“Could be spies,” Ryan said.
“Yeah. They spies, Quick?”
This was getting ridic. “They’re little old ladies like ya said Dolores is,” I said.
“Even so. Ryan, find those dames.”
“Ya got addresses for them?”
“No.”
“Who else visited her?”
I wasn’t getting anyone else involved in this stupidity. I was sorry I’d given him names. None of those girls had anything to do with shooting Dolores.
“I don’t know who else. I gave ya what I know.”
“You on a case now?”
I had to tell the truth. “Yeah.”
“What case?”
“Ya know I can’t talk about it.”
“A couple a nights in the cooler could change that.”
He was bluffing. “So book me.”
“You’re obstructin the law.”
“I’m protectin my client.”
“Ah, you private dicks turn my stomach.”
I had plenty a answers to that, but I kept em to myself.
“I think ya know more than yer tellin,” Davis said.
“I’ve been cooperative, given ya names, what more do ya want?”
“I want to know about yer case. It might have somethin to do with this shootin.”
“That’s baloney.” I wondered how Davis had gotten so smart all of a sudden. I didn’t know for sure Dolores had been shot cause of me, but I wasn’t ruling it out.
“Don’t leave town.”
“I can’t believe ya said that. Must be all those radio shows yer listenin to.”
“Get outta here.”
I turned to go and the door opened. A man I didn’t know came in.
“Who’re you?” Davis said.
“I’m Morris Sidney. Dolores is my mother.”
TWENTY-THREE
Morris Sidney was what Dolores would call a schlemiel. I’d seen the types she’d called this as they walked by the stoop. I decided Morris took after his father.
He was skinny and wore a paint-stained white shirt, the sleeves rolled up, no tie. His gray pants were wrinkled and baggy and held up with a worn black belt. His black clod-hoppers were cracked and dirty.
I figured he was somewhere between thirty-five and fortyfive, with a hairline that started on the top of his head and only wisps of what had been showing above his ears.
Droopy brown eyes, a crooked nose, and a mouth you could hardly make out. Above it, a pencil mustache needing a trim completed the picture. All in all Morris Sidney was a look-alike for a starving rodent.
Davis said, “You know what happened to yer mother?”
“Not exactly. I just came from the hospital and they told me she’d been shot.”
“How’d ya know to go to the hospital?” I said.
“Shut yer hole,” Ryan said. “So, Morris, how’d ya know to go to the hospital?”
“A neighbor called me.” He pulled a crumpled pack of Raleighs and a small box of matches out of a pocket, then shoved a smoke in his mouth and lit it.
“What’s the update on your mother’s condition,” I asked.
“She was in intensive care when I was there. They wouldn’t let me see her.”
“Stop jawin, you two. Was the neighbor who called ya yers or yer mother’s?”
“My mother’s. Mrs. Kilbride.”
“I know her,” I said.
The detectives ignored me.
“She phoned ya?”
“Told me my mother was in St. Vincent’s.”
“How’d she happen to have yer phone number?”
“Ya got me.” He shrugged.
“I know Ethel Kilbride. I can find out,” I said.
“No, thanks,” Davis said.
I was really getting cheesed off by this attitude. It was clear Davis and Ryan were bent on locking me out. Maybe I wouldn’t get help from them, but they couldn’t keep me from running my own investigation.
“Where do ya live, Morris?” Davis asked.
“The Bronx.”
“Whaddaya do there?”
He looked at the detectives, then at me.
“I live there.”
Davis squeezed his lips so tight the skin around them turned white.
“What do ya do there to make a livin?”
“Who says I make a living?”
“How do ya eat, Morris?”
He smiled and I could hear him saying something like: With a fork. But he resisted.
“You mean where do I get money?”
“Right.”
“I don’t see why that’s your business. I came here because I wanted to see what happened to my mother’s apartment and what anyone knew, not to be asked a lot of dumb questions about my life.”
Hooray for you, Morris.
“Did it ever occur to ya that ya might be a suspect?” Davis said.
“No, it never did.”
“Right now yer number one on the list.”
“I always wanted to be number one on some list.”
“You got a smart mouth, Morris.”
“Thanks.”
“Ya wanna answer questions here or at the precinct?”
“You sound like somebody on a radio show,” Morris said. “If we were uptown you’d probably say, I’m taking you downtown. But we’re already downtown so you can’t say that.”
“Yer peevin me, Morris.”
“Yeah? The feeling is mutual. This is my mother’s place and she was shot here. I want some answers.”
Maybe I’d misjudged Morris. He might look like a schlemiel, but he wasn’t acting like one.
Davis and Ryan looked at each other. I could tell they weren’t sure what to do next.
Morris turned to me. “What’s your name?”
I told him.
“Oh, you’re her neighbor, aren’t you?”
“I am.”
“She likes you a lot.”
“I like her a lot.”
“She probably never told you about me.”
“Fraid not.”
He waved a hand at me. “Nah. Don’t worry about it. She never talks about me or my brother.”
“You have a brother?”
“Larry. He lives in California.”
Davis said, “Are you two finished?”
