by Howard Fast
The whole place was full of damage and hatred. Malignant, childish fury, as if some dreadful and frustrated little boy had raged about the place with all the strength of a maniacal adult. This Gonzalez was thinking, and this he saw reflected in Sally’s eyes when, from the gym, a shot sounded and then a second shot. The second shot shattered the glass of the halfopen door and whined murderously off the metal file.
Gonzalez moved very fast. His big arm swept Sally Dillman off her feet and down on the floor next to him, and then he was in front of her, making a wall in front of her, whispering to her, “Stay right here. Don’t move!”
And then he crawled toward the door, yet maintaining his body as a wall between her and the door, and somehow or other he drew his gun. She didn’t know how he could have drawn the gun and afterward she tried to remember seeing him draw it. Gonzalez had reacted instinctively. The moment the gun was in his hand, he flung himself on hands and knees through the doorway, and then he sprawled there in front of the office, searching for movement in the gym. He heard steps on the stairs—quick steps going down—and he leaped to his feet and raced across the gym to the windows overlooking the streets. The windows were locked and covered with grime. He tried wiping the grime away and then kicked out the bottom of one of the panes with his heel. He kicked a ragged hole in the window and poked his head out and looked up and down the street. He saw only startled and frightened passers-by whose attention had been attracted by the sound of breaking and falling glass. But if one of these passers-by was the man he sought, there was no indication of it in anyone’s behavior. They were ordinary citizens—startled, curious, afraid—unwilling to become concerned in what was someone else’s almost certainly violent business. Yet they were held by their curiosity.
He turned back into the gym. There was no one there except Patsy Mendoza, who lay face down on the floor. Gonzalez holstered his gun and went to Mendoza, lifted him, and saw that he had been shot almost directly in the center of the forehead. His battered face was relaxed. He had died with less pain than he had lived with. Yet, holding him in his arms like this and looking at the dead face and the fatal, ugly little hole that had brought death, Gonzalez’ eyes filled with tears. His face convulsed and he wept in spite of himself. He laid down Mendoza as gently as he might have laid down his own hurt child, and when he stood up, and Sally came out of the office, he bit his lips and swallowed hard, but he could not control the tears flowing down his cheeks.
Sally said to him, her own eyes filled with tears, “Don’t be ashamed to cry because I’m here. I’m crying too. Is he dead?”
Gonzalez nodded.
“Who killed him?” she sobbed.
Gonzalez managed now to stop his tears and to control the movements of his face. “I think the same man killed him who killed Compatra and who has a contract to kill you.”
There were quick running steps up the stairs. Gonzalez stepped in front of Sally Dillman, drew his gun again, and told her hoarsely, “Stay here behind me. Don’t lose your head and run for it. Just stand right there behind me. Do you hear me, God damn it?”
“I hear you,” she said. “Of course I hear you.”
The door burst open, and it was Lieutenant Rothschild. He looked at them and he looked at the dead boxer lying there on the floor, and then he demanded to know whether Sally Dillman was all right. She stepped out now from behind Gonzalez.
“You couldn’t wait for me,” Rothschild said bitterly. “Damn you, you couldn’t wait for me. You had to go in here yourself. You had to be the smart, brave cop.”
CHAPTER
7
TWENTY minutes later the gym was bright with lights and crowded with people. Photographers took flash pictures of the scene—police photographers and news photographers. Two interns were examining the body of Patsy Mendoza. A fingerprint man was doing desultory work around the place—not to any effect, but because he was the official fingerprint man from Homicide South and because he had to look as if his job was necessary and realistic.
There were men in uniform and plain-clothes men from Homicide Headquarters on Fifty-eighth Street, and there was a television team, two cameramen, a director, an interviewer and a maze of wires and microphones, and heavy-duty cables.
Sally Dillman sat quietly on a folding chair at one side of the gym. Her face was pale; she puffed nervously on a tasteless cigarette. Now and again Gonzalez glanced at her. Too many things were happening right now for him to pay particular attention to her, but he was able to head off the television interviewers. They were very curious about her. The man with the microphone, the news interviewer whose name was Ressman, demanded to know what she had to do with the murder and why was she sitting there like a small, lost, stray cat?
