And what, when you came to think of it, had Agnes done to finish up on the rug with a purple throat and staring eyes? Or Saunders, for that matter, to lie beside her with brains and blood oozing onto the rug? Was it because Roger needed or even wanted them dead, or was it because he was caught like a fly in the web of his own organizing abilities?
He could call it off any moment, of course. He braked violently as a car jumped the traffic light at Swiss Cottage; sweat oozed into his eyes. But he couldn’t call it off — because in that case he was mad, a stark lunatic, and lunatics have to go right on to the end of the road just to prove they’re sane.
He took a grip on himself. Over the North Circular, onto the motorway. Mad as a hatter. Sane as a — now, what were you as sane as? Couldn’t remember. Didn’t matter, anyway…
It was 7:40 when he parked his car at the edge of a convenient spinney and let himself silently into the house by the little-used side entrance.
There was a light in his wife’s bedroom. He could hear her footsteps as he stood in the dark hall, listening intently. He would have to call her down, for the “liquidation” had to be staged in the living room. The poker and curtained hiding place made that imperative.
Upstairs a door slammed shut. He stepped into the small cloakroom under the stairs. Then his blood froze as he heard her voice.
“Bernard!” she called from the top of the stairs. “Bernard, I can’t find my bag. A little weekend case…”
In the darkness Railton put out both hands to grasp at something, but there was nothing to grasp. Now he heard Saunders’ voice from the living room.
“Damn the bag! Put what you need in something else. I’ll buy you another bag. Let’s get out of here before he comes back.”
A silence, then his wife’s voice again. “You’re sure, Bernard? Sure it’s the right thing for us to do?”
“What’s right, what’s wrong?” demanded Saunders. “You’re coming with me now — before he kills what’s left of you. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
The click of a light switch, the slam of another door. Railton’s groping fingers grasped something at last. An empty coat hook. He gripped it, swung on it, suspended above the chasm of his future.
He’d never known, never even guessed.
Saunders, coming straight over the moment he knew the coast was clear. That hadn’t been in Roger’s carefully planned schedule.
Railton remembered the dance at Lord Vardy’s place. What had he said to Saunders? I can change course with the next… Give me just fifteen seconds…
Fifteen seconds. Time to assimilate all the details of a new situation and devise a new means to cope with it.
“Eight, nine, ten—” he muttered to himself.
They were going through the front door. Saunders’ car would be parked there. Railton swallowed the bitter pill — if he’d come that way instead of using the side door, he’d have seen it, he would have been able to think of something.
He blundered after them.
He was an organized man, wasn’t he?
Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen…
But Saunders’ car was already turning off into the quiet suburban road, and then it picked up speed.
Nightshade
by Ed McBain {© 1970 by Ed McBain.}
Another short novel about the 87th Precinct… one night in the lives and deaths of the men of the 87th — detectives Steve Carella, Cotton Hawes, Bert Kling, Meyer Meyer, and the rest of the squad… one night that is a microcosm of a metropolis — a mosaic of murder, vandalism, ghosts (!), bombing, theft, of missing persons, junkies, pushers, drunk-and-disorderlies, burglars, muggers — you name it, it swims into the orbit of a Precinct Station in a big city when “paradoxically, the night people take over in the morning.”
This short novel is the newest of Ed McBain s strictly American police procedurals — with the hard smack of realism and the interweaving, intertwining, interacting, interlinking of all-in-the-night’s-work at the 87th Precinct…
The morning hours of the night come imperceptibly here.
It is a minute before midnight on the peeling face of the hanging wall clock, and then it is midnight, and then the minute hand moves visibly and with a lurch into the new day. The morning hours have begun, but scarcely anyone has noticed. The stale coffee in soggy cardboard containers tastes the same as it did thirty seconds ago, the spastic rhythm of the clacking typewriters continues unabated, a drunk across the room shouts that the world is full of brutality, and cigarette smoke drifts up toward the face of the clock where, unnoticed and unmourned, the old day has already been dead for two minutes.
Then the telephone rings.
The men in this room are part of a tired routine, somewhat shabby about the edges, as faded and as gloomy as the room itself, with its cigarette-scarred desks and its smudged green walls. This could be the office of a failing insurance company were it not for the evidence of the holstered pistols hanging from belts on the backs of wooden chairs painted a darker green than the walls. The furniture is ancient, the typewriters are ancient, the building itself is ancient — which is perhaps only fitting since these men are involved in what is an ancient pursuit, a pursuit once considered honorable. They are law enforcers. They are, in the mildest words of the drunk still hurling epithets from the grilled detention cage across the room, dirty rotten pigs.
The telephone continues to ring.
The little girl lying in the alley behind the theater was wearing a belted white trench coat wet with blood. There was blood on the floor of the alley, and blood on the metal fire door behind her, and blood on her face and matted in her blonde hair, blood on her miniskirt and on the lavender tights she wore. A neon sign across the street stained the girl’s ebbing life juices green and then orange, while from the open knife wound in her chest the blood sprouted like some ghastly night flower, dark and rich, red, orange, green, pulsing in time to the neon flicker — a grotesque psychedelic light show, and then losing the rhythm, welling up with less force and power.
She opened her mouth, she tried to speak, and the scream of an ambulance approaching the theater seemed to come from her mouth on a fresh bubble of blood. The blood stopped, her life ended, the girl’s eyes rolled back into her head.
Detective Steve Carella turned away as the ambulance attendants rushed a stretcher into the alley. He told them the girl was dead.
“We got here in seven minutes,” one of the attendants said.
“Nobody’s blaming you,” Carella answered.
“This is Saturday night,” the attendant complained. “Streets are full of traffic. Even with the damn siren.”
Carella walked to the unmarked sedan parked at the curb. Detective Cotton Hawes, sitting behind the wheel, rolled down his frost-rimed window and said, “How is she?”
“We’ve got a homicide,” Carella answered.
The boy was 18 years old, and he had been picked up not ten minutes ago for breaking off car aerials. He had broken off twelve on the same street, strewing them behind him like a Johnny Appleseed planting radios; a cruising squad car had spotted him as he tried to twist off the aerial of a 1966 Cadillac. He was drunk or stoned or both, and when Sergeant Murchison at the muster desk asked him to read the Miranda-Escobedo warning signs on the wall, printed in both English and Spanish, he could read neither.