“Only if you fill me in on what happened here.”
“Somebody came in and shot yer mother.”
“That much I know.”
“It wasn’t a break-in. Seems like she musta known her assailant.”
“Why were they in the bedroom?” I asked.
“Bedroom? My mother’s in her eighties.”
“She is?” I’d always thought seventies. Good for Dolores.
“Eighty-four.”
“You’d never know it.”
“I know. Anyway, we want to know why she was in the bedroom with the person who shot her?”
“We. Now it’s we?” Ryan said.
“Don’t eschew the question,” Morris said.
“Eschew?”
“Look, I’m running out of patience here. If there wasn’t a break-in, then what was my mother doing in the bedroom with the guy who shot her?”
“Yer just gonna have to ask yer eighty-four-year-old mother, ain’tcha?” He wiggled his eyebrows in a suggestive way.
“You’re disgusting,” Morris said. “Basically what you’re telling me is that you don’t know anything. You know somebody shot my mother, you don’t know why they were in the bedroom or why she was shot at all. That about it?”
“Listen, bub, we just started our investigation. In case ya don’t know, it takes time to gather info, build a case. This is now a crime scene, and it’s time the both of ya left.”
“Just like that,” he said.
“Yeah. But before ya do, I want yer address and phone number, Morris.”
He rattled them off.
“Ya get that, Ryan?”
He handed Morris the notebook. “Write it
down here.”
He did.
“All right.” Davis grabbed the notebook outta Morris’s hands. “I’d like to search yer apartment, Quick.”
“Get a warrant.”
“Don’t think I won’t.”
“I think ya will. I’ve got nothin to hide, Detective.” I had a gun but it was licensed and obviously not used to shoot Dolores.
“Get out. We have police work to do here.”
In the hall I introduced Johnny to Morris, and invited them both into my apartment. Inside I offered them drinks. The boys had beer and I had a rum and Coke. We sat in the living room. I filled Johnny in.
“This is a nice place,” Morris said when I was finished.
“Thanks.”
“Same layout as my mother’s, but you’d never know it. She’s a collector.” His smile made him less funny looking. He picked up his pilsner glass and took a sip, white foam clinging to his mustache for just a second before the tiny bubbles popped.
“Morris, can ya think of anyone who’d want to kill yer mother.”
“You think somebody tried to kill her?”
“I think that was the idea.”
“Yeah. Sure. Of course. My father would’ve, but he’s dead.”
“Any living person?”
“No. I really can’t think of anyone.”
Johnny said, “You mean those two blockheads didn’t ask you this?”
“Nope.”
Johnny shook his head.
“Far as I know, my mother has a lot of friends and no enemies. She runs her mouth a lot, but I think that’s harmless.”
“It is,” I said. “I’ve heard her gossip but never say anything vicious.”
I thought it was time to bring myself into this. “It’s occurred to me that Dolores gettin shot might have somethin to do with my case.”
“Why do you think that, Faye?” Johnny asked.
“I don’t know. A feelin.”
“That’s not enough,” he said.
“What case is that?” Morris said.
“You know about the missin soldier and the dead body in his room?” It’d been in all the papers.
“Sure.”
“Someone hired me to find Private Charlie Ladd. This is what I see,” I said. “Somebody came here lookin for me, and Dolores was in the hall, sweepin. She got talkin to the somebody. This happened once before. The somebody asked to use the phone and Dolores bein Dolores let that somebody in.”
“Even if that’s true, Faye, why would he shoot Dolores?”
“That part I haven’t figured out yet.”
“Maybe she got suspicious of the guy,” Morris said.
“That’s possible,” Johnny said.
“I don’t know. She’s pretty open to people. Was she always like that, Morris?”
“Yeah. Talking to people she didn’t know in stores and on the street. It embarrassed me as a kid.”
“That’s what she does now. When she’s on the stoop, people she doesn’t know walk by and she talks to em.”
Johnny said, “Do any of them get annoyed?”
“You wanna be annoyed by Dolores sometimes, but it’s hard.” I got annoyed plenty of times. Strangers didn’t, though. They thought she was charming. And she was, in her way.
“Anything could’ve happened, I guess,” Morris said.
“I think we should go across the street and ask Ethel Kilbride why Dolores gave her Morris’s number.” This didn’t have much to do with the shooting, but I wanted to know why Dolores gave the number to Ethel instead of me. I couldn’t believe how petty I was.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Johnny asked.
“Ya never know,” I said.
“If you say so,” Johnny said.
We downed our drinks and left the apartment. A uniform stood in front of Dolores’s door. Outside, we marched to one of the brownstones across the street.
Ethel Kilbride lived on the fourth floor. We went up the three flights and knocked on her door. Ethel was a woman of a certain age and I hoped she wasn’t asleep cause it was almost ten.
She asked who was there and I think that mighta been a first. We all opened our doors to a knock, but now, I guessed, the neighborhood people were afraid. I told her and she unlocked and let us in.
It was pretty clear that the décor of Ethel’s apartment was inspired by her trips to India. In her younger days there’d been a slew of them, according to Dolores.
