Killer's Choice

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

'Who killed her?' they had asked at first.

And now they were asking something else again. Now they were asking, 'Who was killed?' They had asked questions about a girl named Annie Boone, and they had learned that there were many girls named Annie Boone, and to know who had killed Annie they first had to discover which of the Annies had been killed. The vivacious redhead? The intellectual reader and ballet-goer? The pool-shooter? The divorced wife? The mistress? The mother? The daughter? The social drinker? The drunkard? The girl who talked with a blind boy? Which was Annie? And which Annie had been killed? Or were they all Annie, and had the killer murdered someone who was all things to all men?

No, the killer had slain a specific Annie. And now the killer had a specific problem, and the problem was a letter.

Standing in the doorway across from the apartment house, the killer could watch everyone who went in or out of the building. When Monica and Mrs Travail left the apartment, the killer crossed the street rapidly, and then went upstairs. It was not easy to force the door of the apartment. There could be no sudden sound, no sharp splintering of wood. And so the tool used was a simple wood chisel pried into the jamb, pressed, pressed with subtle force until the door sprang open. The killer went directly to the dead Annie Boone's room.

There, books were knocked from shelves, closets were ransacked, the record player was almost demolished, the bed was stripped, the mattress turned over—but the letter was not found.

The whirlwind swept destructively throughout the entire apartment, seeking, seeking, not finding, infuriated by failure, destroying property as senselessly as it had in the liquor shop on the night of the murder. The killer ransacked and destroyed and rampaged.

But the letter remained undiscovered.

The killer succeeded in doing two things.

First, the wild rampage brought the cops back to the apartment. This time, they realized just how important that letter was. This time, there were a dozen cops going over the place. This time, whenever two cops finished with a room, two other cops came in and started searching all over again.

They found the letter on Annie's desk.

She had tucked both letter and envelope into a larger envelope containing a brochure from one of the department stores. Safe within the pages of the brochure, the letter had escaped the killer's search. The killer, of course, did not have a dozen men searching, nor was a salary being paid for the solitary search.

The letter was very short. It was not a masterpiece of English composition. It said what it had to say. It was written in haste, but not in anger. It spoke of a murder which was coldly premeditated. It promised death in cold precise words. It said:

Annie Boone—

Soon—

You will know why. You know why already. You shall pay. Soon and swiftly.

You will die!

The killer had not bothered to sign the letter but the killer had signed two death warrants none the less: Annie Boone's, and the killer's own. That was the second thing the killer succeeded in doing.

The envelope was postmarked at International Airport at 8 a.m. on the morning of 5 June.

The rest was easy.

This is the stub torn from an automobile registration application. This stub is on file in the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in the state capital.

If you've ever registered an automobile, you signed the stub. You signed your name. In your handwriting.

This now is the reverse side of a stub torn from an application for a driver's licence. This stub, too, is on file in the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in the state capital.

You signed it.

The first time you applied for a driver's licence, you sign2d the stub. There are stubs like this on file in the motor vehicle bureaus of almost every state in the union.

Not too long ago, a drunk named George had stumbled into the squad room of the 87th Precinct and said, 'I wannuh… uh… I wannuh talk tuddy bull who's handlin' the… uh… the li'l girl got killed inny… uh… inny liquor store.'

He had spoken to Meyer Meyer, and then Miscolo had made a lot of bum jokes about the drunk being Meyer's father—but the drunk had told Meyer one thing, and maybe he was just an old drunk or maybe he was telling the truth, but he'd told Meyer that he'd seen someone driving away from the liquor store after hearing shots and breakage. If the drank had been telling the truth, and unless the men of the 87th were up against the miracle of an unlicenced driver driving an unregistered car, the killer didn't have much time left.

There was the killer's handwriting on that letter mailed to Annie Boone. And there were thousands and thousands of signatures on the stubs in the Bureau of Motor Vehicles upstate. The comparisons began.

The drunk named George had not been lying, and the age of miracles was dead.

Mrs Franklin Phelps sat quite regally in the straight-backed chair in the squad room. They let Steve Carella question her because Carella allegedly had a way with women, even though he was a married man. She knew it was all over, anyway. It was in her eyes and on her face. Anyone could have questioned her. A rookie off the streets could have questioned her.

'Mrs Phelps,' Carella said, 'you left for Florida on the 5th, is that right?'

'Yes,' Mrs Phelps said.

'Did you mail this letter from International Airport before you boarded your plane?' He showed her the letter in its blue envelope.

'Yes,' she said.

'You planned then to kill Annie Boone before you boarded that plane?'

'Yes,' Mrs Phelps said.

'Did you kill Annie Boone on the night of June 10th, Mrs Phelps?'

Mrs Phelps did not answer.

