Эд Макбейн - Jigsaw

“You’ll do it?” Carella said.

“Oh, man, I love it,” Brown said, and fell into a deliberately broad dialect. “We goan send a big black nigger man to scare our Georgia peach out’n her skin! Oh, man, it’s delicious!”

Prejudice is a wonderful thing.

Stereotypes are marvelous.

At 2:00 in the morning, Suzie Endicott opened her door to find that the most terrifying of her Southern fantasies had materialized in the gloom, a Nigra come to rape her in the night, just as her mother had warned her time and again. She started to close the door, but her rapist suddenly shouted, “You jes’ hole it right there, Missy. This here’s the law! Detective Arthur Brown of d’87th Squad. I got some questions to ast you.”

“Wh... wh... it’s... the middle of the night,” Suzie said.

Brown flashed his shield. “This hunk o’ tin here doan respec’ no time o’ day nor night,” he said, and grinned. “You goan let me in, Missy, or does I start causin’ a ruckus here?” Suzie hesitated. Brown suddenly wondered if he were playing it too broadly, and then decided he was doing just fine. Without waiting for an answer, he shoved past her into the apartment, threw his fedora onto the hall table, looked around appreciatively, whistled, and said, “Man, this’s some nice place you got here. Ain’t never been inside no fancy place like this one.”

“Wh... wh... what did you want to ask me?” Suzie said. She was wearing a robe over her nightgown, and her right hand was clutched tightly into the collar of the robe.

“Well now, ain’ no hurry, is there?” Brown asked.

“I... I have to go to work in the mor... morning,” Suzie said. “I... I... I... have to get some sleep,” she said, and realized instantly she had made a mistake by even mentioning anything even remotely suggesting bed. “I mean...”

“Oh, I knows whut you mean,” Brown said, and grinned lewdly. “Sit down, Missy.”

“Wh... what did you want to ask?”

“I said sit down! You jes’ do whut I tells you to do, okay, an’ we goan get along fine. Otherwise...”

Suzie sat instantly, tucking the flaps of her robe around her.

“Those’re nice legs,” Brown said. He narrowed his eyes. “Mighty fine white legs, I can tell you that, honey.”

Suzie wet her lips and then swallowed. Brown was suddenly afraid she might pass out cold before he got to the finale of his act. He decided to push on regardless.

“We busted yo’ li’l playmate half an hour ago,” he said. “So if you’re thinkin’ he goan help you, you can jes’ f ‘get it.”

“Who? What? What did you say?”

“Irving Krutch, yo’ lover boy,” Brown said. “You shunt’a lied to us, Missy. That ain’t goan sit too well with the DA.”

“I didn’t lie to... to... anybody,” Suzie said.

“ ‘Bout bein’ in bed there all the time? ‘Bout making love there when two people was being murdered. Tsk, tsk, Missy, them was outright lies. I’m really sprised at you.”

“We did, we were, we did do that, we...” Suzie started, and realized they were talking about making love, and suddenly looked into Brown’s eyes, and saw the fixed, drooling stare of a sex-crazed maniac and wondered how she would ever get out of this alive. She should have listened to her mother who had warned her never to wear a tight skirt walking past any of these people because it was so easy to arouse animal lust in them.

“You in serious trouble,” Brown said.

“I didn’t...”

“Real serious trouble.”

“...lie to anybody, I swear.”

“Only one way to get out of that trouble now,” Brown said.

“But I didn’t...”

“Only one way, Missy.”

“...really. I didn’t lie, really. Really, officer,” she heard herself saying to this black man, “officer, I really didn’t, I swear. I don’t know what Irving told you, but I honestly did not lie to anyone, if anyone was lying, it was him. I had no idea of anything, of it, of anything. I mean that, officer, you can check that out if you want to. I certainly wouldn’t lie to the police, not to those nice policemen who...”

“Only one way to save yo’ sweet ass now,” Brown said, and saw her face go pale.

“Wh... what’s that?” Suzie said. “What way? What?”

“You can tell d’troof,” Brown said, and rose out of his chair to his full monstrous height, muscles bulging, eyes glaring, shoulders heaving, rose like a huge black gorilla, and hulked toward her with his arms dangling at his sides, hands curled like an ape’s, towered over her where she sat small and white and trembling on the edge of her chair, and repeated in his most menacing nigger-in-the alley voice, “You can tell d’troof now, Missy, unless you cares to work it out some other way!”

“Oh my good Lord Jesus,” Suzie shouted, “he left the apartment, he left both times, I don’t know where he went, I don’t know anything else, if he killed those people, I had nothing to do with it!”

“Thank you, Miss Endicott,” Brown said. “Would you put on some clothes now, I’d like you to accompany me to the squadroom.”

She stared at him in disbelief. Where had the rapist gone? Who was this polite nuclear physicist standing in his place? And then his charade dawned upon her, and her eyes narrowed, and her lips drew back over her teeth, and she said, “Boy, you say please when you ask me to go any place.”

“Go to hell,” Brown said. “Please.”

“The rotten bitch,” Krutch said.

He could have been talking about Suzie Endicott, but he wasn’t. He was railing, instead, against the late Alice Bonamico. The departed gang leader’s departed wife, it seemed, had cheated Krutch. In his investigation of the robbery, he had learned from Carmine’s widow that she was in possession of “certain documents and photographic segments” purporting to show the hiding place of the NSLA loot. He had bargained with her for months, and they had finally agreed on a purchase price. She had turned over to him the half of the list in her possession as well as the piece of the photo he had originally shown the police.

“But I didn’t know she had yet another piece,” Krutch said. “I didn’t learn that until I read about her will, and contacted her sister. That’s when I got this piece. The eighth piece of the puzzle. The important one. The one that bitch held out on me.”

“Which, naturally, you didn’t give to us,” Brown said.

“Naturally. It shows the exact location of the loot. Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“Why’d you come to us in the first place?”

“I told you why. Krutch needed help. Krutch couldn’t handle it alone any more. Krutch figured what better way to get help on an investigation than by calling in experts?”

“You got more than you bargained for,” Brown said.

“Except from Alice Bonamico, that bitch. I paid her ten thousand dollars for half of the list and a meaningless piece of the picture. Ten thousand bucks! It was every penny I had.”

“But, of course, you were going for very big money.”

“It was an investment,” Krutch said. “Krutch looked upon it as an investment.”

“Well,” Brown said, “now Krutch can look upon it as a capital loss. Why’d you kill Weinberg?”

“Because you told me he had another piece, and I wanted it. Look, I was running a race with you guys. I knew I was ahead of you because I had the piece with the X on it, but suppose you got cute somewhere along the line and refused to show me anything else? I’m in the insurance business, you know. Getting Weinberg’s piece was insurance, plain and simple.”