Sitting on the paisley sofa, covered with brightly colored Indian shawls draped over the arms, was Jerome Byington, her neighbor from across the hall.
“How’s Dolores, Faye?” Ethel asked.
“She’s in intensive care. This is her son Morris, and I think you’ve met Johnny Lake.”
Ethel made eyes at both men. It was her MO, like an automatic reflex. She was about four feet eleven with gray hair that she wore in a snood, bangs in front. Dolores didn’t like the bangs cause she thought Ethel was trying to look young.
Jerome was younger than Ethel by about twenty years. He wasn’t married, and there was constant speculation among the neighbors about why that was. He combed his dark hair straight back and was always impeccably dressed. Even though he was only at Ethel’s, he wore a suit and tie. Jerome’s outstanding feature was that he had a deep baritone voice, which was a good thing cause he was a radio announcer. He stood by the couch.
“Sit down. Would you like some refreshments?” Ethel said.
“We just had some, thanks. And we’re not stayin long.”
Jerome said, “Is it true that Dolores was shot?”
I told him it was. “What I want to know, Ethel, is why ya had Morris’s phone number.”
“Oh, she gave it to me a while back in case.”
“Of what?”
“This very kind of thing. But she expected it to be a stroke or something more mundane. I must say, I never heard of a shooting in this neighborhood.”
“I don’t think there’s been one,” Johnny said.
“Well, you’re a detective, I guess you should know.” A tiny giggle.
“Had Dolores been afraid of anything lately?” I asked.
Ethel and Jerome chorused a firm no.
“She didn’t mention any strangers hangin around or anything like that.”
“Oh, no,” Ethel said. “And I think if she’d noticed something like that she would’ve told me. She might’ve even have told you, Faye.”
“Why do ya say even?”
“Well, Dolores didn’t like taking advantage of you.”
That made me sad. If she was scared about something I’d hope she woulda let me in on it. Maybe I didn’t give her the chance.
“I guess we have what we need, Ethel.”
When Ethel and I stood, so did the men.
“Is she going to be all right?” Jerome asked.
“The doctor assured me she’d recover,” Morris said.
“Should we send flowers?”
“That’s up to you.”
“We don’t have a room number,” Ethel said. “We’d better wait until she’s out of intensive.”
Byington nodded in agreement.
“It’s so nice to finally meet you, Morris. I wish the circumstances were different.”
I was jealous that Dolores had confided in Ethel and not me. How childish could you get?
We said our goodbyes, then went downstairs and across the street where we stood in front of my building.
“You have a long way to go home, Morris?” Johnny asked.
“It takes about an hour. But it’s worth it. I have a big studio in my apartment.”
“A studio?”
“I’m an artist. I paint.”
Some of the paintings Dolores had on her walls must be his.
“Morris, do ya have any idea why Dolores would keep ya a secret from all of us except Ethel?”
“She doesn’t like me.”
That shut me up fast. I’d never heard of a parent who didn’t li
ke their own kid. Except Ma, of course. But she was one of a kind. At least I’d thought so.
Johnny said, “Do you like her?”
“It’s a funny thing. I do. My brother doesn’t, but he’s her firstborn and she likes him. It’s always the way, isn’t it?”
“Maybe she likes ya and ya don’t know it?”
“It’s okay, Faye. I’ve lived with this for over forty years. I’m used to it. I think I’ll call it a night. Nice to meet you both, and I guess I’ll probably see you at the hospital,” he said to me.
Johnny and I watched him walk to Bleecker and turn. When he was out of sight, Johnny said, “That’s sad.”
“Yeah, it is. I don’t think he did it, do you?”
“Nah. But I think you might be on to something with your theory of how it happened. Somebody after you. And I don’t like that.”
I felt all warm inside. “With Dolores gettin shot I haven’t had a chance to find out how the drop went today. Let’s go in and call Claire.”
“Good idea.” He grinned at me.
Heart, don’t melt.
TWENTY-FOUR
Claire answered on one ring.
“They haven’t called,” she said.
“That’s not right. It’s been eight hours. Somethin musta happened by now. Lemme see what I can dig up.”
I looked at Johnny as I hung up.
“She doesn’t know anything?”
“Right.”
“Want me to make some calls?”
“I thought we agreed not to mix in each other’s cases.”
“That’s true. Why don’t you try whatever it is you’d do now if I wasn’t here. If that doesn’t pan out, I’ll see what I can dig up.”
“That’d be swell, Johnny.”
Zach appeared and did an S around Johnny’s legs, leaving a trail of hair on the bottom of his trousers. I was glad he didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he leaned down, picked Zach up, and cradled him like a baby, scratching his stomach.
I reached William Ladd at the St. Moritz.
“I was callin to see how it went today.”
“It didn’t. Well, not yet.”
“Ya didn’t make the drop?”
“Oh, yes. I did that right on time. Then I came back here to wait. But as of this point no one has picked it up.”
“They probably eyeballed the cops.”
“The police have decided to wait until morning . . . well, there’s one FBI agent on site . . . and if no one picks up the ransom, he will.”
Too Darn Hot Page 19