Ed McBain_87th Precinct 47 (14 page)

“I’m going to say I didn’t know anything about it.

” “Right.”

“I’ll tell them you must’ve dreamt it all up on your own.”

“On my … ?”

“Without my knowledge.”

There was a silence on the line.

“I’m not going down with you, Johnny …”

“You helped ...”

“I’m gonna be a star, Johnny.”

“You helped me
plan
id” he shouted.

“Prove it,” she said, and hung up.

She had double-locked the door, and put the chain on, and angled the Fox-lock bar firmly in place, but she was still scared
he might come in through the window or whatever, one of the heating vents even, he could be a crazy bastard when he wanted
to. The moment she’d hung up she’d realized how stupid it had been to tell him in advance what she would do if push ever came
to shove. Now she sat here wondering whether she ought to get out of the apartment altogether, go crash with any one of a
hundred unemployed actresses she knew in this city, even take a hotel room someplace till the cops arrested him, which she
guessed should be any minute now, the way they were closing in on him.

How could he have been such a jackass, telling them he was someplace he couldn’t
possibly
have been at the time of the stabbing? Didn’t he
realize
they’d time the distance from the theater to O’Leary’s? Didn’t he
know
they’d check his alibi? Even if they didn’t for a minute suspect there was some kind of conspiracy here, even if they never
once imagined this was all planned to call attention to her as the star of a show about to go down the drain, even if they
were every bit as stupid as all the other cops in this city, didn’t he
know
they’d suspect him if only because he was the significant
other?
Didn’t he read the newspapers?

What’d he think? That everything he saw on television and in the movies was the way it was in real life? All those complicated
murder plots? All those shrewd schemes that would net millions and millions of dollars for the person clever enough to hatch
them and execute them? Baloney. If you read the papers, you knew that most murders had nothing to do with brilliant planning.
Most murders these days were either murders committed during the commission of some
other
crime, or else they were murders between people who knew each other. A little while ago, it used to be random killings, strangers
knocking off strangers for no apparent reason. But now, the pendulum had swung back to the family circle again, and people
who loved each other were busy slitting each other’s throats. Husbands and wives, sweethearts and lovers, brothers and sisters,
mothers and sons and fathers and uncles,
these
were the people who were killing each other these days. She knew because she’d done a lot of research for this dumb play
she was in.

One of the things that
had
to’ve occurred to the police was that the guy making threatening calls in a Jack Nicholson voice might have been none other
than the guy who was currently sleeping with the victim, who by the way had been the same guy sleeping with her for the past
seven years, give or take, and not counting the times his hands were up under her skirt when she was twelve or thirteen. If
Michelle Cassidy gets stabbed in a dark alley coming out of a theater, who are the cops going to think did it, some crazed
Puerto Rican drug dealer named Ricardo Mendez or whoever? No, they are going to think
Boyfriend,
they are going to think Johnny Milton, they are going to think there’s something wrong with that relationship there, be-cause
that’s the way they’re
trained
to think. They’re trained to think mother father son daughter boyfriend girlfriend goldfish. Even if they never once think
it’s a scheme to put my name up in lights, they’ll look to Johnny.

He should’ve realized that, and he should’ve been ready for whatever they’d thrown at him, instead of giving them an alibi
that wouldn’t wash. The weak son of a bitch would probably begin sniveling the minute they went back and began turning the
screws on him. They’d come here pounding on her door next, wanting to know what part she’d had in the scheme. Me, Officers?
Moi? Why, I don’t know what you’re talking about, sirs. She knew all about interrogations because of this dumb play she was
in.

She looked at her wristwatch.

Seven-thirty, dark outside already. Maybe he didn’t plan on coming home at all, maybe she’d scared him into running for China
or Colorado, wherever. Maybe she could relax. No Johnny Milton, no cops, just her name up above the title of the play in big
blazing lights,

M*I*C*H*E*L*L*E C*A*S*S*I*D*Y!

Speaking of which.

She turned back to the blue-bindered script in her lap.

