Ed McBain_87th Precinct 47 (20 page)

“The instructor on Tuesday was a woman named Carol Gorman. You’d better call first, she’s not there all the time.”

“We will. Thanks for your … ”

“Andy
^?
”

They all turned to where a strapping young man in watch cap and overalls was standing in the doorway.

“Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t realize … ”

“Come in, Chuck,” she said. “Have you met Mutt and Jeff?”

Madden looked puzzled.

“Good Cop/Bad Cop,” she said. “Detectives Carella and Kling.”

“Saw you the other day,” Madden said. “How are you?” Turning to Andrea again, he said, “Ash wants to run the Understudy/Detective
scene ten minutes from now.”

“We just ran it,” Andrea said dryly.

Once upon a time, a detective named Roger Havilland worked out of the Eight-Seven. He abruptly stopped working there when
someone tossed him through a plate-glass window. But before his untimely demise, he’d once remarked, “I love this city when
the coats come off.”

He’d been referring to women, of course.
Women
taking off their coats, hell with the men. He and Carella had been strolling along Hall Avenue in the sunshine, and Havilland
had been admiring the girls prancing by.
Girls
back then, not
women.
Nobody was quite as ready to take offense back then. Except Havilland, perhaps, who’d been a hater of monumental proportions.
No one missed him. Enough police department bigots had risen to take his place. Oddly, though, on a beautiful spring day like
today, Carella remembered the one memorable thing Havilland had ever said.

I love this city when the coats come off

Today, the
women
had taken off their coats. Even the women who were only sixteen years old were prancing by in celebration of spring. The
skirts were even shorter now than when Havilland had made his immortal remark, and the girls, the
women,
the
persons of
contrasting sex were now wearing thigh-high black stockings, some of them exposing garter belts, below the hems of their
teeny-weeny skirts. It was a nice time of the year to take the air, especially down here in the Quarter.

Carella had always felt this part of the city was the most vital, a self-contained enclave of the eccentric and the eclectic,
a city within the city proper, honoring its own established morals and mores, its own rules of acceptable behavior, most of
it outrageous. A girl walked by wearing …

Well, she really
was
a girl, if twelve counted, anymore.

… what appeared to be a caftan, white with black trim at the hem and the long flowing sleeves. Over this, she wore an assortment
of dangling, clanging chains, and a black fez beneath which her blond hair cascaded. She was barefooted, her feet caked with
the grime of the city. She smiled at him as she went past. He wondered if his own daughter would one day dress like a camel
driver and smile blissfully at every passing stranger.

The sun felt good on his shoulders and head.

He did not want to go indoors, he did not want to work on a day like today.

But Frederick Peter Corbin III was waiting.

Bodies by Rhoda was
on the second floor of a red brick building on Swift Avenue, not far from the old Federal Bank Building. Kling had got there
a half hour earlier and had been told by a woman with frizzy black hair and leotard and tights to match that Carol’s Step-and-Stretch
class was still in progress and wouldn’t break till eleven. It was now ten minutes to the hour, and he sat patiently on a
bench in the reception area, looking through a plate-glass window at a wide variety of women jumping and bouncing in the air.
He could not hear any music behind the glass, but he suspected some was being played, otherwise the sight would have been
entirely bizarre.

The women began pouring out of the room at about five past the hour, all of them sweating, all of them looking flushed and
invigorated. He asked a somewhat beefy blonde who Carol might be, and she pointed out a trim brunette wearing a shocking-pink
leotard and black tights, rewinding a tape at the player across the room. The room smelled vaguely of female perspiration.
He caught his own reflection in what seemed a dozen mirrors as he crossed to the far corner.

“Miss Gorman?” he asked tentatively.

She turned. Faint surprised look on her freckled face. Green eyes wide. Lips slightly parted. No makeup on her cheeks, eyes
or mouth. Fresh-faced kid of twenty-one, twenty-two, he guessed.

“Yes?” she said.

