by Ed McBain
“Then the firemen must have it.”
“Mr. Hassler, how was this reel of film labeled?”
“The usual way.”
“Which is?”
“First the date on the top line. Then the title of the reel, which in this case was ‘The Hundred Dollar Bill.’ Then, after that it said ‘with Tommy Barlow and Sammy La Paloma’-that’s the name of the kid we discovered in the park. That’s all.”
“Then anyone who looked at the cover of the can would know that Tommy Barlow was in this reel of film.”
“That’s right.”
“Mr. Hassler, thank you very much,” Carella said. “We’ll try our best to get it back for you.”
“It was the Forty Thieves,” Hassler insisted. “Those louses’ll take the sink if it isn’t nailed down.”
But Carella wasn’t at all sure the firemen were responsible for the theft of Fred Hassler’s film. Carella was remembering that Mary Tomlinson had said, “I wish I had some pictures of Tommy, too. I have a lot of Margaret, but none of the man she was going to marry.” And he was remembering that Michael Thayer had said, “I want to keep looking at him. That’s strange, isn’t it? I want to find out what was so… different about him.” And he was remembering, too, that Amos Barlow had said, “Ever since he died, I’ve been going around the house looking for traces of him. Old letters, snapshots, anything that was Tommy.” So whereas he knew that perhaps the firemen had earned their nickname with good reason, he also knew that none of the Forty Thieves would be crazy enough to steal a container of home movies. The carousel music had suddenly started again. The gold ring was once more in sight. The horses were in motion.
Carella went downtown and swore out three search warrants.
Hawes, in the meantime, perhaps motivated by the sudden burst of activity on the case, decided that he wanted to talk to Miss Martha Tamid one more time. They were each, Carella and Hawes, about to gasp their last breath on this case, but they were nonetheless still giving it the old college try. Hawes didn’t really believe that Martha Tamid had anything at all to do with the suicide-homicide, but there remained nonetheless the fact that she had lied about going to Amos Barlow’s house on the afternoon of April 16. The specific purpose of his visit was to find out why she had lied. She told him immediately and without hesitation.
“Because I was embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed, Miss Tamid?”
“Yes, how would you feel? I knew he was in there. I could see his car in the garage. But he wouldn’t answer the doorbell. Well, no matter. It is finished.”
“What do you mean, finished? No, don’t answer that yet, Miss Tamid, we’ll come back to it. I want to get something else straight first. You’re saying that you lied to the police because your feelings were hurt? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Yes.”
“Suppose you tell me why you went there in the first place, Miss Tamid?”
“You are getting harsh with me,” Martha said, her eyes seeming to get larger and a little moist.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Hawes answered. “Why did you go there?”
Martha Tamid shrugged. “Because I do not like being ignored,” she said. “I am a woman.”
“Why did you go there, Miss Tamid?”
“To make love,” she answered simply.
Hawes was silent for several moments. Then he said, “But Amos Barlow wouldn’t open the door.”
“He would not. Of course, he did not know why I was coming there”
“Otherwise he most certainly would have opened the door, is that right?”
“No, he would not have opened the door, anyway. I know that now. But I thought I would mention to you anyway, that he did not know I was coming to make love.”
“Are you in love with Amos Barlow?” Hawes asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous!”
“Were you in love with him?”
“Certainly not!”
“But you nonetheless went there that Sunday to… to seduce him?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I am a woman.”
“Yes, you’ve already told me that.”
“I do not like to be ignored.”
“You’ve told me that, too.”
“Then? It’s simple, n’est-ce pas?” She nodded emphatically. “Besides, it’s finished now. I no longer care.”
“Why is it finished, Miss Tamid? Why do you no longer care?”
“Because he was here, and now I know, and now I do not feel unattractive anymore.”
“When was he here?”
“Four nights ago, five nights? I don’t remember exactly.”
“He came of his own accord?”
“I invited him.”
“And? What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.” Martha nodded. “I am a very patient woman, you know. My patience is endless. But, you know… I gave him every opportunity. He is simply… he is inexperienced… he knows nothing, but nothing. And there is a limit to anyone’s patience.”
“I’m not sure I follow you, Miss Tamid,” Hawes said.
“You cannot blame a person for being inexperienced. This is not the same thing as being inattentive, you know. So when I tried, and I realized he was… comment dit-on?
… simple? naïf? ingénu? … what is there to do? He did not know. He simply did not know.”
“What didn’t he know, Miss Tamid?”
“What to do, how to do! He did not know.” She leaned forward suddenly. “I can trust you, can’t I? You are like a confesseur, isn’t that true? A priest who hears confession? I can tell you?”
