Эд Макбейн - Ice

“Carella residence,” she said.

“Fanny, hi, it’s me,” he said. “Can you give Teddy a message? First tell her I’ve got tickets to a show called Fatback, and I thought we’d have dinner down here tonight before the show. Ask her to meet me at six-thirty, at a place called O’Malley’s; she knows it, we’ve been there before. Next, tell her to bring a lot of cash; I’m running low.”

“That’s three messages,” Fanny said. “How much cash?”

“Enough to cover dinner.”

“I planned to make pork chops,” Fanny said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “This came up all of a sudden.”

“Mm,” Fanny said.

He visualized her standing by the phone in the living room. Fanny Knowles was “fiftyish,” as she put it in her faint Irish brogue, and she had blue hair, and she wore a pince-nez, and she weighed about 150 pounds, and she’d ruled the Carella household with an iron fist from the day she’d arrived there as a temporary gift from Teddy’s father — ten years ago. Fanny was a registered nurse, and she’d originally been hired to stay with the Carellas for only a month, just long enough to give Teddy a hand till she was able to cope alone with the infant twins. It was Fanny who suggested that she ought to stay on a while longer, at a salary they could afford, telling them she never again wanted to stick another thermometer into a dying old man. She was still there. Her silence on the phone was ominous.

“Fanny, I’m really sorry,” he said. “This is sort of business.”

“What do I do with a dozen pork chops?” she said.

“Make a cassoulet,” he said.

“What in hell is a cassoulet?” she asked.

“Look it up,” he said. “Will you give her my message?”

“When she gets home,” Fanny said, “which should be any minute now. She’ll have to run a foot race to meet you downtown at six-thirty.”

“Well, tell her, okay?”

“I’ll tell her,” Fanny said, and hung up.

He put the receiver back on the hook, went out of the theater, found the alley leading to the stage door, went to the door, and knocked on it.

An old man opened the door and peered out at him.

“Box office is up front,” he said.

Carella showed him his shield and ID card. “I’m supposed to pick up a list,” he said.

“What list?”

“Of everyone in the company.”

“Oh, yeah, Mr. Carter phoned me about it. Come on in. I got one on the clipboard here, but I can’t let you have it, it’s the only one I got.” The old man paused. “You can copy it down, if you like.”

Carella went to the list hanging on the wall near the telephone, and looked at it. Four typewritten pages. He glanced at his watch.

“Okay if I take it out and have it Xeroxed?” he asked.

“No way,” the old man said. “Only one I got.”

“I was hoping—”

“How’re we supposed to get in touch with anybody, case he don’t show up for half hour? How we supposed to know to put in a swing dancer case somebody’s sick or something? That list has to stay right there, right where it is.” The old man paused. “You want my advice?”

Carella sighed, sat on the high stool near the wall telephone, and began copying the list into his notebook.

The Laundromat was on the corner of Culver and Tenth, a neighborhood enclave that for many years had been exclusively Irish but that nowadays was a rich melting-pot mixture of Irish, black, and Puerto Rican. The melting pot here, as elsewhere in this city, never seemed to come to a precise boil, but that didn’t bother any of the residents; they all knew it was nonsense, anyway. Even though they all shopped the same supermarkets and clothing stores; even though they all bought gasoline at the same gas stations and rode the same subways; even though they washed their clothes at the same Laundromats and ate hamburgers side by side in the same greasy spoons, they all knew that when it came to socializing it was the Irish with the Irish and the blacks with the blacks and the Puerto Ricans with the Puerto Ricans and never mind that brotherhood-of-man stuff.

Eileen Burke, what with her peaches-and-cream complexion and her red hair and green eyes, could have passed for any daughter of Hibernian descent in the neighborhood — which, of course, was exactly what they were hoping for. It would not do to have the Dirty Panties Bandit, as the boys of the Eight-Seven had wittily taken to calling him, pop into the Laundromat with his .357 Magnum in his fist, spot Eileen for a policewoman, and put a hole the size of a bowling ball in her ample chest. No, no. Eileen Burke did not want to become a dead heroine. Eileen Burke wanted to become the first lady Chief of Detectives in this city, but not over her own dead body. For the job tonight, she was dressed rather more sedately than she would have been if she’d been on the street trying to flush a rapist. Her red hair was pulled to the back of her head, held there with a rubber band, and covered with a dun-colored scarf knotted under her chin and hiding the pair of gold loop earrings she considered her good-luck charms. She was wearing a cloth coat that matched the scarf, and knee-length brown socks and brown rubber boots and she was sitting on a yellow plastic chair in the very cold Laundromat, watching her dirty laundry (or rather the dirty laundry supplied by the Eight-Seven) turn over and over in one of the washing machines while the neon sign in the window of the place flashed LAUNDROMAT first in orange, and then LAVANDERÍA in green. In the open handbag on her lap, the butt of a .38 Detective’s Special beckoned from behind a wad of Kleenex tissues.

The manager of the place did not know Eileen was a cop. The manager of the place was the night man, who came on at 4:00 and worked through till midnight, at which time he locked up the place and went home. Every morning, the owner of the Laundromat would come around to unlock the machines, pour all the coins into a big gray sack, and take them to the bank. That was the owner’s job: emptying the machines of coins. The owner had thirty-seven Laundromats all over the city, and he lived in a very good section of Majesta. He did not empty the machines at closing time because he thought that might be dangerous, which in fact it would have been. He preferred that his thirty-seven night men all over the city simply lock the doors, turn on the burglar alarms, and go home. That was part of their job, the night men. The rest of their job was to make change for the ladies who brought in their dirty clothes, and to call for service if any of the machines broke down, and also to make sure nobody stole any of the cheap plastic furniture in the various Laundromats, although the owner didn’t care much about that since he’d got a break on the stuff from his brother-in-law. Every now and then it occurred to the owner that his thirty-seven night men each had keys to the thirty-seven separate burglar alarms in the thirty-seven different locations and if they decided to go into cahoots with one of the crazies in this city, they could open the stores and break open the machines — but so what? Easy come, easy go. Besides, he liked to think all of his night men were pure and innocent.

Detective Hal Willis knew for damn sure that the night man at the Laundromat on Tenth and Culver was as pure and as innocent as the driven snow so far as the true identity of Eileen Burke was concerned. The night man did not know she was a cop, nor did he know that Willis himself, angle-parked in an unmarked green Toronado in front of the bar next door to the Laundromat, was also a cop. In fact, the night man did not have the faintest inkling that the Eight-Seven had chosen his nice little establishment for a stakeout on the assumption that the Dirty Panties Bandit would hit it next. The assumption seemed a good educated guess. The man had been working his way straight down Culver Avenue for the past three weeks, hitting Laundromats on alternate sides of the avenue, inexorably moving farther and farther downtown. The place he’d hit three nights ago had been on the south side of the avenue. The Laundromat they were staking out tonight was eight blocks farther downtown, on the north side of the avenue.