Til Death (2 page)

Carella shoved the box away from him instantly. A look of utter horror had crossed his face, and it lingered still in his eyes and around the corners of his mouth.

“Yeah,” Tommy said. “That’s just the way I felt.”

“You could have told me what was in the box,” Carella said, beginning to think his future brother-in-law was something of a sadist. He had never liked spiders. During the war, stationed on a Pacific island, he had fought as bitterly against crawling jungle arachnids as he had against the Japanese. “You think this is a gag somebody played?” he asked incredulously.

“I did before I opened the box. Now I don’t know. You’d have to have a pretty queer sense of humor to give somebody a black widow spider. Or
any
kind of a spider, for Christ’s sake!”

“Is that coffee ready?”

“Just about.”

“I’m really going to need a cup. Spiders have two effects on me. My mouth dries up, and I get itchy all over.”

“I just get itchy,” Tommy said. “When I was in basic training in Texas, we had to shake our shoes out every morning before we put them on. To make sure no tarantulas had crawled into them during the—”

“Please!” Carella said.

“Yeah, it gives you the creeps, don’t it?”

“Do any of your friends have…odd senses of humor?” He swallowed hard. There seemed to be no saliva in his mouth.

“Well, I know some crazy people,” Tommy said, “but this is a little far out, don’t you think? I mean, this is slightly offbeat.”

“Slightly,” Carella said. “How’s the coffee?”

“In a minute.”

“Of course it
may
be a gag, who knows?” Carella said. “A sort of a wedding joke. After all, the spider is a classic symbol.”

“Of what?”

“Of the vagina,” Carella said.

Tommy blushed. A bright crimson smear started at his throat and quickly worked its way onto his face. If Carella had not seen it with his own eyes, he wouldn’t have believed it. He quickly changed the topic.

“Or maybe it’s just a feeble pun on marriage in general. You know. The female black widow is supposed to devour her mate.”

Again Tommy blushed, and Carella realized there was no safe ground with a prospective bridegroom. Besides, he felt itchy. And his throat was dry. And no future brother-in-law had the goddamn right to spring a spider on a man so early in the morning— especially on Sunday morning.

“And of course,” Carella went on, “there are more ominous overtones—if we’re looking for them.”

“Yeah,” Tommy said. He glanced at the stove. “Coffee’s ready.” He carried the pot to the table and began pouring. “A gag is a gag, but suppose I’d reached into that box and got bit? The black widow is poisonous.”

“Suppose
I’d
reached into it?” Carella asked.

“I wouldn’t have let you, don’t worry. But there was no one here when I opened it. I could’ve got bit.”

“I doubt if it would have killed you.”

“No, but it could have made me pretty sick.”

“Maybe somebody wants you to miss your own wedding,” Carella said.

“I thought of that. I also thought of something else.”

“What?”

“Why send a black widow? A
widow,
do you follow me? It’s almost as if…well…maybe it’s a hint that Angela’s gonna be a bride and a widow on the same day.”

“You’re talking like a man with a lot of enemies, Tommy.”

“No. But I thought it might be a hint.”

“A warning, you mean.”

“Yes. And I’ve been wracking my brain ever since I opened that box, trying to think of anybody who’d…who’d want me dead.”

“And who’d you come up with?”

“Only one guy. And he’s three thousand miles away from here.”

“Who?”

“A guy I knew in the Army. He said I was responsible for his buddy getting shot. I wasn’t, Steve. We were on patrol together when a sniper opened up. I ducked the minute I heard the shot, and this other guy got hit. So his buddy claimed I was responsible. Said I should have yelled there was a sniper. How the hell was I supposed to yell it? I didn’t even know it until I heard the shot— and then it was too late.”

“Was the man killed?”

Tommy hesitated. “Yeah,” he said at last.

“And his buddy threatened you?”

“He said he was gonna kill me one day.”

“What happened after that?”

“He got shipped back home. Frostbite or something. I don’t know. He lives in California.”

“Have you ever heard from him since?”

“No.”

