Read So Long As You Both Shall Live (87th Precinct) Online
Authors: Ed McBain
So Long As You Both Shall Live (87th Precinct) (15 page)
They were all holding guns, but the fat man was the only one who fired. Steve and Bert, they just stood there looking into the room, they saw the scalpel in his hand, they saw her in a wedding gown, crouched in the corner of the room, the scalpel coming toward her face—
I mutilated a female cadaver
—the fat man taking in the situation at once, his gun coming level, and two explosions erupting from the muzzle.
She would realize later that the fat man was the only one who did not love her. And she would vow never to ask either Steve or Bert why they had not fired instantly, why they had left it to Fat Ollie Weeks to pump the two slugs into the man who was about to slit her throat.
WEEKS: We just told you your rights, and you just told us you understood your rights and didn’t need no lawyer here to tell us what this whole thing is about. Now, I just want you to understand one more thing, you shithead, and that’s you’re in no danger of dying, the doctor says you’re gonna be fine. So I don’t want no trouble later, I want it clear on the record when we get to court that nobody said you were going to die or anything. We didn’t get you to make a statement by saying you were a dying man or nothing like that.
SCHEINER: That’s true.
WEEKS: So that’s why the stenographer’s taking all this down if you want to tell us about it.
SCHEINER: What do you want to know?
WEEKS: Why’d you kidnap the lady?
SCHEINER: Because I love her.
WEEKS: You love her, huh? You were ready to f’Christ’s sake
kill
her when we—
SCHEINER:
And
myself.
WEEKS: You were going to kill yourself, too?
SCHEINER: Yes.
WEEKS: Why?
SCHEINER: With her dead, what would be the sense of living?
WEEKS: You’re crazier’n a fuckin’ bedbug, you know that?
You
’re the one was gonna kill her.
SCHEINER: To punish her for what she did.
WEEKS: What’d she do?
SCHEINER: She allowed him.
WEEKS: She allowed him, huh? You fuckin’ lunatic, you’re a fuckin’ lunatic, you know that? How’d you know what hotel they were at?
SCHEINER: I followed them from the church.
WEEKS: Were you at the reception?
SCHEINER: No. I waited downstairs for them.
WEEKS: All the while the reception was going on?
SCHEINER: Yes. Except for when I moved the ambulance.
WEEKS: When was that?
SCHEINER: About eleven o’clock, I think it was. I moved it into the alley behind the hotel. That was after I learned where the service courtyard was.
WEEKS: Then what?
SCHEINER: Then I came around to the front again—because the alley door was locked, I couldn’t get in that way. And I was just coming through the revolving doors when I saw them standing there, just inside the doors—he was taking a picture of her and another man. I turned away, I walked toward the phone booths.
WEEKS: How’d you find out what room they were in?
SCHEINER: I picked up a house phone in the lobby, and asked.
WEEKS: You see that? You see what they’ll tell you? You walk in any hotel in this city, you ask them what room Mr. So-and-so is in, they’ll tell you. Unless he’s a celebrity. How’d you get into the room, Scheiner?
SCHEINER: I used a slat from a Venetian blind.
WEEKS: How come you know how to do that? What
are
you, a burglar?
SCHEINER: No, no. I drive an ambulance.
WEEKS: Then how’d you learn about that?
SCHEINER: I have read books.
WEEKS: And you learned how to loid a door, huh?
SCHEINER: I learned how to force a door, to push back the bolt.
WEEKS: That’s loiding.
SCHEINER: I don’t know what you call it.
WEEKS: But you know how to
do
it pretty good, don’t you, you shithead? Didn’t you know there was a
cop
in that room? He could’ve blown your head off the minute you opened the door.
SCHEINER: I did not think he would have a gun on his wedding day. Besides, I was prepared.
WEEKS: For what?
SCHEINER: To kill him.
WEEKS: Why?
SCHEINER: For taking her from me.
They put Kling and Augusta into a taxi, and then they went out for hamburgers and coffee. Fat Ollie Weeks ate six hamburgers. He did not say a word all the while he was eating. He had finished his six hamburgers and three cups of coffee before Meyer and Carella finished what they had ordered, and then he sat back against the red leatherette booth, and belched, and said, “That man was a fuckin’ lunatic. I’da cracked the case earlier if only we hadn’t been dealing with a lunatic. Lunatics are very hard to fathom.” He belched again. “I’ll bet old Augusta ain’t gonna forget
this
for a while, huh?”
“I guess not,” Meyer said.
“I wonder if he got in her pants,” Ollie said.
“Ollie,” Carella said very softly, “if I were you, I wouldn’t ever again wonder anything like that aloud.
Ever,
Ollie. You understand me?”
“Oh sure,” Ollie said.
“Ever,”
Carella said.
“Yeah, yeah, relax already, will ya?” Ollie said. “I think I’ll have another hamburger. You guys feel like another hamburger?”
“Are you sure you understand me?” Carella asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” Ollie said. He called the waitress over, and ordered another hamburger, and then was silent until the hamburger came. He gulped it down without saying a word, and then he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and said, completely out of the blue, “I think I’ll apply for a transfer to the Eight-Seven. I mean it, that’s one hell of a precinct you got there. That’s just what I’m gonna do.”
Carella looked at Meyer.
“Yep,” Ollie said.
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.
