by Howard Fast
CHAPTER
10
LIEUTENANT ROTHSCHILD raced his squad car downtown with the sirens wide open and screaming in his ears, and then at Centre Street he presumed on his small acquaintance with John Comaday, the Commissioner of Police, to bull his way into Comaday’s office.
It was the kind of thing that Rothschild had never done before, nor was it the kind of thing that Comaday particularly appreciated. John Comaday, Commissioner or Police, was a short bulldog of a man with a habitual air of hostility—and suspicion, and a bark instead of a voice. He was a competent administrator and a very good policeman. If he had ever possessed a vivid imagination, he had put that to rest many, many years ago.
Once Rothschild was in his office, Comaday stared across his desk at him and said plainly and directly, “You’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve coming here and telling me that you got to have forty plain-clothes cops in the next fifteen minutes. You know you can’t have forty anything in the next fifteen minutes, and you know damn well why you can’t. I don’t keep reserves here, and the city is broke. Now, why don’t you make some sense and let me forget the kind of half-ass play you pulled?”
“I did not pull any kind of half-ass play, Commissioner,” Rothschild retorted stolidly. “I came to you because there’s a peculiar, a particular kind of emergency and because I think this is the only way to deal with it.”
“Why is this the only way? She’s still alive, isn’t she? She’s in the St. Regis Hotel, isn’t she? And you got Gonzalez, who, from all I hear, is a smart kind of a cop, sitting on her doorstep—right? So she’s taken care of for the time being. This killer of yours is not going to wipe her out tonight. Why can’t it wait for tomorrow? Or for the day after that? What the hell do you mean by coming in here and telling me you want forty cops in the next fifteen, twenty minutes?”
“It can wait for tomorrow. It can just go on waiting,” said Rothschild. “But this contract man—this is a certain kind of killer—maybe he won’t wait for tomorrow. He’s got his own schedule.”
“How do you know he won’t wait for tomorrow?” Comaday asked. “If the door is locked, and you got the girl under sufficient guard, he’s going to wait for tomorrow, and he’s going to wait for the day after tomorrow as well. So what kind of bull is this that you’re beefing me with?”
“It doesn’t work that way for me,” said Rothschild. “I can’t think with a killer’s mind, and so help me, it’s not that hard to kill someone. You know that, Commissioner.”
“Rothschild, don’t get out of line. Don’t come here and tell me what I know or what I don’t know. Let me worry about that, huh? Meanwhile, this idea of yours is not for me. If you want forty cops, you got to put in a satisfactory and intelligent requisition for forty cops. You have to show what kind of an emergency has happened up there in the Nineteenth—wait a minute. The St. Regis isn’t in the Nineteenth to begin with. The St. Regis is in the Seventeenth Precinct. Isn’t that so?”
“That’s so,” Rothschild admitted.
“And as far as Joey Compatra’s gym is concerned, that’s in the Eighteenth. Am I right? Now look, why don’t you just calm down, Lieutenant? Take it easy. Homicide South is in the Eighteenth. They got the matter under control. They got enough men to deal with any contingency that may arise. If you got an emergency over in the area of Fifty-fifth Street and Madison and Fifth Avenue, I’ll do this for you. I’ll call Bixby at the Eighteenth and I’ll talk to him. I’ll push it a little. I’ll tell him this is for Homicide South, and I’ll even tell him to pull whatever men he needs. You want to work out a proposition with him, you work it out. I’m not trying to knock you down, you understand? I got a lot of respect for a cop who thinks, and I look at you as a cop who thinks. That’s why I don’t blow my top, understand? That’s why I’m willing to discuss this thing calmly with you and see what we can work out.”
“In the next half hour,” Rothschild insisted, wondering what the Commissioner meant when he used the word “calmly.”
“Now, don’t keep pushing me with that next-half-hour business, Rothschild. I told you it can wait for tomorrow. There’s almost nothing in this world that can’t wait for tomorrow. You had no business bulling in here. Why didn’t you go to the chief inspector?”
