Night Secrets

by Thomas H. Cook

  “As you can see,” Tannenbaum said, “I’m working the graveyard shift these days.”

  Frank looked at him. “How come?”

  “My choice,” Tannenbaum said. He smiled quietly. “Maybe I’m getting a little like you in my old age.” He pulled a chair over beside his desk. “Have a seat.”

  Frank sat down.

  “So, what’s on your mind?” Tannenbaum asked.

  “The murder,” Frank told him. “The fortune-teller.”

  Tannenbaum didn’t look surprised. He nodded, then glanced toward the large windows at the front of the room. They were covered over with an opaque mixture of dust, soot, and urban grime, so that the panes looked dull and milky, like rows of square, pupil-less eyes which watched the room from behind a thin wire mesh. For a moment, Tannenbaum’s eyes moved over them in a steady sweep like two nightsticks thumping down a corridor of steel bars. Then he snapped out of it suddenly, and looked back at Frank. “Did someone hire you?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re working it?” Tannenbaum asked. “I mean professionally?”

  “Just at night.”

  A curious, uneven smile fluttered onto Tannenbaum’s lips, then instantly disappeared. “Well that’s the kind of thing it is,” he said. “A night case.”

  Frank looked at him quizzically.

  “You know the kind I mean, Frank,” Tannenbaum said. “A beautiful woman, an untimely death.” He smiled. “Add a little cigarette smoke, maybe a saxophone, and you got all you need to get you through the night.”

  “There may be more to it than that,” Frank said.

  Tannenbaum smiled his worldly smile. “Frank, there’s never more to anything than that.”

  Frank didn’t feel like arguing the point. He shrugged.

  Tannenbaum leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. “Well, you know how it works, Frank, in this case just like any other one. You get anything, I’m the one you show it to.” He pulled a cigar out of his jacket pocket and bit off the tip. “Have you got anything on it yet?”

  “Maybe a little something that might save a few steps,” Frank told him.

  The end of the cigar twitched slightly. “I’m listening.”

  “You’ll never find her name because she doesn’t have one,” Frank told him. “She goes by a title: Puri Dai. It means she’s the Tribal Woman.”

  Tannenbaum looked at Frank unbelievingly, but said nothing.

  “Farouk says that’s the way it is.”

  “And he’s some kind of expert on Gypsies?”

  “He knows things,” Frank said simply.

  Another detective came into the room, shifting slowly through the maze of desks and file cabinets. He wore a faded green suit and moved very heavily toward the far end of the room. When he finally got to his own desk, he switched on the small plastic radio that rested on top of it, and a distant, scratchy wail of steel guitars swept the room.

  “That’s McBride,” Tannenbaum said. “He’s like you, another Rebel. Louisiana, I think.” He laughed softly. “Talk about a fish out of water. They just shipped him over to Manhattan North from some place in the Bronx.”

  Frank’s eyes shifted over toward him. He’d grown up with boys who looked much like him, pale faces, greenish, watery eyes—boys with slow, lumbering gaits who kept silent until the moment they exploded.

  “Somebody raped his wife a few years ago,” Tannenbaum said. “Then shot her. She’s been paralyzed since then. From the neck down, I hear. He brought her up here for treatment. Never left.” He drew his feet from the desk. “You should talk to him sometime. He was the first guy from Homicide on the scene.”

  Frank nodded. “Does he work the night shift, too?”

  “Yeah,” Tannenbaum said, “always has.” He took a deep breath. “You Rebels are like that, night crawlers. It makes me glad you’re on our side.”

  “Not all of us,” Frank said.

  “At least the ones I know,” Tannenbaum said. He shifted slightly in his chair. “But getting back to this Gypsy thing,” he said, “what you gave me, it’s not that much, Frank.”

  “It’s all I’ve got right now.”

  “And now you want something from me, right?”

  Frank took out his pen and notebook. “What do you know about the dead woman?”

