'Til Death (87th Precinct) - By Ed McBain Page 0,10

wanted one here, and one here, and himself over there! Pazzo! His own son, as crazy as all the others.

And the tall one, the redheaded one with the white streak in his hair—sangue della maruzza! He was enough to frighten all the bridesmaids in Riverhead. And Tony was sure he had seen a gun under the redhead’s coat when he stooped down to tie his shoe. A big black revolver sticking out of a shoulder holster. All right, it was a good thing for his son to be a cop, but did his friends have to carry weapons to a peaceful Christian wedding?

And then Angela had started. At one-fifteen, exactly one hour and forty-five minutes before the wedding, she had begun to cry as if the world was trying to rape her. Louisa had come running out back, wringing her hands.

“Stevie,” she said, “go up to her. Tell her it’ll be all right, will you? Go. Go to your sister.”

Tony had watched his son go upstairs. That wailing from the upper-story bedroom window had not ceased. Tony sat with his daughter-in-law Teddy—com’é grande, he thought, povera Theodora!—and the three strangers, Mr. Hawes, Mr. Kling, and Miss Maxwell, drinking wine and ready to shoot his wife, strangle his son, disown his daughter, and call off the whole damn wedding!

He fumed and fretted until Teddy patted his hand. And then he smiled at her, and nodded his head, and rested his hands on his paunch and hoped—please, dear God!—that everything would turn out all right and that somehow he, Antonio Carella, would survive the day.

Standing in the corridor outside Angela’s bedroom, Carella could hear his sister sobbing beyond the door. He knocked gently and then waited.

“Who is it?” Angela said, her voice breaking.

“Me. Steve.”

“What do you want?”

“Come on, Slip, open up.”

“Go away, Steve.”

“You can’t chase me away. I’m a police officer investigating a disturbance of the peace.” He wasn’t quite sure, but he thought he heard his sister stifle a laugh on the other side of the door. “Slip?” he said.

“What?”

“Do I have to kick it in?”

“Oh, wait a minute,” Angela said. He heard footsteps approaching the door. The bolt was slipped, but Angela did not open the door for him. He heard her footsteps retreating and then the bedsprings creaking as she hurled herself down. He eased the door open and entered the room. Angela was lying full length on the bed, her face buried in the pillow. She wore a full white slip and her brown hair tumbled to her shoulders in a riot of disarray. Her slip had pulled back to reveal a blue garter taut around her nylon.

“Pull down your dress,” Carella said. “Your behind is showing.”

“It’s not a dress,” Angela said poutingly. “It’s a slip. And who asked you to look?” but she pulled it down over her leg instantly.

Carella sat on the edge of the bed. “What’s the trouble?”

“There’s no trouble.” She paused. “There’s no trouble at all.” And then she sat up suddenly, turning her brown eyes toward her brother, surprisingly Oriental eyes in a high-cheekboned face, the face a refinement of Carella’s, pretty with an exotic tint that spoke of Arabian visits to the island of Sicily in the far distant past. “I don’t want to marry him,” she said. She paused. “That’s the trouble.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t love him.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Carella said.

“I don’t like swearing, Steve. You know that. I never could stand swearing, even when we were kids. You used to swear on purpose, just to annoy me. That, and calling me ‘Slip.’”

“You started the ‘slip’ business,” Carella said.

“I did not,” Angela told him. “You did. Because you were mean and rotten.”

“I was telling you the truth,” Carella said.

“It’s not nice to tell a thirteen-year-old girl that she’s not really a girl because she still wears cotton slips.”

“I was helping you on the road to maturity. You asked Mama to buy you some nylon slips after that, didn’t you?”

“Yes, and she refused.”

“It was in the right direction.”

“You gave me an inferiority complex.”

“I gave you an insight into the mysterious ways of womanhood.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Angela said, and Carella laughed aloud. “It’s not funny. I’m not going to marry him. I don’t like anything about him. He’s a worse boor than you are. And he swears more. And besides…” She stopped. “Stevie, I’m afraid. Stevie, I don’t know what to do. I’m terrified.”

“Come on,” he said, “come on,” and he took his sister into his arms and stroked her hair and said, “There’s nothing to