'Did you?'

'Yes.'

'Do you want to tell us about it?'

'Why?' she said dully.

'We'd like to know.'

'Go to hell,' Mrs Phelps said. 'I killed the woman who was stealing my husband from me. I killed Franklin's mistress. I don't have to tell you anything else.'

'You killed a lot more than a mistress,' Carella said. 'You killed a woman. In fact, you may not understand this, Mrs Phelps, but you killed a lot of women, a lot of different women.'

'I killed only one,' she said. 'My husband's mistress. That's the only one I set out to kill, and the only one I did kill.'

She looked at Carella unblinkingly.

'Do you want to tell us about it?' he asked.

And again Mrs Phelps said, 'Go to hell.'

The newspapers called it a crime of passion.

At the trial, the district attorney proved how coldly diabolical had been the murder plot conceived and executed by Mrs Franklin Phelps. At the trial, she told how she had got the idea to kill Annie at the same time she'd got the idea for a vacation in Florida, and then explained how her mind had related the two, wedded them in a fatal plan. On 5 June, she had left for Miami. She could not resist sending the note from the airport, the note which led to her eventual capture. Her plan was a simple one. Even as she flew down to Miami for the first time, she had tickets for two other flights in her purse—one from Miami to this city under the name of Frieda Nelson; the other from this city to Miami under the name of June Arbuthnot.

On 10 June, the Hotel Shalimar had thrown a cocktail party. The party was a stroke of luck upon which Mrs Phelps had not counted. She had planned to execute her scheme without benefit of any cover-plan, assuming her mere presence in Miami Beach at the time of a murder thousands of miles away would automatically eliminate her as a suspect. But since the party had presented itself, she used it. She appeared in her brightest red dress when the party started. She slipped away early and took a cab to Miami city and the airport where, as Frieda Nelson, she boarded a north-bound plane at 6.30 p.m. The plane landed at the International Airport here at 10.15 p.m.

Mrs Phelps had gone to her car where she'd left it in the airport parking lot five days earlier. She drove to the liquor store, killed Annie with the .25 calibre automatic she had illegally purchased two weeks before in a hockshop, and then destroyed her husband's stock in a further attempt to divert suspicion from herself completely.

Forty minutes after the murder had been committed, she was back at the airport. As June Arbuthnot, she boarded the 12.30 a.m. south-bound flight to Miami. The flight enjoyed good weather all the way down, arriving in Miami at 4 a.m. She took a cab out to the beach and was back at the hotel in time for breakfast.

At the trial, despite the plea of guilty, the D.A. called Mrs Phelps a 'cold-blooded killer' and a 'wanton murderess'.

At the trial, Mrs Phelps staunchly refused to divulge the name or location of the hockshop where she had purchased the .25.

At the trial, despite the D.A.'s roars for a death sentence, Mrs Franklin Phelps was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The detectives from the 87th Squad were riding back from the trial in the police sedan after their stints as state's witnesses.

It was August, and it was hot, and the bulls rode in their shirt sleeves, Meyer on the front seat alongside Kling who was driving; Carella and Hawes in the back.

'You know who cracked this one?' Meyer asked. 'You think it was us?'

'It was Cotton Hawes,' Kling said, smiling into the rear view mirror.

Hawes caught the smile and grinned back. 'Sure, sure,' he said.

'None of us,' Meyer said. 'Mrs Phelps cracked it herself. Except she had help. She had help from a drunken wino named George. George is the hero of this piece.'

Carella was strangely silent. Kling's eyes flicked from the thick traffic in the hot city streets to the rear view mirror.

'What's the matter, Steve?' he asked.

'Huh?' Carella said. 'Oh, nothing.'

'He's thinking of his wife,' Meyer said. 'It shakes a man to find out that wives are capable of homicide.'

Carella smiled. 'Something like that,' he said.

'You afraid Teddy'll take a gun to somebody?' Kling asked. 'Maybe I ought to stay away from marriage, huh?'

'No, no, that's not it. I was thinking of what Mrs Phelps said to me. She said, "I killed only one." Hell, maybe she didn't kill any.'

'That's not the way the D.A. read it,' Hawes said.

'No. But maybe somebody else did the real killing, the real killing. Maybe somebody else took Annie Boone's life and, for all practical purposes, Mrs Phelps's life, too. Maybe somebody killed them both.'

'Who, Steve?' Kling asked.

'Franklin Phelps,' Carella said. 'If George is the hero of this piece, maybe Phelps is the villain. Maybe he's the rotten bastard in this kettle of fish.'

'You mixed a metaphor,' Hawes said.

The car went silent.

The men breathed the hot summer air. Slowly, the car threaded its way uptown to the precinct and the squad room.