by Stuart Woods
“Anybody know we’re coming?” Stone asked, as they got out of the car.
“I called the warden’s office before we left. We’re to ask for the captain of the guard.”
They entered a door marked VISITORS, presented their IDs at the desk, and asked for the captain of the guard.
“You’ll have to check your weapons,” the desk clerk said.
Dino handed over his pistol, and Stone opened his coat to show that he was unarmed.
A thickly built, crew-cut, uniformed man in his fifties appeared in the reception room and waved Dino and Stone through a door, locking it behind him. “And you wanted to see…?” he asked, not bothering to introduce himself.
“Herbert Mitteldorfer, Captain,” Dino replied, looking at Stone and shrugging at the man’s coldness.
“Wait a minute,” the man said, picking up a wall phone in the hallway. “Johnson?” he said. “Bring Herbie Mitteldorfer down to reception one; he’s got visitors.” He hung up the phone and led them on down the hallway to another locked door.
“Is Mitteldorfer a trusty?” Dino asked the man.
“Yeah.”
“Was he, by any chance, out on the town last night?”
The captain stopped before a door. “He gets to shop for office supplies in the town; he’s always back inside by five P.M.”
“Yesterday, too?”
“Yesterday, too.”
He unlocked the door, let them walk into the room, and slammed it behind them.
Dino sat down in a steel chair and rested his elbows on the table. “What’s with that guy?” he asked. “Some reception for the NYPD, huh?”
“You didn’t see his name tag?” Stone asked.
“No.”
“His name is Warkowski,” Stone said.
“War…?” Dino stopped in mid-name.
“We’ll be lucky to get out of here without serving time,” Stone said.
Ten minutes of dead time passed before another door opened and a guard escorted a small man into the room.
“There you go, Herbie,” the guard said. “Let yourself out and lock the door behind you when you’re through.” He handed the prisoner a key.
Herbert Mitteldorfer was five-six, 130; he had gone bald on top and gray on the sides; his hair was cut short, not the longer, frizzier hair of Stone’s memory. He stared at Dino and Stone. “Well,” he said, “to what do I owe this great pleasure?”
“Sit down,” Dino said. “We want to ask you some questions.”
“I think I read in the papers that you, ah, retired, Mr. Barrington,” Mitteldorfer said, taking a seat. “Do you spend your time visiting prisoners now?”
“Only on special occasions,” Stone said. “I understand you’re a trusty here.”
“Since my second year inside,” Mitteldorfer replied. “I’m a trustworthy sort of fellow.”
Dino spoke up. “Where were you last night, Herbert?”
Mitteldorfer burst out laughing, and Stone had to restrain himself from joining him. “I think you could say I have an iron-clad alibi,” he replied.
“Yeah? Alibi for what?”
“You tell me; I’ve no idea why you’re here.”
“Tell me about your day yesterday.”
“Easy question. I rose at six, showered and breakfasted, then went to work. I broke forty-five minutes for lunch, then returned to work. I finished work at four-thirty, then wrote some letters and watched TV until dinner at six. After dinner I went to the library and read for two hours, then I returned to my cell and read myself to sleep.”
“Did you run any errands outside the prison yesterday?” Dino asked.
“Asked and answered,” Mitteldorfer replied.
“You’ve been here how long?”
“Just finished my twelfth year.”
“So you’ll have a parole hearing coming up soon?”
“Yes.”
“Well, unless you’d like me to show up at your hearing and tell the board what a dangerous little shit you still are, you’d better start answering my questions with a little more feeling.”
“I apologize,” Mitteldorfer replied, chastened. “I’ll be happy to answer anything you’d like to ask.”
“How often do you leave the prison?”
“Once or twice a week, depending on what errands have to be run.”
“What sort of errands do you run?”
“I buy stationery and office supplies; I go to the computer store; sometimes I’m allowed to do some personal shopping.”
“What sort of personal shopping?”