“Because she’s a small, lost, stray cat,” Gonzalez answered briefly.
“Can we talk to her?”
“No.”
“Why can’t we talk to her?”
“Because I say you can’t talk to her. She’s got nothing to do with this, and she’s got nothing to say. She’s a stray. Forget about her. I’m telling you, leave her alone.”
Rothschild joined them now and he said to Ressman, “Look, old buddy, why don’t you go over and talk to the ambulance men, talk to the patrolmen from Fifty-eighth Street. They got romance. Talk to the medical examiner. There’s a lot of people to talk to here. What do you want with the girl?”
“I want to know what the girl is doing here,” he insisted stubbornly.
“Well, it’s going to be none of your business what she’s doing here, so just forget about it,” Rothschild said. “I’m trying to be friendly.”
“I’m glad you told me.”
The television camera began to grind across the face and the body of the dead man, and Rothschild said with disgust, “Whatever happens, it’s a circus. Life and death and all—the jazz that’s in between—it’s all a stinkin’ circus. We are back with the Emperor Nero. Give them the bread and lions and the gladiators and the rest of it right in their own living rooms.”
“What the hell, when has it been different?” asked Gonzalez. He was watching Sally Dillman. She turned to look at him pleadingly. The hubbub in the place increased.
Rothschild said to him, “Look, Frank, you say you got a lead from Mendoza that links this thing to San Francisco?”
“A thin thread. He thinks the gun was from San Francisco. He also thinks that Compatra was with some kind of a double cross.”
“Compatra spent his life in a double cross. That’s no news. I’m going to call San Francisco myself. I got a sort of a fifth cousin or something out there—a horse’s ass who is a big shot in the police force. Every time I think of it, it makes me worry about their police force. But what the hell, you can’t reform the world. Anyway, I intend to call him, so what do you think you can give me?”
“Should I take a flier?” Gonzalez asked.
“Why not? We got nothing much lower than cloud twenty-four.”
“All right,” said Gonzalez, “try it this way. The contract man is about twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four years old, say about five-ten tall, kind of wavy blond hair—maybe the hair is dyed, maybe it isn’t—blue eyes, but small, small and very pale blue eyes, likes a—a kind of sporty, statusy manner of dressing—what goes for Ivy today—you know, the Brooks Brothers kind of thing. Conservative sports jackets, tab shirts, conservative tie, expensive clothes. Maybe he’s a college kid, who knows? That’s worth a try anyway.”
“That’s an awfully complicated and detailed guess,” Rothschild said, regarding Gonzalez with new respect.
A uniformed police officer, gold badge on his jacket, came over to Rothschild and said to him, “Look, Lieutenant, I know this ties in with your territory, but I hope you don’t mind if we run it. I mean, we got contradictory orders to the TV men, and we got some contradictory orders to the medical men. As far as the newspapers are concerned, do you mind if I handle it?”
“I don’t mind. Handle it,” Rothschild said.
>
“Now about that girl over there,” the uniformed policeman asked, pointing toward Sally Dillman.
“She’s my responsibility,” Rothschild said. “This is a matter of my—my area—my squad—and I don’t want to complicate it. I’ll give Homicide all I have on it, but just for the moment I want a free hand with her.”
“What is it, some kind of C.I.A. stuff?” the uniformed policeman asked with growing irritation.
“No, there’s nothing secret about it. The kid is in trouble, and her trouble is mixed up with Joey Compatra, and if they want to know about it downtown, I’ll be glad to give them a total case history about it, and I’ll be glad to sit down with you and give you a case history if you want a case history. But, meanwhile, I want to get her out of here without her having to talk to newspapermen or TV men or any other kind of blabbermouths. After that there’s a lot to do and you can question her. But she was with Gonzalez when Mendoza was killed, and you have what she knows. So do you mind if I let Detective Gonzalez here take her away?”
“Why should I mind?” asked the uniformed captain. “Everyone does things in his own way. Go ahead, go ahead. Don’t let me interfere. Who needs discipline?”
