So Long As You Both Shall Live (87th Precinct) (3 page)

It was then that he became alarmed.

Steve Carella arrived at the hotel at precisely ten minutes past midnight to find Kling in a state that could generously be described only as hysteria. He was smoking when he let Carella into the room, something Carella had never seen him do in all the years they’d been working together. He closed the door behind Carella and immediately began pacing the room. He was wearing tan gabardine slacks, blue sports shirt open at the throat, a tan cardigan sweater over it, tan socks, brown loafers. He looked like a gentleman horse breeder, dressed casually for a day at the races, lacking only a pair of binoculars slung around his neck. But his nervous pacing seemed more suited to the maternity ward of a hospital. Carella immediately told him to
sit
down and
calm
down. Kling did neither.

“Have you called anyone but me?” Carella asked.

“No. I figured if there’s going to be a ransom demand—”

“Right …”

“—first thing they’ll say is ‘Don’t call the police.’ Shit, Steve, I
am
the police! Who’d be crazy enough to pull a stupid fucking thing like this?”

His use of profanity, too, was unusual. He was puffing and pacing, and swearing like a sailor, and there was a feverish glow on his face, and his eyes seemed moist and on the edge of tears.

“All right, calm down now,” Carella said. “Let’s try to work up a timetable, okay? Tell me when you left the room.”

“I went into the bathroom at about eleven-twenty, and came out about eleven-thirty.”

“Hear anything during that time? Any sounds of a struggle, any—”

“Nothing. I was in the
shower,
Steve. How could I hear—”

“You weren’t in the shower all that time, were you? You came
out
of the shower at some point, and you dried yourself, didn’t you? I’m assuming you dried yourself, Bert.”

“Yes. I also brushed my teeth.”

“
After
you got out of the shower?”

“Yes.”

“All right, did you hear anything while you were drying yourself or brushing your teeth?”

“Nothing.”

“How long were you in the shower?”

“About five minutes.”

“Then whoever abducted Augusta—”

“Christ!” Kling said.

“What’s the matter?”

“The one fucking thing I don’t need right now is
cop
talk!”

“All right, fine. Whoever
took
Augusta out of this room did it during the five minutes you were actually in the shower. Sometime between eleven-twenty and eleven twenty-five.”

“Yes. Steve, can we just—”

“Take it easy,” Carella said. “Were you and Augusta talking before you left the room?”

“Talking? I guess so. No, wait a minute, we weren’t. Well, we exchanged a few words. But we were pretty quiet, I guess.”

“When did you exchange the few words?”

“I asked her if she wanted a nightcap.”

“Uh-huh,” Carella said, and nodded.

“And she said she’d had too much to drink already.”

“Uh-huh, was that it?”

“No, then she, uh…No,
I
asked
her
if she wanted to use the bathroom first, and she said she wanted to lay out the clothes she’d be wearing in the morning, and then, uh, I told her I loved her.”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh.”

“And, uh, she said she loved me, too, I guess, and we, uh, embraced, and then I went into the bathroom to shower.”

“Did she say anything to you before you went into the bathroom?”

“Yeah. She said, ‘Now go take your shower.’”

“So if someone had been listening outside the door, he’d have known you were leaving the room at that point.”

“I guess so.”

“Especially if he didn’t hear any voices after that.”

“Yeah.”

“Have you left this room since you called me?”

“No.”

“You didn’t check out the fire stairs or anything?”

“No.”

“Did you talk to anyone in the hotel? Elevator operators, anyone who might have seen her or the person who—”

“I spoke to the desk clerk and also the bartender. This was when I thought you guys were kidding around.”

“What do you mean?”

“What Parker said at the reception. About brides being kidnapped on their wedding night. I thought maybe …”

“Yeah, well, mmm,” Carella said, and grimaced. “Have you talked to anyone else here at the hotel? Aside from the desk clerk and the bartender?”

“No.”

“How do you feel?”

“Okay.”

“Bert, I want you to stay out of this one.”

“Why?”

“I want you to relax a bit.”

“I’m relaxed,” Kling said.

