"Is that why?" He could hear again the baby crying, the gigantic ego of the very young, the imperious demand that they be attended to. And in the place of terror, he now felt only rage. That this useless half-begun thing should kill, and kill
"Do you know what's going to happen to you?" he asked her. "They won't execute you, you're too young. They'll judge you insane, and they'll lock you away. And there'll be guards and matrons there, to say don't do this and don't do that, a million million times more than you can imagine. And they'll keep you locked away in a little room, forever and ever, and they'll let you do nothing you want to do, nothing."
He moved now, feeling his way around the chair, reaching out to touch the wall, working his way carefully toward the door. "There's nothing you can do to me now," he said. "Your bag of tricks won't work, and I won't drink the poison you fed your mother. And no one will believe the suicide confession you forged. I'm going to phone the precinct, and they'll come and get you, and you'll be locked away in that tiny room, forever and ever."
The flashlight hit the floor with a muffled thud, and then he heard her running, away from him, deeper into the apartment. He crossed the room with cautious haste, hands out before him, and felt around on the floor till his fingers blundered into the flashlight. He picked it up, clicked it on, and followed.
He found her in her mother's bedroom, standing on the window sill. The window was wide open, and the December wind keened into the room. The dead woman lay reposed on the bed, the suicide note conspicuous on the nightstand. He shone the light full on the girl, and she warned him, "Stay away. Stay away from me."
He walked toward her. "They'll lock you away," he said. "In a tiny, tiny room."
"No, they won't!"she was gone from the window.
Levine breathed, knowing what he had done, that he had made it end this way. She hadn't ever understood death, and so it was possible for her to throw herself into it. The parents begin the child, and the child ends the parents. A white rage flamed in him at the thought.
He stepped to the window and looked down at the broken doll on the sidewalk far below. In another apartment, above his head, a baby wailed, creasing the night. Make way, make way.
He looked up. "We will," he whispered. "We will. But in our own time. Don't rush us."
THE DEATH OF A BUM
Abraham Levine of Brooklyn's Forty-Third Precinct sat at his desk in the squadroom and wished Jack Crawley would get well soon. Crawley, his usual tour partner, was in the hospital recovering from a bullet in the leg, and Levine was working now with a youngster recently assigned to the squad, a college graduate named Andy Stettin. Levine liked the boy —though he sometimes had the feeling Stettin was picking his brains —but there was an awkwardness in the work without Crawley.
He was sitting now at the desk, thinking about Jack Crawley, when the telephone rang. He answered, saying, "Forty-Third Precinct. Levine."
It was a woman's voice, middle-aged, very excited. "There's a man been murdered! You've got to come right away!"
Levine pulled pencil and paper close, then said, "Your name, please?**
"There's been a murder! Don't you understand "
"Yes, ma'am. May I have your name, please?"
"Mrs. Francis Temple. He's lying right upstairs."
"The address, please?"
"One ninety-eight Third Street. I told all this to the other man, I don't see — "
"And you say there's a dead man there?"
"He's been shot! I just went in to change the linen, and he was lying there!"
"Someone will be there right away." He hung up as she was starting another sentence, and looked up to see Stettin, a tall athletic young man with dark-rimmed glasses and a blond crewcut, standing by the door, already wearing his coat.
"Just a second," Levine said, and dialed for Mulvane, on the desk downstairs. "This is Abe. Did you just transfer a call from Mrs. Francis Temple to my office?"
"I did. The beat car's on the way."
"All right. Andy and I are taking it."
Levine cradled the phone and got to his feet. He went over and took his coat from the rack and shrugged into it, then followed the impatient Stettin downstairs to the car.
That was another thing. Crawley had always driven the Chevy. But Stettin drove too fast, was too quick to hit the siren and gun through busy intersections, so now Levine had to do the driving, a chore he didn't enjoy.
The address was" on a block of ornate nineteenth-century brownstones, now all converted either into furnished apartments or boarding houses. One ninety-eight was furnished apartments, and Mrs. Francis Temple was its landlady. She was waiting on the top step of the stoop, wringing her hands, a buxom fiftyish woman in a black dress and open black sweater, a maroon knit shawl over her head to keep out the cold.