At that moment the telephone on the Commissioner’s desk began to ring. He picked it up, spoke a few words into it, and then looked coldly at Rothschild.
“Did you put a call through directly to Chief Inspector Kromlick in San Francisco?”
“That’s right, Commissioner,” Rothschild replied.
“Would you mind telling me why? What’s wrong with the wire service? Since when do we call San Francisco person-to-person direct?”
“I had to,” said Rothschild. “I had to speak with him. I had to do it direct. I’ll pay for the goddam telephone call myself. Here, you want me to lay it on your desk?” Rothschild went into his pocket and took out a skinny folder of bills and peeled off a five-dollar bill and dropped it on the Commissioner’s desk.
“Just stop right there!” Comaday snapped. “Put the money back in your pocket. Don’t push me too far.”
Rothschild picked up the telephone, listened for a moment, and said, “Yes, sir, this is Lieutenant Rothschild of the Nineteenth Precinct, New York City Police. Yes, sir, I had the call put through. Yes, we have a—a most peculiar situation here. We have a contract killer on the tail of a young lady. The contract is called for today. The contract man was working with a local New York hoodlum called Joey Compatra. He ran a gym at Eighth Avenue and Fifty-third Street. There was some kind of a falling out between Compatra and the contract man, and a good guess is that the gun killed Compatra. The gun also killed, guessing again, a punchy welterweight fighter named Patsy Mendoza. The contract man killed the fighter to squash I.D. We guess that he killed Compatra because Compatra had welched on him in some way, or maybe Compatra held back money that was coming to the gun …”
Comaday was listening and watching Rothschild and thinking to himself that he always let himself get out of hand and bear down too hard, but with a cop like Rothschild it didn’t make sense. Rothschild knew what he was doing and he knew how to do it. He was cold, calculating, and responsible, and he tried to work things out logically. He held the bits and pieces of a case in the palm of his hand, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and he was always observing them and trying to fit them together. That made for an unusual kind of a cop.
“You want me to hold it to three minutes, Commissioner?” Rothschild demanded, speaking aside and covering the phone.
“The hell with that! Say what you have to say.”
Rothschild said into the phone, “Yes, sir, we got a notion about him. It’s nothing in the way of a fix on him or an identification or anything that we could specify as evidence or even reliable knowledge. We figure him to be, oh, twenty-two to twenty-five years old, maybe five feet ten inches in height, blond hair, pale-blue eyes, natty dresser. When noticed today he was wearing black trousers, narrow cuff, white shirt, dark tie, light-gray tweed jacket—good jacket, maybe a hundred-dollar jacket, good clothes right down the line, college look to him, uses a thirty-two caliber gun—we haven’t got a maker’s fix on it yet—”
“We got it,” Comaday interrupted. “Smith and Wesson.”
Rothschild repeated the information and added, “There’s at least an indication of a morbid streak of sentimentality, warped, psychotic romanticism. Yes, sir, that’s about all that we have except that he is an excellent shot, cold on the trigger, but high-strung. My own guess would be that he’s subject to fits of wild anger and that he will kill as a reaction when pressed.”
Comaday listened to Rothschild with increasing respect. It was a diagnosis he would not have believed possible from this dry, sour, and dyspeptic man.
Now Rothschild listened. He listened for a minute or two, and then he took a pad and pen from his pocket, held the phone with his shoulder, and wrote down a name. He listened again, nodded, and said finally, “Yes, sir. Thank yo
u, sir. I appreciate this deeply, sir.”
He put down the telephone and turned back to Comaday, who said, “What have you got?”
“I got a name,” Rothschild said. “James Fennington, dropout after one year in Berkeley. Good family—if you like to define families in those terms. Father very rich and a suicide. Mother remarried three times. Fennington has a record a mile long. But all of it is small trouble. He spent a year in Hollywood, wanting to be an actor, played some bit parts and got into one bad fight. Another time, on a movie set, he almost blinded a guy with a blank-cartridge revolver—the kind they use in films. Back in San Francisco until recently, and the rumor around town is that he was working contracts. Chief Inspector says they haven’t any evidence to pin on him, but there is enough hot rumor to make them willing to believe. Chief Inspector also thinks, although he can’t remember without going to the records, that there was something about a Smith and Wesson in connection with the father’s death. But, if that was the case, the police would have appropriated the gun and kept it. He says that there has been nothing about Fennington in the past two weeks, just very cool, but that doesn’t mean that Fennington left town.”