“You don’t look that way to me. When they call here, they’re going to ask to talk to you. You’ve got to stay on top of this, Bert, so you can stall them while we—”

“I
am
on top of it! If you’d just stop the bullshit and—”

“Bert,” Carella said very quietly. “Come on, huh?”

Kling said nothing.

“Let us handle it, okay? Just put yourself out of it for now. Your only job is to talk to those people when they call.”

Kling still said nothing.

“Bert? Do you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Okay then.”

“What do they hope to get from a salaried cop?” Kling asked. He did not expect an answer; he was shaking his head and staring down at his own shoes.

“Has her father got money?” Carella asked.

“I suppose so. He owns a paper mill in Seattle.”

“Then maybe he’s the target,” Carella said. He thought about this for a moment, nodded his head in the equivalent of a shrug, and then went to the telephone to make his various calls. When he got off the phone, he saw Kling reaching into Augusta’s bag for another cigarette.

“You don’t need that,” he told him.

“I need it,” Kling said.

Carella nodded again, but this time the nod was more like a sigh. “Tech crew should be here within ten minutes, the lieutenant and Meyer are on their way, too. We want to cool this for now, Bert, keep the hotel people in the dark as long as we can. At least until we’ve had some contact. Okay?”

“Yeah,” Kling said glumly.

“I want to check out those fire stairs. Will you be all right?”

“Yeah.”

“Bert?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Okay,” Carella said, and went out of the room.

The main entrance to the hotel was on Mayr Terrace, and the fire stairs were at the rear of the building, opening on a service courtyard between the hotel and the apartment house adjacent to it. Carella, reasoning that anyone carrying an unconscious woman would hardly take her down in the elevator, automatically tried the fire stairs as the most logical escape route. The room from which Augusta had been abducted was on the eighth floor of the hotel, and there were seventeen floors in all. Carella had a choice of moving either up or down—Augusta’s kidnapper could have headed for the service court below or the roof above. Again, remembering that the kidnapper had been carrying the dead weight of an unconscious woman, Carella reasoned he’d have taken the easiest path of escape—to the service court below. He started down the steps.

On the third-floor landing, he found Augusta’s second shoe. It had probably fallen from her foot as the kidnapper moved downstairs with his heavy burden. Carella put the shoe into his coat pocket and continued down to the lobby floor. There were two fire doors on the landing there. One of them opened onto the lobby; the other opened onto the courtyard outside. He knew the kidnapper would not have carried Augusta across the lobby, so he opened the door to the courtyard. A fierce November gust of wind whipped into the building, causing his coat to flap wildly about his legs. He went out into the courtyard, his hair blowing, his eyes at once beginning to tear. Immediately opposite the exit door, some thirty feet from the hotel, there was the unbroken brick wall of the apartment house next door. On Carella’s left, as he stood with his back to the exit door, he could see the driveway that ran between the two buildings, and he could see the early-morning traffic on the cross street. On his right he saw a bank of grimy windows running like a lighted bridge from hotel to apartment house, part of a low stucco structure that crouched between the two buildings as though frightened it would be squashed flat by one or the other of them. A metal door to the right of the windows was painted red. Carella did not appreciate the current slang for cops, but neither had he appreciated the terminology that was in vogue when he’d first made detective. In those days, detectives were called “bulls.” Nonetheless, he zeroed in on that red door as if it were a cape being waved by a matador. Crossing the windy courtyard, cursing the cold, he reached the door and knocked on it.

There was no answer.

He knocked again.

“Who is it?” a voice said.

“Police,” Carella said.

“Who?”

“Police officer. Would you please open the door, sir?”

“Just a second, okay?”

The man who unlocked and then opened the door appeared to be in his early seventies, a tall thin man wearing eyeglasses, black trousers, a white shirt, and a long dirty white apron. He was holding a broom in his left hand.

“Could I see your badge, please?” he asked Carella.

Carella showed him the gold shield.

“Come in, officer,” the man said, and then waited for Carella to enter, and closed and locked the door behind him. As soon as he had performed this task, he shifted the broom to his right hand. “Cold out there, ain’t it?” he said.

“Very,” Carella said.

