Lady Killer (87th Precinct), page 1
Praise for Ed McBain & the 87th Precinct
“Raw and realistic…The bad guys are very bad, and the good guys are better.”—Detroit Free Press
“Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series…simply the best police procedurals being written in the United States.”—Washington Post
“The best crime writer in the business.”—Houston Post
“Ed McBain is a national treasure.”—Mystery News
“It’s hard to think of anyone better at what he does. In fact, it’s impossible.”—Robert B. Parker
“I never read Ed McBain without the awful thought that I still have a lot to learn. And when you think you’re catching up, he gets better.”
—Tony Hillerman
“McBain is the unquestioned king…light years ahead of anyone else in the field.”—San Diego Union-Tribune
“McBain tells great stories.”—Elmore Leonard
“Pure prose poetry…It is such writers as McBain who bring the great American urban mythology to life.”—The London Times
“The McBain stamp: sharp dialogue and crisp plotting.”
—Miami Herald
“You’ll be engrossed by McBain’s fast, lean prose.”—Chicago Tribune
“McBain redefines the American police novel…he can stop you dead in your tracks with a line of dialogue.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“The wit, the pacing, his relish for the drama of human diversity [are] what you remember about McBain novels.”—Philadelphia Inquirer
“McBain is a top pro, at the top of his game.”—Los Angeles Daily News
Lady Killer
AN 87TH PRECINCT NOVEL
Ed McBain
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright ©1958 Hui Corporation
Republished in 2011 All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
eISBN: 9781477855546
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The city in these pages is imaginary.
The people, the places are all fictitious.
Only the police routine is based on established
investigatory technique.
INTRODUCTION
Lady Killer was written in nine days during the summer of 1957. My records show that I was paid the delivery advance on August 2 of that year, so I’m assuming I delivered the book sometime in July.
We were renting a house on Martha’s Vineyard that summer, and I wanted to get the book out of the way as soon as possible so I could go flop on the beach. I set myself up in a garage behind the house and worked straight through for nine days, twenty pages a day, which came to 180 manuscript pages. No rewrites. Play it as it lays.
The 87th Precinct novels were still paperback originals in those days, and that was the required length—180. Not a page more, not a page less. If they’d been as long as today’s 87th Precinct novels, which run some 400 to 450 pages in manuscript, I’d have been in that damn garage all summer.
Twenty pages a day was not unusual for me back then. This output diminished over the years to ten pages a day, and eventually to eight pages a day, which is about my current speed. Critics seem to believe that fast is lousy. That’s because it takes them a week and a half to write a 400-word book review praising a novel somebody took seventeen years to write. The odd thing about Lady Killer is that it is no better and no worse than any of the 87th Precinct novels over which I labored longer. This may mean that all of them are lousy.
On the morning of the ninth day, Sloan Wilson and his family arrived.
I’m sure you remember the author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and A Summer Place, among other worthy novels. We had invited him and his then wife Elise and their three children to spend a week with us—but who expected them to arrive while I was about to jump into the last twenty pages of a book? Well, actually, we’d expected them to arrive, since that was the date we’d put on the calendar. So here they were, ready to go swimming and bicycling and sunning and fishing and whatnot while I was ready to walk over to the garage. Talk about suspense.
You must understand that I was used to children running around underfoot while I was writing. My own three sons were respectively seven and five and five that summer—two of them were twins. But here were three more kids ranging in age and size from smaller to taller, ready for a whole week of fun in the sun and not understanding at all—even though their own father was a writer—that a murderer was waiting in the garage. Sloan knew all about deadlines, though, even self-inflicted ones, and he offered to take my eldest son and his own son fishing while the women went to the beach with the other children and I went to finish my book.
There I was, alone in the garage.
It was around 4:00 in the afternoon when everyone came back to the house. I was on the last few pages of the book, closing in on the killer. But here came Sloan and the boys, and the two women, and my twins, and the two girls, and there was such a commotion over at the house that I thought someone was being murdered over there, never mind the garage.
What happened was they’d caught a shark.
Well, I tell you!
None of us but Sloan had ever eaten shark meat, who claimed it was delicious and insisted that he prepare it for dinner. My son’s expression said Boy, Dad, you never caught a shark, you never ate a shark, you don’t know how to cook a shark, you never sliced open a shark’s belly the way Mr. Wilson is doing right this minute before my very own eyes! Like sous chef and grand master, they puttered and pattered about the kitchen, finally carrying fillets to the skillet on the stove, where together they began frying up a fine smelly mess of fish. I went back to see how my people in the garage were doing.
They were doing okay.
