Ed McBain
Heat
This is for Annie and Syd Solomon
The city in these pages is imaginary.
The people, the places are all fictitious.
Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique.
1
The five-year-old, unmarked sedan Steve Carella was driving to the scene was fitted with an air conditioner that had been repaired last summer and that now — when it was desperately needed — had perversely decided to malfunction. The windows front and back were open, but the air that flowed through the car was sodden and hot, the humidity in this city frequently accompanying the soaring temperature like a leaden ballet dancer lifting a fat partner. Bert Kling sat suffocating in silence beside Carella as the car moved uptown and crosstown.
The initial call had been received by Communications on High Street at 8:30 a.m., an Emergency 911 call that had been routed immediately to a dispatcher who’d radioed car Eight-Seven Frank to the scene. The responding patrolmen weren’t at all surprised to find a corpse: the woman who’d called 911 had reported that she’d just come home to find her husband dead in their apartment. The dispatcher had ended his radio message with “See the lady,” and the lady had indeed been waiting for the police in the lobby of the building. But they had not called back to the station house with a request for detectives until they’d entered the sixth-floor apartment and seen for themselves that there was, in fact, a body on the living-room floor.
The building was in a section of the precinct that was rather more elegant than many of the others, sitting in a semicircle of apartment houses that partially surrounded Silvermine Oval and overlooked Silvermine Park, the River Highway, and the river itself beyond. The buildings themselves had succumbed to the onslaught of the graffiti writers, a visual attack as numbing as a blackjack blow, but there were still doormen in livery here, and the security was presumably tight. A trio of radio motor patrol cars and an Emergency 911 van were all angle-parked in front of the building as Carella nosed the unmarked sedan into the curb. It was then that Kling, who had been silent all the way from the station house, said, “Steve, I think my wife is playing around with somebody.”
One of the patrolmen who’d responded to the dispatcher’s call was standing at the curb, waiting for the detectives. He recognized the faded maroon car as Carella cut the ignition, and then he recognized Carella and Kling as well, and moved toward the car as the doors on either side opened. Carella was staring at Kling over the roof of the car. Kling, his head ducked, began walking toward the patrolman. He had, until just recently, been the youngest man on the squad, blond and blue-eyed, with a boyish, clean-shaven face and an innocent gaze that belied his line of work. He was slightly taller than Carella, and broader in the shoulders; he was wearing a lightweight jacket, darker slacks, a white shirt, and — in keeping with the lieutenant’s recent dictum — a tie. Carella, a stunned look still on his face, came around the side of the car and stepped onto the curb. He walked with the casual stride of an athlete, a man with dark hair and dark eyes peculiarly slanted downward to give his face a somewhat Oriental look. The tropical suit he’d put on at a quarter to seven that morning had already wilted; it resembled an insulted dishrag.
“Where is it?” he asked the patrolman.
“Upstairs, apartment 6B. My partner’s in the hall outside. Lady’s in the lobby, with the doorman there. Came home and found the spouse dead.”
The lady was a tall brunette, her hair cut in the wedge an ice-skating star had made famous, looking fresh and cool in a cotton print dress and high-heeled pumps. Her face was narrow, almost lupine, dominated by startlingly green eyes and a wide mouth. She had been crying; her eyes still glistened with tears, and mascara was running down her cheeks. Carella hesitated before approaching her. This was the part he hated; this was the part that was always most difficult. He took a deep breath.
“I’m Detective Carella,” he said, “87th Squad. I’m sorry, ma’am, but I have to ask you some questions.”
“That’s all right,” she said. Her voice was low and throaty. She seemed numb as she blinked back the tears and nodded.
“Can you tell me your husband’s name, please?”
“Jeremiah Newman.”
“And your name?”
“Anne. Anne Newman.”
“I understand you came home to—”
“Yes.”
“When was that, Mrs. Newman?”
“Just before I called the police.”
“What time was that?”
“Around eight-thirty.”
“And you were coming home, did you say?”
“Yes.”
“Do you work nights?”
“No, no. I’ve been away. I came here directly from the airport.”
“Away where?”
“Los Angeles. I caught the Red Eye last night at ten-thirty and was supposed to get here at six-thirty this morning. But the plane was late, and we didn’t land till almost seven-thirty.”
“Is that when you left the airport?”
“As soon as I’d picked up my luggage, yes.”
“And came immediately here?”
“Yes.”
“When you went upstairs, was the door locked?”
“Yes.”
“Did you touch anything in the apartment?”
“Nothing.”
“Not even the telephone?”
“I called from downstairs in the lobby. I couldn’t have stayed in that apartment another minute.”
The apartment was a malodorous oven.
The moment the detectives opened the door, they were assailed with a blast of heat and an accompanying stench that caused them to back off at once. Covering their noses with their handkerchiefs, they moved into the apartment as though it were the lair of a foul, fire-breathing dragon, and walked directly into the living room. The dead man lay on his back on the rug, his body cavities, tissues, and blood vessels bloated with gas, the skin on his hands, face, and throat — where it showed in the open neck of his bathrobe — discolored a brown that was almost black. The internal gaseous pressure had protruded his lips and forced his tongue out between his lips. His eyes were bulging. His nose had bled, and the blood was now caked beneath his nostrils and on his upper lip, where it had merged with a greenish fluid. He smelled of bacterial invasion and vomited stomach contents and expelled fecal matter.
“Jesus, let’s open some windows,” Kling said.
“Not till the techs get here.”
“Then how about the air conditioner?”
“The M.E.’ll want the temperature the way we found it.”
“So what do we do?”
“Nothing.”
There was, in fact, nothing they could do till the rest of the team arrived. It was almost a full hour before the Mobile Laboratory technicians finally dusted the apartment for latent prints, but even then Carella would not open any of the windows till the Medical Examiner got there. The assistant M.E., who’d been stuck in traffic on his way uptown, got there at twenty minutes past ten. He winced when he stepped into the apartment and then automatically checked the thermostat on the wall, and said to Carella, “If this thing’s right, the temperature in here is a hundred and two degrees.”
“Feels like a hundred and ten,” Carella said. “Can we turn on the air conditioner?”
“Not till I’m through,” the M.E. said, and knelt beside the body and went to work.
Anne Newman was waiting in the corridor outside. There were two expensive suitcases alongside the wall, apparently where she’d dropped them before unlocking the door. Her eyes were dry now, and she had wiped her face clean of the mascara stains. She still looked amazingly cool in her cotton print dress.