by Peter Quinn
“Stay as long as you like. Though he might not be able to express it, Mr. Kipps will appreciate every minute you spend with him. All our patients welcome company. The sad fact is, the lack of it shortens their lives.”
The ancient elevator wheezed and creaked its way to the top floor. Directly across the hall was Kipps’s room. Slumped in a wheelchair facing the window, he was bent over so far he appeared at first to be headless. The nurse put her hand on his forearm, rubbed it with a slow, gentle touch. “Mr. Kipps,” she said, “you have a visitor. An old friend from the police force, Mr. Fintan Dunne.” She rolled the wheelchair back a short distance from the window, reached her hands beneath his armpits and propped him up.
Lifting a chair by the wall an inch or two from the floor, careful not to scratch the linoleum, she placed it next to him and rubbed his arm once more. “And, Mr. Kipps, in case you get the inclination.” She took a pad and pencil from the pocket of her uniform and laid the pad in his lap. “I brought you this.” She folded his fingers around the pencil. “There. Now let me leave you two old friends together so you can have a nice visit.”
Kipps stared at the pad in his lap. There wasn’t much left of the round, beefy figure whose picture ran on the front page of the Standard twenty-five years before when he’d railed at reporters to stop hounding Mrs. Crater (“Judge’s Chauffeur Calls Mrs. Crater ‘An Angel’”). Sunken chest. Hollow cheeks. Gray strands plastered to a white, freckled skull.
Dunne raised the window a few inches, let a sliver of cold air slip into the room, and lit a cigarette. Kipps raised his head, sniffed. Dunne put the cigarette to Kipps’s lips. The hollows in his cheeks deepened as he inhaled. Dunne repeated the process until Kipps dropped his head. Tossing the butt out the window, he sat beside Kipps, who leaned back and gazed into his face. Kipps’s left eye was almost closed; the right, closest to Dunne, was wide as a fried egg, blue yoke surrounded by blood-shot white. Hard to tell what the mind behind it was thinking. Or not thinking. Maybe only the fair and obvious question: Who the hell are you?
“Well, Fred,” Dunne said as if in answer, “like you, I’m an ex-cop, but we’ve never met. So here’s the deal. I’ll gab, you do whatever you like, and we’ll call it a visit.” Kipps showed no reaction. Dunne laid out the story of his involvement with the Crater investigation, from Mulholland’s phone call to his interview with Wilkes, Nan Renard’s role, research and reading he’d done. Felt almost like going to confession.
He lit another cigarette. No use in offering a drag to Kipps, who seemed to be asleep. In the distance, atop the Palisades, a lustrous reddish-blue winter sunset was reminiscent of that last visit with Izzy Bleier, late winter 1941, in the Veterans Hospital outside Poughkeepsie. Izzy looked up at the sky with a faint spark in his eyes, the hint of momentary ignition, but the engine wouldn’t turn over.
Hometown hero of the Lower East Side and one-time middle-weight contender, Izzy had been buried alive for several minutes during the German offensive at the Aisne, in May 1918, by the same shell that wiped out the rest of his company. Another shell blew him free. Spent the next twenty-two years sitting by the window, elbows planted on armrests, palms pressed against ears. He went the week after Pearl Harbor. There were five people at his memorial service in a dinky synagogue on Madison Street. Old soldiers never die. They just rot away, alone and dazed, in hospital rooms.
Wasn’t until the nurse pressed her hand down on his shoulder that he realized he’d fallen asleep. Evening had arrived. She turned on the light by the bed and whispered, “It’s wonderful you’ve spent all this time, Mr. Dunne, simply wonderful. Now I wonder if I could impose on you to help me lift Mr. Kipps into bed?”
She turned the sheet down, fluffed the pillow, and deftly maneuvered the wheelchair up to the bed. In one quick motion, each taking a firm grip on an arm, they lifted him up and sat him on the mattress. She guided his head onto the pillow as Dunne raised the legs, removed the slippers and covered him with the sheet and blanket. Walking over to the window, she reached down and picked up the pad, which had fallen to the floor. “Well, look at this,” she said softly. “He’s written something.” She handed the pad to Dunne. “How encouraging.”
On it, printed in a wobbly, spidery hand, was a simple, almost indecipherable word.
