One thing about him, Tony Cook thought, he never throws his weight around. He doesn’t tell Charlie Pieronelli what to do because he knows Charlie already knows what to do, and what to start others doing.
The wind hurried through Washington Place and blew them east. It was a cold wind. It had cleared the air; when you looked up you could see half a moon and clouds hurrying across it. The cold wind blew them diagonally across Washington Square Park and held them back a little—tried to make them tilt a little—up Fifth to Eighth Street. It blew them east through Eighth Street to the Village Brawl, and by that time Shapiro knew what there was to know about the finding of Janet Rushton’s body, snatching Tony Cook’s words as the wind blew them past him.
“Probably just the way he says it was,” Shapiro said, as they went down the steps to the doors with pictures of naked girls pasted on them.
It would not, of course, be left at “probably.” Things would be checked out; the party Arthur Minor said he had been to would be checked out; the girl he had taken home would be found and asked about being taken home. They would find out more about Arthur Minor and more about Janet Rushton. There would be dozens of men working on it, directly. And all over the city, policemen were asking clerks in hardware stores about recent purchases of entirely ordinary ice picks. Of this last, it was a thousand to one nothing would come. Which is no reason for not spreading out a net.
A doorman in uniform said “Good evening, gentlemen.” He led them to and opened the door of the Village Brawl. It was a little after nine, and the combo was making loud noises on its platform—sax and guitar and piano and a trumpet. The trumpet was pretty good, Tony thought. Nathan prefers Brahms.
The restaurant was only moderately filled. A man in a dinner jacket came up to them and said, “Two?” and then, “Oh.” His voice went down on the “Oh.”
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “Back again, Mr. Granzo. Mr. Schmidt around?”
Granzo repeated the name as if he had never heard it before. “Yes,” Shapiro said. “The waiter.” Granzo said, “Oh, Emile,” and looked back into the restaurant. “Don’t see—yeah, there he comes.” He did not point; he indicated with a movement of his head.
The man he indicated was tall and blond and looked young. He was carrying a small tray with glasses on it above his head and circling the dance floor on which three couples were dancing. He carried his tray to a table halfway down the room and served the drinks from it. Then he turned and started back toward the entrance of the bar.
“Pretty busy just now,” Granzo said. “Band’s just started up and they’re beginning to come in. Maybe if you don’t—”
He stopped because Shapiro was not paying attention to him. Shapiro was moving between tables in the direction Emile Schmidt had taken, and Tony Cook was moving after him. Granzo shrugged his shoulders. He said, “Two, m’sieu?” to a heavy-set man behind a girl who might have been his daughter and probably wasn’t, which was none of Granzo’s business. He said, “This way, sir,” and led the way.
There were stools part of the way along the length of the bar, and a man and a girl were sitting on two of them. At the far end there was a sign which said, “Service Only,” and there Emile Schmidt was putting a tray on the bar and leaning toward the bartender. Emile wore a maroon jacket with dark green lapels and so did the bartender. There was a second bartender, in the same uniform. He was polishing glasses.
He put a glass down on the bar when Shapiro and Cook went in and moved up to the bar and looked expectant. Shapiro shook his head, and he and Cook went to the far end, where the bartender was putting cocktail glasses with crushed ice in them on Emile Schmidt’s tray. It looked like being a good bar, Tony thought. Maybe some day he and Rachel might try it. She was one hell of a good dancer.
Shapiro said, “Mr. Schmidt?” to Schmidt and Schmidt said, “M’sieu?” Shapiro would rather have expected “Bitte?”
“Police,” Shapiro said.
It did not disturb Emile Schmidt, but this time he said “Yeah?” instead of “M’sieu?”
Shapiro took the glossy print out of its envelope and held it out to Emile Schmidt and said, “Ever see her before?”
Schmidt took the photograph and moved so that the light fell on it. He looked at it carefully. He said, “A looker, ain’t she?”
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “Remember ever seeing her before?”
“Somebody I ought to know?” Schmidt said, and looked at the picture again.
“I don’t know,” Shapiro said. “Possibly.”
“Can’t say I—” Schmidt said and stopped with that and looked at the picture again. Then he said, “Seems like maybe I—” and stopped again and looked at the photograph again. Then he said, “Customer, maybe?”
