“I couldn’t,” she said. “Anyway, what difference does it make?”
“Probably none.”
“Oh?”
“It reminded me of a case we had,” I said. “Ages ago.”
“Back when you were a cop, and I was a cop’s girlfriend.”
I shook my head. “Only the first half. I was on the force, but you and I hadn’t met yet. I was still wearing a uniform, and it would be a while before I got my gold shield. And we hadn’t moved to Long Island yet, we were still living in Brooklyn.”
“You and Anita and the boys.”
“Was Andy even born yet? No, he couldn’t have been, because she was pregnant with him when we bought the house in Syosset. We probably had Mike by then, but what difference does it make? It wasn’t about them. It was about the poor sonofabitch in Park Slope who shot himself.”
“And did he use a revolver or an automatic?”
“An automatic. He was a World War Two vet, and this was the gun he’d brought home with him. It must have been a forty-five.”
“And he stuck it in his mouth and—”
“Put it to his temple. Putting it in your mouth, I think it was cops who made that popular.”
“Popular?”
“You know what I mean. The expression caught on, ‘eating your gun,’ and you started seeing more civilian suicides who took that route.” I fell silent, remembering. “I was partnered with Vince Mahaffey. I’ve told you about him.”
“He smoked those little cigars.”
“Guinea-stinkers, he called them. DeNobilis was the brand name, and they were these nasty little things that looked as though they’d passed through the digestive system of a cat. I don’t think they could have smelled any worse if they had. Vince smoked them all day long, and he ate like a pig and drank like a fish.”
“The perfect role model.”
“Vince was all right,” I said. “I learned a hell of a lot from Vince.”
“Are you gonna tell me the story?”
“You want to hear it?”
She got comfortable on the couch. “Sure,” she said. “I like it when you tell me stories.”
It was a week night, I remembered, and the moon was full. It seemed to me it was in the spring, but I could have been wrong about that part.
Mahaffey and I were in a radio car. I was driving when the call came in, and he rang in and said we’d take this one. It was in the Slope. I don’t remember the address, but wherever it was we weren’t far from it, and I drove there and we went in.
Park Slope’s a very desirable area now, but this was before the gentrification process got underway, and the Slope was still a working-class neighborhood, and predominantly Irish. The house we were directed to was one of a row of identical brownstone houses, four stories tall, two apartments to a floor. The vestibule was a half-flight up from street level, and a man was standing in the doorway, waiting for us.
“You want the Conways,” he said. “Two flights up and on your left.”
“You’re a neighbor?”
“Downstairs of them,” he said. “It was me called it in. My wife’s with her now, the poor woman. He was a bastard, that husband of hers.”
“You didn’t get along?”
“Why would you say that? He was a good neighbor.”
“Then how did he get to be a bastard?”
“To do what he did,” the man said darkly. “You want to kill yourself, Jesus, it’s an unforgivable sin, but it’s a man’s own business, isn’t it?” He shook his head. “But do it in private, for God’s sake. Not with your wife looking on. As long as the poor woman lives, that’s her last memory of her husband.”
We climbed the stairs. The building was in good repair, but drab, and the stairwell smelled of cabbage and of mice. The cooking smells in tenements have changed over the years, with the ethnic makeup of their occupants. Cabbage was what you used to smell in Irish neighborhoods. I suppose it’s still much in evidence in Greenpoint and Brighton Beach, where new arrivals from Poland and Russia reside. And I’m sure the smells are very different in the stairwells of buildings housing immigrants from Asia and Africa and Latin America, but I suspect the mouse smell is there too.
Halfway up the second flight of stairs, we met a woman on her way down. “Mary Frances!” she called upstairs. “It’s the police!” She turned to us. “She’s in the back,” she said, “with her kids, the poor darlings. It’s just at the top of the stairs, on your left. You can walk right in.”
The door of the Conway apartment was ajar. Mahaffey knocked on it, then pushed it open when the knock went unanswered. We walked in and there he was, a middle-aged man in dark blue trousers and a white cotton tank-top undershirt. He’d nicked himself shaving that morning, but that was the least of his problems.
He was sprawled in an easy chair facing the television set. He’d fallen over on his left side, and there was a large hole in his right temple, the skin scorched around the entry wound. His right hand lay in his lap, the fingers still holding the gun he’d brought back from the war.
“Jesus,” Mahaffey said.
There was a picture of Jesus on the wall over the fireplace, and, similarly framed, another of John F. Kennedy. Other photos and holy pictures reposed here and there in the room—on table tops, on walls, on top of the television set. I was looking at a small framed photo of a smiling young man in an army uniform and just beginning to realize it was a younger version of the dead man when his wife came into the room.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I never heard you come in. I was with the children. They’re in a state, as you can imagine.”
“You’re Mrs. Conway?”
“Mrs. James Conway.” She glanced at her late husband, but her eyes didn’t stay on him for long. “He was talking and laughing,” she said. “He was making jokes. And then he shot himself. Why would he do such a thing?”
“Had he been drinking, Mrs. Conway?”
“He’d had a drink or two,” she said. “He liked his drink. But he wasn’t drunk.”
“Where’d the bottle go?”