He gave the pad back. “I can’t make it out without my glasses. What’s it say?”
“Let’s see.” She held it at arm’s length and squinted. “Looks to me like ‘taxi.’ Were you talking to him about taxis?”
“I might have mentioned one.”
Head resting in the center of the pillow, eyes shut, mouth agape, Kipps let out a loud snore. Standing at the bottom of the bed, Dunne noticed for the first time that there was a pronounced bent to one of Kipps’s ears. His right ear stuck out.
First thing in the morning was a phone conversation with Sam Hechtman. They arranged to meet later that afternoon, after five. Dunne lay back down on the bed. Hadn’t gone to sleep till almost dawn. Kept going over the visit with Kipps. By itself, a bent ear wouldn’t mean much; but that word Kipps had obviously gone to such effort to produce, what was it? A random thought that wandered out of his wrecked brain? A regurgitated fragment of the recounting of the Crater story that he’d just heard? Or a final enfeebled attempt at confession?
He looked at the notes he’d taken while reading Stella Crater’s account. Hadn’t paid close attention to Kipps’s role the first time around. Now he did. After Kipps drives her to Lake Belvedere, he leaves the car and goes off on a vacation of his own. Doesn’t return until August 13th, a week after Crater vanishes. Ex-cop and chauffeur, he doesn’t seem upset or even very curious when Stella tells him she hasn’t heard from Joe in nine days. Pats her shoulder and pours her a shot of whisky, like a cop might do at the wake of another cop. When she asks him to drive her to New York, he talks her out of going and goes himself, but doesn’t contact the police, all the while letting the trail get colder.
She hears nothing from Kipps until a special delivery letter arrives, offering her the slender assurance that everything looks okay at their apartment, and though he hasn’t seen the judge himself, nobody seems worried about your husband of them I talked to. He returns afterwards, tending to Mrs. Crater’s frayed nerves by offering her tugs on his flask and finally, at her insistence, driving her to New York on August 29th, only to encourage her to take the advice of Det. Luke Ruppert and return to Lake Belvedere two days later.
Dunne skipped breakfast, showered and dressed, ready to try Roberta again, when the phone rang. Nan Renard’s secretary wanted to know if he could meet Miss Renard for dinner at the Coral, at eight that night. He agreed. Instead of calling Roberta, he took the subway to police headquarters and went right to Crow’s office. Didn’t bring up his visit with Kipps the previous day, but pressed Crow for what he remembered about him.
“Sad case,” Crow said. “Left the department to join the army in 1917. Returned a decorated vet and was welcomed back to his old job. Unfortunately, having been gassed or shell shocked, Fred could get a little fuzzy at times, not cracked or scrambled, but vague, a bit slow. Occasionally overfond of the grape. Retired on disability, he was hired by Crater as his driver. Got his name in the papers a few times for championing Mrs. Crater’s innocence. When the circus moved on, he dropped out of sight.”
“Is there a personnel file on him?”
“As long as he’s still alive and getting a pension, there is.”
“Could you check?”
“That’s a department matter.”
“Once a cop, always a …”
“Smart cop wouldn’t waste his time like this.”
“I’ve got a reputation as a pain in the ass, remember? Don’t want to lose it.”
Crow shook his head. “Dante put it best. ‘A mind sequestered in its own delusions is to reason invincible.’ I’ll see what I can dig up.”
In the record room, Dunne combed through the files to find the references to Fred Kipps that he�
��d previously skimmed. The interview with Detectives Fitzgerald and Moon was dated September 7, 1930. Kipps, they noted, was entirely cooperative and vigorous in his insistence on Mrs. Crater’s innocence. He accounted for his movements between the time he dropped off Mrs. Crater in Lake Belvedere and his return six weeks later, stating he stayed with his mother at her bungalow in Rockaway. (Penned in the margin of the report was the notation “Confirmed, phone conversation, Mrs. Bertha Kipps, 9/9/30.”)
Kipps told Fitzgerald and Moon he never imagined anything bad had happened to Judge Crater. Certain that Crater was involved in “the usual political shenanigans,” which he wanted to steer clear of, he returned to the city in August mostly just to calm Mrs. Crater’s nerves. The only people he talked to were the Craters’ colored maid and “some court officers.” Nobody seemed very concerned. Last two days of the trip he spent in “McGurk’s, a speak on Lexington and 43rd Street.” (Confirmed in person by Det. Moon in an interview with Jerry McGurk, proprietor and bartender, 9/11/30.)