“It fits,” Comaday said. “At least you can make it fit. Do you always pull things out of the air like that, Rothschild, and put them together? Like what they call making a dream come true—right?” Comaday was admiring, but he had to cover his admiration with at least a small sneer.
Rothschild said, “You don’t often get a chance. The Nineteenth is not the most exciting place in the world.”
“Not the dullest either,” Comaday replied. “Look, I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you. I’ll call Bixby and tell him to get together with the Seventeenth Precinct and take the maximum. Meanwhile, pull together whatever you can up at your place. Pull men in on extra duty. We can’t give you anything from downtown, but up there you can take from all three. Among the three squads you should be able to put together forty, fifty men. How about that?”
“I can try it,” Rothschild said.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing but time and red tape. You know that, Commissioner.”
“So use time and red tape. You show me any part of this system that doesn’t move on red tape. Instead of arguing about it, Rothschild, get with it.”
“Yes, sir,” Rothschild said. “Thank you very much. I’ll get with it.”
He was sour and dyspeptic again, and he said his good-bys briefly as he left the Commissioner’s office.
Rothschild went to the St. Regis Hotel first. He thought it would do him good to have another talk with Gonzalez, and then the two of them could work out the trap. If their hope to do it immediately went out of the window, there were still a lot of hours of the night left, and the night hours might even be better than the day hours.
It was quite dark when Rothschild arrived at the hotel. He went inside and asked for Miss Dillman’s room, got the number, called it on the house phone, and received no answer. He let it ring until the switchboard girl explained that the telephone was not answering and that Miss Dillman was unquestionably out. Rothschild then went to Kennedy’s office. Kennedy greeted him eagerly and told him that he had been expecting him.
“Why?”
“Well, don’t you know what happened?”
“How the hell should I know what happened?”
“I phoned your precinct. I’ve been talking to them on and off.”
“About what?” Rothschild asked softly. “What happened here, Kennedy?”
“Well, evidently the girl was in her room and Gonzalez told her to stay there, and then for some reason she didn’t stay there. She came down to the lobby, and this blond fellow that you and Gonzalez got tagged for the killer, he was in the lobby, and maybe he cut her off, so she ran across Fifty-fifth Street. The killer went after her. We got that story from the doorman. Gonzalez went after the killer. I stayed here to wait for you—at least that’s what Gonzalez said to do.”
“When was this?” Rothschild whispered.
“About thirty minutes ago,” Kennedy said.
“Oh, my God!” Rothschild whispered. “How much of a God-damned fool can a cop be?”
But whether he was referring to himself or to Gonzalez, Kennedy did not know.
CHAPTER
11
THE film company was loading its equipment onto the truck now and preparing to depart for the night. Gonzalez took Sally’s arm and walked slowly past them. The man called Sidney turned to look at them, and then he said something to one of the other men. They both laughed.
Gonzalez walked slowly and evenly toward the edge of the Sheep Meadow.
Sally asked him, “Why are they laughing at me?”
“The hell with them,” Gonzalez said shortly. “Let them laugh. We’re way put of that kind of thing. We’re walking into something else.”
“I wish I knew what.”
“You’ll know what in a little while. Just take it easy, stay with me, keep your head up, and don’t panic. You do what I say. I say, ‘Stand up,’ and you stand up. I say, ‘Get behind me,’ you get behind me. I say, ‘Drop to the ground,’ you drop to the ground. You drop flat and you put your face against the grass, and if it’s cold and wet, that doesn’t mean one damned thing to me. You put your face against the grass—you understand?”