The man had brown eyes, magnified by the thick lenses of his glasses. He had a very soft speaking voice, so low that Carella had trouble hearing him. A gray bristle was on his chin and cheeks. “What’s the trouble, officer?” he asked.

“This is a routine investigation,” Carella said, hauling out the old police pacifier. Routine investigation. Two words that usually satisfied any honest citizen’s curiosity. Try them on a crook, though, and they often struck terror in his heart. “How long have you been in here tonight, sir?”

“I got in around ten.”

Looking around now, Carella saw that he was in a kitchen. A huge black cookstove ran almost the length of the courtyard wall. The grimy windows Carella had seen from outside had undoubtedly got that way from the grease spatters of the day’s cooking. There was a large butcher-block worktable opposite the stove, spotless stainless-steel bowls and utensils ranged on it in readiness for the morning’s work. On the other side of the worktable, there was a bank of stainless-steel refrigerators. “Is this a restaurant?” Carella asked.

“Luncheonette,” the old man answered. “The R and M Luncheonette. I seen you looking at the windows there. Haven’t got to them yet. They’ll be spotless clean, time I leave here.”

“You say you got to work at ten?” Carella asked.

“That’s right. My job’s cleaning up. They close right after supper, usually around nine o’clock, sometimes a little later. I come in at ten. My name’s Bill Bailey, please don’t make no jokes, okay? Every time I meet somebody, he says, ‘Bill Bailey, whyn’t you go on home and stop causing that woman so much trouble?’” Bailey chuckled and shook his head. “Wish they’d never written that song, I’ve got to tell you.” But it was plain to see he enjoyed whatever small notoriety the song offered him. “What’s
your
name, sir, if I may ask?”

“Detective Carella.”

“How do you do, sir?” Bailey said, and shifted the broom to his left hand again, and extended his right hand.

“How do you do?” Carella said. They shook hands almost solemnly. For Bailey, this must have been a rare occurrence, a detective coming into the luncheonette in the early hours of the morning. He lingered over the handshake, savoring it, and finally let Carella’s hand go.

“Mr. Bailey?” Carella said.

“Yes, sir?”

“I wonder if you can tell me whether you saw anyone outside in the courtyard tonight?”

“A person, do you mean?”

“Yes. A person.”

“No, sir, I did not see any person out there.”

“What
did
you see?” Carella asked, suddenly realizing that Bailey had wanted clarification only because he’d seen something
other
than a person.

“A truck,” Bailey said.

“When was this?”

“Pulled in around eleven o’clock, I would say. Around that time.”

“What kind of a truck?”

“A white one. Driver backed it in. Backed it all the way up the alley to where the hotel’s fire door is. You don’t see many of the delivery trucks doing that. Fellows usually drive them in headfirst, and then back them out when they’re leaving. This fellow backed it in all the way.”

“How’d you happen to see it?” Carella asked. “Were you outside in the courtyard?”

“In this weather? No,
sir,
” Bailey said. “I saw it through the windows there.” He gestured with the broom toward the grease-stained windows over the stove. The windows were set about five feet above the floor. Bailey was a thin scarecrow of a man, tall enough to have seen through the windows easily—if they’d been clean. But looking through them now, Carella had the feeling that a veil had been dropped over his eyes. He could barely make out the brick wall of the apartment building on the right, and could certainly not see the fire door of the hotel on the left.

“You saw the truck through these windows, huh?” Carella said.

“Yes, sir, I did. I know what you’re thinking, sir. You’re thinking I’m an old man wearing these thick eyeglasses here, and those windows are filthy, so how could I see anything out there in the courtyard? Well, sir, the windows
are
filthy, that’s true, but I’m
used
to looking through them that way, and I see all
sorts
of things out there, especially in the summertime when sometimes the chambermaids are out there with the bellhops. Not in the winter, mind you. Too cold. Freeze their behinds off out there. The thing people usually forget about anybody who wears eyeglasses, no matter
how
thick those glasses may be, is that the glasses are there to
correct
the person’s vision, do you understand? Man can see just fine when he’s got his glasses on. It’s only when he takes them
off,
he can’t see too well.”