She put her hands together. She was a small woman, with a pinched face and pale blue eyes, and she wore a cotton housedress with a floral pattern. “I put it away,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done that, should I?”
“Did you move anything else, ma’am?”
“Only the bottle,” she said. “The bottle and the glass. I didn’t want people saying he was drunk when he did it, because how would that be for the children?” Her face clouded. “Or is better thinking it was the drink that made him do it? I don’t know which is worse. What do you men think?”
“I think we could all use a drink,” he said. “Yourself not least of all, ma’am.”
She crossed the room and got a bottle of Schenley’s from a mahogany cabinet. She brought it, along with three small glasses of cut crystal. Mahaffey poured drinks for all three of us and held his to the light. She took a tentative sip of hers while Mahaffey and I drank ours down. It was an ordinary blended whiskey, an honest workingman’s drink. Nothing fancy about it, but it did the job.
Mahaffey raised his glass again and looked at the bare-bulb ceiling fixture through it. “These are fine glasses,” he said.
“Waterford,” she said. “There were eight, they were my mother’s, and these three are all that’s left.” She glanced at the dead man. “He had his from a jelly glass. We don’t use the Waterford for every day.”
“Well, I’d call this a special occasion,” Mahaffey said. “Drink that yourself, will you? It’s good for you.”
She braced herself, drank the whiskey down, shuddered slightly, then drew a deep breath. “Thank you,” she said. “It is good for me, I’d have to say. No, no more for me. But have another for yourselves.”
I passed. Vince poured himself a short one. He went over her story with her, jotting down notes from time to time in his notebook. At one point she began to calculate how she’d manage without poor Jim. He’d been out of
work lately, but he was in the building trades, and when he worked he made decent money. And there’d be something from the Veterans Administration, wouldn’t there? And Social Security?
“I’m sure there’ll be something,” Vince told her. “And insurance? Did he have insurance?”
There was a policy, she said. Twenty-five thousand dollars, he’d taken it out when the first child was born, and she’d seen to it that the premium was paid each month. But he’d killed himself, and wouldn’t that keep them from paying?
“That’s what everybody thinks,” he told her, “but it’s rarely the case. There’s generally a clause, no payment for suicide during the first six months, the first year, maybe even the first two years. To keep you from taking out the policy on Monday and doing away with yourself on Tuesday. But you’ve had this for more than two years, haven’t you?”
She was nodding eagerly. “How old is Patrick? Almost nine, and it was taken out just around the time he was born.”
“Then I’d say you’re in the clear,” he said. “And it’s only fair, if you think about it. The company’s been taking a man’s premiums all these years, why should a moment of wrong thinking get them off the hook?”
“I had the same notion myself,” she said, “but I thought there was no hope. I thought that was just the way it was.”
“Well,” he said, “it’s not.”
“What did you call it? A moment of wrong thinking? But isn’t that all it takes to keep him out of heaven? It’s the sin of despair, you know.” She addressed this last to me, guessing that Mahaffey was more aware of the theology of it than I. “And is that fair?” she demanded, turning to Mahaffey again. “Better to cheat a widow out of the money than to cheat James Conway into hell.”
“Maybe the Lord’s able to take a longer view of things.”
“That’s not what the fathers say.”
“If he wasn’t in his right mind at the time. . .”
“His right mind!” She stepped back, pressed her hand to her breast. “Who in his right mind ever did such a thing?”
“Well. . .”
“He was joking,” she said. “And he put the gun to his head, and even then I wasn’t frightened, because he seemed his usual self and there was nothing frightening about it. Except I had the thought that the gun might go off by accident, and I said as much.”
“What did he say to that?”
“That we’d all be better off if it did, himself included. And I said not to say such a thing, that it was horrid and sinful, and he said it was only the truth, and then he looked at me, he looked at me.”
“What kind of a look?”
“Like, See what I’m doing? Like, Are you watching me, Mary Frances? And then he shot himself.”
“Maybe it was an accident,” I suggested.
“I saw his face. I saw his finger tighten on the trigger. It was as if he did it to spite me. But he wasn’t angry at me. For the love of God, why would he. . .”
Mahaffey clapped me on the shoulder. “Take Mrs. Conway into the other room,” he said. “Let her freshen up her face and drink a glass of water, and make sure the kids are all right.” I looked at him, and he gave my shoulder a squeeze. “Something I want to check,” he said.
I went into the kitchen, where Mrs. Conway wet a dishtowel and dabbed tentatively at her face, then filled a jelly glass with water and drank it down in a series of small sips. Then we went to check on the children, a boy of eight and a girl a couple of years younger. They were just sitting there, hands folded in their laps, as if someone had told them not to move.
Mrs. Conway fussed over them and assured them everything was going to be fine and told them to get ready for bed. We left them as we found them, sitting side by side, their hands still folded in their laps. I supposed they were in shock, and it seemed to me they had the right.
I brought the woman back to the living room, where Mahaffey was bent over the body of her husband. He straightened up as we entered the room. “Mrs. Conway,” he said, “I have something important to tell you.”
She waited to hear what it was.
“Your husband didn’t kill himself,” he announced.