You don’t lead witnesses. A led witness is no good to anybody. Shapiro said, “Could be, Mr. Schmidt.”
“Lot of them look like that,” Schmidt said.
Cagy? Nathan wondered. Or just not wanting to stick his neck out? Or, as was most likely, only not sure. A waiter sees a lot of people. He doesn’t often look at them closely, even when they are pretty girls. Well, it had always been an outside—
“Wait a min-ute,” Schmidt said. “Last night? With this—with this guy got killed?”
“Up to you,” Shapiro said. “Just take your time, Mr. Schmidt.”
Schmidt moved off a little, where the light was better. The bartender took two small decanters out of a bed of crushed ice and put them on the tray and poured into them from a shaker. He put a dish of slivers of lemon peel on the tray. One hell of a good bar, Tony thought. They go to trouble even when nobody’s watching them.
“I tell you,” Schmidt said, turning back. “It could be. I don’t say for sure it is, but it could be. I was hopping and I just put these two drinks down, but it could be this is the girl. Matter of fact, I sort of think it is. Not that I could swear to it. Come down to that, I couldn’t, mister. But it sure as hell looks like her.”
It wasn’t much and it wasn’t good. But, Nathan Shapiro thought, it was what they were going to get. For now, anyway. Shapiro held a hand out, and Schmidt gave him back the photograph of a pretty girl who was now lying in the Bellevue morgue, unless they had already gone to work on her. Shapiro and Tony Cook went back into the main restaurant. It had filled up a good deal in the few minutes they had been out of it. They had to wait near the entrance for Granzo to come back from seating people. The music, to Shapiro, seemed even louder than before.
It was André Brideaux’s night off. A detective’s life is full of minor tribulations. The hat-check girl, shown the picture, said, “Mister, I see hundreds like her.”
“She probably would have come in alone last night,” Shapiro said. “Meeting somebody here. Would have had some sort of wrap to check.”
“Nope,” the hat-check girl said. “You don’t want me to lie to you, do you, mister?”
There was a cab in front of the Village Brawl, and a man was leaning into it paying the driver. The light went on on top of the cab and Tony said, “Hold it!” and reached for the door handle. The driver said, “Look, mister, I’m due in. Which way you want to go?”
“Uptown,” Tony said, and got into the cab and Shapiro got in after him.
“Listen,” the driver said, “the garage is over in—”
Shapiro gave him the address in West Twentieth Street. The driver turned around and looked at him. He said, “That’s a police station, ain’t it?”
“Yes,” Shapiro said, “that’s a police station, Mr. Brekowitch.”
The names and photographs are on visible cards in all New York taxicabs. Shapiro looks at them. Like all policemen, he wishes more taxi riders did.
The driver slapped his flag down. Traffic wasn’t bad to West Twentieth Street. It was too late for the theater crowd. Big trucks dozed at curbs. Shapiro paid the hacker, and the “Off Duty” sign went up on top of the cab. The driver had really meant it. It wasn’t the usual time for a change in shifts. That comes most often
late in the afternoon, just when people finish shopping or leave offices and try to get home. But taxi drivers are unpredictable.
Cook and Shapiro climbed to the squad room of Homicide South. They went into Shapiro’s small office and turned on the lights. Shapiro’s In basket was full, ready for morning. He sat at the desk and shuffled papers and rubbed his eyes, because typed reports tended to blur. It had been a long day—a long day with nothing accomplished. “Count that day lost—” and what was the rest of it?
Tony Cook sat across the desk and waited.
Detectives of the downtown precinct would be calling numbers listed in Janet Rushton’s address book. They would be ringing doorbells at addresses listed in it. Some of the people listed would be home, but most would not. The names she had written down would, probably, be of friends of her own age. Most of them would not be sitting home at nine-thirty in the evening.
Detectives would have quit asking in hardware stores about an ordinary ice pick, because hardware stores would be closed. They would still be showing a photograph of Ralph Farmington to bartenders in the area around the Hotel Wexley, because the bars would be open.
“She was slugged first,” Shapiro said, and slid a copy of the preliminary report from the Bellevue morgue across the desk to Tony Cook.
