Killer’s Wedge (87th Precinct), page 14
“Sure. Why not Mark? He’s been pushed around by the old bastard all his life. He hasn’t said a word against him since the time he was fourteen. All that hatred building up inside while he smiled on the outside. And the latest slap in the face, sending Mark to that New Jersey rattrap where—when he finishes his cheap on-the-job-training—he goes into the firm at the magnificent salary of fifteen thousand dollars a year. For the boss’s son! Why, the old bastard pays his file clerks more.”
“You’re exaggerating,” Carella said.
“All right, I’m exaggerating. But don’t think Mark liked what the old bastard was doing to him. He didn’t like it one damn bit. And David had his own reasons for killing dear father.”
“Like what?”
“Like lovely Christine.”
“What are you saying, Mr. Scott?”
“What does it sound like I’m saying?”
“You mean…”
“Sure. Look, I’m playing this straight with you, Carella. My hate is big enough to share, believe me. And I don’t want to see my neck stretched for something somebody else did, even if he deserved it.”
“Then your father—”
“My father was a lecherous old toad who kept Christine in this house by threatening to cut David off penniless if they left. Period. Not nice, but there it is.”
“Not nice at all. And Christine?”
“Try talking to her. An iceberg. Maybe she liked the setup, how do I know? At any rate, she knew who buttered her bread. And it was well buttered, believe me.”
“Maybe you all got together, Mr. Scott, to do the job. Is that a possibility?”
“This family couldn’t get together to start a bridge game,” Alan said. “It’s a wonder we managed to open that door in concert. You’ve heard of togetherness? This family’s motto is ‘apartheid’. Maybe it’ll be different now that he’s dead—but I doubt it.”
“Then you believe that someone in this house—one of your brothers, or Christine—killed your father?”
“Yeah. That’s what I believe.”
“Through a locked door?”
“Through a locked bank vault, if you will, with six inches of lead on every damn wall. Where there’s a will there’s a way.”
“And there was a fat will here,” Carella said.
Alan Scott did not smile. “I’ll tell you something, Detective Carella. If you work this from the motive angle, you’ll go nuts. We’ve got enough motive in this run-down mansion to blow up the entire city.”
“How then, Mr. Scott, would you suggest that I work it?”
“I’d find out how somebody managed to hang the bastard through a locked door. Figure out how it was done, and you’ll also figure out who did it. That’s my guess, Mr. Carella.”
“And, of course,” Carella said, “that’s the easiest part of detective work. Everyone knows that.”
Alan Scott did not smile.
“I’m leaving,” Carella said. “There isn’t much more I can do here tonight.”
“Will you be back tomorrow?”
“Maybe. If I think of anything.”
“Otherwise?”
“Otherwise it’s a suicide. We’ve got motive, as you say, plenty of it. And we’ve got means. But, man, we sure are lacking in the opportunity department. I’m no genius, Mr. Scott. I’m just a working stiff. If we still suspect a homicide, we’ll dump the case in the Open File.” Carella shrugged.
“You didn’t strike me as being that kind of a man, Mr. Carella,” Alan said.
“Which kind of a man?”
“The kind who gives up easily.”
Carella stared at him for a long moment. “Don’t confuse the Open File with the Dead Letter department of the Post Office,” he said at last. “Good night, Mr. Scott.”
When Teddy Carella walked into the squadroom at two minutes past seven, Peter Byrnes thought he would have a heart attack. He saw her coming down the corridor and at first he couldn’t believe he was seeing correctly and then he recognized the trim figure and proud walk of Steve’s wife, and he walked quickly to the railing.
“What are you doing?” Virginia said.
“Somebody coming,” Byrnes answered, and he waited. He did not want Virginia to know this was Carella’s wife. He had watched the woman grow increasingly more tense and jumpy since the pistol-whipping of Meyer, and he did not know what action she might conceivably take against Teddy were she to realize her identity. In the corner of the room, he could see Hawes administering to Meyer. Badly cut, Meyer tried to peer out of his swollen eyes. His lip hung loose, split down the center by the unyielding steel of the revolver. Hawes, working patiently with iodine, kept mumbling over and over again, “Easy, Meyer, easy,” and there was a deadly control to his voice as if he—as much as the nitro—were ready to explode into the squadroom.
