The Hour of the Cat

by Peter Quinn

  A small bell tinkled. An altar boy emerged from the sacristy. Behind him, the priest in white vestments carried the veiled chalice. The clatter of rosaries against the wooden pews subsided. The server knelt beside the priest at the bottom of the three steps before the altar.

  They began the ancient exchange.

  Introibo ad altare Dei.

  Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.

  Dunne walked back to where he’d been sitting, lay his forearm on the pew in front, and rested his head on it. His knees were stiff from kneeling. Out of practice. “Offer it up for the poor souls in purgatory,” had been his mother’s response to every emotional or physical complaint. The Church’s cure-all for everything from colds to cancer. He decided to offer up the ache in his joints for himself, as penance for wasting the whole morning staking out Roberta Dee’s place in Brooklyn.

  Babcock visited Roberta Dee with such regularity it made shadowing him about as complicated as a shoeshine. She must have had the whole performance choreographed, one, two, clothes off, three, four, once more, five, six, we’ve had our kicks. The woman was a pro, the kind who apparently had Babcock running back and forth according to her clock, which made it seem unlikely he’d be bothering with a teenage stenographer. Mrs. Babcock was right about that much: her husband couldn’t keep his fly buttoned. She made sure the SOB was DOA. Too bad it had to be today.

  That morning, after leaving the BMT at Grand Army Plaza, Dunne had gone directly to Roberta Dee’s and sat across the street. Babcock’s routine never seemed to change. He always looked both ways as he left the taxi and entered her building, as though he might see someone he knew. In Newport or Palm Beach, maybe. In Brooklyn, not likely.

  Fifteen minutes passed, still no Babcock. A nattily dressed gent hurried out of the building. Late for something. An appointment. A client. Maybe a girl of his own. The doorman stepped into the street and blew his whistle. The flummoxed pigeons loitering near Dunne’s bench rose into the sky. The gent stood under the canopy that stretched from the building to the curb. Dunne had seen him before. A garden-variety specimen of the type that had taken root in the buildings this side of Prospect Park, a doctor maybe or a lawyer in the service of the Brooklyn Democratic machine. Two bull markets that never went away: pain and politics. The perennials.

  The doorman blew again, emptying his lungs into the whistle. A cab appeared and screeched to a halt. Dunne half-expected Babcock to pop out. But when the doorman swung the door open, it was empty. The gent slipped him a coin, entered the cab and sped away. Dunne tossed the newspapers he was carrying into a trashcan and crossed the street. Was it possible Babcock had caught on to being tailed? More probable that he was just delayed or forced to change his plans.

  Dunne unfolded the wrapper from a stick of chewing gum and stuck the gum in his mouth. He took a bill from his pocket that he’d already folded into a square, put the wrapper around it, and handed it to the doorman. “Can you get rid of this for me?”

  “Sure bet,” the doorman said.

  “Mind if I take a look around.”

  “Be my guest.”

  The lobby was dim and cool. The only light spread from brass wall sconces beneath japanned, parchment-like shades. Dunne pressed for the elevator. A moment later, the gate rolled back with a thud.

  “Well, well,” the elevator man said, “if it ain’t my favorite Sherlock. How’d I know you’d be here? Think I’m clairvoyant?”

  “Let’s see.”

  They’d been through the same routine several times before. Dunne held out his hand with another folded bill. The elevator man stuck it in his pocket and stared at Dunne’s empty palm, squinting, as if struggling to see. “Can just make it out, Apartment 4C, a name right below the doorbell. Roberta Dee.”

  “All that’s right there on my palm?”

  “Better than a crystal ball.”

  “See anybody go in?”

  “Not today.”

  Nor tomorrow, in Babcock’s case. Dunne left there thinking how odd it is for Babcock to break his routine. But not to worry, these things happen all the time. At that same moment, the double-dealer was getting pumped five times by his wife.

  Amen, amen, I say unto you: Beware the sure thing.