The subject had been five feet four inches tall and had weighed a hundred and three pounds. She had died of asphyxiation. Before death she had been hit heavily on the left side of the jaw, probably with a fist. It was probable that the blow had rendered her unconscious. She had been in her early twenties.
“Expecting somebody, probably,” Shapiro said. “Didn’t call down to ask who it was. May have left the door unlocked. If she didn’t want bells ringing and the latch clattering. Obviously didn’t fasten the chain.”
“Yeah,” Tony said. “And opened the door and whoever it was slugged her. They ask for it, don’t they?”
They asked for it.
“If she was the girl with Prentis,” Tony said, “figure Prentis was the man she was expecting? Had left the door unlocked for? Why would he have let her go on ahead? It could be risky for a girl by herself at two in the morning, or whenever it was.”
“I don’t know. Didn’t want to be seen with her, maybe.”
“Or maybe he was already dead.”
“Yes. Maybe he was already dead. And she cut and ran.”
“Only,” Tony said, “Rachel says she seemed like a nice kid. Not the sort of thing a nice kid would do, you’d think.”
Shapiro said “Mmmm.” You can’t tell what a nice girl may do. You can guess, but you can’t be sure. At the moment, Nathan Shapiro couldn’t tell what anybody would do. About these people he couldn’t even guess. He went back to sorting reports.
Henry Pruitt, treasurer of the Mission of Redemption, Inc., had taken a plane out of St. Louis for New York. He might be in New York by now. Or he might be locked in a cylinder with eighty others—a hundred others—going round and round above New York, waiting for a cleared runway. Coming east to preside over the dissolution of the Mission of Redemption, Inc. Which was what it would come to, presumably, with the Voice silenced. And—
Shapiro said, “Mmmm,” with an inflection and slid another sheet of paper across the desk to Tony Cook. This one was a report from the police of Little Rock, Arkansas. Mrs. Jonathan Prentis’s name appeared on a list of passengers in an airplane out of Little Rock for St. Louis on Sunday, February 22. Tony said, “Uh?”
“She thinks it’s sinful to travel on Sunday,” Shapiro said. “She was supposed to have come east with the main group, which got here on March second. She allowed herself a lot of time in Saint Louis.”
“Could be,” Tony said, “she likes Saint Louis better than Little Rock. Or, could be she didn’t stay in Saint Louis. Could be she came on here. On her own.”
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “She was asleep at eleven o’clock last night, according to Mrs. Mathews. But—she might have waked up. We’ll have to ask her.”
“Came east,” Tony said. “Scouted around. Found out her husband was going in for fun and games. Did see him going out of his room last night. Wearing civvies. Put two and two together and—came up with an ice pick?”
“We’ll have to ask,” Shapiro said. “See if they’ve got a car for us, Tony.”
Tony Cook used the telephone. Nathan Shapiro shuffled papers together and put a paperweight on top of them. They went uptown in a police car, Shapiro carrying the glossy photograph of Janet Rushton in its manila envelope. They did not call up on the house phone in the Hotel Wexley. They went up to the sixth floor in one of the elevators. Tony started down the corridor toward the rooms at the end of it—the rooms across the hall from each other. But Nathan said, “Not yet, Tony,” and went across the hall and rang a doorbell. He had to ring it several times before the door opened.
Ralph Farmington was fully dressed in a dark suit and a white shirt. After he had opened the door he pulled the knot of his necktie tighter. He said, “Oh, you again. The Reverend isn’t here. Gone out to Kennedy to meet Pruitt. And I—I was just going downstairs for a cup of coffee.”
He stepped out of the way to let Shapiro and Cook go into the living room of the suite. He watched Shapiro go across the room and sit behind the desk.
“You act like something new’s come up,” Farmington told Shapiro.
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “Something new’s come up, Mr. Farmington. Come over and have a look at this, will you?”
He took the photograph of a dead girl out of its envelope and laid it on the desk, and Farmington crossed the room and picked it up. Tony stood near the door, his back to the wall. He leaned against the wall.
Farmington looked at the photograph. He read the underlines taped to it. He turned it over and looked at the back with “Talent, Inc.” stamped on it. He said, “Yeah. One of the girls. Something special about her?”
“For us, yes,” Shapiro said. “She’s dead, Mr. Farmington. Killed some time last night. In her apartment. Probably after the Reverend Prentis was killed.”