“Yes, Miss?” Byrnes said.
Teddy stopped dead outside the railing, a surprised look on her face. If she had read the lieutenant’s lips correctly…
“Can I help you, Miss?” he said.
Teddy blinked.
“Get in here, you,” Virginia barked from her desk. Teddy could not see the woman from where she stood. And, not seeing her, she could not “hear” her. She waited now for Byrnes to spring the punch line of whatever gag he was playing, but his face remained set and serious, and then he said, “Won’t you come in, Miss?” and—puzzled even more now—Teddy entered the squadroom.
She saw Virginia Dodge immediately and knew intuitively that Byrnes was trying to protect her.
“Sit down,” Virginia said. “Do as I tell you and you won’t get hurt. What do you want here?”
Teddy did not, could not, answer.
“Did you hear me? What are you doing here?”
Teddy shook her head helplessly.
“What’s the matter with her?” Virginia asked impatiently. “Damnit, answer me.”
“Don’t be frightened, Miss,” Byrnes said. “Nothing will happen to you if…” He stopped dead, feigning discovery, and then turned to Virginia. “I think…I think she’s a deaf mute,” he said.
“Come here,” Virginia said, and Teddy walked to her. Their eyes locked over the desk. “Can you hear?”
Teddy touched her lips.
“You can read my lips?”
Teddy nodded.
“But you can’t speak?”
Teddy shook her head.
Virginia shoved a sheet of paper across the desk. She took a pencil from the tray and tossed it to Teddy. “There’s paper and pencil. Write down what you want here.”
In a quick hand, Teddy wrote “Burglary” on the sheet and handed it to Virginia.
“Mmm,” Virginia said. “Well, you’re getting a lot more than you’re bargaining for, honey. Sit down.” She turned to Byrnes and, in the first kind words she’d uttered since coming into the squadroom, she said, “She’s a pretty little thing, isn’t she?”
Teddy sat.
“What’s your name?” Virginia asked. “Come over here and write down your name.”
Byrnes almost leaped forward to intercept Teddy as she walked to the desk again. Teddy picked up the pencil and rapidly wrote “Marcia…” She hesitated. A last name would not come. In desperation, she finally wrote her maiden name—”Franklin.”
“Marcia Franklin,” Virginia said. “Pretty name. You’re a pretty girl, Marcia, do you know that? Can you read my lips?”
Teddy nodded.
“Do you know what I’m saying?”
Again, Teddy nodded.
“You’re very pretty. Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you. I’m only after one person, and I won’t hurt anybody unless they try to stop me. Have you ever loved anyone, Marcia?”
Yes, Teddy said with her head.
“Then you know what it’s like. Being in love. Well, someone killed the man I loved, Marcia. And now I’m going to kill him. Wouldn’t you do that, too?”
Teddy stood motionless.
“You would. I know you would. You’re very pretty, Marcia. I was pretty once—until they took my man away from me. A woman needs a man. Life’s no good without a man. And mine is dead. And I’m going to kill the man who’s responsible. I’m going to kill a rotten bastard named Steve Carella.”
The words hit Teddy with the force of a pitched baseball. She flinched visibly, and then she caught her lips between her teeth, and Virginia watched her in puzzlement and then said, “I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t mean to swear. But I…this has been…” She shook her head.
Teddy had gone pale. She stood with her lip caught between her teeth, and she bit it hard, and she looked at the revolver in the hand of the woman at the desk, and her first impulse was to fling herself at the gun. She looked at the wall clock. It was 7:08. She turned toward Virginia and took a step forward.
“Miss,” Byrnes said, “that’s a bottle of nitroglycerin on the desk there.” He paused. “What I mean is, any sudden movement might set it off. And hurt a lot of people.”
