Эд Макбейн - Ice

“You!” she said sharply.

The man turned toward her. The gun turned at the same time.

“Take mine,” she said.

“What?” he said.

“Leave her alone. Take my panties.”

“What?”

“Reach under my skirt,” she whispered. “Rip off my panties.”

She thought for a terrifying moment that she’d made a costly mistake. His face contorted in what appeared to be rage, and the gun began shaking even more violently in his fist. Oh, God, she thought, I’ve forced him out of the closet, I’ve forced him to see himself for what he is, that gun is his cock as sure as I’m sitting here, and he’s going to jerk it off into my face in the next ten seconds! And then a strange thing happened to his face, a strange smile replaced the anger, a strange secret smile touched the corners of his mouth, a secret communication flashed in his eyes, his eyes to her eyes, their secret, a secret to share, he lowered the gun, he moved toward her.

“Police!” she shouted, and the .38 came up out of the bag in the same instant that she came up off the plastic chair, and she rammed the muzzle of the gun into the hollow of his throat and said so quietly that only he could hear it, “Don’t even think it or I’ll shoot you dead!” And she would remember later and remember always the way the shouted word “Police!” had shattered the secret in his eyes, their shared secret, and she would always wonder if the way she’d disarmed him hadn’t been particularly cruel and unjust.

She clamped the handcuffs onto his wrists and then stooped to pick up the Magnum from where he’d dropped it on the Laundromat floor.

Carella could not fall asleep.

He kept thinking that too many people were involved. He kept thinking that even if the lieutenant was willing to put another man on the case, even then it would take them at least a week to question all those people in the show, that was if the lieutenant agreed to give him another man, fat chance he’d agree to that. Well, maybe he would. The death of Paco Lopez had gone by without a ripple, there weren’t many people who cared about a two-bit dealer biting the dust — “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” as Carella’s mother used to say when he was but a mere lad coming along in this city he loved. He often wondered where his mother had picked up the expressions that had been her favorites. “Ike and Mike, they look alike,” she would often say of him and his father. Or, whenever Carella managed to knock over a glass of milk at the dinner table, “Very good, Eddie.” Or, regarding his Aunt Clara, whom Carella had positively adored, “She dresses like Astor’s pet horse.” Or (speaking of horses), whenever anyone became insulted about something, Carella’s mother would describe it with the words, “He got on his high horse.” Were Ike and Mike comic strip characters? Who in the world was Eddie? Good riddance to bad rubbish — was there such a thing as good rubbish?

Paco Lopez had been bad rubbish for sure, and no one had mourned his passing. But the Anderson girl’s death had made headlines in the city’s afternoon newspaper, and the muckraking journalists on that yellow sheet were beginning to clamor for a speedy arrest of the “maniac responsible.” So maybe the lieutenant would give Carella the additional man he planned to request, maybe Pete himself was getting some pressure from upstairs.

The newspapers did not yet know, nor did Carella plan to tell them, that a man named Paco Lopez, whose death had gone unnoticed, had been killed with the same gun. There was nothing the journalists would have liked better than a possible romantic link (a possibility that had crossed Carella’s mind) between a young blonde dancer and a Puerto Rican dope dealer. A story like that would make even the television newscasters jump for joy. There were, after all, two Puerto Rican dancers in the show — well, not necessarily Puerto Rican, Carella had asked only if there were any Hispanics in the show, and Tina Wong had told him there were two, so they could be anything, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Colombian, you name it, this city had it. Both of them faggots. Carella wondered if either of them was doing nose candy. Carella wondered if either of them had known Paco Lopez. That was the damn trouble. A hundred fourteen people involved with that show, one or more of whom may have been the connection between Sally Anderson and Paco Lopez, if there was any connection at all besides the .38 caliber gun that had killed them both.

Please don’t let it be a crazy, he thought. Please let it be a nice sensible murderer who killed both those people for a very good reason.

He kept staring up at the ceiling.

There were just too many people involved, he thought.

Willis was trying to explain why he hadn’t happened to notice the Dirty Panties Bandit when he entered the Laundromat. They had sent down for pizza, and now they sat in the relative 1:00 A.M. silence of the squadroom, eating Papa Joe’s really pretty good combination anchovies and pepperoni and drinking Miscolo’s really pretty lousy Colombian coffee; Detective Bert Kling was sitting with them, but he wasn’t eating or saying very much.

Eileen remembered him as a man with a huge appetite, and she wondered now if he was on a diet. He looked thinner than she recalled — well, that had been several years back — and he also looked somewhat drawn and pale and, well, unkempt. His straight blond hair was growing raggedly over his shirt collar and his ears, and the collar itself looked a bit frayed, and his suit looked unpressed, and there were stains on the tie he was wearing. Eileen figured he was maybe coming in off a stakeout someplace. Maybe he was supposed to look like somebody who was going to seed. And maybe those dark shadows under his eyes were all part of the role he was playing out there on the street, in which case he should get not only a commendation but an Academy Award besides.

Willis was very apologetic.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said, “I figured we didn’t have a chance of our man showing. Because on the other jobs, he usually hit between ten and ten-thirty, and it was almost eleven when this guy came running out of the bar—”

“Wait a minute,” Eileen said. “What guy?”

“Came running out of the bar next door,” Willis said. “Bert, don’t you want some of this?”

“Thanks,” Kling said, and shook his head.

“Yelling, ‘Police, police,’ ” Willis said.

“When was this?” Eileen asked.

“I told you, a little before eleven,” Willis said. “Even so, if I thought we had a chance of our man showing I’d have said screw it, let some other cop handle whatever it is in the bar there. But I mean it, Eileen, I figured we’d had it for tonight.”

“So you went in the bar?”

“No. Well, yes. But not right away, no, I got out of the car, and I asked the guy what the trouble was, and he asked me did I see a cop anywhere because there was somebody with a knife in the bar and I told him I was a cop and he said I ought to go in there and take the knife away before somebody got cut.”

“So naturally you went right in,” Eileen said, and winked at Kling. Kling did not wink back. Kling lifted his coffee cup and sipped at it. He seemed not to be listening to what Willis was saying. He seemed almost comatose. Eileen wondered what was wrong with him.

“No, I still gave it a bit of thought,” Willis said. “I would have rushed in immediately, of course—”

“Of course,” Eileen said.

“To disarm that guy... who by the way turned out to be a girl... but I was worried about you being all alone there in the Laundromat in case Mr. Bloomers did decide to show up.”