  The priest stood at the right side of the altar, dipped his fingers in the small glass bowl held by the altar boy, who poured water from a cruet over them. He took the linen napkin draped over the boy’s wrist, dried his fingers, and murmured the words of the Lavabo. The washing away of sins. Hold the starch.

  Dunne left the church, stopped at a little place on the corner of Prince Street and ordered spaghetti and a glass of dago red. He took a cab back to his office. A faint smirk greeted him as he passed Marlene, the combination PBX operator and receptionist who sat in the building’s lobby behind a low, dirt-streaked glass partition. A career in that box, along with a divorce and the loss of all her savings when the Bank of the United States folded, soured a once-attractive woman into a wrinkled killjoy.

  “Had two visitors, Dunne.” Marlene worked the phone lines as she spoke. “One was a cop.” The smirk reworked itself into a sneer. “He said if you know what’s good, you’ll come see him pronto.”

  “Who else was here?”

  “Still here.”

  There wasn’t another soul in sight, unless he was hiding in the janitor closet. “Let me guess. The Invisible Man.”

  “Woman. Went up with Jerroff five minutes ago. Said she could sit in his office till you showed. Better be on the up and up. This ain’t no cathouse.”

  The elevator, which had been on the fritz, was back in service. Its slow upward grind ascended into a keen for the fallen state of the Hackett Building. Nice digs, Dunne told himself, the day he rented space, in July 1929. Brokers and stockjobbers peddling day and night on the telephone, hum of people in the process of getting rich, happiest of human sounds. He’d quit the Police Department the month before, the end of a ten-year career, last of it with the homicide squad. Enough cadavers for a lifetime, thank you. Took up the work of tracking wayward husbands and adulterous wives. The supply of nuptial transgressions seemed to move with the country’s booming prosperity. No more department politics. No more corrupt asshole chiefs like Brannigan. That October the Crash came. Seven billion dollars down the sewers of Wall Street in a single week. The Dow Jones plummeted, and with it, the divorce rate.

  The hum in the Hackett Building sank, rose, then sank for good. Dunne was hard pressed to remember when he knew that neither prosperity nor the corner it was supposedly waiting just around was anywhere in sight. The awareness came to him gradually, like a bad cold or a case of the grippe. “For Rent” signs proliferated in vacant storefronts. Groups of working men stood idly on street corners. In the fall of 1930, the International Apple Shippers Association got rid of its unsold reserves by letting the jobbers have them on credit. Within a few weeks there were 6,000 apple sellers on the streets of New York, some still wearing velvet-collared overcoats from Brooks Brothers.

  The temporary cloud became a permanent gloom. Week after week, it invaded the flickering illusions of the movie house. Amid newsreels of starlets and athletes, statesmen and royalty, the christenings of battleships and voyages of zeppelins, the mounting presence of the unemployed and homeless spun into an epic of disasters. It was as though nature and the stock market were controlled by the same hand. The deluge poured out of the canyons of lower Manhattan, swelled the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Tennessee, a torrent of dark moiled water, sweeping away homes, factories, towns. People paddled down Main Street, dog, radio, lamp in their laps, whatever little they could salvage. From a distance they seemed almost cheerful, until the Movietone camera drew closer and revealed their bewilderment in a shrug of shoulders, a pathetic smile, eyes water-filled, like their lives, the illusion of security washed away.

  One way or another, rain or shine, flood or drought, the ruin spread, biblical-style, across the country. Dunne was in the Hackett Building a few years when h
e bumped into Fuzzy Whalen, an old pal from the regiment, in the lobby. It must have been ’31 or ’32, before Repeal. They walked to Danny Cassidy’s speakeasy on 28th Street and Seventh Avenue and had a few drinks. They came out to a bruised and threatening sky. A thunderstorm seemed about to hit. But there wasn’t a hint of moisture anywhere. The dryness coated tongue and throat. A few drops fell. Hard as sand. A minute later, the storm arrived. A shower of grit, the blown-away fields of dry, exhausted earth from a thousand miles away, from the busted farms of Oklahoma and Texas, descended on New York in a blinding swirl.

