city. The way I figure it, every man’s entitled to a door he can close against the world.”

“And you got the feeling Eileen Glennon wanted that door to close?”

“Yes, lad, that’s the feeling I got.”

“But she didn’t mention anyone else?”

“Who else would she mention?”

“Did she sign for the room?”

“Not one of my rules. She paid a week’s rent in advance, and I gave her a receipt. That’s all she needed. Harry O’Loughlin’s an honest man who keeps a bargain.”

“But she never came back?”

“No.”

“Now think hard, Mr. O’Loughlin. On Saturday, the day Eileen Glennon was supposed to have taken the room, did... did anyone come here asking for her?”

“Nope.”

“Think, please. Did a sixteen-year-old girl come here asking for her?”

“Nope.”

“Did you see a sixteen-year-old girl hanging around outside?”

“Nope.”

“As if she were waiting for someone?”

“Nope.”

O’Brien sighed.

“I don’t get it,” O’Loughlin said.

“I think you rented the room to a woman named Claire Townsend,” O’Brien said. “I don’t know why she used Eileen Glennon’s name, but I suspect she was renting the room for the young girl. Why, I don’t know.”

“Well, if she was renting it for someone else... Let me get this straight. The girl who rented the room was named Claire Townsend?”

“I think so, yes.”

“And you say she used this Eileen Glennon’s name and was actually renting the room for her?”

“I think so, yes. It looks that way.”

“Then why didn’t Eileen Glennon come here Saturday? I mean, if the room was for her...”

“I think she did come here, Mr. O’Loughlin. She came here and waited for Claire to pick up the key and let her in. But Claire never showed up.”

“Why not? If she went to all the trouble of renting the room—”

“Because Claire Townsend was killed Friday night.”

“Oh.” O’Loughlin picked up his glass and drained it. He poured himself another shot, moved the bottle toward O’Brien’s glass, and said, “Some more?”

O’Brien covered the glass with his palm. “No. No, thanks.”

“Something I don’t understand,” O’Loughlin said.

“What’s that?”

“Why’d Claire Townsend use the other girl’s name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was she trying to hide something?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, was she in trouble with the police?”

“No.”

“Was she doing something unlawful?”

“I don’t know.”

“And where’d the other girl disappear to? If she rented the room for her...?”

“I don’t know,” O’Brien said. He paused and looked at his empty glass. “Maybe you’d better give me another shot,” he said.

The Majesta patrolman had come on duty at 4:45 P.M., and it was now close to 6:00. It was Indian summer, true, but timetables had no respect for unseasonal temperature and dusk came just as if it were truly autumn. He was walking through a small park, cutting diagonally across it over a path that was part of his beat, when he saw the spot of yellow off under the trees. He peered into the fast-falling darkness. The yellow seemed to be the sleeve and skirt of a topcoat, partially hidden by a large boulder and the trunk of a tree. The patrolman climbed the grassy knoll and walked a little closer. Sure enough, that’s what it was. A woman’s yellow topcoat.

He walked around the boulder to pick it up.

The coat was thrown carelessly on the ground behind the boulder. A girl was lying on her back not three feet from the coat, staring up at the darkening sky. The girl’s eyes and mouth were open. She was wearing a gray skirt, and the skirt was drenched with blood. Dried blood had stained her exposed thighs and her legs. She was no more than sixteen or seventeen years old.

The patrolman, who had seen death before, knew he was looking at a corpse.

He had no way of knowing the corpse was named Eileen Glennon.

A corpse has no rights.

If you are a corpse, they can take your picture from a hundred unflattering angles as you stare up unseeingly at the popping flash guns, your skirt pulled back to reveal the dried and caked blood on the inside of your thighs and legs, the last flies of summer swarming about your open mouth. They can press their thumbs into your eyes at last to close your lids, and they can pull your skirt down over your knees and mark the position of your body on the shelf of flat rock where you lay motionless behind the trees. They can roll you onto a stretcher and carry you down to the waiting ambulance, the stretcher bouncing as they move along; they are not concerned for your comfort — you are beyond feeling. They can put the stretcher down on the floor of the ambulance with a sudden jolt and then cover you with a sheet — your waist, your young breasts, your throat, your face. You have no rights.

If you are a corpse, they can take off your clothing and put it into a plastic bag, and tag it, and send it to the police laboratory. They can place your cold and naked body on a stainlesssteel table and dissect you in search of a cause of death. You have no rights. You are a corpse, a stiff, a container of clues perhaps, but no longer a person; you have forfeited your rights — forfeited them to death.

If you are a junkie, you have more rights than a corpse — but not many more.

You can still walk and breathe and sleep and laugh and cry — which is something. These things are life — they are not things to be discounted — and you can still do these things. But if you are a junkie you are involved in your own brand of living death, and you are not very much better off than a bona fide corpse. Your death is continuous and persistent. It starts every morning when you wake up and take that first shot, and it continues throughout the day-long hustle for heroin, punctured by the other death-giving shots, or through the night and into another morning, over and over again, you’re a record player spinning the same tired mournful dirge, and the needle is stuck — in your arm. You know you’re dead, and everybody else knows it, too.

Especially the cops.

While the corpse named Eileen Glennon was being disrobed and then dissected, a drug addict named Michael Pine was being questioned in the squadroom of the 87th Precinct. His questioner was a cop named Hal Willis who could take junkies or leave them alone but whose preference was to leave them alone. A lot has been said about the psychology of the drug addict, but Hal Willis wasn’t a psychologist, he was only a cop. He was a disciplined cop who had learned judo because he was only five feet eight inches tall and because he had learned at an early age that big guys like to push around little guys unless little guys learn how to push back. Judo was an exact science and a disciplined one. Drug addiction, so far as Willis was concerned, was the ultimate in lack of discipline. He didn’t like junkies, but only because it seemed to him that they didn’t have to be junkies. He knew with certainty that if he were ever hooked on heroin, he could kick the habit in a week. He would lock himself in a room and puke out his guts, but he would kick it. Discipline. He didn’t hate junkies, and he didn’t pity them; he simply felt they were lacking in self-control, and this to Willis was unforgivable.

“You knew La Scala, huh?” he said to Pine.

“Yeah,” Pine answered. He delivered the word quickly and curtly. No wise-guy intonation, no enthusiasm, just “Yeah,” like the sharp rap of a knuckle on wood.