It didn’t seem likely Kipps carried off an abduction as professional as Crater’s by himself. But if he’d been an accomplice, whoever chose him chose wisely. He was perfect for the role. Total access to Crater’s movements. Trusted by both Crater and his wife. Well liked by his former colleagues in the department who not only felt a little sorry for him but would, as a matter of course, give him the benefit of the doubt. It would have been easy to have slipped out of his mother’s bungalow on August 6th to drive the taxi.
But where would he get it? And what would he do with it afterwards? And what possible motive could Kipps have for agreeing to be an accomplice? There was no ransom involved. He didn’t seem to bear a grudge against Crater and was genuinely protective of Mrs. Crater. Crater in turn seemed to have relied on Kipps. Why else would he have kept him on as his driver after Kipps accidentally slammed the car door on his finger? So what stake did Kipps have in seeing Crater removed? Whatever the answers, whether they implicated him or not, Fred Kipps was no longer in any condition to offer anything more than a word haltingly printed on a piece of paper.
Late afternoon, he went back to see Crow. “There’s next to nothing in those files about the cab Crater got into,” he said.
“For good reason. All anybody was able to turn up was ‘next to nothing.’”
“I talked with Patti Leroche. She got a fleeting glimpse of the back of the cabby’s head. Said his right ear stuck out.”
“Matter of fact, if I remember correctly, she wasn’t sure if it was only his right ear, since she could only see that side, and Sam Hechtman couldn’t even corroborate that impression. Just so you know, a couple of detectives spent weeks interviewing cabbies on duty that night. You’d be surprised at how many taxi drivers in New York have an ear—or two—off kilter. In the end it went nowhere, like everything connected to the case.”
Sam Hechtman’s law office was on Third Avenue and 101st Street, a second-floor walk-up above a bowling alley. Hechtman’s cubicle, the only enclosed space in the long, capacious, desk-filled room, was situated at alley’s end. Knowing that Patti Leroche had probably warned Hechtman what was up, Dunne didn’t try to catch him unaware.
When he’d called that morning, Hechtman’s secretary put him right through. “Mr. Dunne,” he said, “I believe you’ve already spoken to Patti Leroche—or whatever the hell name she goes by now.”
“Pat Roche.”
“I’m not mistaken, she recommended you go fuck yourself.”
“Words to that effect.”
“Well, I second her recommendation.”
Dunne expected Hechtman might hang up, but he didn’t. He stayed on for several minutes to rehash the raw deal he got from the Schumann brothers, how despite the transparent irrationality of it, they blamed him for being with Crater the night he disappeared, which unleashed a torrent of noxious press stories quoting anonymous showgirls and disgruntled actors about what sex-crazed skinflints the Schumann brothers were. “They acted as if I’d deliberately decided to be with Crater that night, as if I knew what was about to happen and could have avoided it. Of course, they kept me on long as they needed my help, but the minute business got better, it was, ‘so long, Sam Hechtman.’”
Mid-sixties, frail, with skin wizened from one-too-many suntans, Hechtman didn’t have to be prompted or provoked to tell what he knew. Lit a cigar, put his feet up on the desk and, after Dunne turned down his offer of a shot of rye, poured one for himself; heknocked it back and poured another. “Joe Crater was no schlemiel. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Then as now, there were a lot of putzheads on the bench, but he wasn’t among them. He was smart, very smart. Remember, he wasn’t from the city but from some one-pump, hayseed burg in Pennsylvania. He could have returned there after finishing law school, been a lawyer for the railroads, town big shot, mayor or something, elder in the church, Republican county leader, maybe run for the Congress. But he stayed in New York, joined Tammany, a Daniel in the lion’s den. He volunteered in a club, worked the polls and proved himself an ace at arguing New York’s election laws. That led to him being made the law secretary to a Tammany bigwig, which led to him being recommended to the governor for an appointment to the Supreme Court at the tender age of forty.”
Without being asked, Hechtman started on what he remembered of the night of August 6, 1930. “Wasn’t as if me and Patti Leroche started out by asking, ‘What makes this night different from all other nights?’ It was as dull as a Saturday in Philadelphia. Never noticed if a taxi was waiting at the end of the block.”
