Preach No More

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “Chorus line?” Pieronelli said and Granzo turned in his chair and waved a hand toward the small bandstand, raised a few feet from the floor. He said, “There?” He said, “Hell, no. Anyway, that’s for uptown. Much as it’s for any place nowadays. This is—hell, it’s more like being a family place. See what I mean?”

  “Sure,” Tony Cook said. “Not criticizing your place, Mr. Granzo. Just saying it was an odd place for the Reverend Prentis to come to. Being against liquor and everything. Have his uniform on?”

  Granzo shook his head. He said he didn’t get it. “Uniform?”

  “Clericals,” Cook said. “Clerical collar. That sort of thing.”

  “Hell, no,” Granzo said. “Sports jacket, way I remember it. Sort of greenish, when we put the lights up—like now. Except where—well, where this ice pick or whatever was stuck into him. Only, not very much. Not the way you’d expect.”

  “Straight into the heart, the ambulance man said,” Pieronelli said. “Bled internally. Somebody who knew how to keep from hitting a rib. Only there’s plenty of space between ribs. We want any more from Mr. Granzo, Tony?”

  “The lieutenant ought to be along pretty soon,” Tony Cook said. “Maybe he will. Me, I think we’ve got the layout for now. Men who come here, Mr. Granzo. They very often wear sports jackets?”

  “Some of them do,” Granzo said. “Some show up in dinner jackets. They’ve got to wear neckties, though. This joint’s not a joint, see? Not what people call a—”

  There was movement at the front of the long room. A uniformed patrolman came down. He had one hand on the shoulder of a small, dark youth with rather long black hair. “That’s the Manuel-something kid,” Granzo said. “Damn it to hell, he was supposed to get his hair cut yesterday.”

  The patrolman brought the boy, who had very large dark eyes with, Cook thought, fear in them, over to the table. “Kid who found it,” the patrolman said. “Inspector says you may as well get on with it until somebody else shows up. O.K.?”

  “O.K.,” Pieronelli said.

  “Sergeant says they’ve picked up the waiter,” the patrolman said. “Lives to-hell-and-gone up in the Bronx somewhere. Sergeant says, d’you want to talk to him at the station house or shall they bring him over here?”

  “Here, I guess,” Pieronelli said. He looked at Cook and shrugged his shoulders. Tony Cook had no trouble in interpreting the shrug. There was going to be a lot of fuss made about this one. More of a fuss than a couple of detectives, first grade or not, ought to be stuck with. He began to wonder whether, conceivably, the subways were flooded. Where the hell was—

  The glass door with the pictures of naked girls on it opened, and Nathan Shapiro, detective lieutenant, came into the room. Shapiro was tall and thin; his long dark face looked even sadder than usual. Inside he dripped from raincoat to floor. The assistant chief inspector, who had his own raincoat on and was, Cook thought, probably going home to breakfast, said something to Shapiro and then opened the door and went up the steps. Shapiro came across the room and said, “Morning, Tony,” and looked at the others.

  “Detective Charles Pieronelli, Lieutenant,” Tony said and stood up from his chair. “Precinct squad. Mr. Granzo, who owns the place. And this is the bus boy who found Mr. Prentis.”

  Shapiro said, “Morning,” in a muted voice and took two chairs off a table. He put his wet raincoat on one of them and sat on the other. He said, “Get yourself a chair, son,” to the boy with fear in his dark eyes. The boy, who wore a black leather jacket, merely looked at him.

  “You speak English, son?” Shapiro asked him.

  “Si, sir. Not very good, sir.”

  “Get a chair and sit down,” Shapiro said, his voice low and sad.

  The boy got a chair and sat on it. He sat on the edge of it.

  “Nothing bad,” Manuel Perez said. “I do nothing bad, sir.”

  “We don’t think you did,” Shapiro said. “We just want to hear about it.”

  Manuel turned in his chair and faced Granzo. “Nothing bad,” he said. “I didn’t do bad thing, Mr. Granzo.”

  “O.K.,” Granzo said. “I’m not going to fire you, kid. Only how often do I have to tell you to get a haircut?”

