Killer’s Choice (87th Precinct), page 16
No, the killer had slain a specific Annie. And now the killer had a specific problem, and the problem was a letter.
Standing in the doorway across from the apartment house, the killer could watch everyone who went in or out of the building. When Monica and Mrs. Travail left the apartment, the killer crossed the street rapidly and then went upstairs. It was not easy to force the door of the apartment. There could be no sudden sound, no sharp splintering of wood. And so the tool used was a simple wood chisel pried into the jamb, pressed, pressed with subtle force until the door sprang open. The killer went directly to the dead Annie Boone’s room.
There, books were knocked from shelves, closets were ransacked, the record player was almost demolished, the bed was stripped, the mattress turned over—but the letter was not found.
The whirlwind swept destructively throughout the entire apartment, seeking, seeking, not finding, infuriated by failure, destroying property as senselessly as it had in the liquor shop on the night of the murder. The killer ransacked and destroyed and rampaged.
But the letter remained undiscovered.
The killer succeeded in doing two things.
First, the wild rampage brought the cops back to the apartment. This time, they realized just how important that letter was. This time, there were a dozen cops going over the place. This time, whenever two cops finished with a room, two other cops came in and started searching all over again.
They found the letter on Annie’s desk.
She had tucked both letter and envelope into a larger envelope containing a brochure from one of the department stores. Safe within the pages of the brochure, the letter had escaped the killer’s search. The killer, of course, did not have a dozen men searching, nor was a salary being paid for the solitary search.
The letter was very short. It was not a masterpiece of English composition. It said what it had to say. It was written in haste, but not in anger. It spoke of a murder that was coldly premeditated. It promised death in cold, precise words. It said:
The killer had not bothered to sign the letter, but the killer had signed two death warrants nonetheless: Annie Boone’s and the killer’s own. That was the second thing the killer succeeded in doing.
The envelope was postmarked at International Airport at 8:00 A.M. on the morning of June 5.
The rest was easy.
This is the stub torn from an automobile registration application. This stub is on file in the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in the state capitol.
If you’ve ever registered an automobile, you signed the stub. You signed your name. In your handwriting.
This now is the reverse side of a stub torn from an application for a driver’s license. This stub, too, is on file in the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in the state capitol.
You signed it.
The first time you applied for a driver’s license, you signed the stub. There are stubs like this on file in the motor vehicle bureaus of almost every state in the union.
Not too long ago, a drunk named George had stumbled into the squadroom of the 87th Precinct and said, “I wannuh…uh…I wannuh talk tuddy bull who’s hadlin’ the…uh…the li’l girl got killed inny…uh…inny liquor store.”
He had spoken to Meyer Meyer, and then Miscolo had made a lot of bum jokes about the drunk being Meyer’s father—but the drunk had told Meyer one thing, and maybe he was just an old drunk, or maybe he was telling the truth, but he’d told Meyer that he’d seen someone driving away from the liquor store after hearing shots and breakage. If the drunk had been telling the truth, and unless the men of the 87th were up against the miracle of an unlicensed driver driving an unregistered car, the killer didn’t have much time left.
There was the killer’s handwriting on that letter mailed to Annie Boone. And there were thousands and thousands of signatures on the stubs in the Bureau of Motor Vehicles upstate. The comparisons began.
The drunk named George had not been lying, and the age of miracles was dead.
Mrs. Franklin Phelps sat quite regally in the straight-backed chair in the squadroom. They let Steve Carella question her because Carella allegedly had a way with women, even though he was a married man. She knew it was all over, anyway. It was in her eyes and on her face. Anyone could have questioned her. A rookie off the streets could have questioned her.
“Mrs. Phelps,” Carella said, “you left for Florida on the fifth, is that right?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Phelps said.
“Did you mail this letter from International Airport before you boarded your plane?” He showed her the letter in its blue envelope.
“Yes,” she said.
“You planned then to kill Annie Boone before you boarded that plane?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Phelps said.
“Did you kill Annie Boone on the night of June tenth, Mrs. Phelps?”
Mrs. Phelps did not answer.
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to tell us about it?”
“Why?” she said dully.
“We’d like to know.”
“Go to hell,” Mrs. Phelps said. “I killed the woman who was stealing my husband from me. I killed Franklin’s mistress. I don’t have to tell you anything else.”
“You killed a lot more than a mistress,” Carella said. “You killed a woman. In fact, you may not understand this, Mrs. Phelps, but you killed a lot of women, a lot of different women.”
“I killed only one,” she said. “My husband’s mistress. That’s the only one I set out to kill, and the only one I did kill.”
She looked at Carella unblinkingly.
“Do you want to tell us about it?” he asked.
And again Mrs. Phelps said, “Go to hell.”
The newspapers called it a crime of passion.
At the trial, the district attorney proved how coldly diabolical had been the murder plot conceived and executed by Mrs. Franklin Phelps. At the trial, she told how she had got the idea to kill Annie at the same time she’d got the idea for a vacation in Florida and then explained how her mind had related the two, wedded them in a fatal plan. On June 5, she had left for Miami. She could not resist sending the note from the airport, the note which led to her eventual capture. Her plan was a simple one. Even as she flew down to Miami for the first time, she had tickets for two other flights in her purse—one from Miami to this city under the name of Frieda Nelson; the other from this city to Miami under the name of June Arbuthnot.
