Ed McBain Read online

  Learning to Kill

  Stories

  Ed McBain

  * * *

  AN OTTO PENZLER BOOK

  A HARVEST BOOK • HARCOURT, INC.

  Orlando Austin New York

  San Diego Toronto London

  * * *

  This is for my wife, Dragica—

  who wasn't there then,

  but who is always here for me now.

  Copyright © 2006 by Hui Corp

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may

  be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording,

  or any information storage and retrieval system, without

  permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work

  should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact

  or mailed to the following address:

  Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  McBain, Ed, 1926–2005

  Learning to kill: stories/Ed McBain.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  "An Otto Penzler Book."

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Detective and mystery stories, American. I. Title.

  PS3515.U585L43 2006

  813'.54—dc22 2005027059

  ISBN 978-0-15-101222-0

  ISBN 978-0-15-603147-9 (pbk.)

  Text set in Electra

  Designed by Cathy Riggs

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Harvest edition 2007

  A C E G I K J H F D B

  * * *

  Contents

  Introduction vii

  KIDS

  First Offense [>]

  Kid Kill [>]

  See Him Die [>]

  WOMEN IN JEOPARDY

  The Molested [>]

  Carrera's Woman [>]

  Dummy [>]

  PRIVATE EYES

  Good and Dead [>]

  Death Flight [>]

  Kiss Me, Dudley [>]

  COPS AND RODDERS

  Small Homicide [>]

  Still Life [>]

  Accident Report [>]

  Chinese Puzzle [>]

  The Big Day [>]

  INNOCENT BYSTANDERS

  Runaway [>]

  Downpour [>]

  Eye Witness [>]

  Every Morning [>]

  The Innocent One [>]

  LOOSE CANNONS

  Chalk [>]

  Association Test [>]

  Bedbug [>]

  The Merry Merry Christmas [>]

  GANGS

  On the Sidewalk, Bleeding [>]

  The Last Spin [>]

  Afterword [>]

  Bibliography [>]

  * * *

  Introduction

  All of the stories in this collection were written between 1952 and 1957. During part of that time, I was working at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, earning forty dollars a week at first (and later forty-five dollars a week) as "Executive Editor," an exalted title that meant I handled the agency's "commissionable" clients—among whom were Arthur C. Clarke, Lester del Rey, R G. Wodehouse, John Jakes, Poul Anderson, Frank Kane, Helen Neilsen, Richard Prather, Steve Frazee, and a great many other well-known (at the time) mystery, science fiction, and Western writers.

  The agency also handled wannabe writers who'd never been published and who paid a fee to have their manuscripts read and analyzed. If one of the agency's fee readers thought a manuscript had possibilities, he passed it on to me. Occasionally, we sent one of these out to market. But for the most part, I was working with professional writers who were regularly selling their manuscripts to book and magazine publishers all over New York City.

  I had stumbled upon this job quite by accident.

  At Hunter College, I was an English major (an English "concentrator," as it's now called) and my minors were dramatics and education. The dramatics minor was for fun. The education minor was for insurance. I already knew in college that I wanted to be a writer, but I did not think I'd set the world on fire the minute I stepped out on my own, and I figured a teaching license would help support me while I wrote the Great American Novel. It did indeed support me for a total of seventeen days. Like millions of other World War II veterans, I was graduated in June of 1950, and that fall I began teaching with a so-called emergency license at Bronx Vocational High School. I despised the job, and I quit after I got my first paycheck.

  Jobs were scarce in that fall of 1950.

  I took a nighttime job with the Automobile Club, answering calls from motorists in distress, and then I found a daytime job with a company called Regal Lobster on West 72nd Street, another job entailing phone calls, this time to restaurants asking if they'd "like a quote this morning on some live Maine lobsters." I had meanwhile decided that the only way to become a published Writer was to get a job with either a book publisher or a magazine, and so I prepared a catchy résumé and sent it out hither and yon. By the winter of 1951, I'd had no responses.

  It must have been in February that I saw a blind ad in the New York Times's Help Wanted columns. It read something like this:

  EDITOR

  No experience necessary. Must be familiar with book and magazine markets. Reply to box number...

  Well, I didn't have much experience with book markets, but I'd read a lot of books. And during my two years in the Navy, and my four years in college, I'd sent dozens of short stories to nearly every magazine in existence, so I was certainly familiar with magazine markets. In fact, the walls of the bathroom in the apartment I shared with my then-wife and my firstborn son, on North Brother Island in the middle of the East River, were papered entirely with rejection slips. Besides, the ad said "No experience necessary," didn't it?

  So I wrote a witty letter, and sent it off to the indicated box number, and a week or so later I picked up the phone at Regal Lobster, and my wife was on the other end, and she told me she'd got a call from a man named Steve Marlowe who said he wanted to interview me regarding my letter about the editorial position. On my lunch hour that day, I took the subway downtown, walked crosstown to Forty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, entered 580 Fifth, took the elevator up to the eighteenth floor, walked down the hall to room 1806, and there on the upper glass panel of the door were lettered the words:

  SCOTT MEREDITH

  LITERARY AGENCY

  My hand was on the doorknob.

