39 Poison by Ed McBain

Author:Ed McBain
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Police Procedural, Mystery & Detective, Fiction
ISBN: 9780330300803
Publisher: Pan Books
Published: 1987-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

"What is it you want to know?" she asked Carella.

She was wearing blue jeans and a man's shirt. Carella wondered if the shirt was Willis's. They were in the paneled living room. The house was silent at eleven o'clock in the morning, thick walls insulating the room from the sounds of traffic outside. It was difficult to remember she'd taken a fall for prostitution. She looked like a teenager. Flawless skin, alert blue eyes, no makeup on her face, not even lipstick. But you could apply the Multiple Mouse Rule here. If you saw one mouse in your barn, that meant you had a hundred. If a girl took one fall for hooking, you could bet she'd already turned a thousand tricks.

"About Basil Hollander," he said.

"What about him?"

"How'd you happen to know him?"

"Biblically," she said, and smiled.

Hooker's trick. Take the curse off intimacy by joking about it.

"So you told us," he said drily. "How'd you meet him?"

"Why do you want to know this, Mr. Carella?"

"He was a friend of yours," Carella said. "He's dead. Another friend of yours is also dead. I know you'll forgive our curiosity…"

"I don't appreciate sarcasm," she said. "Why don't you like me?"

"I neither like you nor dislike you, Miss Hollis, I'm a cop doing…"

"Oh, please, spare me the cop-doing-his-job routine, will you? I got enough of that from Hal."

Hal. Well, of course. What else would she call him? Detective Willis?

"Why don't you like me?" she said again. "Is it because we're living together?"

Straight to the point. Never mind the other point, the fact that he'd asked her how she'd met Hollander, and she still hadn't answered him.

"Hal's business is Hal's business," he said. Which wasn't what he'd told Willis less than an hour ago. "My business is…"

"I thought you and Hal were in the same business."

"I thought so, too," Carella said.

"But you don't think so anymore, huh? Because he's living with someone who may be a coldblooded killer, isn't that right?"

"You said it, not me."

"But that's what you think, isn't it? That I may have killed both Jerry and Baz?"

"I have no evidence to support…"

"We're not talking about evidence here," she said. "The evidence indicates that I was nowhere near either of them when they were killed. That's the evidence, Mr. Carella. We're talking about gut feeling, aren't we? What's your gut feeling? You think I may have killed them, don't you?"

"I think my job is to…"

"Yes, here we go with your job again."

"Which you're not making any easier," Carella said.

"Oh? How so? By living with your partner?"

"No, by not answering a question I asked you five minutes ago."

"Has it been five minutes already?" she said. "My, how the time flies when you're having a good time."

"Why don't you like me?" he asked.

"I've met you before, Mr. Carella. You're every cop I've ever met. With the exception of Hal. You think if a person's ever been in trouble with the law, he'll always be in trouble with the law. A leopard never changes its spots, right, Mr.

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