  “We’ve come up with a few new things,” Tannenbaum said. “She had a driver’s license from New Jersey, and she’d been living in that place for about three months.” He looked back at Frank. “Her name turned out to be a little longer than the first one the other woman gave us.”

  “What was it?”

  “Immaculata Maria Salome,” Tannenbaum said. “And she was born in Hungary in 1924.”

  Frank took out his notebook and wrote it down. “What do you know about her?”

  “That’s about it,” Tannenbaum said. “She’d been running mat fortune-telling gig since she moved to Tenth Avenue. She had no criminal record. She’d never been married, as far as we could tell.” He shrugged. “It’s pretty much the same with the other old lady, too.” He opened one of the drawers to his desk and pulled out a manilla folder. “I got her full name right here,” he added. “You want it?”

  Frank lowered the pen to the paper. “Go ahead.”

  “Immaculata Maria Jacobe.”

  “Where is she?” Frank asked as he wrote down her name.

  “Still on Tenth Avenue, as far as I know,” Tannenbaum said. “She claims she wasn’t around when it happened.”

  “Where was she?”

  “Over at some little storefront church on Forty-sixth Street, Saint Teresa’s,” Tannenbaum said with a shrug. “She claims it’s her regular routine. She goes around three in the morning, lights a candle, stays about an hour, then comes back home.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t have any reason not to,” Tannenbaum said. “Who knows, maybe she’s casing the place, planning to boost the poor box and a couple of candlesticks on the way out one of these nights.”

  “Do you think she could have had anything to do with the …?”

  Tannenbaum shook his head. “There’s nothing to connect her to it. She went to Saint Teresa’s, and that’s it.”

  “And when she got back?”

  “She found the body,” Tannenbaum said. “But she didn’t see the other woman. She just saw the body, that’s all.”

  “So she called the police?”

  Tannenbaum shook his head. “The Gypsies don’t ever call the cops.”

  “Who did?”

  “A kid who was delivering groceries.”

  Frank looked at Tannenbaum doubtfully. “At four o’clock in the morning?”

  “That’s right,” Tannenbaum said. “There’s an all-night grocery on Forty-third Street. They make deliveries twenty-four hours a day.” He opened the drawer of his desk and pulled out his own notebook. “Here, I’ll give you the kid’s name. You can check it out yourself.” He flipped through the notebook until he found the page he wanted. “Pedro Ortiz, that’s the kid’s name. He works at the Food Palace. On Forty-third Street, like I said.”

  Frank wrote it down, then glanced back up at Tannenbaum. “What’d the other woman say?”

  Tannenbaum shrugged. “Not much, just what she saw.”

  “Which was?”

  “She came home, opened the door, walked in, and there it was, the old lady on the floor.” He glanced toward the window again, then looked at Frank sympathetically. “The young one did it, Frank,” he said. “The woman, I mean. Your client, Puri Dai, or whatever she goes by. She killed that old lady, pure and simple.”

  Frank’s pen stopped. “But why?”

  Tannenbaum shrugged. “For now, I don’t know,” he admitted.

  “The other woman, this Maria Jacobe, did she have any idea?”

  “She was a basket case, Frank,” Tannenbaum said. “She barely knew what country she was in.”

  “So you don’t have a motive?”

&nb
sp; “Not yet,” Tannenbaum said. “But like we say in the trade, the body’s still warm. We’ll find one.”

  “Have you talked to any of the neighbors?”

  Tannenbaum laughed derisively. “The neighbors. What a bag of Halloween candy they are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You got a local drug dealer on one side with a yellow sheet as long as your arm,” Tannenbaum said. “On the other side, you got a family of illegals, refugees who figure that in the end this is going to get them sent back to Haiti.” He lit the cigar, took a quick puff. “But who knows, Frank, maybe you can get these people to cooperate.”

  Frank glanced back down toward his notebook. “How’s the physical evidence standing up?”