  I thought, Aliterary agency?

  Who the hell wants to become a literary agent?

  I almost turned away from that door.

  I almost walked away from the greatest opportunity life would ever offer me.

  Instead, I turned that doorknob, and I opened that door, and stepped into a small waiting room. There was a closed glass panel on the right-hand wall. There was a little push button set on a ledge before the panel. I pressed the button. The panel slid open. I told a pretty blonde receptionist who I was, and she asked me to take a seat, please, and the glass panel slid shut again. I sat on a sofa on the opposite wall. In a few minutes, a man of about my age—I had just turned twenty-four in October of 1950—came out, shook my hand, introduced himself as Steve Marlowe, told me he was the current Executive Editor at the agency, advised me that they'd been impressed by my letter, and asked if I would mind taking a written test. I said I would be happy to.

  He led me into the inner office where there were half a dozen desks with young men behind them, all of them either reading or typing, and then he showed me
to an empty desk with a typewriter on it and a chair behind it. He gave me a manuscript titled "Rattlesnake Cave" and asked me to read it and to write a letter to the author, telling him why I thought the story was either salable or not salable. He said I had fifteen minutes. I looked at my watch and began reading.

  The story was absolutely terrible.

  I later learned that it had been written by Lester del Rey, one of the pre-eminent science fiction writers of the day, and that it was deliberately awful. I didn't know that at the time. I merely wrote a letter telling the supposed real author exactly what I thought of the story.

  Steve Marlowe collected the letter when I'd finished it, asked me to wait outside again, and came out some twenty minutes later to tell me he'd showed the letter to Scott, and that they would like to hire me for a two-month trial period. He told me I would be handling the agency's professional clients, and that Scott himself would be my immediate superior. He told me the job paid forty dollars a week. He told me I would be replacing him as Executive Editor.

  I have to tell you, I was singularly unimpressed.

  The office looked shabby and small, the salary was less than I was earning at Regal Lobster, and a literary agency did not seem the stepping stone I had in mind for a burgeoning literary career.

  I said, "Why are you leaving the job?"

  He said, "Because I'm making so much money selling my own stuff that it doesn't pay to stay here anymore."

  My ears shot up.

  "When do I start?" I asked.

  I did not bring in a batch of my own short stories until the two-month trial period was over, and I was sure the job was truly mine. I gave them to Scott on a Friday afternoon, just before quitting time, and he promised to read them over the weekend. On Monday morning, after he'd read all the mail, he buzzed me into his office. As was our usual working routine, we discussed responses to the various letters from our clients, and he handed me the stack of manuscripts we'd received from them that day, and then he said, "Now, your stories," and slid my precious tales from where he had them neatly stacked on one side of his desk.

  "This one, burn," he said, and moved it aside, and picked up another one, and said, "This one, too," and placed it on top of the first one, and then picked up the third story.

  "This one, I think we can salvage," he said. "I'll tell you how to rewrite it," and moved it aside into what I hoped would become a growing pile.

  "This one, I think I can sell," he said. My heart leaped. I looked at the title. It was called "Welcome, Martians."

  "This one, burn," he said.

  "This one..."

  Of the dozen or so stories I'd showed him, only "Welcome, Martians" met with his approval. He sold it at once to an editor named Bob Lowndes at a pulp magazine called Science-Fiction Quarterly. I got a quarter of a cent a word for it. Scott took his 10 percent commission.

  I was a writer.

  And I had an agent.

  I left the agency in May of 1953 because—like Stephen Marlowe before me—I had begun selling so many of my own stories that it was unprofitable for me to stay there any longer. "Welcome, Martians" is not included in this collection, nor are any of the other science fiction, adventure, or Western stories I wrote while learning my craft at the agency, or while honing it later on. All of the stories in this collection are crime stories. Of the twenty-five stories represented here, you will find only one that I wrote in 1952. That's because most of the stories I wrote when I first began working for the agency were as lousy as "Rattlesnake Cave"—though not deliberately so.

  Nine of the following stories were published in 1953, six in 1954, five in 1955, two in 1956, and another two in 1957. All but five of them were first published in a detective magazine called Manhunt. None of them appeared under the Ed McBain byline. They were written as either Evan Hunter (which in 1952 became my legal name) or as Richard Marsten (a pseudonym derived from the first names of my three sons, Richard, Mark, and Ted) or as Hunt Collins (from my alma mater). But over, lo, these many years, McBain has become the name most closely associated, with matters criminal—and this collection, after all, is about learning to write crime fiction.

  As you will soon discover, in those early years I was trying my hand at every type of crime story. By the time I wrote the first of the 87th Precinct novels, all of the elements were already in place. Here were the kids in trouble and the women in jeopardy, here were the private eyes and the gangs. Here were the loose cannons and the innocent bystanders. And here, too, were the cops and robbers.

  Ed McBain made his debut in May of 1956.

