Ed McBain - Give the Boys a Great Big Hand

Hawes stood in the hallway now and studied the mailboxes. None of them carried a nameplate for Bubbles Caesar or Charles Tudor or Mike Chirapadano or anyone at all with whom Hawes was familiar. Hawes examined the mailboxes again, relying upon one of the most elementary pieces of police knowledge in his second study for the nameplates. For reasons known only to God and psychiatrists, when a person assumes a fictitious name, the assumed name will generally have the same initials as the person’s real name. Actually, this isn’t a mystery worthy of supernatural or psychiatric secrecy. The simple fact is that a great many people own monogrammed handkerchiefs, or shirts, or suitcases, or dispatch cases, or whatever. And if a man named Benjamin Franklin who has the initials B. F. on his bags and his shirts and his underwear and maybe tattooed on his forehead should suddenly register in a hotel as George Washington, a curious clerk might wonder whether or not Benjy came by his B. F. luggage in an illegal manner. Since a man using an assumed name is a man who is not anxious to attract attention, he will do everything possible to make things easier for himself. And so he will use the initials of his real name in choosing an alias.

One of the mailboxes carried a nameplate for a person called Christopher Talley.

It sounded phony, and it utilized the C. T. initials, and so Hawes made a mental note of the apartment number: 6B.

Then he pressed the bell for apartment 2A, waited for the answering buzz that released the inner door lock, and rapidly climbed the steps to the sixth floor. Outside apartment 6B, he put his ear to the door and listened. Inside the apartment, a man was talking.

“Barbara,” the man said, “I brought you some more flowers.”

In the police sedan, Carella said, “I don’t get it, Bert. I just don’t get it.”

“What’s the trouble?” Kling asked.

“No trouble. Only confusion. We find a pair of hands, and the blood group is identified as ‘O,’ right?”

“Right.”

“Okay. Mike Chirapadano is in that blood group. He’s also a big guy, and he vanished last month, and so that would make him a good prospect for the victim, am I right?”

“Right,” Kling said.

“Okay. But when we find the clothes the murderer was wearing, it turns out they belonged to Mike Chirapadano. So it turns out that he’s a good prospect for the murderer, too.”

“Yeah?” Kling said.

“Yeah. Then we get a line on Bubbles Caesar’s hideout, the place she and Chirapadano used, the place we’re going to right now—”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah; and it turns out the phone is listed for Charles Tudor, Bubbles’s agent. Now how does that figure?”

“There’s 1611 up ahead,” Kling said.

Standing in the hallway, Hawes could hear only the man’s voice, and the voice definitely belonged to Charles Tudor. He wondered whether or not he should crash the apartment. Scarcely daring to breathe, trying desperately to hear the girl’s replies, he kept his ear glued to the wood of the door, listening.

“Do you like the flowers, Barbara?” Tudor said.

There was a pause. Hawes listened, but could hear no reply.

“I didn’t know whether or not you liked gardenias, but we have so many of the others in here. Well, a beautiful woman should have lots of flowers.”

Another pause.

“You do like gardenias?” Tudor said. “Good. You look beautiful today, Barbara. Beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you looking so beautiful. Did I tell you about the police?”

Hawes listened for the reply. He thought instantly of Marla Phillips’s tiny voice, and he wondered if all big girls were naturally endowed with the same voices. He could not hear a word.

“You don’t want to hear about the police?” Tudor said. “Well, they came to see me again yesterday. Asking about you and me. And Mike. And asking whether or not I owned a black raincoat and umbrella. I told them I didn’t. That’s the truth, Barbara. I really don’t own a black raincoat, and I’ve never liked umbrellas. You didn’t know that, did you? Well, there are a lot of things you don’t know about me. I’m a very complex person. But we have lots of time. You can learn all about me. You look so lovely. Do you mind my telling you how beautiful you look?”

This time, Hawes heard something.

But the sound had come from behind him, in the hallway.

He whirled, drawing his.38 instantly.

“Put up the gun, Cotton,” Carella whispered.

“Man, you scared the hell out of me!” Hawes whispered back. He peered past Carella, saw Kling standing there behind him.

“Tudor in there?” Carella asked.

“Yeah. He’s with the girl.”

“Bubbles?”

“That’s right.”

“Okay, let’s break it open,” Carella said.

Kling took up a position to the right of the door, Hawes to the left. Carella braced himself and kicked in the lock. The door swung open. They burst into the room with their guns in their hands, and they saw Charles Tudor on his knees at one end of the room. And then they saw what was behind Tudor, and each of the men separately felt identical waves of shock and terror and pity, and Carella knew at once that they would not need their guns.

The room was filled with flowers. Bouquets of red roses and white roses and yellow roses, smaller bouquets of violets, long-stemmed gladioli, carnations, gardenias, rhododendron leaves in waterfilled vases. The room was filled with the aroma of flowers — fresh flowers and dying flowers, flowers that were new, and flowers that had lost their bloom. The room was filled with the overwhelming scent of flowers and the overwhelming stench of something else.

The girl, Bubbles Caesar, lay quite still on the table around which the flowers were massed. Her black hair trailed behind her head, her long body was clad only in a nightgown, her slender hands were crossed over her bosom. A ruby necklace circled her throat. She lay on the table and stared at the ceiling, and she saw nothing, because she was stone cold dead and she’d been that way for a month and her decomposing body stank to high heaven.

Tudor, on his knees, turned to look at the detectives.

“So you found us,” he said quietly.

“Get up, Tudor.”

“You found us,” he repeated. He looked at the dead girl again. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” he asked of no one. “I’ve never known anyone as beautiful as she.”

In the closet, they found the body of a man. He was wearing only his undershorts. Both of his hands had been amputated.

The man was Mike Chirapadano.

Oh, he knew that she was dead; he knew that he had killed them both. They stood around him in the squadroom, and they asked their questions in hushed voices because it was all over now and, killer or not, Charles Tudor was a human being, a man who had loved. Not a cheap thief, and not a punk, only a murderer who had loved. But yes, he knew she was dead. Yes, he knew that. Yes, he knew he had killed her, killed them both. He knew.

And yet, as he talked, as he answered the almost whispered questions of the detectives, it seemed he did not know, it seemed he wandered from the cruel reality of murder to another world, a world where Barbara Cesare was still alive and laughing. He crossed the boundary line into this other world with facility, and then recrossed it to reality, and then lost it again until there were no boundaries any more, there was only a man wandering between two alien lands, a native of neither, a stranger to both.

“When they called me from the club,” he said, “when Randy Simms called me from the club, I didn’t know what to think. Barbara was usually very reliable. So I called her apartment, the one she shared with the other girls, and I spoke to one of her roommates, and the roommate told me she hadn’t seen her since early that morning. This was the twelfth, February twelfth; I’ll remember that day as long as I live, it was the day I killed Barbara.”