“Detective Kling,” he said, “Eighty-seventh Squad,” and showed her the shield. She seemed impressed. Nodded. Waited.

“I wonder if you can give me some information about this past Tuesday night …”

“Yes?”

“… that would’ve been the seventh of April.”

“Yes?”

“Were you here that night?”

“I think so. Tuesday? Yes, I’m sure I was. Why? What happened?”

“Were you teaching a class from six-thirty to seven forty-five that night?”

“Yes. Well, from six-thirty to seven-
thirty,
actually. Gee, you sound stern. Something terrible must have happened.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to …”

“I mean, you don’t
look
stern, but you sure do
sound
stern. Very.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“What is it that happened?”

“Nothing,” he said. “This is a routine inquiry.”

“Into what?”

“Do you know a woman named Andrea Packer?”

“Yes?”

“Was she in that class on Tuesday night?”

“Oh, this is about the actress who got killed, right? Michelle whatever. Someone told me Andy was in the same play with her.”

“Yes,” he said. “Was Miss Packer in that class?”

“Yes, she was. Is that what she told you?”

“That’s what she told me.”

“Well, she was telling the truth.”

“I figured she might be,” Kling said, and sighed.

In fact, even before he’d shlepped away the hell over here, he’d been dead certain she’d been telling the truth. Not once
in his entire time on the force, as uniformed officer
or
detective, had anyone given him an alibi that later turned out to be false. Not once. Well, maybe once, but if so he couldn’t
remember when. Well, actually, yes, he could remember some guy telling him he was at a movie when actually he was out chopping
up his mother-in-law. But never had anyone told him.
This
is where I was at such and such a time on such and such a night and—

Well, wait a minute. How about that jackass Johnny Milton, who’d told them he was at O’Leary’s at seven when he didn’t get
there until seven-fifteen, the jackass. A person had to be crazy to tell you he was someplace he wasn’t when there were people
who could absolutely state otherwise. Yet each and every goddamn alibi had to be checked out against the likelihood that the
person was lying, which he’d have to be an idiot to do, when it was so easy to verify.

“Why didn’t you simply
call
?” Carol asked.

Another good question.

He hadn’t simply
called
because then he wouldn’t have been able to ascertain that the person to whom he was speaking on the telephone was not being
coerced into saying Yes, Andrea Packer was here bouncing around on Tuesday night. Over the phone, you couldn’t tell if someone
was holding a gun to a person’s head. So what you did, you marched all the way over to Swift Avenue and waited on a bench
while a lot of women you didn’t know jumped in the air to the accompaniment of unheard music, and then finally you talked
to the alibi and got the answer you knew you’d get all along. Sometimes, he thought he might enjoy being a fire fighter.

“Have you had lunch yet?” Carol asked.

“No,” he said.

“Would you like to join me?” she asked. “There’s a very good deli just around the corner.”

He thought of Sharyn.

“Thanks,” he said, “but I’ve got to get back to the office.”

“Where’s that?” she asked.

“The Eight-Seven? Uptown. Just off the park.”

“I might stop in sometime.”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“See what a police station looks like.”

“Uh-huh. Well, thanks for your help, Miss Gorman, I appreciate it.”

“Thanks for coming by,” she said, and raised one eyebrow.

* * *

Freddie Corbin was telling Carella that non-fiction writing wasn’t really writing,
anyone
could write a non-fiction piece. In fact, all non-fiction writing was just “What I Did Last Summer” over and over again.
Carella didn’t think he could write a non-fiction piece; he even had trouble writing detective reports.

They were sitting in a small sun-washed room Corbin called his study, “Not because I’m affected,” he said, “but because a
portrait painter had this apartment before I took it, and he used to paint in this room he called his study. As painters are
wont to do,” he added, and smiled.