  By then, I felt I knew how to write a crime story.

  Here's how I learned to do it.

  KIDS

  This story first appeared in Manhunt. The editor of the magazine was someone named John McCloud. No one knew who John McCloud was. The poem parody we recited was "I wandered lonely as McCloud." Well, John McCloud was Scott Meredith. It was very good to be working for the man who was editing the hottest detective magazine of the day; in 1953 alone, fourteen of my stories appeared in Manhunt under the Marsten, Hunter, or Collins bylines. This one was published in 1955, under the Evan Hunter byline, which by that time had been my legal name for almost three years.

  First Offense

  HE SAT IN THE POLICE VAN WITH THE COLLAR OF HIS leather jacket turned up, the bright silver studs sharp against the otherwise unrelieved black. He was seventeen years old, and he wore his hair in a high black crown. He carried his head high and erect because he knew he had a good profile, and he carried his mouth like a switch knife, ready to spring open at the slightest provocation. His hands were thrust deep into his jacket pockets, and his gray eyes reflected the walls of the van. There was excitement in his eyes, too, an almost holiday excitement. He tried to tell himself he was in trouble, but he couldn't quite believe it. His gradual descent to disbelief had been a spiral that had spun dizzily through the range of his emotions. Terror when the cop's flash had picked him out; blind panic when he'd started to run; rebellion when the cop's firm hand had closed around the leather sleeve of his jacket; sullen resignation when the cop had thrown him into the RMP car; and then cocky stubbornness when they'd booked him at the local precinct.

  The desk sergeant had looked him over curiously, with a strange aloofness in his Irish eyes.

  "What's the matter, Fatty?" he'd asked.

  The sergeant stared at him implacably. "Put him away for the night," the sergeant said.

  He'd slept overnight in the precinct cell block, and he'd awakened with this strange excitement pulsing through his narrow body, and it was the excitement that had caused his disbelief. Trouble, hell! He'd been in trouble before, but it had never felt like this. This was different. This was a ball, man. This was like being initiated into a secret society someplace. His contempt for the police had grown when they refused him the opportunity to shave after breakfast. He was only seventeen, but he had a fairly decent beard, and a man should be allowed to shave in the morning, what the hell! But even the beard had somehow lent to the unreality of the situation, made him appear—in his own eyes—somehow more desperate, more sinister-looking. He knew he was in trouble, but the trouble was glamorous, and he surrounded it with the gossamer lie of make-believe. He was living the storybook legend. He was big time now. They'd caught him and booked him, and he should have been scared but he was excited instead.

  There was one other person in the van with him, a guy who'd spent the night in the cell block, too. The guy was an obvious bum, and his breath stank of cheap wine, but he was better than nobody to talk to.

  "Hey!" he said.

  The bum looked up. "You talking to me?"

  "Yeah. Where we going?"

  "The lineup, kid," the bum said. "This your first offense?"

  "This's the first time I got caught," he answered cockily.

  "All felonies go to the lineup," the bum told him. "And also some special types of misdemeanors. You commit a felony?"

  "Yeah," he said, hopi
ng he sounded nonchalant. What'd they have this bum in for anyway? Sleeping on a park bench?

  "Well, that's why you're goin' to the lineup. They have guys from every detective squad in the city there, to look you over. So they'll remember you next time. They put you on a stage, and they read off the offense, and the Chief of Detectives starts firing questions at you. What's your name, kid?"

  "What's it to you?"

  "Don't get smart, punk, or I'll break your arm," the bum said.

  He looked at the bum curiously. He was a pretty big guy, with a heavy growth of beard, and powerful shoulders. "My name's Stevie," he said.

  "I'm Jim Skinner " the bum said. "When somebody's trying to give you advice, don't go hip on him..."

  "Yeah, well, what's your advice?" he asked, not wanting to back down completely.

  "When they get you up there, you don't have to answer anything. They'll throw questions but you don't have to answer. Did you make a statement at the scene?"

  "No," he answered.

  "Good. Then don't make no statement now, either. They can't force you to. Just keep your mouth shut, and don't tell them nothing."

  "I ain't afraid. They know all about it anyway," Stevie said.

  The bum shrugged and gathered around him the sullen pearls of his scattered wisdom. Stevie sat in the van whistling, listening to the accompanying hum of the tires, hearing the secret hum of his blood beneath the other louder sound. He sat at the core of a self-imposed importance, basking in its warm glow, whistling contentedly, secretly happy. Beside him, Skinner leaned back against the wall of the van.

  When they arrived at the Center Street Headquarters, they put them in detention cells, awaiting the lineup which began at nine. At ten minutes to nine they led him out of his cell, and the cop who'd arrested him originally took him into the special prisoners' elevator.

  "How's it feel being an elevator boy?" he asked the cop.

  The cop didn't answer him. They went upstairs to the big room where the lineup was being held. A detective in front of them was pinning on his shield so he could get past the cop at the desk. They crossed the large gymnasium-like compartment, walking past the men sitting in folded chairs before the stage.