“I buy underwear and socks, batteries for my portable radio, a new toothbrush. Sometimes I’ll have an ice-cream cone; they don’t serve Häagen-Dazs in here.”
“Do you have a son?”
“No.”
“Any male relatives who are younger than you?”
“No, not in this country.”
“Where else?”
“In Germany; I have a nephew, my sister’s son.”
“What’s his age?”
“Oh, mid-thirties, I suppose. I only met him once, when he was a teenager, when I visited her.”
“What’s his name?”
“Ernst Hausman.”
“Has he ever been to this country?”
“No. I hear from my sister several times a year; I think she’d have told me if he came here.”
“Where does he live?”
“In Hamburg. I don’t have his address. He works at a cigarette factory, I believe.”
“Social work, huh? Helping out his fellow man.”
Mitteldorfer shrugged. “He doesn’t have my conscience.”
“Stone, you got any questions?”
“Mr. Mitteldorfer,” Stone said, “do you have any regular correspondents besides your sister?”
Mitteldorfer hesitated for a moment. “There’s a woman I once worked with,” he said finally. “We write from time to time.”
“Anyone else?”
“No.”
“Do you have any regular visitors?”
“Just the woman,” he replied.
“What is her name?”
“I do hope you won’t drag her into whatever this is about,” Mitteldorfer said, pleading in his voice.
“What is her name?” Dino demanded.
“Eloise Enzberg,” he replied softly.
“She live in the city?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
He gave Dino an address in the East Eighties. “I hope you won’t find it necessary to visit her. She’s a very proper sort of person, and she would be shocked if the police knocked on her door.”
“What sort of work do you do here?” Stone asked.
“I’m the office manager,” Mitteldorfer said. “I oversee the prison bookkeeping, and I hire and train other prisoners to do office work.”
Dino broke in. “Have you cut anybody’s throat lately, Herbert?”
Mitteldorfer looked horrified. “Please. I think you’re aware that my crime was one of passion. I’m not the sort of person ever to repeat it.”
“Does Ms. Enzberg know what you’re in here for?” Dino asked.
“Yes, she does. She read about it in the papers when you arrested me, and after the trial she wrote to me.”
Stone was becoming uncomfortable with this. Mitteldorfer was a mild little man, much different than Stone remembered. He seemed to have served his time well, and there was no point in persecuting him. “That’s it for me, Dino,” he said. “You ready to go?”
Dino ignored him. “Something I remember about you, now, Herbert,” he said. “You enjoyed killing your wife, didn’t you? She was fucking somebody else, and when you found out about it, you took pleasure in cutting her throat, didn’t you?”
Mitteldorfer looked at the tabletop. “Please,” he said.
“Let’s go, Dino,” Stone said.
“All right, get out of here,” Dino said to Mitteldorfer.
Mitteldorfer rose and
, without another word, let himself out of the room. They heard him lock the door behind him.
Stone stood up and tried the door by which they had entered. “Locked,” he said. “I wonder how long it’ll be before Captain Warkowski remembers to let us out of here.”
It was nearly an hour before Captain Warkowski turned up and unlocked the door. Stone made a point of keeping his body between Warkowski and Dino.
Dino drove like a wild man all the way back to the city.
8
T HEY WERE CROSSING THE HARLEM River Bridge when Dino’s cell phone rang. He got it out, said hello, then held it away from his ear.
Stone could hear a woman’s voice, practically screaming.
“Not so loud!” Dino yelled into the phone, still holding it away from his head.
“It’s me!” the woman yelled.
“Mary Ann? What’s going on?”
She was still shouting, but not screaming; Stone could hear her clearly. “A man just attacked me! I shot him!”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m not hurt, if that’s what you mean.”
“Where did this happen?”
“On the street, outside the building.”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m in the apartment.”
“I’m on the West Side; I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. I’ll have a squad car sent. Lock the door, and don’t let anybody in but cops.”