The prowl car was double-parked in front of the house, and Levine braked the Chevy to a stop behind it. He and
Stettin climbed out, crossed the sidewalk, and went up the stoop.
Mrs. Temple was on the verge of panic. Her hands kept washing each other, she kept shifting her weight back and forth from one foot to the other, and she stared bug-eyed as the detectives came up the stoop toward her.
"Are you police?" she demanded, her voice shrill.
Levine dragged out his wallet, showed her the badge. "Are the patrolmen up there?" he asked.
She nodded, stepping aside to let him move past her. "I went in to change the linen, and there he was, lying in the bed, all covered with blood. It was terrible, terrible."
Levine went on in, Stettin after him, and Mrs. Temple brought up the rear, still talking. Levine interrupted her to ask, "Which room?"
"The third floor front," she said, and went back to repeating how terrible it had been when she'd gone in there and seen him on the bed, covered with blood.
Stettin was too eager for conscious politeness. He bounded on up the maroon-carpeted stairs, while Levine plodded up after him, the woman one step behind all the way, the shawl still over her head.
One of the patrolmen was standing in the open doorway at the other end of the third-floor hall. As was usual in this type of brownstone, the upper floors consisted of two large rooms rented separately, each with a small kitchenette but both sharing the same bath. The dead man was in the front room.
Levine said to the woman, "Wait out here, please," nodded to the patrolman, and went on through into the room.
Stettin and the second patrolman were over to the right, by the studio couch, talking together. Their forms obscured Levine's view of the couch as he came through the doorway, and he got the feeling, as he had had more than once with the energetic Stettin, that he was Stettin's assistant rather than the other way around.
Which was ridiculous, of course. Stettin turned, clearing Levine's view, saying, "How's it look to you. Abe?"
The studio couch had been opened up and was now in its other guise, that of a linen-covered bed. Between the sheets the corpse lay peaceably on its back with the covers tucked up around the sheets and rested stiffly on its chest.
Levine came over and stood by the bed, looking down at it. The bullet had struck the bridge of the nose, smashing bone and cartilage, and discoloring the flesh around it. There was hardly any nose left. The mouth hung open, and the top front teeth had been jarred partially out of their sockets by the force of the bullet.
The slain man had bled profusely, and the pillow and the turned-down sheet around his throat were drenched with blood.
The top blanket was blue, and was now scattered with smallish chunks of white stuff. Levine reached down and picked up one of the white chunks, feeling it between his fingers.
"Potato," he said, more to himself than to the cop at his side.
Stettin said, "What's that?"
"Potato. That stuff on the bed. He used a potato for a silencer."
Stettin smiled blankly. "I don't follow you. Abe."
Levine moved his hands in demonstration as he described what he meant. "The k
iller took a raw potato, and jammed the barrel of the gun into it. Then, when he fired, the bullet smashed through the potato, muffling the sound. It's a kind of home-made silencer."
Stettin nodded, and glanced again at the body. "Think it was a gang killing, then?"
"I don't know," Levine replied, frowning. He turned to the patrolman. "What have you got?"
The patrolman dragged a flat black notebook out of his hip pocket, and flipped it open. "He's the guy that rented the place. The landlady identified him. He gave his name as Maurice Gold."
Excited, Stettin said, "Morry Gold?" He came closer to the bed, squinting down at the face remnant as though he could see it better that way. "Yeah, by God, it is," he said, his expression grim. "It was a gang killing, Abe!"
"You know him?"
"I saw him once. On the lineup downtown, maybe —two months ago."
Levine smiled thinly. Leave it to Stettin, he thought. Most detectives considered the lineup a chore and a waste of time, and grumbled every time their turn came around to go downtown and attend. The line-up was supposed to familiarize the precinct detectives with the faces of known felons, but it took a go-getter like Stettin to make the theory work. Levine had been attending the lineup twice a month for fifteen years and hadn't once recognized one of the felons later on.