“Sure,” Hawes said.
“I took off my own blouse,” Martha said, “because he was fumbling so with the buttons. But then… he did not know how to undress me. He simply did not know. He had never been with a woman before, do you understand? He is an innocent.” Martha Tamid sat back in her chair. “One cannot be offended by innocence,” she said.
The police who went through all those rooms were pretty much offended by all the rampant innocence. They searched Mary Tomlinson’s house from basement to attic, and they went through every inch of Michael Thayer’s apartment, and they covered Amos Barlow’s house like a horde of termites-but they didn’t turn up hide or hair of the film that had been stolen from Fred Hassler. They went through Mrs. Tomlinson’s tiny little Volkswagen, and through Michael Thayer’s blue Oldsmobile sedan, and through Amos Barlow’s tan Chevrolet, but they found nothing. They searched through Thayer’s small office in the Brio Building, and through Barlow’s mailing room at 891 Mayfair-but they did not find the film, and the merry-go-round was slowing to a halt again.
The next day, without realizing how close they’d come to grabbing the gold ring, the detectives held a meeting in the squadroom.
“What do you think?” Hawes asked, “have you got any ideas?”
“None,” Carella said.
“Meyer?”
Meyer shook his head.
“Bert?”
Kling hesitated a moment, and then said, “No.”
“So do we call it a suicide and close it out?” Hawes asked.
“What the hell else can we do?” Meyer asked.
“Let’s ask Pete for permission to leave it in the Open File,” Carella said.
“That’s the same thing as killing it,” Hawes said.
Carella shrugged, “Something may come up on it someday.”
“When?”
“Who knows? We’ve ran it into the ground. What else can we do?”
Hawes hesitated, unwilling to be the one who officially killed the case. “You want to vote on it?” he asked. The detectives nodded. “All those in favor of asking Pete to dump it in Siberia?” None of the men raised their hands.
“Meyer?”
“Dump it,” Meyer said.
“Bert?”
“Dump it.”
“Steve?�
��
Carella paused for a long time. Then he nodded reluctantly and said, “Dump it. Dump it.”
The request was placed on Lieutenant Peter Byrnes’ desk that afternoon. He glanced at it cursorily, picked up his pen, and then signed it, granting his permission. Before he went home that night, Alf Miscolo, filing a sheaf of papers he’d picked up from all the desks in the squadroom, went to the green cabinet marked OPEN FILE, slid out the drawer and dropped into it a manila folder containing all the papers on the Tommy Barlow-Irene Thayer case.
For all intents and purposes, the case was closed.
* * * *
14
The man was lying on his back in Grover Park.
They had already traced the outline of his body on the moist grass by the time Carella and Hawes arrived, and the man seemed ludicrously framed by his own ridiculous posture, the white powder capturing the position of death and freezing it. The police photographer was performing his macabre dance around the corpse, choreographing himself into new angles each time his flash bulb popped. The corpse stared up at him unblinkingly, twisted into the foolish grotesquery of death, one leg bent impossibly beneath him, the other stretched out straight. The sun was shining. It was May, and there was the heady aroma of newly mown grass in the park, the delicious fragrance of magnolia and cornelian cherry and quince. The man had a knife in his heart.
They stood around the body exchanging the amenities, men who were called together only when Death gave a party. The lab boys, the photographer, the assistant medical examiner, the two detectives from Homicide North, the two men from the 87th, they all stood around the man with the knife sticking out of his chest, and they asked each other how they were, and had they heard about Manulus over in the 33rd, got shot by a burglar night before last, what about this moon-lighting stuff, did they think the commissioner would stick to his guns, it was a nice day, wasn’t it, beautiful weather they’d been having this spring, hardly a drop of rain. They cracked a few jokes-the photographer had one about the first astronaut to reach the moon-and they went about their work with a faintly detached air of busyness. That was a dead man lying in the grass there. They accepted his presence only by performing a mental sleight of hand that in effect denied his humanity. He was no longer a man, he was simply a problem.
Carella pulled the knife from the dead man’s chest as soon as the assistant m.e. and the photographer were through with the stiff, carefully lifting the knife with his handkerchief tented over his hand, so as not to smear any latent prints that might be on the handle or blade.
“You going to make out the tag?” one of the laboratory boys asked him.
“Yeah,” Carella answered curtly.
He pulled three or four evidence tags from his back pocket, slid one loose from the rubber-banded stack, returned the others to his pocket, took the cap from his fountain pen, and began writing:
Automatically, he turned over the tag and filled in the information requested on the reverse side:
He looped the strings of the tag over the handle of the knife, fastening the two together where blade joined handle. Then, carrying the knife by the tag, he went over to where the laboratory technician was making a sketch of the body and its location.