Farmington went over and sat on a sofa and looked at Nathan Shapiro for some seconds. Then, to Shapiro’s surprise, he said, “Jesus Christ.” He did not say it in a tone of prayer.
“Also,” Shapiro said, “she may have been with Mr. Prentis at this restaurant. Where he was killed. You got any idea how that could have come about, Mr. Farmington?”
Farmington shook his head—his rather handsome head, with gray just beginning to show in his yellow hair. He said, “Why should I, Lieutenant?”
“She was one of the singers you recruited,” Shapiro said. “Interviewed, I suppose. Auditioned?”
“No,” Farmington said. “Look, I had a hundred and eighty to round up. More, for spares. Joe Westclock says she’s O.K., so I say send her around. Knew Joe wouldn’t let me down.”
“Westclock?”
“Runs the agency. Used to handle me in the old days. This kid wasn’t going to sing a solo or anything.”
“You engaged several of your singers through Mr. Westclock? Just—just what, Mr. Farmington? So many sopranos? So many contraltos?”
“And tenors and baritones,” Farmington said. “Sure, that was pretty much the way. Joe came through with maybe twenty. Maybe thirty. It’s all down somewhere. There are a lot of singers kicking around loose in New York. And a lot of flesh peddlers handling them.”
“You didn’t interview them personally?”
“Had them show up at the rehearsal hall Ted Acton got us. Sorted them out and gave them the music and went at it. With the regulars helping, of course. The ones who travel with us. Takes a week, ten days, to get them shaped up.”
“No special attention to individuals?”
“Not unless they sing off-key. Doesn’t happen very often. They’re mostly pros. Not big-time pros, but they can carry tunes. Damn near anybody can sing hymns, Lieutenant.”
Nathan said he saw. He said that Mr. Farmington made it very clear. He said, “So Mis
s Rushton didn’t stand out in any way? As an individual?”
“No. Just one of the crowd.”
“But,” Nathan said, “you recognized her quickly enough from her picture, Mr. Farmington. She was a good-looking girl. One any man might notice, I’d think.”
“Look,” Farmington said, “I told you before, or near enough. I don’t look. I listen. I’m not hiring a chorus line.”
You are going out of character, Shapiro thought. First time around you were one of the godly. When you remembered, anyway. Now you’re—I guess it’s theater. A producer, who knows his way around. What Shapiro said was, “I see, Mr. Farmington.” But then he said, “I suppose you did look at pictures, Mr. Farmington? Of singers Mr. Westclock thought he could get for you?”
“Joe and a dozen other agents. Sometimes. They’ve all got pictures of their clients. Most jobs, it makes a difference what the boys and girls look like. More than what they sound like, most of the time.”
“The ones you hired through Mr. Westclock? Miss Rushton and the others?”
“I guess so. Sure, I remember. Joe wanted me to look at them. Joe and I’re sort of old friends. Sort of friends, anyway.”
“Other good-looking young women?”
“A couple of others. Blondes. Like he—”
He stopped speaking. He stopped abruptly.
Shapiro waited for some seconds without saying anything, but looking at the big, good-looking man on the sofa. Then he said, “Yes, Mr. Farmington? You were going to say?”
“Nothing.”
Shapiro shook his head, sadly. He said, “No. That’s not good enough, is it?” His voice was very sad and very tired. “Not nearly good enough, is it? You—what, Mr. Farmington? Showed these pictures of pretty blondes to Mr. Prentis? For him to pick from?”
“Hell,” Farmington said. “It wasn’t the way you make it sound. He—all right. This week or so the Voice spent sort of preparing himself. Getting to know about the city he was going—going to redeem. See what I mean?”
“No,” Shapiro said, “I can’t say I do. But go on.”
“Thing is,” Farmington said, and now he spoke slowly, and, Shapiro thought, not with confidence. Now he spoke like a man feeling his way with care. “Thing is, you come into a city cold, the way he had to. Helps if you have somebody who can—oh, show you around. Go places with you where a man by himself would—sort of stand out. Particularly a man who wouldn’t look as if he belonged in places the Reverend Prentis wanted to find out about. See what I mean now, Lieutenant?”
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