He turned around and walked away, indignant and hurt, and Rothschild said to Gonzalez, “The hell with him! Let him burn it off. Look, get her the hell out of here, Frank. Take her over to the hotel and don’t pull any tricks. Don’t pull any antics. Don’t pull any Rover Boy stuff—”
“What do you mean—Rover Boy? What’s Rover Boy?”
“All right, Rover Boy is my generation. So don’t pull any Superman stuff. Does that bring it up to date? Just play it calm and cool and collected. Take her over to her hotel—what was it?”
“The St. Regis.”
“All right, the St. Regis. The house dick at the St. Regis is Clare Kennedy. He’s a damned good man, and he’s cooperative and he’ll work with you. Now, let’s leave her there at the St. Regis. It’s no use trying to run with her. We’ll play it this way. Tell the situation to Kennedy and work with him—but work gently. Stay in the hotel—right in the room with her until I get there. I got a notion that we can end this thing pretty quickly.”
“Do you mind telling me?”
“I don’t want to go into it in detail now, Frank, but just in a rough sort of way, we can spread a net out of the hotel, pull him into it, work her out of the hotel, let him move into a trap that doesn’t look like a trap, and then close the trap. We can throw the net around the front of the hotel—maybe all of Fifty-fifth Street from Madison Avenue to Fifth Avenue, and maybe we can make some kind of a cul-de-sac out of Fifth Avenue and out of Madison Avenue as well. I don’t know—it’s just a notion I have. I don’t know where the hell I’m going to get the men. You need a hundred men to do it right. I don’t know where I’m going to get the co-operation. But I figured maybe if I took a flying trip downtown, they might see it my way and they might play ball with me. They don’t like fancy games—you know that. That want everything cut and dried and according to regulation, but this isn’t cut and dried. This is a crazy case. This is a crazy goddam mixed-up case. Look, do what I say, will you?”
“All right.” Gonzalez shrugged. “I’ll do as you say.”
He walked over to Sally Dillman, who glanced up at him hopefully and yet with resignation.
“How are you taking it?” he asked her.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m getting frightened again. I just don’t know how it will come out. Do you know who killed him?”
“Nothing new. Still the same boy who wants to kill you.”
“Why would he kill that poor man?”
“I suppose because that poor man knows who he is. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Now, as far as we’re concerned, we’re going to get out of here and we’re going to go back to your hotel and we’re going to do it all quietly and easily with no more trouble. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” she said.
He patted her shoulder gently, pushed some stray hairs away from her eyes, and let one finger slide along her cheek. There was nothing in it in the way of an advance, or a pass, or anything more than a reflection of the peculiar intimacy that had grown up between them in a few hours.
“Easy does it.”
He put his hand under her arm and then walked toward the door. A newspaper photographer snapped them twice. Gonzalez shrugged and told her not to give it a second thought. The newspaperman came after them, trying for names, Gonzalez said to him, “Go soak your head. You know this is off limits, don’t you?”
“You love to be good buddy-buddy with the press, don’t you?” the photographer demanded.
“Go to hell,” Gonzalez said ingratiatingly. “I like the press. Your kind give me a pain in the butt.”
He walked her away and down the stairs and out onto the street. It was midafternoon now. The sun was shining.
“This is the first good April day,” Gonzalez told her. “It’s been a rotten April. It’s been a rotten year. The weather has been black and gloomy. You know something? You know my mother and father—they come from Puerto Rico. I’ve never been to Puerto Rico, but, oh, the talk I’ve heard of Puerto Rico. Since I’m a little kid I hear all this talk of Puerto Rico, and one thing they all say, ‘Always in Puerto Rico the sun shines.’ Let me tell you about New York in four words. The sun never shines.”
“Why haven’t you ever gone to Puerto Rico?” she asked him. “I should think you would want to go.”
He nodded and thought about it. It occurred to him now to keep the conversation like this—keep it about Puerto Rico, keep it about his own past and away from her past. And, in that way, detach her from the fear. That was going to be his problem from here on in—to detach her from the fear, to shield her from the fear.