Stettin was turning his head this way and that, squinting at the body again. "Yeah, sure," he said. "Morry Gold. He had a funny way of talking —a Cockney accent, maybe. That's him, all right."
"What was he brought in for?"
"Possession of stolen goods. He was a fence. I remember the Chief talking to him. I guess he'd been brought in lots of times before." He shook his head. "Apparently he managed to wriggle out of it."
The patrolman said, "He'd have been much better off if he hadn't."
"A falling out among thieves," said Stettin. "Think so, Abe?"
"It could be." To the patrolman, he said, "Anything else?"
"He lived here not quite two years. That's what the landlady told me. She found him at quarter after four, and the last time she saw him alive was yesterday, around seven o'clock in the evening. He went out then. He must have come back some time after eleven o'clock, when the landlady went to bed. Otherwise, she'd have seen him come in." He grinned without humor. "She's one of those," he said.
"I'll go talk to her." Levine looked over at the body again, and averted his eyes. An old English epitaph flickered through his mind: As you are, so was I; as I am, so you will be. Twenty-four years as a cop hadn't hardened him to the tragic and depressing finality of death, and in the last few years, as he had moved steadily into the heart-attack range and as the inevitability of his own end had become more and more real to him, he had grown steadily more vulnerable to the dread implicit in the sight of death.
He turned away, saying, "Andy, give the place a going-over. Address book, phone numbers, somebody's name in the flyleaf of a book. You know the kind of thing."
"Sure." Stettin glanced around, eager to get at it. "Do you think he'd have any of the swag here?"
The word sounded strange on Stettin's tongue, odd and archaic. Levine smiled, as the death-dread wore off", and said, "I doubt it. Stick around here for the M.E. and the technical crew. Get the time of death and whatever else they can give you,"
"Sure thing."
Mrs. Francis Temple was still outside in the hall, jabbering now at the second patrolman, who was making no attempt to hide his boredom. Levine took her away, much to the patrolman's relief, and they went downstairs to her cellar apartment, the living room of which was Gay Nineties from end to end, from the fringed beaded lampshades to the marble porcelain vases on the mantle.
In these surroundings, Mrs. Temple's wordiness switched from the terrible details of her discovery of the body to the nostalgic details of her life with her late husband, who had been a newspaperman.
Levine, by main force, wrestled the conversation back to the present, in order to ask his questions about Maurice Gold, "What did he do for a Hving," he asked. "Do you know?"
"He said he was a salesman. Sometimes he was gone nearly a week at a time."
"Do you know what he sold?"
She shook her head. "There were never any samples or anything in his room," she said. "I would have noticed them." She shivered suddenly, hugging herself, and said, "What a terrible thing. You don't know what it was like, to come into the room and see him — "
Levine thought he knew. He thought he knew better than Mrs. Temple. He said, "Did he have many visitors? Close friends, that you know about?"
"Well — There were two or three men who came by sometimes in the evenings. I believe they played cards."
"Do you know their names?"
"No, I'm sorry. I really didn't know Mr. Gold very well — not as a friend. He was a very close-mouthed man." One hand fluttered to her lips. "Oh, listen to me. The poor man is lying dead, and listen to me talking about him."
"Did anyone else ever come by?" Levine persisted. "Besides these three men he played cards with."
She shook her head. "Not that I remember. I think he was a lonely man. Lonely people can recognize one another, and I've been lonely, too, since Alfred died. These last few years have been difficult for me, Mr. Levine."
It took Levine ten minutes to break away from the woman gently, without learning anything more. "We'd like to try to identify his card-playing friends," he said. "Would you have time to come look at pictures this afternoon?"
"Well, yes, of course. It was a terrible thing, Mr. Levine, an absolutely terrible — "
"Yes, ma'am."
Levine escaped, to find Stettin coming back downstairs, loose-limbed and athletic. Feeling a little bit guilty at palming the voluble Mrs. Temple off on his partner, Levine said, "Take Mrs, Temple to look at some mug shots, will you? Known former acquaintances of Gold —or anyone she recognizes. She says there were two or three men who used to come here to play cards."