While perspiring over whether that lunatic would come break down the door or something, she’d been trying to go over her lines
in the scene where the Detective takes her aside—-takes the
Actress
aside—-and talks to her confidentially about what he thinks is going on, a very difficult scene to play in that no one in
the play knew what was going on because their genius playwright, Frederick Peter Corbin III, hadn’t bothered to mention anywhere
in the entire script who it was that stabbed the girl, excuse me, the goddamn
Actress.
So the scene was like two people talking underwater. Or sinking in quicksand. The
Detective
doesn’t know what’s going on, and the
Actress
doesn’t know what’s going on, either, and neither would the audience. Which is why it had become necessary in the first place
to stab her in the alley, not the Actress in the play, but the actress in real life, Michelle Cassidy, if she was ever going
to get anywhere in this fucking business.

THE DETECTIVE

What I’m trying to get at, miss, is
whether or not
you
saw the man, woman,
person who stabbed you as you were
coming out of the restaurant?

THE ACTRESS

No, I didn’t

(pause)

Did
you?

She hated it when a playwright—-
any
playwright and not just their genius playwright, Frederick Peter Corbin III—-underlined words in a script to show his actors
exactly which word or words he wanted stressed. Whenever she read a line like “But
I love
you, Anthony,” with the word
love
underlined for indicated emphasis, she automatically and perversely read it every which way but what the playwright had heard
in his head, how
dare
he intrude upon her creativity that way? Sitting around a table at a first reading, she would say, “But I love you, Anthony,”
or “But I love
you,
Anthony,” or “But I love you, Anthony,” or even “But I love you,
Anthony!“

THE ACTRESS

No, I didn’ t.

(pause)

Did
you?

THE DETECTIVE

Well, no, of course not, I was nowhere
near
the restaurant when you were
stabbed.

THE ACTRESS

I
realize
that. I just thought …

All those fucking underlined words.

… you might have been suggesting
that I
saw
who stabbed me when
actually, you know, I
didn’t
.

THE DETECTIVE

Neither did I.

(pause)

Because, you see, I was wondering

… if I didn’t see you get stabbed,

and if you
yourself
didn’t see the

person who stabbed you, if no one, in

fact, actually saw you getting

stabbed …

(pause)

Then
did
you, in fact, actually
get
stabbed?

What a dumb fucking play, she thought, and was about to put the script down when the doorbell sounded, startling her. She
hesitated a moment, not saying anything, sitting quite still in the easy chair with its flower-patterned slipcovers, the open
blue-bindered script in her lap, the lamp behind her casting light over her shoulder and onto the script and spilling over
onto the floor.

The doorbell sounded again.

Still, she said nothing.

From outside the door, a voice called, “Michelle?”

“Who is it?” she asked.

Her heart was pounding.

“Me,” the voice said. “Open the door.”

“Who’s me?” she said, and rose from the easy chair and placed the script down on its seat, and then walked to the door and
looked through the peephole flap, and said in relief, “Oh, hi, just a sec,” and took off the chain, and released the Fox lock,
and then unlocked the dead bolt and the Medeco lock and opened the door wide and saw the knife coming at her.

R
EEKING OF GARLIC AND UNIDENTIFIABLE EFFLUVIUM, DETEC
tive Fat Ollie Weeks oozed into the squadroom, spotted Meyer Meyer sitting alone at his desk, and announced, “Well, well,
well, well, well, well, well,
well,”
in his world-famous imitation of W. C. Fields, which was more and more beginning to resemble Al Pacino doing the blind marine
in Scent
of a Woman.
Meyer looked up wearily.

In all truth, Ollie resembled W. C. Fields more than he did Al Pacino, not for nothing was he called
Fat
Ollie Weeks. This Wednesday morning, the eighth day of April, a gray and dismal but not yet wet reminder of the day before,
Ollie was wearing a white button-down-collar shirt open at the throat, a brownish sports jacket with mustard stains on it,
rumpled darker brown slacks, and a pair of scuffed brown loafers which, Meyer noted with surprise, had a penny inserted in
the leather band across each vamp, would wonders never.