Their eyes met. Teddy nodded.
She turned away from Virginia and Byrnes, crossing to sit in the chair facing the slatted railing, hoping the lieutenant had not seen the sudden tears in her eyes.
The clock read 7:10.
Teddy thought only, I must warn him.
Methodically, mechanically, the clock chewed time, swallowed it, spat digested seconds into the room. The clock was an old one, and its mechanism was audible to everyone but Teddy, whirr, whirr, and the old clock digested second after second until they piled into minutes and the hands moved with a sudden click in the stillness of the room.
7:11…
7:12…
I must warn him, she thought. She had given up the thought of jumping Virginia and thought only of warning Steve now. I can see the length of the corridor from here, she thought, can see the top step of the metal stairway leading from below. If I could hear I would recognize his tread even before he came into view because I know his walk, I have imagined the sound of his walk a thousand times. A masculine sound, but light-footed, he moves with animal grace, I would recognize the sound of his walk the moment he entered the building—if only I could hear.
But I cannot hear, and I cannot speak. I cannot shout a warning to him when he enters this second floor corridor. I can only run to him. She will not use the nitro, not if she knows Steve is in the building where she can shoot him. She needs the nitro for her escape. So I’ll run to him and be his shield, he must not die.
And the baby?
The baby, she thought. Hardly a baby yet, a life just begun, but Steve must not die. Myself, yes. The baby, yes. But not Steve. I will run to him. The moment I see him, I will run to him, and then let her shoot. But not Steve.
She had almost lost him once, she could remember that Christmas as if it were yesterday, the painfully white hospital room, and her man gasping for breath. She had hated his occupation then, detested police work and criminals, abhorred the chance circumstances that had allowed her husband to be shot by a narcotics peddler in a city park. And then she had allowed her hatred to dissolve, and she had prayed, simply and sincerely, and all the while she knew that he would die and that her silent world would truly become silent. With Steve, there was no silence. With Steve, she was surrounded by the noise of life.
This was not a time for prayer.
All the prayers in the world would not save Steve now.
When he comes, she thought, I will run to him and I will take the bullet.
When he comes…
The clock read 7:13.
That isn’t nitroglycerin, Hawes thought.
Maybe it is.
That isn’t nitroglycerin.
It can’t be. She handles it like water, she treats it with all the disdain she’d give to water, she wouldn’t be so damn careless with it if it were capable of exploding.
It isn’t nitroglycerin.
Now wait a minute, he told himself, let’s just wait a minute, let’s not rationalize a desire into a fact.
I want desperately for the liquid in that bottle to be water. I want it because for the first time in my life I am ready to knock a woman silly. I am ready to cross this room and, gun be damned, knock her flat on her ass and keep hitting her until she is senseless. That is the way I feel right now, and chivalry can go to Hell because that is the way I feel. I know it’s not particularly nice to go around slugging women, but Virginia Dodge has become something less than a woman, or perhaps something more than a woman, she has become something inhuman and I no more consider her a woman than I would apply gender to a telephone or a pair of shoes.
She is Virginia Dodge.
And I hate her.
And I’m ashamed because I hate so goddamn deeply. I did not think myself capable of such hatred, but she has brought it out in me, she has enabled me to hate deeply and viciously. I hate her, and I hate myself for hating, and this causes me to hate deeper. Virginia Dodge has reduced me to an animal, a blind animal responding to a pain that is being inflicted. And the curious thing is that the pain is not my own. Oh, the cheek, I’ve been hit harder before, the cheek doesn’t matter. But what she did to Miscolo, and what she did to that Puerto Rican girl, and what she did to Meyer, these are things I cannot excuse, rationally or emotionally. These are pains inflicted on humans who have never done a blessed solitary thing to the non-human called Virginia Dodge. They were simply here and, being here, she used them, she somehow reduced them to meaningless ciphers.
And this is why I hate.