"Will do." Stettin paused at the foot of the steps. "Uh, Abe," he said, "we don't have to break our humps over this one, do we?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well " Stettin shrugged, and nodded his head at the stairs. "He was just a bum, you know. A small-time crook. The world's better off without him."
"He was alive," said Levine. "And now he's dead."
"Okay, okay. For Pete's sake, I wasn't saying we should forget the whole thing—just that we shouldn't break our humps over it."
"We'll do our job," Levine told him, "just as though he'd had the keys to the city and money in fifty-seven banks."
"Okay. You didn't have to get sore, Abe."
"I'm not sore. Take Mrs. Temple in the car. I'm going to stay here a while and ask some more questions. Mrs. Temple's in her apartment there."
"Okay."
"Oh, by the way. When you get out to the car, call in and have somebody get us the dope on that arrest two months ago. Find out if you can whether there was anybody else involved, and if by chance the arresting officer knows any of Gold's friends. Anything like that."
"Will do."
Levine went on upstairs to ask questions.
The other tenants knew even less than Mrs. Temple. Levine was interrupted for a while by a reporter, and by the time he'd finished questioning the tenants it was past four o'clock, and late enough for him to go off duty. He phoned the precinct, and then went on home.
The following morning he arrived ai the precinct at eight o'clock for his third and last day-shift on this cycle. Stettin was already there, sitting at Levine's desk and looking through a folder. He leaped to his feet, grinning and ebullient as ever, saying, "Hiya, Abe. We got us some names."
"Good."
Levine eased himself into his chair, and Stettin hovered over him, opening the folder. "The arresting officer was a Patrolman Michaels, out of the Thirtieth. I couldn't find out why the charge didn't stick, because Michaels was kind of touchy about that. I guess he made some kind of procedural goof. But anyhow, he gave me some nam
es. Gold has a brother, Abner, who runs a pawnshop in East New York. Michaels says Gold was a kind of go-between for his brother. Morry would buy the stolen goods, cache it, and then transfer it to Abner's store."
Levine nodded. "Anything else?"
"Well, Gold took one fall, about nine years ago. He was caught accepting a crate full of stolen furs. The thief was caught with him." Stettin pointed to a name and address. "That's him —Elly Kapp. Kapp got out last year, and that's his last known address."
"You've been doing good work," Levine told him. He grinned up at Stettin and said, "Been breaking your hump?"
Stettin grinned back, in embarrassment. "I can't help it," he said. "You know me, old Stettin Fetchit."
Levine nodded. He'd heard Stettin use the line before. It was his half-joking apology for being a boy on the way up, surrounded by stodgy plodders like Abe Levine.
"Okay," said Levine. "Anything from Mrs. Temple?"
"One positive identification, and a dozen maybes. The positive is a guy named Sal Casetta. He's a small-time bookie."
Levine got to his feet. "Let's go talk to these three," he said. "The brother first."
Twenty-two minutes later they were in the East New York pawnshop. Abner Gold was a stocky man with thinning hair and thick spectacles. He was also —once Levine had flashed the police identification —very nervous.
"Come into the office," he said. "Please, please. Come into the office."
Levine noticed that the thick accent Gold had worn when they'd first come in had suddenly vanished.
Gold unlocked the door to the cage, relocked it after them, and led the way back past the bins to his office, a small and crowded room full of ledgers. There was a rolltop desk, a metal filing cabinet and four sagging leather chairs.
"Sit down, sit down," he said. "You've come about my brother."
"You've been notified?"
"I read about it in the News. A terrible way to hear, believe me.
"I'm sure it must be," Levine said.
He hesitated. Usually, Jack Crawley handled the questioning, while Levine observed silently from a corner. But Jack was still laid up with the bad leg, and Levine wasn't sure Stettin —eager though he might be —would know the right questions or how to ask them. So it was up to him.
Westlake, Donald E - Novel 41 Page 13