  The boy said something in Spanish, speaking very rapidly. Granzo said, “All right, kid. See that you do.” Then he said, “Can’t have them going around grubby,” to nobody in particular. “Makes the joint look like a joint.”

  “The boy doesn’t look grubby,” Shapiro said. “He looks like a nice clean boy. Your name’s Manuel, son?”

  “Manuel Perez, sir.”

  “How old are you, Manuel?”

  The boy looked quickly at Granzo and then back at Nathan Shapiro. He said, “I’m twenty-one, sir.”

  He didn’t look it, Shapiro thought. He looked, perhaps, seventeen. But it was nothing to make a point of.

  “All right,” Shapiro said, “tell us about it, son. You were clearing up. By yourself, Manuel?”

  “Two others,” Manuel said. He held up two fingers. He said, “Sir.”

  “About what time?”

  “All gone,” Manuel said. “Everybody gone.”

  Shapiro looked at Granzo.

  “He banged on my door a little before three,” Granzo said. “Like I told these gentlemen, I’d just gone up. He—”

  “All right,” Shapiro said. “Go ahead, son. You were cleaning up. Used glasses. Ashtrays. That sort of thing? Tablecloths?”

  “We use mats,” Granzo said. “Linen napkins, sure. But mats. Made special for us.”

  “Mats,” Shapiro said. “You were clearing up the booths, Manuel?”

  “Si, sir.”

  “With a tray, or something like that? To put things on?”

  “Si, sir. A cart.”

  “You came to this booth,” Shapiro said. He pointed across the room to the booth in which the fingerprint men were still working, using lights. “Then what, son?”

  “Man, sir. I said, ‘We’re closing up, sir.’ He didn’t say anything and I said, ‘Please, sir. We’re closed up, sir.’”

  “He was sitting at the table. On the bench?”

  Manuel answered in Spanish, speaking very rapidly.

  “Take it easy, son,” Shapiro said. “And in English. I don’t understand Spanish. Fine language, but I don’t understand it. He was sitting on the bench at the table. And?”

  It came more slowly in English. It came with many halts for words.

  The man had been sitting on the bench—the bench on the right side as you looked into the booth. He had had his head down on the table. Manuel had thought he was drunk. “On trip, maybe.” He had said, “Please, sir,” several times. There had been a highball glass, empty, beside the man. He had picked the glass up and put it, with the others, on the cart. There had been only one glass. The man’s head had been on the place mat and Manuel, when the man did not answer him, and did not move, had tried to pull the mat out from under the head. The man had moved a little, then, and then Manuel had seen “this thing.” The thing was stuck in the man’s back. “A thing like Joe uses for the ice, I thought maybe.”

  Shapiro looked at Granzo.

  “The bartender, he means,” Granzo said. “We’ve got an ice machine at the bar, sure, but sometimes the cubes stick together. You know what I mean, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “Then, Manuel?”

  “I thought something wrong with him. So I ran upstairs to tell Mr. Granzo, sir.”

  “Right thing to do, son,” Shapiro told him. “Earlier on. During the evening. You’d been to this booth? Cleaning ashtrays? Taking off used glasses? That sort of thing?”

  “All over,” Manuel said. “Lots of people, sir.”

  “This man,” Shapiro said. “You remember whether he was alone in the booth, son?”

  “Always two people in the booths, sir. Maybe four people.”

  He held up four fingers.

  “So you’d have noticed if this man had been alone in the booth all e
vening?”

  “Maybe, sir. But I all the time running. I work hard, sir. Work good.”

  “Sure you do,” Shapiro said. “So you can’t be sure the man was alone?”

  “Lots of people,” Manuel said. “Lots of tables, sir. And the waiters all the time saying, ‘Do this, boy,’ ‘Do that, boy.’”

  “After you had gone upstairs and got Mr. Granzo,” Shapiro said. “You came back down with him. Then?”

  Sadly, Nathan Shapiro anticipated the answer.

  Manuel Perez had finished clearing tables. He had put things on his cart and wheeled the cart into the kitchen, and had taken glasses and plates and knives and forks off it and put them in the dishwasher. And when he and the two other bus boys had filled the dishwasher, one of them had pressed the button and the washer had begun to churn. And the detergent in it to scrub off fingerprints.