They had walked down Eighth Avenue to Fifty-third Street and now they were walking east along Fifty-third Street. He was outside of her, shielding her, his eyes watching, moving, darting. He was as wary as an animal in its own jungle—but that was to the point. He was in his own jungle and his eyes never stopped their searching motion as he told her:
“That’s some question. Why was I never in Puerto Rico? You know, it’s a funny thing about people in New York—some of them, they never go anywhere and they never want to go anywhere. If I say to myself, ‘Frank Gonzalez, why haven’t you been in Puerto Rico?’ there’s only one honest answer. I don’t want to go to Puerto Rico.”
“Or perhaps,” she added thoughtfully, “you’re afraid to go to Puerto Rico.”
This had never occurred to him. And, in spite of his wariness and his alertness, he had to think about it and combine this possibility with other things that occupied him. Why should he have been afraid to visit Puerto Rico? He couldn’t think of anything to fear, and he put it to her that way, “What is there in Puerto Rico for me to be afraid of?”
“Maybe yourself,” she said, and then added very quickly, “No, no, I don’t mean that at all. That was a silly, stupid thing for me to say, wasn’t it? I don’t even know why I said it. But it wasn’t kind, was it? I know what you were trying to do. You were trying to involve us in talking about Puerto Rico, and then I would forget about myself for a little and forget to be afraid. Isn’t that so?”
“Possibly,” he admitted.
“But I’m not afraid the way I was afraid before. I mean when you—when you stopped me on Fifth Avenue, that was a different kind of fear. Now I have only part of fear. Then I had like a whole apple of fear, and now I’ve cut the apple in half and I like to feel that now you have the other part of the fear and you’re handling it better than I could ever handle it by myself.”
“Maybe you’ve been too long by yourself,” he said.
“That occurred to me, too,” she said. “Don’t think I haven’t thought about that, but it’s not simply being with another person. I mean you mustn’t think that at home I only lived with my father and my mother. I was at a school. Well, I was a student at a school, in normal school, and
that’s like being at college, and then I did teach in the public school and I had a great many acquaintances there—”
“Acquaintances,” he remarked pointedly.
“But,” she said, “I don’t know if you can come truly together with anyone unless it’s in fear, because I’ve never felt toward anyone else the way I feel toward you, and I ask myself why and I think that it’s because we are in danger together.”
“It would be a hell of a world, wouldn’t it,” Gonzalez asked her, “if the only way people could come together was to be in danger together?”
“But isn’t that the way it happens?” she said. “I read about the blitz in London—”
“This isn’t the blitz in London.”
“But for you and me it is. Tell me, Frank, why did they kill him? I mean Patsy Mendoza, the boxer. Why did they kill him? I asked you that before and you didn’t tell me.”
“I told you that the killer killed him because he knew who the killer was.”
“Then why didn’t Patsy tell you who the killer is?”
“He couldn’t tell me.” Gonzalez nodded. “He was punchy. You don’t know what that is, do you?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t know what it is. I think I read about it somewhere—but I don’t really know what it is.”
“It’s the essence of boxing. It’s the essence of what they call in this country ‘the manly art of self-defense.’ That’s a lie. You know, ninety-nine and maybe nine-tenths per cent of everything that goes around as fact is a lie. You’ve got to look for the one-tenth of one per cent, and most people, I guess, in their whole lives, they never find it. But in that ninety-nine per cent there’s boxing. Boxing is as rotten and as filthy and as lousy as bullfighting is with the Spanish-speaking people. So it turns my stomach when I go to the movies and I see this bullfighting jazz and I watch people make slobs of themselves about bullfighting—it’s a big, brave thing, and boxing, too, that’s a big, brave thing. But the only ones who get in there and box are the kids who have no other way out of the jungle. The kids who come from the bottom. In the old days it was the Irish, and then it was the Jewish kids, and then it was the Italian kids, and then it was the Negro kids, and now it’s the Puerto Rican kids. And they all get punchy because no human being was ever made to be punched in the head and in the belly and in the kidneys and—and in the liver—again and again and again. That isn’t why God made people. God didn’t make people to live like executioners or punching bags.”