On June 10, the Hotel Shalimar had thrown a cocktail party. The party was a stroke of luck upon which Mrs. Phelps had not counted. She had planned to execute her scheme without benefit of any cover-plan, assuming her mere presence in Miami Beach at the time of a murder thousands of miles away would automatically eliminate her as a suspect. But since the party had presented itself, she used it. She appeared in her brightest-red dress when the party started. She slipped away early and took a cab to Miami city and the airport where, as Frieda Nelson, she boarded a northbound plane at 6:30 P.M. The plane landed at the International Airport here at 10:15 P.M.
Mrs. Phelps had gone to her car where she’d left it in the airport parking lot five days earlier. She drove to the liquor store, killed Annie with the .25-caliber automatic she had illegally purchased two weeks before in a hockshop, and then destroyed her husband’s stock in a further attempt to divert suspicion from herself completely.
Forty minutes after the murder had been committed, she was back at the airport. As June Arbuthnot, she boarded the 12:30 A.M. southbound flight to Miami. The flight enjoyed good weather all the way down, arriving in Miami at 4:00 A.M. She took a cab out to the beach and was back at the hotel in time for breakfast.
At the trial, despite the plea of guilty, the DA called Mrs. Phelps a “cold-blooded killer” and a “wanton murderess.”
At the trial, Mrs. Phelps staunchly refused to divulge the name or location of the hockshop where she had purchased the .25.
At the trial, despite the DA’s roars for a death sentence, Mrs. Franklin Phelps was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The detectives from the 87th Squad were riding back from the trial in the police sedan after their stints as state’s witnesses.
It was August, and it was hot, and the bulls rode in their shirtsleeves, Meyer on the front seat alongside Kling, who was driving, Carella and Hawes in the back.
“You know who cracked this one?” Meyer asked. “You think it was us?”
“It was Cotton Hawes,” Kling said, smiling into the rearview mirror.
Hawes caught the smile and grinned back. “Sure, sure,” he said.
“None of us,” Meyer said. “Mrs. Phelps cracked it herself. Except she had help. She had help from a drunken wino named George. George is the hero of this piece.”
Carella was strangely silent. Kling’s eyes flicked from the thick traffic in the hot city streets to the rearview mirror.
“What’s the matter, Steve?” he asked.
“Huh?” Carella said. “Oh, nothing.”
“He’s thinking of his wife,” Meyer said. “It shakes a man to find out that wives are capable of homicide.”
Carella smiled. “Something like that,” he said.
“You afraid Teddy’ll take a gun to somebody?” Kling asked. “Maybe I ought to stay away from marriage, huh?”
“No, no, that’s not it. I was thinking of what Mrs. Phelps said to me. She said, ‘I killed only one.’ Hell, maybe she didn’t kill any.”
“That’s not the way the DA read it,” Hawes said.
“No. But maybe somebody else did the real killing, the real killing. Maybe somebody else took Annie Boone’s life and, for all practical purposes, Mrs. Phelps’ life, too. Maybe somebody killed them both.”
“Who, Steve?” Kling asked.
“Franklin Phelps,” Carella said. “If George is the hero of this piece, maybe Phelps is the villain. Maybe he’s the rotten bastard in this kettle of fish.”
“You mixed a metaphor,” Hawes said.
The car went silent.
The men breathed the hot summer air. Slowly, the car threaded its way uptown to the precinct and the squadroom.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photograph © Dragica Hunter
Ed McBain was one of the many pen names of the successful and prolific crime fiction author Evan Hunter (1926–2005). Born Salvatore Lambino in New York, McBain served aboard a destroyer in the US Navy during World War II and then earned a degree from Hunter College in English and psychology. After a short stint teaching in a high school, McBain went to work for a literary agency in New York, working with authors such as Arthur C. Clarke and P.G. Wodehouse, all the while working on his own writing on nights and weekends. He had his first breakthrough in 1954 with the novel The Blackboard Jungle, which was published under his newly legal name Evan Hunter and based on his time teaching in the Bronx.
Perhaps his most popular work, the 87th Precinct series (released mainly under the name Ed McBain) is one of the longest running crime series ever published, debuting in 1956 with Cop Hater and featuring over fifty novels. The series is set in a fictional locale called Isola and features a wide cast of detectives including the prevalent Detective Steve Carella.
McBain was also known as a screenwriter. Most famously he adapted a short story from Daphne Du Maurier into the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). In addition to writing for the silver screen, he wrote for many television series, including Columbo and the NBC series 87th Precinct (1961–1962), based on his popular novels.
McBain was awarded the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in 1986 by the Mystery Writers of America and was the first American to receive the Cartier Diamond Dagger award from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. He passed away in 2005 in his home in Connecticut after a battle with larynx cancer.
Ed McBain, Killer’s Choice (87th Precinct)