  “The Rock of Gibraltar,” Tannenbaum said confidently. “We could nail her six ways from Sunday.” He lifted his hand, shot one finger into the air. “The blood on her sleeves and under her fingernails came straight out of the old lady’s throat.” A second finger joined the first. “The prints on the razor couldn’t be better. Clear as a goddamn bell. Textbook shots, I mean it. Unmistakable.” The third finger rose. “The little guy who runs the bodega next door saw her go into the house only a couple minutes before the old lady died, so that’s two people who can testify that she was present, like they say, at the scene of the crime.”

  “Are you sure the razor’s the murder weapon?” Frank asked, as he continued to write in his notebook.

  “According to the medical examiner, it is.”

  “What did the autopsy say?”

  “That she died from a single cut to the throat,” Tannenbaum said. He picked up one of the sheets of paper in the folder and read the exact words. “A deep cut which severed the major veins and arteries of the neck.” He returned the paper to the folder. “It was very deep, and it was pretty much ear to ear.”

  “Must have been a sharp razor,” Frank said. “What kind was it?”

  “Kind? What do you mean, kind? It was a razor.”

  “A shaving razor?”

  “That’s right.”

  “In a house with no men?”

  Tannenbaum smiled. “Not bad, Frank.”

  “Did you check it out?”

  “First thing.”

  Frank waited.

  “There were no traces of hair or hair follicles on the blade,” Tannenbaum said.

  Frank nodded.

  “So what that tells us is that nobody had ever used it to shave with,” Tannenbaum said. “It was clean as a whistle.”

  “Except for fingerprints,” Frank reminded him.

  “That’s right.”

  “And they belong to the woman.”

  “Yeah.”

  Frank tried to pull it all togemer. “So the razor had never been used.”

  “There was nothing but the old woman’s blood on it,” Tannenbaum said. “My guess is the woman bought it new, just for the occasion.”

  Frank wrote it down.

  “I hear the woman has a lawyer now,” Tannenbaum said.

  “Yeah, she does.”

  “The lab report will be on his desk in the morning,” Tannenbaum said. “By the way, who is he?”

  “A guy named Andrew Deegan,” Frank said. He closed his notebook. “I’d like to see where it happened,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Just to get a feel for it,” Frank told him.

  Tannenbaum drew in a weary breath. “Okay, I’ll arrange for you to take a look.”

  Frank stood up immediately.

  Tannenbaum looked at him incredulously. “You mean, now? At this hour?”

  “It’s the only time I can,” Frank told him. “I’m working something else during the day.”

  Tannenbaum drew in a tired breath, then pulled himself out of the chair. “Okay, Frank, I’ll give you the okay.” He smiled. “Why don’t you go over now? The old lady may be awake. From the look of things, the Gypsies don’t sleep much either.”

  He arrived at the fortune-teller’s storefront only a few minutes later. It was a two-story building and the upper floor was entirely dark. The fortuneteller’s blue neon sign was dark as well, but he could see a faint light glowing through the light-blue curtain which still covered the front window.

  He stepped up to the door, tapped lightly, then waited. He could hear footsteps as they neared the door, then stopped. The door did not open, and so he tapped at it again.

  The door opened slowly, and through the small space between its edge and the jamb, he could see a single dark-brown eye.

  “My name’s demons,” he said. He quickly took out his card and held it up to the lone staring eye. “I’m a private investigator.”

  The woman stared at him expressionlessly.

  “You got a call from Manhattan North, right?” Frank asked.

  The woman nodded silently.

  “Well, I’m the guy they told you about, the one who was coming over.”

  The old woman looked closely at the card, then turned toward him.

  “I’m looking into the murder,” Frank said. “Trying to find out a few things about it.”

  “You are not from the police?”

  “No, just someone who’s looking into the case,” Frank said. “Are you Maria Jacobe?”

  The woman said nothing.

  “If you’re not, I wonder if you could tell me where I could find her,” Frank said.