  Dunne drew back the gate and exited into the gloom. All the floors—two above and four below—had the same shadowy hallways, peeling walls, small-time salesmen peddling insurance, prostheses, elixirs, gadgets, cheap cutlery, nudist magazines. The titles stenciled on the frosted glass changed, but the faces didn’t. Fail at one flimflam, try another. Try, try, try again. Hack it as long as they can. On warm summer days, when the doors were opened a crack, honeyed, desperate phone spiels spilled into the hallways: Good morning Mr./Mrs. Jones, and congratulations, today’s your lucky day!

  Whatever you’re sellin’, I ain’t interested. Click.

  The glass on the door next to Dunne’s office had freshly painted lettering on it. EMILE JERROFF. ACCOUNTANT AND NOTARY PUBLIC. A month before, Jerroff’s legend was “Toys & Novelties.” Something else before that. Dunne couldn’t remember what. The door was ajar. Inside, Jerroff perched Humpty-Dumpty fashion on the edge of his desk, short, sausage-shaped legs dangling above the floor. A lacquered black panama hid the head of the person sitting in front of him.

  Jerroff hopped off the desk. “Ah, Dunne, at last. I was playing host until you arrived.”

  The broad-rimmed hat turned to reveal the guest’s face, olive-complexioned, fine-boned, young.

  “We were discussing the war in Spain,” Jerroff said. “Miss Corado feels as I do. Defeat for the Republic will inspire new aggressions by the Fascists.”

  Miss Corado stood. A head taller than Jerroff, she extended her gloved hand. The touch of kid. A nice feel. She smiled. “I’m Elba Corado, Mr. Dunne. I apologize for not calling to make an appointment. I thought I’d try my luck and drop in. My luck didn’t fail. Mr. Jerroff has been most patient and charming.”

  “Emile,” Jerroff said, “please call me Emile.”

  “Of course, Emile.”

  “Remember, Miss Corado, whenever you’re in the Hackett Building, you must stop by. Promise?”

  She laughed. “Yes, I promise.”

  Next door, in his office, Dunne pulled up a chair for her in front of his desk. Miss Corado put her purse beside her and smoothed her dress with her hands, a white silk dress splashed with big red and black flowers. She took the cigarette he offered, leaned forward and put it into the flame of his lighter. Her black bra was visible, breasts firm and buoyant.

  “Mr. Jerroff was very gracious.”

  “Emile,” Dunne said. Another smile from Miss Corado, more of her straight, pearly teeth. He couldn’t place her name, but if he’d seen the face, he’d remember, for sure. “But you didn’t come here to talk about Spain.”

  “No.” The smile vanished. Eyes closed, she sighed.

  They always had trouble getting started. Beat around it. Oh, my wounded heart. Tears first, then rage. Young, old, pretty, plain, they stumbled over the pain, shock, anger of betrayal, adultery. “Miss Corado, I think I know why you’re here.”

  Her tropical eyes, brown pupils shaded by lashes lush as palm leaves, open wide. “You do?”

  “It’s my business.”

  “You know about Wilfredo?”

  “Your husband?”

  “My brother, actually my half brother. The papers used the English name he took for himself when he came here from Cuba, Walter. Walter Grillo.”

  Dunne lit a cigarette for himself. “Your brother is the one with the problem?”

  “Mr. Dunne, they’re sending him to the electric chair for a crime he didn’t commit. They said he raped and murdered a nurse. The trial was a travesty.”

  A memory of it stirred in Dunne’s head. Brannigan did his best to make it look as if it took real brains to solve. A chimp could have done it as quick.

  “Wilfredo couldn’t have done it. He’s incapable of such an act.” She rattled off a litany of Wilfredo’s attributes. Courteous, kind, loyal. A real Boy Scout.

  Dunne leaned back. The loud creak of his chair sounded almost like a moan. One of those things you don’t notice until a visitor shows up. Like the holes in the linoleum, or the water stains on the walls, or the jagged puncture in the green leather couch. He opened his top drawer, lifted out a business card and placed it in front of her.

  She glanced at it but didn’t pick it up. “Mr. Dunne, please, I need your help.”