“What about the cabbie?”
“Never saw him.”
“Patti Leroche caught a glimpse. She thought his right ear was bent.”
“Bent, schment. You been a professional snoop long enough to know all about ‘eyewitnesses.’ They’re about as reliable as a paper hat in a hurricane. Usually remember seeing what’s been suggested they remember or what they thought they saw or what’ll satisfy whoever it is needs satisfying. We couldn’t agree on what kind of hat Crater was wearing when he said goodbye. I could swear it was brown felt. She swore it was a Panama. We both saw what we saw. I’m not saying Patti Leroche is a liar. But the screws were turned pretty tight on us to come up with something useful. Not being a lawyer, Patti felt the pressure worse than me.”
Hechtman re-lit the cigar. “What you got to admire about whoever did the Crater job is how professional it was. These weren’t amateurs. Forget about Tammany having Crater killed to keep him quiet. Tammany had a lot of tricks, but murder wasn’t among them. Except for hardcore right-wingers and Coughlinites, nobody believes F.D.R. arranged it to hush up a scandal.” He finished his second shot of rye and poured another.
This time Dunne joined him. “Patti Leroche says you told her Elaine Dove, her ex-roommate, was in the hospital with the clap, and you guessed Crater gave it to her.”
“Crater couldn’t keep his schvantz still—this is news? Had plenty of company in that department. But this was no crime of passion by a jilted lover. This was as cold and premeditated as it gets. It takes a pro to erase every shred of evidence, never mind a cab, and it takes the mob to enforce a code of total silence. There were some smart cops on this case. Any slip-ups, they’d have jumped on them. But there weren’t any, which means it was the mob. At some point, Crater must have crossed them. What that was—what he did or didn’t do to get them to act—is buried under omertà. My advice? Let it lie. Otherwise, if by some miracle you find the answer, it’s going to be the last thing you do on earth.”
Hechtman gulped his rye. Devoid of the reluctance that others had to revisit his involvement with Crater, he’d come to his own conclusions and wasn’t interested in entertaining anybody else’s. (He had to be reminded of who Fred Kipps was.) When he polished off another rye and started repeating himself, Dunne said he had a dinner appointment to keep. Hechtman escorted him past half a dozen desks stacked high with folders. “I employ five lawyers,” he said. “Second-raters to a man.
But this is volume work mostly, two-bit personal injury, routine landlord and tenant. The big ones, the ones that go to trial, I take myself.”
He went ahead of Dunne down the stairs and yelled at a group of leather-jacketed teenagers loitering in the doorway. They strolled away at a leisurely pace, their greased-back hair glistening under the street lamp. He went outside without a coat and picked up the candy wrappers that the teenagers had littered on the ground. Wide flashy suspenders and garters on his sleeves gave him a dated look.
“Everything went to shit after Crater disappeared.” He chewed and twisted the cigar stump, rolling it from one side of his mouth to the other. “The economy. The city. The world. But Broadway took the biggest hit. The minute Wall Street went bust, financing for plays dried up. The action moved to Hollywood. Broadway survived, but wasn’t the old Broadway no more. Theatres became movie palaces and grindhouses. Great White Way went gray, tawdry and cheap, no different from Coney Island. The golden age was over, and Joe Crater wasn’t around to see the end. Lucky him.” He crushed the litter in his fist and went back inside without another word.
The Coral was less crowded than the last time. He arrived early. Had a drink at the bar. The fish tank held two miniature sharks. They moved slowly, in concentric circles. Nan Renard tapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Mr. Malaconda, I presume.” Her face was as lovely as he remembered, but tired.
“Malacoda.”
A slender, fleeting smile crossed her lips. “Was that a test?”
“You passed.”
“Some day, when there’s time, you’ll have to fill me in. Let’s sit.”
She signaled to the maitre d’. He led them to the same rear booth as before. A waiter placed drinks in front of them without even being asked.
“Long day?” Dunne asked.
“Endless. I’m not even sure what day it is. Tuesday?”
“Close. Yesterday was Tuesday.” He picked up the flower floating in the oyster-shaped bowl at the center of the table. “Here, this orchid is for you.”