Ed McBain - Eighty Million Eyes

Oh, they could tell you tales of love, all right. Boy, the tales of love they could tell. They had heard tales of love from a hundred and one people, or maybe even more. And don’t think they didn’t know what love was all about, oh, they knew what it was all about, all right. Love was sweet and pure and marvelous, love was magnificent. Hadn’t they loved their mothers and their fathers and their aunts and uncles and such? Hadn’t they kissed a girl for the first time when they were thirteen or fourteen or something, wasn’t that love? Oh boy, it sure was. And weren’t they both happily married men who loved their wives and their children? Listen, it wouldn’t pay to tell them about love because they knew all about it, yes, sir.

“We love each other,” Nelson said.

“We love each other,” Melanie said.

The pair sat in the 2:00 A.M. silence of the squadroom and dictated their confessions to police stenographers, sitting at separate desks, their hands still stained with the ink that had been used to fingerprint them. Meyer and Carella listened unemotionally, silently, patiently—they had heard it all before. Neither Nelson nor Melanie seemed to realize that they would be taken from the precinct by police van at 9:00 A.M., brought downtown for arraignment, and then put into separate cells. They had been seeing each other secretly for more than a year, they said, but they did not yet seem to realize they would not see each other again until they were brought to trial—and then perhaps never after.

Carella and Meyer listened silently as their tale of love unfolded.

“You can’t legislate against love,” Nelson said, transforming another man’s comment, but making his meaning clear enough. “This thing between Melanie and me just happened. Neither of us wanted it, and neither of us asked for it. It just happened.”

“It just happened,” Melanie said at the desk nearby. “I remember exactly when. We were sitting outside the studio in Carl’s car one night, waiting for Stan to take off his makeup so the three of us could go to dinner together. Carl’s hand touched mine, and the next thing we knew we were kissing. We fell in love shortly afterwards. I guess we fell in love.”

“We fell in love,” Nelson said. “We tried to stop ourselves. We knew it wasn’t right. But when we saw we couldn’t stop, we went to Stan and told him about it, and asked him for a divorce. This was immediately after the incident at his party, when he tried to hit me. Last month, September. We told him we were in love and that Melanie wanted a divorce. He flatly refused.”

“I think he’d known about us all along,” Melanie said. “If you say he revised his will, then that’s why he must have done it. He must have known that Carl and I were having an affair. He was a very sensitive man, my husband. He must have known that something was wrong long before we told him about it.”

“The idea to kill him was mine,” Nelson said.

“I agreed to it readily,” Melanie said.

“I began drawing strophanthin from the hospital pharmacy last month. I know the pharmacist there, I often stop in when I’m short of something or other, something I need in my bag or at my office. I’ll stop in and say, ‘Hi, Charlie, I need some penicillin,’ and of course he’ll give it to me because he knows me. I did the same thing with the strophanthin. I never discussed why I needed it. I assumed he thought it was for my private practice, outside the hospital. At any rate, he never questioned me about it, why should he?”

“Carl prepared the capsule,” Melanie said. “At the breakfast table that Wednesday, after Stan had taken his morning vitamins, I switched the remaining capsule for the one containing the poison. At lunch, I watched while he washed it down with water. We knew it would take somewhere between three and eight hours for the capsule to dissolve, but we didn’t know exactly how long. We didn’t necessarily expect him to die on camera, but it didn’t matter, you see. We’d be nowhere near when it happened, and that was all that mattered. We’d be completely out of it.”

“And yet,” Nelson said, “we realized that I would be a prime suspect. After all, I am a physician, and I do have access to drugs. We planned for this possibility by making certain that I was the one who suggested foul play, I was the one who demanded an autopsy.”

“We also figured,” Melanie said, “that it would be a good idea if I said I suspected Carl. Then, once you found out what kind of poison had been used—how fast it worked, I mean—and once you knew Carl had been home all during the show, well then you’d automatically drop him as a suspect. That was what we figured.”

“We love each other,” Nelson said.

“We love each other,” Melanie said.

They sat still and silent after they had finished talking. The police stenographers showed them transcripts of what they had separately said, and they signed multiple copies, and then Alf Miscolo came out of the Clerical Office, handcuffed the pair, and led them downstairs to the detention cells.

“One for us, one for the lieutenant, and one for Homicide,” Carella told his stenographer. The stenographer merely nodded. He, too, had heard it all already. There was nothing you could tell him about love or homicide. He put on his hat, dropped the requested number of signed confessions on the desk nearest the railing, and went out of the squadroom. As he walked down the corridor, he could hear muted voices behind the closed door of the Interrogation Room.

“Why’d you beat her up?” Kling asked.

“I didn’t beat up nobody,” Cookie said. “I love that girl.”

“You what ?”

“I love her, you deaf? I loved her from the first minute I ever seen her.”

“When was that?”

“The end of the summer. August. It was on the Stem. I just made a collection in a candy store on the corner there, and I was passing this Pokerino place in the middle of the block, and I thought maybe I’d stop in, kill some time, you know? The guy outside was giving his spiel, and I was standing there listening to him, so many games for a quarter, or whatever the hell it was. I looked in and there was this girl in a dark-green dress, leaning over one of the tables and rolling the balls, I think she had something like three queens, I’m not sure.”

“All right, what happened then?”

“I went in.”

“Go ahead.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I want to know why you beat her up.”

“I didn’t beat her up, I told you that!”

“Who’d you think was in that bed tonight, you son of a bitch?”

“I didn’t know who was in it. Leave me alone. You got nothing on me, you think I’m some snot-nosed kid?”

“Yeah, I think you’re some snot-nosed kid,” Kling said. “What happened that first night you saw her?”

“Nothing. There was a guy with her, a young guy, one of these advertising types. I kept watching her, that’s all. She didn’t know I was watching her, she didn’t even know I existed. Then I followed them when they left, and found out where she lived, and after that I kept following her wherever she went. That’s all.”

“That’s not all.”

“I’m telling you that’s all.”

“Okay, play it your way,” Kling said. “Be a wise guy. We’ll throw everything but the goddamn kitchen sink at you.”

“I’m telling you I never laid a finger on her. I went up to her office to let her know, that’s all.”

“Let her know what?”

“That she was my girl. That, you know, she wasn’t supposed to go out with nobody else or see nobody, that she was mine , you dig? That’s the only reason I went up there, to let her know. I didn’t expect all that kind of goddamn trouble. All I wanted to do was tell her what I expected from her, that’s all.”