  Probably, Shapiro thought, it didn’t matter. There had been identifying papers in Jonathan Prentis’s pockets—an Arkansas driver’s license, a social security card, credit cards. Quite enough to go on with.

  “Manuel,” Shapiro said. “You said a highball glass on the table. Just one?”

  “I think so, sir. I think just one.”

  “All right, son,” Shapiro said. “You worked all night. You go home and get some sleep.” He turned toward Detective Charles Pieronelli. He said, “We know where he lives, don’t we?”

  Pieronelli said, “Sure, Lieutenant.”

  Manuel Perez said, “You mean I go home, sir?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “That’s what I mean, son.”

  3

  It was taking a long time to get the waiter down from the Bronx. But it takes a time to get anybody down from the Bronx to lower Manhattan.

  They watched Manuel Perez walk toward the door. He walked, Nathan Shapiro thought, like a boy who expects to be stopped. Shapiro thought of having a police car take the boy home, but he decided against it. A police car would scare the kid. He wouldn’t believe the police car was taking him home. Manuel went through the door and up the steps to the sidewalk. He was only a shadow going up the steps but a shadow which moved more quickly.

  “The waiters have regular stations?” Shapiro asked Granzo, and Granzo said they did, but that they were shifted—rotated—on stations every week. The man last night?

  “Brideaux,” Granzo said, “says his first name’s André. Tables twenty-two to twenty-eight.”

  The booth was number?

  “That’s twenty-two,” Granzo said. “B twenty-two. The B’s for ‘booth.’”

  “When the waiter makes out the check,” Shapiro said, “I suppose he puts the table number on it? And the number of people served?”

  He did. Sure he did. And the checker, who had a table and an adding machine at the end of the bar, checked totals and took money.

  “Case anybody pays money,” Granzo said. “Mostly it’s credit cards. A few charge customers but not many. Damn credit cards. You know they nick us, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “Bar checks and food checks are—”

  “Only thing,” Granzo said, “they bring people in. Damn near got to honor them. What?”

  “Bar checks and food checks,” Shapiro said. “Two cards? Or all on one? One slip, or whatever you call it?”

  “Separate checks,” Granzo said. “Stapled together. Joe makes out the drink bills and the waiter the food bills, and Mr. Esposito totals them and writes the total on the back and staples them together.”

  “Esposito?”

  “The checker, Lieutenant. Name’s Michael but he likes the ‘mister’ bit. Married to my sister, Micky is.”

  “When you close up,” Shapiro said. “What does Mr. Esposito do with the paid checks? And the cash? And the charge-card duplicates, of course?”

  “Puts them in the safe,” Granzo said. “Around noon the bookkeeper comes in and adds things up. See what I mean?”

  Shapiro nodded his head.

  “I guess we’d better get them out,” Shapiro said. “See what Table twenty-two had in the way of drinks. And how many were at the table.”

  “Listen,” Granzo said. “We had maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty customers last night. And Micky doesn’t have time to put them in order. And—”

  “Detective Pieronelli’ll give you a hand,” Shapiro said.

  “Also,” Granzo said, “we get a turnover. What I mean is, people get finished and somebody else gets the table. See what I mean?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “Several people may have been at Table twenty-two last night. Detective Pieronelli will help you sort the checks out, Mr. Granzo. You might go along with them, Tony.”

  Granzo sighed obviously. But he got up and went across the big room and between tables with chairs piled on them and through a wide doorway into, presumably, the service bar. Pieronelli went after him. Pieronelli wasn’t as neatly dressed as the man he followed. On the other hand, he was a good deal taller. Cook was last. He was taller than either of the others.

  Nathan Shapiro drummed his fingertips on the table and his long sad face grew sadder. This wasn’t a case he’d be any good at. That should have been obvious to anybody. This dead man had been a preacher; he had been a Christian preacher. It was the sort of thing which might have ramifications into religion. It would bring Nathan Shapiro up against values, conventions, of which he knew nothing. There would be nuances which he could not be expected to understand. It should go to somebody else, obviously. Bill Weigand himself, for example. Bill was a Christian. He was not, so far as Shapiro knew, very avid about it, but Nathan Shapiro was not especially avid about his own faith. High Holy Days. That about did it. But he was after all the son of a rabbi and that should have been taken into account; should have been taken into account by Captain William Weigand, commanding, Homicide South.