“I understand,” Sally said. “You don’t have to snap and bark at me and keep on trying to impress me with how tough you are.”
“I snap and bark. Not at you, but because I’m tense and because I’m frightened. Right now you’re not the only one who’s frightened. I’m telling you this so you will understand that the fact that you are frightened does not give you any exclusive rights. It does not give you the right to panic, and it does not give you the right to run.”
“I understand you,” she said.
They were on the edge of the Sheep Meadow now. It was almost twilight, and the great stretch of meadow land was deserted. It was strangely bright, burnished, surrounded as it was by the mighty circle of buildings, the great high-rise apartment houses on Central Park West, on Central Park South, and on Fifth Avenue. There the meadow lay—a flat, saucer-like valley in the midst of the greatest high-rise city on the face of the earth.
Sally looked around her with awe. She said in a whisper, “I’ve never been out here before just like this—I mean this way, with the meadow all empty.”
“It empties as soon as the day finishes,” Gonzalez explained. “That’s the way the park is. Maybe the park is no more dangerous than any other part of the city. Personally I think so. Personally I think it’s a lot of folklore about the park being a dangerous, mugging, jungle kind of a place. I’ve known real jungles and the park is not that. But, at the same time, the legend persists. So usually, especially in parts of the park like this, big open stretches and big wooded stretches, it will empty out as nightfall approaches.”
“But not a soul is here,” Sally said.
“That’s it. That’s why we can play this crazy long shot, because there’s not a soul here, only the two of us.”
Across the Sheep Meadow traffic flowing south on the West Drive had put on lights. The traffic spun a web of moving light around the Sheep Meadow. As Sally and the detective walked toward the center of the great meadow, they passed a softball, forgotten, a forlorn symbol. Sally let go of Gonzalez’ arm and ran to pick up the softball.
“Don’t do that,” Gonzalez said.
“But it’s only a softball, Frank, that’s all it is. The kids who play ball here must have left it.”
“Throw it away. I don’t want anything in your hands. You hear me? Not for one moment do I want anything in your hands.”
She threw the softball away and said to him, “You are a provoking person. What harm did it do if I picked up the ball?”
“It diverted you.”
“So what harm in that?”
“Jesus God!” he exploded. “God Almighty, can’t you listen to me? We’re
playing a game here. We’re playing a game of death, and you ask me what kind of harm can it do if you’re diverted. It can only kill you or maybe kill us both if you’re diverted. You’re not to be diverted! You hear? By anything. You listen to my voice. You do what I tell you. You don’t do what anything else tells you. Do you hear me?”
“My goodness, you do have a temper,” she replied.
“I don’t have a temper, and I haven’t lost my temper. I’m deliberately yelling at you. I’m yelling at you because I want to drive a point home.”
“Well,” she said, “if you would only tell me what we’re up to and what you intend to do, then maybe I’d understand you a lot better.”
“All right, that’s my fault. I should have told you. Now look, I will explain it. A city detective carries a thirty-eight-caliber revolver—that’s a six-shooter. It can be either a Colt or a Smith and Wesson. Mine happens to be a Colt. Now look, don’t think I am a gun-enchanted person. Even now, with what’s going on right here, I don’t want you to think that. I dislike guns, and I am afraid of them. I also have contempt for them. But I know something about guns and, because I’m a cop, I know how to use a gun. This is a good revolver, an excellent revolver. It throws true, and I am a good shot. I have a steady hand. In pistol shooting the most important thing in the world is a steady hand because, when you fire a pistol, it is impossible to hit anything.”
“But if it’s impossible to hit anything, how do people kill people with pistols?”
“That’s a good question. When I say impossible, I don’t mean impossible. We’re trained to hit things. All sorts of people are pistol-trained, and they learn to use a pistol, but it’s an unreliable weapon. The pistol can be counted on only so long as the man can be counted on. A frightened man can shoot a gun, a rifle, accurately. A frightened man cannot shoot a pistol accurately. To shoot a pistol accurately, you must be calm, cold, and in command of yourself. Do you see?”
“I think I understand what you mean.”