The book is okay, too, I think.
In fact, I kind of like it.
Because I was driven by a singular need to get onto the beach as soon as possible, the book itself is driven by a single plot. It’s a no-frills book. You jump right into it, you move right along with it, you let it take you where it wants to go. And because it was written fast, it seems to move fast. The ticking twelve-hour clock in the book seems to echo the urgency of the deadline I’d set for myself. Nine days. Twenty pages a day. Clocks are ticking and the cotton is high.
Speaking of Cotton, you’ll notice that in this book I simply had no time to fool around with making Hawes a big *S*T*A*R*, the way a misguided publishing person had earlier insisted. Instead, he becomes a mere human being, an integral part of other humans in the repertory company of cops. I like him better this way.
It took more time to get the stench of that damn shark out of the kitchen than it did to write this book.
—ED McBAIN
NORWALK, CONNECTICUT
FEBRUARY 1994
WERE YOU
A CRANK
THIS WEEK????
A crank is a person who calls Frederick 7-8024 and says, “I don’t want to have to tell you about that Chinese laundry downstairs again. The owner uses a steam iron, and the hissing keeps me awake. Now, will you please arrest him?”
A crank is a person who addresses a letter to the 87th Precinct and writes: “I am surrounded by assassins. I need police protection. The Russians know that I have invented a supersonic tank.”
Every police precinct in the world gets its share of crank calls and letters every day of the week. The calls and letters range from the sincere to the idiotic to the sublime. There are people who have information about suspected Communists, kidnappers, murderers, abortionists, forgers, and high-class whorehouses. There are people who complain about television comedians, mice, landlords, loud phonographs, strange ticking sounds in the walls, and automobile horns that play, “I’ll be down to getya inna taxi, honey.” There are people who claim to have been exhorted, extorted, duped, threatened, libeled, slandered, beaten, maimed, and even murdered. The classic call at the 87th was from a woman who claimed to have been shot dead four days ago, and why hadn’t the police yet found her murderer?
There are, too, mysterious and anonymous calls that flatly and simply state, “There is a bomb in a shoe box at the Avon Theater.”
Crank calls can be terrifying. Crank calls and letters cost the city a lot of time and expense. The trouble is, you see, that you can’t tell a crank from a non-crank without a program.
WERE YOU
A CRANK
THIS WEEK????
It was Wednesday, July 24.
The city was hot, and the muster room of the 87th Precinct was probably the hottest place in the city. Dave Murchison sat behind the high desk to the lef
At 7:45 A.M., Captain Frick, the commanding officer of the precinct, had inspected the handful of uniformed policemen who had not relieved their colleagues on post. He had then sent them out into the streets and turned to Murchison.
“Going to be a scorcher, huh, Dave?” he had asked.
Murchison had nodded bleakly. He was fifty-three years old and had lived through many a suffocating summer in his day. He had learned over the years that comments about the weather very rarely changed the weather. The thing to do was sit it out quietly. It was his own belief that all this heat was caused by those damn H-bomb explosions in the Pacific. Human beings had begun messing around with stuff best left to God, and this was what they got for it.
Surlily, Dave Murchison tugged at his underwear.
He barely looked at the boy who mounted the stone steps before the station house and walked into the muster room. The kid glanced at the sign requesting all visitors to stop at the desk. He walked to the sign and stood before it, laboriously working out the words.
“What do you want, sonny?” Murchison asked.
“You the desk sergeant?”
“I’m the desk sergeant,” Murchison said. He reflected on the virtues of a job that made it necessary to justify yourself to a snotnose.
“Here,” the kid said, and he handed Murchison an envelope. Murchison took it. The boy started out of the building.
“Just a second, kid,” Murchison said.
The kid didn’t stop. He kept walking, down the steps, out onto the sidewalk, into the city, into the world.
“Hey!” Murchison said. Hastily, he looked around him for a patrolman. He had never seen it to fail. There never was a cop around when you needed one.
Sourly, he tugged at his undershorts and opened the envelope. He read the single page inside the envelope. Then he folded the page, put it back into the envelope, and shouted, “Is there another damn cop in this building besides me?”
A patrolman poked his head from behind one of the doors on the ground floor.
“Something wrong, Sarge?” he asked.
“Where the hell is everybody?”
“Around,” the patrolman said. “We’re around.”
“Take this letter up to the squadroom,” Murchison said. He handed the envelope over the desk.
“A billet-doux?” the patrolman asked. Murchison did not reply. It was too hot for half-assed attempts at humor. The patrolman shrugged and followed the pointing DETECTIVE DIVISION sign to the second floor of the building.