  He was always getting assigned to cases beyond his competence. Cases involving painters and theater people, about which he knew no more than he knew of the mores of Christian evangelists. If “evangelists” was what they ought to be called. Bill Weigand was a good cop but one subject to illusions. One of his illusions was Nathan Shapiro, detective lieutenant because of some inexplicable misjudgment on the part of the New York Police Department. Somebody—who was on last night? Oh, sure, Lieutenant Timothy O’Callaghan—had called Weigand at home and waked him up and said that a famous evangelist had been killed in a dive in Greenwich Village and Bill had said, “Get Nate on it.”

  So. Instead of telling O’Callaghan to get on it himself. O’Callaghan was after all a Christian. Oh, a Roman Catholic, and Catholics, so far as Shapiro knew, did not go in for evangelical drives. (Probably “drive” was the wrong word. “Crusade”?) But there had been Bishop Sheen on television. In robes, as Nate Shapiro dimly remembered from having once, inadvertently, turned him on. Anyway—

  Anyway, I’ve got it for now, Shapiro thought. When we’re through here, Bill will be in his office and I’ll tell him I’m the wrong man for the job. He sighed, and his long face fell into sadder lines. It wouldn’t do any good to explain to Bill Weigand how unsuitable Nate Shapiro was for this particular case. It never had done any good. Because now and then I’ve been lucky, Nate Shapiro thought, Bill keeps on picking me for jobs I don’t belong on.

  Shapiro got up from the table and walked over to the booth the fingerprint men had finished with.

  The booth was shallow. There were half walls on either side separating it from, presumably, Booths 21 and 23. A narrow table ran through the booth. There were benches on either side. Each bench, he thought, would seat two people if they kept their elbows in close while they ate.

  The narrow table was bare, except for traces of the fingerprint dust the technical men had used. Back against the wall there was a small lamp, not lighted. Shapiro reached in and pressed the lamp’s button and a dim light came on. Twenty-five-watt, at a guess. Not enough to eat by.

  He backed out of the booth and looked up. Yes. Indirect lighting, hidden by wooden
baffles. Not too much of it on this gray morning. Less, of course, in the night’s darkness.

  He leaned down into the booth and peered in the semi-darkness at both benches. A precinct detective who had been watching him came over, and he had a flashlight and pointed its beam down on the seat to the right as one entered the booth. There was a little dried blood on the seat. It was at the nearest end of the bench.

  “Where he was sitting,” the detective said. “Didn’t bleed much.”

  “Enough,” Shapiro said. “Internally, I suppose.”

  The man from the precinct squad said, “Way it looks, Lieutenant.”

  “This ice pick,” Shapiro said. “You see it?”

  The detective hadn’t. The body had been gone when he got there. But, hell, the lieutenant knew the routine.

  Shapiro nodded his head. The routine was set. D.O.A., by the ambulance attendant. Photographs, from all angles. Sketch artist with measurements. Ice pick pulled out, with care about fingerprints, by one of the lab boys and taken to the lab. Body taken to the Bellevue morgue.

  Copies of the photographs would, in due course, turn up at Homicide South. They would show a dead man, face down against a table with the wooden handle—or plastic handle—sticking out of his back.

  Shapiro stood and looked into the booth, and made up in his mind what the photograph would show.

  The Reverend Jonathan Prentis—what size would he be?—leaning forward on the table with the haft of an ice pick sticking out of his back. On the right-hand bench, where the dried blood was. Near the end of the bench closest to the passageway between it and the tables in the middle of the room.

  Somebody had leaned into the booth. Prentis had already been leaning forward on the table. Or leaning toward someone sitting opposite him? Or a murderer with an ice pick ready had pushed him forward? Prentis drunk? Or partly drunk? That would show up in the autopsy. Easy to push down on the table? Or resisting of the pressure? The ice pick in his back. Avoiding a rib by luck or knowledge? The murderer’s own body shielding the action from people at the tables, from passing bus boys and waiters? And where the hell was the waiter? The Bronx wasn’t all that far for a cruise car.