Ed McBain - Ten Plus One

“Look, you weren’t exactly radiating…”

“I’ve never in my entire life dealt with anyone as…”

“…sunshine when you came in here. You looked sore, and I automatically…”

“…suspicious, or as rude, or as overbearing in his manner…”

“…assumed you—”

“Shut up when I’m talking!” Cindy shouted.

“Look, miss,” Kling said angrily. “This happens to be a police station, and I happen to be a policeman, and I—”

“ Some policeman!” Cindy snapped.

“You want me to kick you out of here?” Kling said menacingly.

“I want you to apologize to me!” Cindy yelled.

“Yeah, you’ve got a fat chance.”

“Yeah, I’m going to tell you something, Mister Big Shot Boss’s Son. If you think a citizen…”

“I’m not the boss’s son,” Kling yelled.

“You said you were!” Cindy yelled back.

“Only because you were so snotty!”

“ I was snotty? I was—”

“I’m not used to seventeen-year-old brats…”

“I’m nineteen! Damn you, I’m twenty !”

“Make up your mind!” Kling shouted, and Cindy picked up her bag by the straps and swung it at him. Kling instinctively put up one of his hands, and the black leather collided with the flat palm, and all the junk Cindy had painstakingly put back into the bag came spilling out again, all over the floor.

They both stood stock-still, as if the spilling contents of the bag were an avalanche. Cigarettes, matches, lipstick, eye shadow, sunglasses, a comb, an address and appointment book, a bottle of APC tablets, a book of twenty-five gummed parcel-post labels, a checkbook, a compact, more matches, a package of Chiclets, an empty cigarette package, a scrap of yellow paper with the handwritten words “Laundry, Quiz Philosophy,” a hairbrush, an eyelash curler, two more combs, a package of Kleenex, several soiled Kleenex tissues, more matches, a pillbox without any pills in it, a box of Sucrets, two pencils, a wallet, more matches, a ballpoint pen, three pennies, several empty cellophane wrappers, and a peach pit all came tumbling out of the bag and fell onto the floor to settle in a disorderly heap between them.

Kling looked down at the mess.

Cindy looked down at the mess.

Silently, she knelt and began filling the bag again. She worked without looking up at him, without saying a word. Then she rose, picked up the manila folder from the desk, put it into Kling’s hands, and frostily said, “Will you please see that Detective Carella gets this?”

Kling accepted the folder. “Who shall I say left it?”

“Cynthia Forrest.”

“Listen, I’m sorry about…”

“Detective Kling,” Cindy said, enunciating every word sharply and distinctly, “I think you are the biggest bastard I’ve ever met in my life.”

Then she turned and walked out of the squadroom.

Kling stared after her a moment, and then shrugged. He carried the manila folder to Carella’s desk, remembered abruptly that the name Cynthia Forrest had been in at least two of the DD reports he’d read, realized immediately that she was the daughter of the dead Anthony Forrest, almost started out of the squadroom in an attempt to catch up with her, said “The hell with it” aloud, and plunked the folder down on Carella’s desktop.

The folder did not contain as much junk as Cindy’s bag had contained, but it did hold a great deal of material on the man who had been her father. Most of the stuff dealt with his days as a student at Ramsey University—some of his old term papers, pictures of him with the football squad, several report cards, a notebook he had kept, and, oh, stuff like that. Carella would not see the contents of the folder until the next morning, because he would be occupied uptown all that day, and would go directly home to dinner with his wife and two kids afterward.

Actually, there wasn’t much in the folder that would have helped him or the case. Except perhaps one thing.

The one thing was a frayed and yellowing theater program.

The front of the program read:

The program sat on top of Carella’s desk, inside the manila folder. The inside of the program listed the past activities of the drama group on the left-hand page, together with a well-wishing half-page ad from the graduating class of June 1940. The back of the program carried a full-page ad for Harry’s Luncheonette, Ice Cream Treats Our Specialty, near the school.

The inside right-hand page of the program contained the following printed information:

CAST IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE

FAT JOE Thomas Di Pasquale NICK Andrew Mulligan MAG Margaret Buff OLSON Randolph Norden DRISCOLL Anthony Forrest COCKY David Arthur Cohen IVAN Peter Kelby KATE Helen Struthers FREDA Blanche Ruth Lettiger FIRST ROUGH Salvatore Palumbo SECOND ROUGH Rudy Fenstermacher

That night, while Detective Steve Carella was sitting down to dinner with his wife, Teddy, and the twins, Mark and April, a man named Rudy Fenstermacher was walking from the subway to his home in Majesta.

He never made it, because a .308-caliber bullet hit him right in the head and killed him instantly.

Carella started the next morning by yelling.

He was not a yelling man by nature, and he was very fond of Bert Kling, at whom he was directing his tirade. But he was roaring anyway, so loud that the cops downstairs in the locker room could hear him.

“You call yourself a cop?” he shouted. “What kind of a cop…?”

“I didn’t think to look, okay?” Kling said patiently. “She said it was for you, so…”

“I thought you’d been assigned to this case.”

“That’s right,” Kling said patiently.

“Then why didn’t…?”

“How the hell was I supposed to know what was in that folder?”

“She gave it to you, didn’t she?”

“She said it was for you.”

“So you didn’t even look to see what…”

“I felt inside it,” Kling said. “When she first came up.”

“You what?”

“I felt inside it.”

“You felt ? Did you say ‘felt’?”

“That’s right.”

“What the hell for?”

“To see if she was carrying a gun.”

“Who?”

“Cynthia Forrest.”

“Carrying a what ?”

“A gun.”

“Cynthia Forrest?”

“Yes.”

“What could have possibly given you the idea that Cynthia Forrest…?”

“Because she came up here asking for you, and when I told her you weren’t here, she said she’d wait and then began coming through that gate. And I remembered what happened with Virginia Dodge that time, and I figured maybe this one wanted to put a hole in your head, too. That’s why. Okay?”

“Oh, boy,” Carella said.

“So I felt in the folder, and I looked in her purse, and when I saw she wasn’t heeled, I just took the folder and dumped it on your desk, after I had an argument with her.”

“Without looking inside it.”

“That’s right.”

“Oh, boy,” Carella said.

“Look, I know I’m just a stupid amateur when it comes to the mastermind…”

“Cut it out,” Carella said.

“…of the squad, but I’m new on this case, and I don’t know who half these people are, and I’m not in the habit of opening something that was specifically…”

“Go get him a crying towel, will you, Meyer?”

“…left for someone else. Now, if you want to make a big federal case out of this…”