“Was he the kind of a person who’d do a thing like this? Send a spider?”

“I didn’t know him very well. From what I did know, he seemed like the kind of guy who
ate
spiders for breakfast.”

Carella almost choked on his coffee. He put down his cup and said, “Tommy, I’m going to give you some advice. Angela is a very sensitive girl. I guess it runs in the Carella family. Unless you want to wind up getting a divorce real soon, I wouldn’t discuss hairy or crawly or…”

“I’m sorry, Steve,” Tommy said.

“Okay. What was this guy’s name? The one who threatened you?”

“Sokolin. Marty Sokolin.”

“Have any pictures of him?”

“No. What would I be doing with his picture?”

“Were you in the same company?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have one of these company group pictures where everybody’s grinning and wishing he was out of the Army?”

“No.”

“Can you describe him?”

“He was a very big, beefy guy with a broken nose. He looked like a wrestler. Black hair, very dark eyes. A small scar near his right eye. He was always smoking cigars.”

“Think he had a police record?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, we’ll check on it.” Carella was pensive for a moment. “It doesn’t seem like, though, that he’s the guy. I mean, what the hell, how would he know you were getting married today?” He shrugged. “Hell, this may just be a gag, anyway. Somebody with a warped sense of humor.”

“Maybe,” Tommy said, but he didn’t seem convinced.

“Where’s your phone?” Carella asked.

“In the bedroom.”

Carella started out of the kitchen. He paused. “Tommy, would you mind a few extra guests at your wedding?” he asked.

“No. Why?”

“Well, if this
isn’t
a gag—and it probably is—but if it isn’t, we don’t want anything happening to the groom, do we?” He grinned. “And the nice thing about having a cop for a brother-in-law is that he can get bodyguards whenever he needs them. Even on a Sunday.”

There is no such day as Sunday in the police department. Sunday is exactly the same as Monday and Tuesday and all those other days. If you happen to have the duty on Sunday, that’s it. You don’t go to the commissioner or the chaplain or the mayor. You go to the squadroom. If Christmas happens to fall on one of your duty days, that’s extremely unfortunate, too, unless you can arrange a switch with a cop who isn’t celebrating Christmas. Life is just one merry round in the police department.

On Sunday morning, June 22, Detective/2nd Grade Meyer Meyer was catching in the squadroom of the 87th Precinct. It was not a bad day to be in charge of the six-man detective team that had begun its shift at 8:00
A.M.
and that would work through until 6:00
P.M.
that evening. There was a mild breeze on the air, and
the sky was a cloudless blue, and sunlight was pouring through the meshed grill screening over the squadroom’s windows. The squadroom, shoddy with time and use, was quite comfortable on a day such as this. There were days when the city’s temperature soared into the nineties, and on those days the squadroom of the 87th Precinct resembled nothing so much as a big iron coffin. But not today. Today, a man could sit without his trousers crawling up his behind. Today, a man could type up reports or answer phones or dig in the files without danger of melting into a small unidentifiable puddle on the squadroom floor.

Meyer Meyer was quite content. Puffing on his pipe, he studied the
Wanted
circulars on his desk and thought about how nice it was to be alive in June.

Bob O’Brien, six feet and one inch tall in his bare feet, weighing in at 210 pounds, stomped across the room and collapsed into the chair beside Meyer’s desk. Meyer felt an immediate sense of doom, because if ever there was a jinxed cop it was O’Brien. Since the time he’d been forced to kill a neighborhood butcher years ago—a man he’d known since he was a boy—O’Brien seemed to find himself constantly in the kind of scrapes wherein gunplay was absolutely necessary. He had not wanted to kill Eddie the butcher. But Eddie’d been a little out of his head and had come raving out of his shop swinging a meat cleaver at an innocent woman. O’Brien tried to stop him, but it was no use. Eddie knocked him to the pavement and then raised the meat cleaver and O’Brien, acting reflexively, drew his service revolver and fired. He killed Eddie with a single shot. And that night he went home and wept like a baby. He had killed six men since that time. In each of the shootings, he had not wanted to draw his gun—but circumstances so combined to force him into the act of legal murder. And whenever he was forced to kill, he still wept. Not openly. He wept inside, where it hurts most.