Her eyes widened, and she looked at Mahaffey as if he’d gone suddenly mad. “But I saw him do it,” she said.
He frowned, nodded. “Forgive me,” he said. “I misspoke. What I meant to say was that the poor man did not commit suicide. He did kill himself, of course he killed himself—”
“I saw him do it.”
“—and of course you did, and what a terrible thing for you, what a cruel thing. But it was not his intention, ma’am. It was an accident!”
“An accident.”
“Yes.”
“To put a gun to your head and pull the trigger. An accident?”
Mahaffey had a handkerchief in his hand. He turned his hand palm-up to show what he was holding with it. It was the cartridge clip from the pistol.
“An accident,” Mahaffey said. “You said he was joking, and that’s what it was, a joke that went bad. Do you know what this is?”
“Something to do with the gun?”
“It’s the clip, ma’am. Or the magazine, they call it that as well. It holds the cartridges.”
“The bullets?”
“The bullets, yes. And do you know where I found it?”
“In the gun?”
“That’s where I would have expected to find it,” he said, “and that’s where I looked for it, but it wasn’t there. And then I patted his pants pockets, and there it was.” And, still using the handkerchief to hold it, he tucked the cartridge clip into the man’s right-hand pocket.
“You don’t understand,” he told the woman. “How about you, Matt? You see what happened?”
“I think so.”
“He was playing a joke on you, ma’am. He took the clip out of the gun and put it in his pocket. Then he was going to hold the unloaded gun to his head and give you a scare. He’d give the trigger a squeeze, and there’d be that instant before the hammer clicked on an empty chamber, that instant where you’d think he’d really shot himself, and he’d get to see your reaction.”
“But he did shoot himself,” she said.
“Because the gun still had a round in the chamber. Once you’ve chambered a round, removing the clip won’t unload the gun. He forgot about the round in the chamber, he thought he had an unloaded weapon in his hand, and when he squeezed the trigger he didn’t even have time to be surprised.”
“Christ have mercy,” she said.
“Amen to that,” Mahaffey said. “It’s a horrible thing, ma’am, but it’s not suicide. Your husband never meant to kill himself. It’s a tragedy, a terrible tragedy, but it was an accident.” He drew a breath. “It might cost him a bit of time in purgatory, playing a joke like that, but he’s spared hellfire, and that’s something, isn’t it? And now I’ll want to use your phone, ma’am, and call this in.”
“That’s why you wanted to know if it was a revolver or an automatic,” Elaine said. “One has a clip and one doesn’t.”
“An automatic has a clip. A revolver has a cylinder.”
“If he’d had a revolver he could have played Russian roulette. That’s when you spin the cylinder, isn’t it?”
“So I understand.”
“How does it work? All but one chamber is empty? Or all but one chamber has a bullet in it?”
“I guess it depends what kind of odds you like.”
She thought about it, shrugged. “These poor people in Brooklyn,” she said. “What made Mahaffey think of looking for the clip?”
“Something felt off about the whole thing,” I said, “and he remembered a case of a man who’d shot a friend with what he was sure was an unloaded gun, because he’d removed the clip. That was the defense at trial, he told me, and it hadn’t gotten the guy anywhere, but it stayed in Mahaffey’s mind. And as soon as he took a close look at the gun he saw the clip was missing, so it was just a matter of finding it.”
“In the dead man’s pocket.”
“Right.”
“Thus saving James Conway from an eternity in hell,” she said. “Except he’d be off the hook with or without Mahaffey, wouldn’t he? I mean, wouldn’t God know where to send him without having some cop hold up a cartridge clip?”
“Don’t ask me, honey. I’m not even Catholic.”
“Goyim is goyim,” she said. “You’re supposed to know these things. Never mind, I get the point. It may not make a difference to God or to Conway, but it makes a real difference to Mary Frances. She can bury her husband in holy ground and know he’ll be waiting for her when she gets to heaven her own self.”
“Right.”
“It’s a terrible story, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a good story as a story, but it’s terrible, the idea of a man killing himself that way. And his wife and kids witnessing it, and having to live with it.”
“Terrible,” I agreed.
“But there’s more to it. Isn’t there?”
“More?”
“Come on,” she said. “You left something out.”
“You know me too well.”
“Damn right I do.”
“So what’s the part I didn’t get to?”
She thought about it. “Drinking a glass of water,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“He sent you both out of the room,” she said, “before he looked to see if the clip was there or not. So it was just Mahaffey, finding the clip all by himself.”
“She was beside herself, and he figured it would do her good to splash a little water on her face. And we hadn’t heard a peep out of those kids, and it made sense to have her check on them.”
“And she had to have you along so she didn’t get lost on the way to the bedroom.”
I nodded. “It’s convenient,” I allowed, “making the discovery with no one around. He had plenty of time to pick up the gun, remove the clip, put the gun back in Conway’s hand, and slip the clip into the man’s pocket. That way he could do his good deed for the day, turning a suicide into an accidental death. It might not fool God, but it would be more than enough to fool the parish priest. Conway’s body could be buried in holy ground, regardless of his soul’s ultimate destination.”
Have a NYC 3 Page 9