“All right.”
Dino hung up and dug out the flasher again. “Did you get that?” he asked Stone.
“All of it.”
Dino dialed another number. “This is Bacchetti; who’s got the duty?” He paused. “Anderson? Get over to my apartment right now.” He gave the detective the address. “But first, get a squad car there. Somebody’s attacked my wife. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” Dino hung up and concentrated on his driving, roaring down the Henry Hudson Parkway, weaving in and out of the heavy traffic.
Stone put his hands on the dashboard and braced himself. He had always thought it a good possibility that he would die in a car with Dino at the wheel, and he wondered if this was going to be the day.
Dino got off the parkway at Seventy-ninth Street and charged across the West Side. He turned down Central Park West and raced to Sixty-fifth Street, then turned into the park, driving across a traffic island to break into the traffic. “I wish the hell this thing had a siren,” he said, half to himself. He overtook half a dozen cars at one go, bulling his way through the traffic from the opposite direction, miraculously not hitting another car. Two minutes after leaving the park he drove the wrong way down his block, abandoned the car in front of a fire hydrant, and ran toward his apartment building, with Stone on his heels.
The building’s doorman saw them coming. “There’s two uniforms up there already, Mr. Bacchetti,” he shouted, as they sprinted past him for the elevator. A minute later they were in the apartment, and Dino was holding Mary Ann, who didn’t seem all that flustered now.
“I’m all right,” she said. “Don’t make a big deal.”
Dino sat her down on a sofa. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
“I got out of a cab at the corner and was walking toward the building. When I was almost to the front door I saw this guy coming down the block in the opposite direction, and I could tell by the look on his face that he was coming at me. He was only a few steps away when I saw him take a knife out of his pocket—a big switchblade—and flick it open. I already had my hand in my purse.” She pointed at her pocketbook, lying on a chair opposite; there was a gaping hole in the bag. “I fired before he could get to me, and the shot spun him around. He could run, though, and he did.”
“Where did you hit him?”
“I didn’t have much chance to aim, but I was going for his head. I think I caught an ear.”
“Which ear?”
“Uh, the left. Yes, that’s right, the left ear. He had his hand on it as he ran, and I saw some blood.”
“You,” Dino said, pointing at one of the two uniforms in the room, “go downstairs and see if you can find some blood on the sidewalk. Don’t let anybody step in it; I want a sample taken.”
The cop left at a run.
“You,” Dino said, pointing at the other uniform, “get on the phone to the precinct and tell them I want a tech over here right now to collect a sample.”
The cop went to a phone and started dialing.
“Are you all right, now?” he said to his wife.
“Perfectly,” she said.
“All right enough to answer an important question?”
“Sure, I’m okay; what do you want to know?”
“What I want to know is, where the hell did you get a gun?” Dino demanded, his voice rising.
Mary Ann looked away petulantly. “Daddy gave it to me.”
“You took a gun from your father?”
Stone knew that Mary Ann’s father was an extremely well connected Italian gentleman of the old school with many business interests, licit and otherwise, and a wide acquaintance among people who owned guns.
“Yes, I did,” she said, rounding on him. “I knew you wouldn’t let me have one.”
“Oh, swell,” Dino said. “And, knowing your father, I don’t suppose he bothered with the permitting process.”
“As a matter of fact, he did bother,” Mary Ann replied. “The permit is in my purse, if you don’t believe me.”
“Jesus, you’re lucky you didn’t shoot yourself. You’ve got no business with a gun.”
“Listen, Dino, I go with Charlton Heston on this one, okay? And need I remind you that, if I hadn’t had the gun, I’d be lying down there in the street with a very big knife in me?”
“All right, all right,” Dino said, seeing that he was not going to win this one. “Can you describe the man?”
“Late thirties, early forties, small; I’d say five-seven. Wiry, and he had an Afro.”
“He was black?”