“How’d
you like Schindler’s List?”
Ollie asked pointedly.

“I didn’t see it,” Meyer said.

“You didn’t go see a picture about your own
people?
” Meaning Jews, Meyer figured.

He did not feel he had to explain to a bigot like Ollie that the reason he hadn’t gone to see the movie was that he thought
it might be too painful an experience. Unlike Steven Spielberg, who in countless articles preceding the release of the film
had confessed that making the movie had put him in touch with his own Jewishness, or words to that effect, Meyer had been
in touch with his own Jewishness for a very long time now, thank you. And unlike Spielberg, Meyer did not believe that the
Holocaust had been in any danger of becoming “a footnote to history” before this particular movie came along. No more than
dinosaurs were a footnote to history before Jurassic
Park
roared into theaters all over the world. There were Jews like Meyer who would
never
forget the Holocaust even if there hadn’t been a single Hollwood movie ever made about it.

Meyer’s nephew Irwin, who had been known affectionately as Irwin the Vermin when he was but a prepubescent child, had since
grown into a somewhat rabbinical type given to rolling his eyes and davening even when asking someone to please pass the salt.
He had seen
Schindler’s List
and had pontificated that this wasn’t a movie about the Holocaust here, this was a movie here about a man finding in himself
depths of f`eeling and empathy he had not before known he’d possessed. “What this movie is about is a flower growing up through
a concrete sidewalk, cracking through that sidewalk and spreading its petals to the sunshine, is what this movie is all about,”
Irwin had proclaimed at Aunt Rose’s house last night.

Meyer had said nothing.

He was thinking that here was a Jew who’d gone to see a movie which, according to its director, had been designed to make
people
remember
there’d been such a thing as the Holocaust, and instead it had caused Irwin to
forget
there’d been a Holocaust and to remember instead that flowers could grow through sidewalks.

Now here was Fat Ollie Weeks, in all his fetid obesity, standing before Meyer’s desk like a fat Nazi bastard, demanding to
know why Meyer had chosen not to go see a movie that might cause him to weep.

“You think all that really happened?” Ollie asked.

Meyer looked at him.

“All that stuff?” Ollie said.

“What brings you here?” Meyer asked, attempting to change the subject.

“The stuff they say the Nazis did to the Jews?” Ollie persisted.

“No, they made it all up,” Meyer said. “What brings you here?”

Ollie looked at him for a moment, as if trying to decide whether this wise Jew here was putting him on or what, telling him
the whole fuckin Hologram had been invented, whereas Ollie knew there wasn’t a Jew in the world who believed that, who was
he trying to kid here? Or maybe he’d finally seen the light himself, and realized governments could stage things like fake
moon landings and six million Jews getting exterminated. He let the whole thing go because, to tell the truth, he didn’t give
a shit one way or the other, six million Jews getting killed on the moon, or six fake astronauts flying over Poland.

“I think we’re gonna be working together again,” he said, and leaned across Meyer’s desk and nudged him in a hamfisted gesture
of camaraderie. Meyer instinctively backed away from the unctuous reek. How had he got so lucky? he wondered. There he’d been,
sitting behind his desk, minding his own business, a good-looking man if he said so himself, thirtysomething but still hale
and hearty although entirely bald, tall and burly with bright inquisitive blue eyes—if, again, he said so himself—wearing
suspenders that matched the cornflower blue, a gift from his wife Sarah at Christmas, or Chanukah, or both, because each was
celebrated in turn at the Meyer household, when all at once comes a two-ton tank smelling of diesel oil and farts, announcing
that they’d be
working
together again,
of vay’z mir.

“On what?” Meyer asked.

“On this girl got stabbed and slashed twenty-two times-and incidentally murdered, by the way-in apartment 6C at 1214 Carter
Avenue in the Eighty-eighth Precinct, which happens to be where I work, ah yes,” he said, falling into his W. C. Fields mode
again. “Whereas I under-stand, m’boy, that the vie was
previously
stabbed right here in the old Eight-Seven, although a mere superficial wound, ah yes.”