The only clues to the savage killing of a beautiful young woman in a lush penthouse apartment are a steamy collection of erotic letters and thirty-two separate knife wounds - clues are fewer still for her elderly lover, shot four times in the head.
The dead man has left behind four other women: his ex-wife and their two daughters, and his present wife. Four mourners.
Four suspects. For Detective Steve Carella it's a crime that
strikes close to the heart - his own mother has just become a
widow herself...
"Angela," he said, "it's Steve."
She'd been crying, her voice revealed that.
"We just got back from the hospital," she said.
"What happened?" he asked. "Was it his heart again?"
"No, Steve. Not his heart."
"Then what?"
"We went there to make positive identification."
For a moment he didn't quite understand. Or didn't choose to understand.
"What do you mean?" he said.
"We had to identify the body."
"Why? Angela, what happened?"
"He was killed."
"Killed? What . . . ?"
"In the bakery shop."
"No."
"Steve ..."
"Jesus, what. . . ?"
"Two men came in. Papa was alone. They cleaned out the cash register . . ."
"Angela, don't tell me this, please."
"I'm sorry," she said.
And suddenly he was crying.
WIDOWS
Ed McBain
First published in Great Britain 1991
by William Heinemann Ltd
This edition published 1992
The city in these pages is imaginary.
The people, the places are all fictitious.
Only the police routine is based on
established investigatory technique.
1
She'd been brutally stabbed and slashed more times than Carella chose to imagine. The knife seemed to have been a weapon of convenience, a small paring knife that evidently had been taken from the bartop where a bottle opener with a matching wooden handle sat beside a half-full pitcher of martinis, an ice bucket, and a whole lemon from which a narrow sliver of skin was missing.
Someone had been drinking a martini. With a twist. Presumably the paring knife had been used to peel back the skin of the lemon before the knife was used on its victim. The martini was still on the coffee table alongside which she was lying. The lemon twist lay curled on the bottom of the glass. The paring knife was on the floor beside her. The blade was covered with blood. She was bleeding from what appeared to be a hundred cuts and gashes.
"Natural blonde," Monoghan said.
She was wearing a black silk kimono patterned with oversized red poppies. The kimono was belted at the waist, but it had been torn open to reveal her long, slender legs and the blonde pubic patch upon which Monoghan now based his clever deduction. Her blue eyes were open. Her throat had been slit. Her face had been repeatedly slashed, but you could still see she'd been a beauty. Nineteen, twenty years old, long blonde hair and startling blue eyes, wide open, staring at the ceiling of the penthouse apartment. Young, beautiful body
under the slashed black kimono with poppies the color of blood.
The men in suits and jackets stood around her, looking down at her, plastic-encased ID cards clipped to their coat collars. Monoghan and Monroe from Homicide North; Detective/Second Grade Steve Carella from the Eight-Seven; Detective/Third Grade Arthur Brown, same precinct. Nice little gathering here at a little past eight o'clock on a hot, muggy night late in July. Monoghan and Monroe kept staring down at the body as if pondering the mystery of it all. There were slash and stab marks on her breasts and her belly. Her wounds shrieked silently to the night. The insides of her thighs had been slashed. There was blood everywhere you looked. Torn white flesh and bright red blood. Shrieking. The men were waiting for the medical examiner to arrive. This weather, cars and people all over the streets, it took time to get anywhere. There was a pained look on Carella's face. Brown looked angry, the way he normally did, even when he was deliriously happy.
"Girls like this, they can get in trouble, this city," Monroe said.
Carella wondered Girls like what!
"You get a young, pretty girl like this one," Monoghan said, "they don't know what this city is like."
"What this city can do to you," Monroe said.
"This city can do terrible things to young girls," Monoghan said.
They stood there with their hands in the pockets of their suit jackets, thumbs showing, identical navy-blue suits and white shirts and blue ties, looking down at the dead woman. Girl, they had called her. Nineteen, twenty years old at most. Carella wondered if she'd thought of herself as a woman. On all the subsequent reports, she would be labeled merely female. Generic labeling. No fine distinction for feminists to pursue, no quarrel over whether it should be girl or woman, no such bullshit once you became a victim. The minute you were dead, you became female, period.
The pained look was still in his eyes,
Dark brown eyes, slanting downward to give his face a somewhat Oriental look. Brown hair. Tall and slender. His nose was running, a summer cold. He took out his handkerchief, blew his nose, and looked toward the front door. Where the hell was the ME? The apartment felt sticky and damp, was there a window open someplace, diluting the air-conditioning? No window units here, everything hidden and enclosed, this was an expensive apartment. High-rise, high-rent condo here on what passed for the precinct's Gold Coast, such as it was, overlooking the River Harb and the next state. Two blocks south you had your tenements and your hot-bed hotels. Here, on the floor of the building's only penthouse apartment, a young woman in an expensive silk kimono lay torn and bleeding on a thick pile carpet, a martini in a stemmed glass on the coffee table behind her. Liquid silver in the glass. Yellow twist of lemon curling. Lipstick stain on the glass's rim. Enough still left in the pitcher on the bar to pour half a dozen more glasses like this one. Had she been expecting company? Had she voluntarily admitted her own murderer to the apartment? Or was there a window open?
"They say it's gonna be even hotter tomorrow than it was today," Monoghan said idly, and turned away from the victim as though bored with her lifeless pose.
"Who's theyV Monroe asked.
"The weather guys."
"Then why didn't you say so? Why do people always say they this, they that, instead of who the hell they is supposed to be?"
"What's the matter with you tonight?" Monoghan asked, surprised.
"I just don't like people saying they this, they that all the time."
"I'm not people," Monoghan said, looking offended and hurt. "I'm your partner."
"So stop saying they this, they that all the time."
"I certainly will," Monoghan said, and walked over to where
a second black leather sofa rested under the windows on the far side of the room. He glanced angrily at the sofa, and then heavily plunked himself down onto it.
Brown couldn't believe that the M&Ms were arguing. Monoghan and Monroe? Joined at the hip since birth? Exchanging heated words? Impossible. But there was Monoghan, sitting on the sofa in a sulk, and here was Monroe, unwilling to let go of it. Brown kept his distance.
"People are always doing that," Monroe said. "It drives me crazy. Don't it drive you crazy?" he asked Brown.
"I don't pay much attention to it," Brown said, trying to stay neutral.
"It's the heat's driving you crazy," Monoghan said from across the room.
"It ain't the goddamn heat," Monroe said, "it's people always saying they this, they that."
Brown tried to look aloof.
At six feet four inches tall and weighing two hundred and twenty pounds, he was bigger and in better condition than either of the two Homicide dicks. But he sensed that the argument between them was something that could easily turn against him if he wasn't careful. Nowadays in this city, a black man had to be careful, except with people he trusted completely. He trusted Carella that way, but he knew nothing at all about the religion or politics of the M&Ms, so he figured it was best not to get himself involved in what was essentially a family dispute. One thing he didn't want was a hassle on a hot summer night.