“No, but he had an Afro, kind of. Kind of a Jewish Afro.”
“He was Jewish? How do you know that?”
“No; I mean, that’s what we used to call it in high school, when a Jewish kid had that kind of kinky hair, you know?”
“Did the guy look Jewish?”
“Not particularly. His hair was dark, though, almost black.”
“How was he dressed?”
“He was wearing a raincoat, kind of new-looking, you know? Freshly pressed, no wrinkles.”
“Anything else?”
“No, the raincoat covered everything. It was single-breasted, not a trench coat; I remember that.”
Detectives Anderson and Kelly arrived, then, and Dino brought them up-to-date. “Andy, you get on the phone and get out an APB for this guy. Get a bulletin out to all the hospitals in Manhattan to expect a guy answering the description to come in with a gunshot wound to the head, possibly to the left ear. Be sure and tell them he’s armed with a knife and to exercise extreme caution. I don’t want this guy cutting up a nurse.”
Anderson went to the phone, while Kelly leaned against a wall, saying nothing.
“Thank God the kid was in school,” Dino said. He wrote something on a pad, ripped it off, and handed it to the idle Kelly. “Get over there and pick up my kid at his school. That’s the address.” Kelly left. “Mary Ann, neither of you goes anywhere without a cop for a while.”
“Oh, come on, Dino,” she replied. “The guy’s not coming back. No mugger is that stupid.”
Dino looked at the floor. “You do like I tell you about this, you hear me?”
Stone went and sat on the sofa next to her. “Mary Ann,” he said, “it’s not a mugger.”
“What are you talking about?”
He turned to Dino. “It’s our guy,” he said.
“Yeah, I know,” Dino replied. “Worst fears realized.”
9
K ELLY RETURNED WITH DINO’S SON, Benedetto, a black-eyed six-year-old who looked like a tiny Sicili
an prince, taking after his mother’s line. Dino dismissed Kelly, then gathered up the boy, sat him on his lap, and explained what had happened that afternoon.
“Why don’t you just have the guy capped?” the child asked.
Dino sighed and looked at Stone. “He spent the weekend with his grandfather.” He turned back to the boy. “Because, Ben, I am a police officer, and we don’t have guys capped. We arrest them and put them in jail, remember? Now you go and get washed up for dinner. Uncle Stone is going to join us.” The boy got down from his father’s lap and ran toward his room.
“Thanks, I’d love to,” Stone said.
Mary Ann excused herself and headed for the kitchen.
“Come on into my study,” Dino said. “Let’s have a drink.”
Stone followed Dino into the handsome little walnut-paneled room, where Dino produced Stone’s favorite bourbon and a scotch for himself. It was not the study or the apartment of a New York City police lieutenant, and the books on the shelves, mostly art history, history, and biography, revealed a broader Dino than most people knew.
Stone knew that Dino’s father-in-law had acquired the apartment for his daughter in circumstances that were murky, to say the least. It was in a white-shoe, East Side cooperative building that did not ordinarily entertain applications from people whose names ended in vowels, and Stone reckoned it would sell for somewhere between a million and a half and two million dollars on the open market. Stone knew that the apartment’s purchaser and his daughter’s ownership were protected behind a complex corporate veil, and he doubted if any other member of the NYPD had ever entered the place before today. He wondered what would happen if Dino ever became the target of some in-depth departmental investigation.
“You got any thoughts about all this?” Dino asked.
At first, Stone thought he meant the apartment, then he realized what the subject was. “Oh. Not really. Certainly, Mitteldorfer’s alibi is tight. I think I’d check out the nephew in Hamburg, to see if he’s really in Germany. Might be good to check out Mitteldorfer’s visitors list, too?” He allowed himself a grin. “If you can get it out of Captain Warkowski.”
Dino raised his glass in a little toast. “Fuck you,” he said.
Stone lifted his glass. “Thanks. Have you got any ideas?”