He walked down the corridor, stopped at the slatted-rail divider, pushed open the gate in the railing, walked to the desk of Cotton Hawes, and said, “Desk sergeant said to bring this up here.”
“Thanks,” Hawes said, and he opened the letter.
The letter read:
Detective Hawes read the letter and then read it again. His first reaction was “Crank.”
His second reaction was “Suppose not?”
Sighing, he shoved back his chair and walked across the squadroom. He was a tall man, six feet two inches in slipper socks, and he weighed 190 pounds. He had blue eyes and a square jaw with a cleft chin. His hair was red, except for a streak over his left temple where he had once been knifed and where the hair had curiously grown in white after the wound healed. His straight nose was clean and unbroken, and he had a good mouth with a wide lower lip. His fists were huge. He used one of them now on the lieutenant’s door.
“Come!” Lieutenant Byrnes shouted.
Hawes opened the door and stepped into the corner office. A rotating fan swept air across the lieutenant’s desk. Byrnes sat behind the desk, a compact man in shirtsleeves, his tie pulled down, his collar open, the sleeves rolled up over his biceps.
“The newspapers say rain,” he said. “Where the hell’s the rain?” Hawes grinned. “You bringing me trouble, Hawes?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?” He put the letter on Byrnes’s desk.
Byrnes read it rapidly. “It never fails,” he said. “We always get the cuckoos when the temperature’s in the nineties. It drives them out of the woodwork.”
“Do you think it’s a crank, sir?”
“How the hell do I know? It’s either a crank, or it’s legit.” He smiled. “That’s a phenomenal bit of deduction, isn’t it? It’s no wonder I’m a lieutenant.”
“What do we do?” Hawes asked.
“What time is it?”
Hawes looked at his watch. “A little past eight, sir.”
“That gives us about twelve hours—assuming this is legit—to stop a potential killer from knocking off ‘the lady,’ whoever she is. Twelve hours to find a killer and a victim in a city of eight million people, with nothing more to go on than this letter. If it’s legit.”
“It may be, sir.”
“I know,” Byrnes said reflectively. “It may also be somebody’s idea of a joke. Nothing to do? Time growing heavy on your hands? Write a letter to the cops. Send them off on a wild-goose chase. It could be that, Cotton.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t you think it’s time you started calling me Pete?”
“Yes, sir.”
Byrnes nodded. “Who’s handled this letter, outside of you and me?”
“The desk sergeant, I imagine. I didn’t touch the surface, sir…Pete…if you’re thinking of latents.”
“I am,” Byrnes said. “Who’s on the desk?”
“Dave Murchison.”
“He’s a good man, but I’ll bet his prints are all over this damn thing. How was he to know what was inside the envelope?” Byrnes thought for a moment. “Let’s play it safe, Cotton. When we send this over to the lab, we’ll shoot a copy of your prints, mine, and Dave’s with it. It might save Grossman’s boys a lot of time. Time looks like the one thing we can use.”
“Yes, sir,” Hawes said.
Byrnes picked up his phone, pressed the intercom button twice, and waited.
“Captain Frick,” a voice answered.
“John, this is Pete,” Byrnes said. “Can you—”
“Hello, Pete,” Frick said. “Going to be a scorcher, huh?”
“Yeah,” Byrnes said. “John, can you relieve Murchison at the desk for an hour or so?”
“I suppose so. Why?”
“And get a man set up with the roller and pad. I want some prints taken right now.”
“Who’d you pick up, Pete?”
“Nobody.”
“Well, whose prints do you want?”
“Mine, Hawes’s, and Murchison’s.”
“Oh, I see,” Frick said, completely bewildered.
“I’ll need a squad car with a siren and a man you can spare. I’ll also want to question Murchison.”
“You sound pretty mysterious, Pete. Want to—”
“We’re coming down now to get printed,” Byrnes said. “Will you be ready for us?”
“Sure, sure,” Frick said, mystified.
“Bye, John.”
The three men were printed.
The prints and the letter were put together into a large manila envelope, and the package was entrusted to a patrolman. The patrolman was instructed to drive directly to Headquarters downtown on High Street, using his siren all the way. He would deliver the package to Sam Grossman, the lieutenant in charge of the police laboratory there, and then he would wait while Sam’s men photographed the letter. He would bring the photograph back to the 87th, where the detectives would study it while Grossman’s laboratory technicians performed their various tests on the original. Grossman had already been called and informed that speed was essential. The patrolman knew this, too. When the squad car pulled away from the curb in front of the station house, the tires were squealing and the siren was beginning its high wail.