  “I thought it was the police,” the woman said. “I open only for the police.”

  Frank smiled quietly. “If I could find her, I’d be happy to pay her for her time.”

  “I open only for the police,” the woman repeated.

  Frank took out one of the crisp hundred-dollar bills Mr. Phillips had given him the day before.

  “I’d start with this,” he said, as he held it up to her.

  The woman’s eyes widened. “I open only for the police,” she said. “But also those who wish to know their fortunes.”

  Frank nodded. “All right,” he said.

  The door opened immediately, and Frank walked into the building.

  The old woman was already in the other room, seated at the small table. “Please come in,” she said.

  Frank swept back the red-beaded curtain and walked into the front room. He sat down opposite the woman and glanced through the second curtain and into the interior room where he’d first seen the Puri Dai. The large wicker chair still rested at the center of the room, along with the small black table beside it. The red candle was still there, as well, and beside it, neatly coiled, a gold chain and large medallion.

  The woman glanced at the money, and Frank immediately handed it to her.

  “Thank you,” the woman said. “Now, may I have your hands, please.”

  Frank stretched them out toward her, and she turned them palms up and peered deeply at their criss-crossed lines.

  “You are going to be very successful,” she said.

  Frank’s eyes drifted back toward the other room, concentrating on the medallion that hung over the table. It was very large, and even from a few feet away, he could follow its details, the flaming tongues which leaped out from its circular edges. It was made of brass, and at its slightly raised center there was an engraving of a scorpion.

  “You will find much joy,” the woman said. She turned his hands over. “Much joy and happiness.”

  Frank turned to her and drew his hands away. “I’m not really interested in my fortune,” he said impatiently.

  The woman stared at him solemnly, but didn’t speak.

  “I gave you a hundred dollars,” Frank reminded her. “I have a few questions to ask, and I expect some answers.”

  The woman glared at him. “If you are not from the police, I do not have to answer.”

  Frank looked at her sternly. “You do if you want to keep that hundred-dollar bill I just gave you.”

  The woman hesitated for a moment, then spoke. “I do not know what you are looking for.”

  “I want to know what happened
here yesterday,” Frank told her.

  “You know about the murder,” the woman replied immediately. She shook her head mournfully. “I weep for Maria Salome. She was a good woman.”

  “How long had you known her?”

  “For many years we live together.”

  “Alone?”

  “But for the other woman,” she said bitterly. “She who is no longer with us.”

  “The Puri Dai,” Frank said.

  The woman looked at him, astonished. “How do you know about the name?”

  “She gave it to the police.”

  The old woman’s face soured. She bent forward and spit on the floor. “Damn her soul,” she cried. “Damn her soul to hell for this crime.”

  “Did you see her do it?”

  She looked at him as if the question were absurd. “Her hands were full of blood,” she said. “And Maria Salome, she was dead.”

  “Why did she do it?” Frank asked.

  The woman shook her head. “She is strange, this woman.”

  “There must have been a reason.”

  “She did not know her place.”

  “What place?”

  “In her blood, there was an evil thing.”

  “Her blood?”

  “She did not do her task.”

  “What task?”

  “She was born to know her place.”

  Frank stepped forward slightly. “But she didn’t?”

  The old woman didn’t answer.

  “Did she fight with the other woman?” Frank asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Were they related at all?”

  She hesitated an instant, then shook her head.

  “So how did they meet?”

  The woman’s body stiffened. “I do not know,” she said. “I know only that the Puri Dai, that she did not know her place in this house, and that when this happens, things can be lost, things can be ruined.”

  “What are you talking about? What things?”

  The old woman looked at him determinedly. “There are things a gorgio cannot know.” She held up the hundred-dollar bill and waved it defiandy in his face. “Things a gorgio’s money cannot buy.”

  “What things?” Frank demanded.

  She sat back, her eyes suddenly very frightened. “You must go. Even if you remained, you would learn nothing.”