The cops of the 87th Squad were not a superstitious bunch, but they nonetheless shied away from answering a complaint with Bob O’Brien along. With O’Brien along, there was bound to be shooting. They did not know why. It certainly wasn’t Bob’s fault He was always the last person on the scene to draw a gun, and he never did so until it became absolutely necessary. But with O’Brien along, there would undoubtedly be shooting and the cops of the 87th were normal-type human beings who did not long to become involved in gun duels. They knew that if O’Brien went out to break up a marble game being played by six-year-old tots, one of those tots would miraculously draw a submachine gun and begin blasting away. That was Bob O’Brien. A hard-luck cop.

And that, of course, was pure police exaggeration because O’Brien had been a cop for ten years, four of them with the 87th, and he’d only shot seven men in all that time. Still, that was a pretty good average.

“How’s it going, Meyer?” he asked.

“Oh, very nicely,” Meyer said. “Very nicely, thank you.”

“I’ve been wondering.”

“What about?”

“Miscolo.”

Miscolo was the patrolman in charge of the Clerical Office just down the corridor. Meyer very rarely wondered about him. In fact, he very rarely even thought about him.

“What’s the matter with Miscolo?” he asked now.

“His coffee,” O’Brien said.

“Something wrong with his coffee?”

“He used to make a good cup of coffee,” O’Brien said wistfully. “I can remember times, especially during the winter, when I’d come in here off a plant or something and there was a cup of Miscolo’s coffee waiting for me and I’m telling you, Meyer, it
made a man feel like a prince, a regular prince. It had rich body, and aroma, and flavor.”

“You’re wasting your time with police work,” Meyer said. “I’m serious, Bob. You should become a television announcer. You can sell coffee the way—”

“Come on, I’m trying to be serious.”

“Excuse me. So what’s wrong with his coffee now?”

“I don’t know. It just isn’t the same any more. You know when it changed?”

“When?”

“When he got shot. Remember when that nutty dame was up here with a bottle of TNT and she shot Miscolo? Remember that time?”

“I remember,” Meyer said. He remembered very well. He still had scars as mementos of the pistol whipping he’d received from Virginia Dodge on that day last October. “Yes, I remember.”

“Well, right after Miscolo got out of the hospital, the first day he was on the job again, the coffee began to stink. Now what do you suppose causes something like that, Meyer?”

“Gee, I don’t know, Bob.”

“Because, to me, it’s a phenomenon, I mean it. A man gets shot, and suddenly he can’t make good coffee any more. Now, to me, that’s one of the eight wonders of the world.”

“Why don’t you ask Miscolo?”

“Now how can I do that, Meyer? He takes pride in the cup of coffee he makes. Can I ask him how come his coffee is suddenly no good? How can I do that, Meyer?”

“I guess you can’t.”

“And I can’t go out to
buy
coffee or he’ll be offended. What should I do, Meyer?”

“Gee, Bob, I don’t know. It seems to me you’ve got a problem. Why don’t you try some occupational therapy?”

“Huh?”

“Why don’t you call up some of the witnesses to that holdup we had the other day and see if you can’t get something more out of them?”

“You think I’m goofing, you mean?”

“Did I say that, Bob?”

“I’m not goofing, Meyer,” O’Brien said. “I’ve just got a thirst for some coffee, and the thought of drinking Miscolo’s is making me sick.”

“Have a glass of water instead.”

“At nine-thirty in the morning?” O’Brien looked shocked. “Do you think we can call the desk and ask Murchison to sneak in some coffee from outside?”

The telephone on Meyer’s desk rang. He snatched it from the cradle and said, “87th Squad, Detective Meyer.”

“Meyer, this is Steve.”

“Hi, boy. Lonely for the place, huh? Can’t resist calling in even on your day off.”