Two side-by-side windows were open to a mild April breeze that wafted up from a small garden two stories below. A fire escape
crowded with red geraniums in clay pots was just outside the windows. Corbin was sitting in a black leather swivel chair behind
his desk. Carella was in a chair across the room. The playwright had been interrupted while rewriting several scenes in his
play, but he seemed in no hurry to get back to the work at hand. Carella wanted to know what Corbin knew about Michelle Cassidy.
Instead, Corbin wanted to tell him what he knew about writing.

“So let’s dismiss non-fiction as something any child of eleven can do,” he said, “and let’s dismiss most forms of
fiction
as writing that requires
no
discipline whatever. The novel, in particular, is by definition a form that
defies
definition. Moreover, most novelists at work today are writing as poorly as the people writing
non
-fiction. What it’s come down to, if a person can successfully string together nine or ten plain words to fashion a simple
sentence, then he or she may be dubbed ‘author’ and be permitted to go on
author’s
tours and speak at Book and
Author
luncheons and generally behave like a
writer.“

Carella couldn’t see the distinction.

“An
author,”
Corbin went on, seemingly reading his mind, “is anyone who’s written a book. The book can be a diet book, or a cookbook,
or a book about the sex life of the tsetse fly in Rwanda, or it can be a trashy woman-in-jeopardy mystery, or a high-tech
novel about a missing Russian diplomat, or any one of a thousand poorly written screeds or palimpsests. An
author
doesn’t need to study literature, he doesn’t need to take any courses in the craft of writing, all he needs to do is impulsively
and ambitiously sit himself down in front of a computer and write as badly as he knows how to write. In this great big land
of the literary jackpot, if he writes badly enough, he may hit it really big, therefore qualifying as a bona fide
author
entitled to go on book tours and television talk shows.
A playwright,
on the other hand, ahhh-hah!”

Carella waited.

“A playwright is
a writer,”
Corbin said.

“I see,” Carella said.

“The living stage is the last bastion of the English language,” Corbin said. “The last arena permitting exploration of character
in depth and with perception. It is the final stuttering hope for beauty and meaning, the last stand, the
only
stand of the word itself. That’s why I write, Mr. Carella. That’s why I wrote
Romance.“

Though Carella couldn’t remember having asked him. ”

Now you may ask … ”

I wish I could ask about Michelle, Carella thought.

“… why I’ve chosen to express myself in terms of a mystery. But
is
my play a mystery? Oh, yes, there is a stabbing in it, an attempted murder, if you will, but the
focus
of the play is not upon the perp, as you call it, but instead on the vic, as you call it. Unlike the mysteries you deal with
every working day of your life … ”

Carella was thinking that in police work there
were no
mysteries. There were only crimes and the people who committed those crimes. He was here today because someone had committed
a most grievous crime against Michelle Cassidy.

“… in a straight play occurs at the
end
of the story,” Corbin was saying. “And this change, this epiphany, can take many different shapes and forms. It can occur
as insight, or simple recognition, or even the realization by a character that he or she will
never
change, which in itself is a change of sorts. In
a mystery,
on the other hand, the change takes place at the very beginning of the story. A murder is committed, there is an aberration
in the normal orderly flow of events … a change, if you will. And a hero or heroine comes into the story to investigate, ultimately
finding the killer and
restoring
order,
correcting
the change that took place in the beginning. So you see, there’s a vast difference between a straight play and a mystery
play.
Romance
is not a mystery. I will not think kindly on any critic who treats it as such.”

“There’s a danger of that happening now, don’t you think?” Carella said.

Trying to get Corbin back to the matter at hand. Which was not writing the great American drama, but was instead this investigation
into an aberration in the normal orderly flow of events as personified by the body of Michelle Cassidy with its twenty-two
stab and slash wounds.

“Do you mean because of the publicity attendant on Michelle’s murder?”

“Yes. Linked with the fact that there’s a stabbing scene in the play itself. Some critics …”

“Fuck the critics,” Corbin said.

Carella blinked.

“I don’t write for critics. I write for myself and for my public. My public will understand that I don’t write cheap mysteries,
never have, never will. My public …”

“I understood … ”