Nocturne by Ed McBain Read Free Book Online

here for you?”
    “A little.”
    “If I turn this off, though, we’ll be freezing again in five minutes. What do you think I should do?”
    “Well, whatever you like, sir,” Hawes said.
    “Jenny liked it warm,” Turner said. He nodded. He was silent for several moments, staring at his hands folded on the kitchen
     table. His hands looked big and dark and somehow useless against the glare of the white oilcloth.
    “Who else was there?” Carella asked. “Watching the show?”
    “Oh, people I recognized from the building mostly. Some of them leaning out their windows, others coming downstairs to see
     things firsthand.”
    “Anyone you didn’t recognize?”
    “Oh, sure, all those cops.”
    “
Aside
from the cops or the ambulance peop—”
    “Lots of others, sure. You know this city. Anything happens, a big crowd gathers.”
    “Did anyone you didn’t recognize come
out
of the building? Aside from cops or …”
    “See what you mean, yeah. Just let me think a minute.”
    The gas jets hissed into the stillness of the apartment. Somewhere in the building, a toilet flushed. Outside on the street,
     a siren doo-wah, doo-wahed to the night. Then all was still again.
    “A tall blond man,” Turner said.
    As he tells it, he first sees the man when he comes out of the alleyway alongside the building. Comes out and stands there
     with the crowd behind the police lines, hands in his pockets. He’s wearing a blue overcoat and a red muffler. Hands in the
     pockets of the coat. Black shoes. Blond hair blowing in the wind.
    “Beard? Mustache?”
    “Clean-shaven.”
    “Anything else you remember about him?”
    He just stands there like all the other people, behind the barricades the police have set up, watching all the activity, more
     cops arriving, plainclothes cops, they must be, uniformed cops, too, with brass on their hats and collars, the man just stands
     there watching, like interested. Then the ambulance people carry her out of the building on a stretcher, and they put her
     inside the ambulance and it drives off.
    “That’s when he went off, too,” Turner said.
    “You watched him leave?”
    “Well, yes.”
    “Why?”
    “There was a … a sort of sad look on his face, I don’t know. As if … I don’t know.”
    “Where’d he go?” Hawes asked. “Which direction?”
    “Headed south. Toward the corner. Stopped near the sewer up the street …”
    Both detectives were suddenly all ears.
    “Bent down to tie his shoelace or something, went on his way again.”
    Which is how they found the murder weapon.

3

    T he gun they’d fished out of the sewer was registered to a man named Rodney Pratt, who—on his application for the pistol permit—had
     given his occupation as “security escort” and had stated that he needed to carry a gun because his business was “providing
     protection of privacy, property, and physical well-being to individuals requiring personalized service.” They figured this
     was the politically correct way of saying he was a private bodyguard.
    In the United States of America, no one is obliged to reveal his race, color, or creed on any application form. They had no
     way of knowing Rodney Pratt was black until he opened the door for them at five minutes past three that morning, and glowered
     out at them in undershirt and boxer shorts. To them, his color was merely an accident of nature. What mattered was that Ballistics
     had already identified the gun registered to him as the weapon that had fired three fatal bullets earlier tonight.
    “Mr. Pratt?” Hawes asked cautiously.
    “Yeah,
what
?” Pratt asked.
    He did not have to say This is three o’fucking clock in the morning, why the fuck are you knocking my door down? His posture
     said that, his angry frown said that, his blazing eyes said that.
    “May we come in, sir?” Hawes asked. “Few questions we’d like to ask you.”
    “What
kind
of questions?” Pratt asked.
    The “sir” had done nothing to mollify him.