I hate because I…I and every other man in this room…have allowed her to reduce humans to ciphers. She has robbed them of humanity, and by allowing her to rob one man of humanity, by allowing her to strip a single human being of all his godly dignity, I have allowed her to reduce all men to a pile of rubbish.
So here I am, Virginia Dodge.
Cotton Hawes is my name, and I am a one-hundred-percent white Protestant American raised by God-fearing parents who instilled in me a sense of right and wrong, and who taught me that women are to be treated with courtesy and chivalry—and you have turned me into a jungle animal ready to kill you, hating you for what you’ve done, ready to kill you.
The liquid in that bottle is not nitroglycerin.
This is what I believe, Virginia Dodge.
Or at least, this is what I am on the road to believing. I do not yet fully believe it. I’m working on it, Virginia. I’m working on it damn hard.
I don’t have to work on the hatred. The hatred is there, and it’s building all the time and God help you, Virginia Dodge, when I’m convinced, when I’ve convinced myself that your bottle of nitroglycerin is a big phony.
God help you, Virginia, because I’ll kill you.
The answer came to him all at once.
Sometimes it comes that way.
He had left Alan Scott in the old mansion, had walked through the stillness of a house gone silent with death, into the huge entry hall with its cut-glass chandelier and its ornate mirror. He had taken his hat from the marble-topped table set in front of the mirror, wondering why he’d worn the hat, he very rarely wore a hat, and then realizing that he had not worn a hat yesterday, and then further realizing that the power of the rich is an intimidating one.
We mustn’t be intolerant, he thought. We mustn’t blame the very rich for never having experienced the sheer ecstasy of poverty.
Smiling grimly, he had faced the mirror, set his hat on his head, and then opened the huge oak door leading outside. Darkness covered the property. A single light burned at the far end of the walk. There was the smell of wood smoke on the air.
He had started down the path, thinking of October, and wood smoke, and burning leaves, and musing about this bit of Exurbia in the center of the city. How nice to be exurban, how nice to burn leaves. He glanced over his shoulder, toward the garage. A figure was silhouetted there against the star-filled sky, a giant of a man, one of the brothers, no doubt, the smoke from the small fire trailing up past his huge body. One of the magnificent Scotts burning leaves, you’d think a job like that would be left to Roger, or the caretaker, no caretaker for the Scott estate? Tch, tch, no caretaker to burn the…
It came to him then.
Wood smoke.
Wood.
And one of the brothers burning his own fire.
Wood. Wood! For Christ’s sake, wood, of course, of course!
He turned suddenly and started back up the path to the garage.
How do you lock a door? he thought, and his thoughts mushroomed onto his face until he was grinning like an absolute idiot. How do you lock it from the outside and let it seem it’s been locked from the inside?
To begin with, you rip the slip bolt from the doorjamb, so that when the door is finally forced open, it looks as if the lock was snapped in the process. That’s the first thing you do, and by Christ, that explains all the marks on the inside of the room, how the hell could the crowbar have got that far inside, why weren’t you thinking, Carella, you moron?
So first you snap the lock.
You have already strangled the old man, and he is lying on the floor while you work on the slip bolt, carefully prying it loose so that it hangs from one screw, so that it will look very realistically snapped when the door is later forced.
Then you put a rope around the old man’s neck, and you toss one end of it over the beam in the ceiling, and you pull him up so that he’s several feet off the ground. He’s a heavy man, but so are you, and you’re working with extra adrenaline shooting through your body, and all you have to do is get him off the floor several feet. And then you back away toward the door and tie the rope around the doorknob.
The old man is dangling free at the other end of the room.
You shove on the door now. This isn’t too difficult. It only has to open wide enough to permit you to slip out of the room. And now you’re out, and the old man’s weight pulls the door shut again. The slip bolt, on the inside, is dangling loose from one screw.
And you are in the corridor, and the problem now is how to give the appearance of the door being locked so that you and your brothers can tug on it to no avail.
