So Long As You Both Shall Live (87th Precinct) Read Online Free PDF Page B

take.”
    “Well, thanks a lot, Mr. Bailey, you’ve been very helpful.”
    “Want a cup of coffee? I’ve got a pot right here on the stove.”
    “Thank you, no, I’ve got to be going.”
    “Nice talking to you,” Bailey said, and unlocked the door for him. Carella stepped out into the courtyard again. The wind was vicious; it ripped through the cloth of his coat and gnawed his bones to the marrow. Newspapers flew about the courtyard like winged night marauders, flapping noisily in the air, slapping blindly against the surrounding brick walls. He walked to the fire door and tried to open it, but it was blind locked on the courtyard side. Ducking his chin into his collar, he thrust his hands into his pockets and walked up the driveway, and out onto the sidewalk and up the block, and around the corner to the front entrance of the hotel.

They had set the police machinery in motion, and now they sat down to wait in the early hours of the morning, the empty hours of the night. It was Monday already, November the tenth, but it still felt like Sunday night. Contrary to Carella’s hopes, it had proved impossible to keep the hotel staff from knowing what had happened. Too many technicians were crawling all over the room, the corridor, the elevator, the fire stairs, and the service courtyard, installing equipment and searching for fingerprints, footprints, and tire tracks. In the end Carella simply warned the hotel staff that the newspapers were not to get hold of this story, and he hinted broadly that news of an abduction wouldn’t do much to help the hotel’s image, either.
    A full description of Augusta had been radioed to the police at air terminals, railroad stations, and bus depots, and a teletype had gone out to police departments in all the adjacent states. A police technician and a telephone installer, working in tandem, had hooked the room’s phone into a tape recorder, and the phone company had been alerted to expect a possible request for a trace if and when the kidnapper called. There was some question as to whether or not Kling’s home phone should be similarly wired; it was decided that he’d keep the room at the hotel till sometime tomorrow morning and then go back to his own apartment, by which time the phone there would also be equipped to record. For now, there was nothing more that any of them could do—except analyze what had happened and try to second-guess the kidnapper’s next move.
    If he was a kidnapper.
    Captain Marshall Frick, who was the captain in charge of the entire 87th Precinct, including the uniformed cops, the detectives, and the clerks, seemed to think otherwise. “It could have been a burglary,” he said. Frick was getting on in years, a man whose thinking was as ancient and as creaky as his white hair prepared one to expect.
    “How do you figure a burglary?” Byrnes asked. They were all sitting in the hotel room, waiting for the phone to ring. Kling was sitting on the edge of the bed, nearest to the phone. Meyer was in a chair alongside the recording equipment; he was wearing earphones, one of them on his left ear, the other pushed away from the right ear so he could hear the conversation in the room. Carella was half sitting on, half leaning against the dresser. Frick was in the room’s one upholstered chair, and Byrnes was in a chair he’d pulled out from the desk. “With all due respect, Marshall, why would a burglar have come in here with chloroform?”
    “I know burglars who’ve used chloroform,” Frick said. “I’ve even known burglars who brought steaks with them, to feed to the watchdog.”
    “Yes—but, Captain,” Carella said, “nothing was stolen from the room.”
    “He may have been scared off,” Frick said.
    “By what?” Carella asked, and belatedly added, “Sir?”
    “By the girl herself,” Frick said. “Kling says he went in the bathroom to shower, which means that anybody standing outside the door there, listening, wouldn’t have heard anyone