“Might as well take this with you,” Carella said.
“Thanks,” the technician said. He accepted the knife and carried it over to his car which was parked partly on the grass, partly on the road that wound through the park. An ambulance had already arrived, and the attendants were waiting for everyone to finish with the body so they could cart it off to the morgue for autopsy. Hawes, standing some ten feet from where the attendants waited, was questioning a man who claimed he had seen the entire thing. Carella walked over aimlessly. He sometimes felt that all the official rigmarole following the discovery of a corpse was designed to allow a painless adjustment to the very idea of death by violence. The men took their pictures and made their sketches and collected their latent prints and whatever evidence was available, but these were only the motions of men who were stalling while they got used to the notion of dealing with a corpse.
“What time was this?” Hawes was asking the man.
“It must have been about a half-hour ago,” the man said. He was a thin old man with rheumy blue eyes and a running nose. He kept wiping his nose with the back of his hand, which was crusted with mucus.
“Where were you sitting, Mr. Coluzzi?” Hawes asked.
“Right there on that high rock. I was making a drawing of the lake. I come here every morning, and I sketch a little. I’m retired, you see. I live with my daughter and my son-in-law on Grover Avenue, just across from the park.”
“Can you tell us what happened, Mr. Coluzzi?” Hawes said. He noticed Carella standing beside him and said, “Steve, this is Mr. Dominick Coluzzi. He was an eyewitness to the killing. Mr. Coluzzi, this is Detective Carella.”
“How do you do?” Coluzzi said, and then immediately asked, “Let è Italiano, no?”
“Yes,” Carella answered.
“Va bene,” Coluzzi said, smiling. “Ho dicevo a questo suo amico …”
“I don’t think he understands Italian,” Carella said gently. “Do you, Cotton?”
“No,” Hawes answered.
“Mi scusi,” Coluzzi said. “I was telling him that I come here every morning to sketch. And I was sitting up there when the car pulled up.”
“What kind of a car was it, Mr. Coluzzi?” Carella asked.
“A Cadillac convertible,” Coluzzi said without hesitation.
“The color?”
“Blue.”
“Top up or down?”
“Up.”
“You didn’t happen to notice the license plate number, did you?”
“I did,” Coluzzi said, and he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “I wrote it down on my pad.”
“You’re a very observant person, Mr. Coluzzi,” Hawes said, his brows raised in admiration.
Coluzzi shrugged and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “It isn’t every day you see a man get stabbed to death,” he said. He was plainly enjoying himself. He was perhaps sixty-seven, sixty-eight, a thin old man whose arms were still muscular and wiry, but whose hands trembled slightly, a thin old man who had been let out to pasture, who came to the park each morning to sketch. This morning which had started out the way all other mornings did for him, something new had come into his life. He had been watching the lake and sketching the section near the dock where the row-boats bobbed in imperfect unison when suddenly a Cadillac had pulled to the side of the winding road, and suddenly murder had been done. And the old man, unnoticed on his high boulder overlooking the lake and the scene of the murder, alert, quick, and watched, and then shouted at the killer, and then had written down the number of the car’s license plate as it drove away. For the first time in a long time, the old man was useful again, and he enjoyed his usefulness, enjoyed talking to these two men who admired his quick thinking, who spoke to him as if they were speaking to an equal, as if they were speaking to another man, and not to some child who had to be let out into the sunshine each morning.
“What was the number of the plate, Mr. Coluzzi?” Carella asked.
Coluzzi opened his sketch pad. He had been working in charcoal, and a delicately shaded drawing of the boats at the dock filled half of the page. In one corner of the page, in charcoal, he had written:
Carella noticed that he had crossed the seven, in the Continental manner. He nodded briefly to himself, and then copied the number into his own pad.
“Can you tell us exactly what happened, Mr. Coluzzi?” he said.
“The car pulled to the curb. Down there.” Coluzzi pointed. “I noticed it right away because it came in with a lot of noise, tires shrieking, door slamming. And then a man ran up the embankment directly to this other man who was sitting on the bench there. The other man got up right away, and tried to run, but the one who got out of the car was too fast for him. He caught his arm and swung him a
round, and then he brought his right hand around and at first I thought he was only punching him, do you know, with his right hand, but instead he was stabbing him. I stood up on the rock and yelled at him, and that was when he turned and looked at me, and began running down to the car again. I think he was frightened. I don’t think he would have left his knife sticking in the man that way, if he hadn’t been frightened.”
“Are you frightened, Mr. Coluzzi?”