  He tapped the card with his finger. “There,” he said, “underneath ‘Private Investigator,’ see? ‘Matrimonial and Divorce.’”

  “My brother is innocent. He came to America as a political exile. He loved freedom so much that even though he was raised to be a gentleman in Cuba, he worked as a janitor here. He is a hero, not a criminal.”

  Not my boy: The abiding faith of sisters and mothers, no matter what kind of bum they have for a sibling or son. It took a special kind of a shark to make a living off them. Devour their savings. Sometimes more than that: their trust, their love. Dunne wouldn’t use a sermon word to describe the reason for not joining private eyes and lawyers who made a living off such fish. Just didn’t want to be surprised by a passing reflection in a mirror or store window: The Judas gaze. His own.

  “Sorry, but I don’t handle criminal cases. That’s a whole other line of work, ’specially homicides.”

  “You did. You were a cop.”

  “Were, Miss Corado.”

  “I was told you were one of the best.”

  A sister’s persistence. The litany in honor of Saint Wilfredo continued: Lawyer, university professor, scholar, father of the poor, good shepherd, true light, you name it. Feeding time for the sharks.

  “Whoever told you that should’ve also told you I’m now in a different kind of business. Sorry if they didn’t.”

  “I hoped you wouldn’t be indifferent to the execution of an innocent man.”

  “I’m not indifferent, Miss Corado.” Dunne said. “It’s just that I don’t handle murder investigations.” What he didn’t say: especially today, with Babcock in the morgue, his wife in custody, Brannigan on the warpath.

  Her brown eyes widened with the look of a child who’d been slapped, same combo of hurt and indignation. She got up abruptly. The end of her cigarette was a curve of gray ash. “Is there an ashtray?”

  He pointed at the floor. She dropped the cigarette, covered it with the toe of her black high heels, ground it with a slow, deliberate twist of her thin, silk-hosed ankle. “Saving an innocent life, I suppose, is too much trouble when you can make more money peeping into people’s bedrooms.”

  “If you want people to take your money, that’s easy. You want results? That’s another matter.”

  “But not something you care to rise to.” She continued to grind the cigarette.

  “Your brother have a trial?”

  “The prosecution was on a crusade. Mr. Dewey wanted my brother’s head so he could wave it about in a campaign. He even came in person to hear the summation.”

  “Mr. Dewey has plenty of heads already.” Everybody’s from Lucky Luciano’s, the Syndicate’s kingpin who’d ascended from the Lower East Side, to Richard Whitney’s, the Wall Street titan and descendant of the Mayflower crowd. In his career as Assistant U.S. Attorney, special prosecutor, and D.A., Dewey had amassed a Who’s Who of heads. The head of Miss Corado’s brother would be only a secondary addition, a small but pointed reminder of Mr. Racket Buster’s unremitting war on evildoers. “Your brother had his own lawyer, didn’t he?”

  “The lawyer for my brother? He might as well have worked for the prosecution. He never believed
in Wilfredo’s innocence. Never. He told Wilfredo to plead guilty and throw himself on the mercy of the court.”

  “Lawyers have given a lot worse advice, believe me.”

  “I can see I’m wasting my time. But to be truthful, the coldness and meanness of this city no longer surprise me. Roberta Dee may be surprised about you, but I’m not.” She walked toward the door. “You are not the man she thinks you are.”

  Once in the war, at the start of the battle of the Ourcq, in 1918, soon before their position was almost overrun and Major Donovan was wounded, a German shell came out of nowhere and hit the rim of his foxhole, one of those 77 millimeter shells the Americans call a “whiz bang” because it exploded almost at the same time you heard it finish its descent. It would have been an instantaneously fatal explosion if Dunne hadn’t been leaning down to pick up his canteen. He didn’t so much remember the deafening concussion as the stunned quiet that followed, the paralyzed surprise.

  A moment like this. “Who?”

  “She was certain you’d take the case. She insisted I come.”

  “Roberta Dee is a friend of yours?” Dunne’s chair moaned as he leaned back; and again as he rocked forward.

  “A friend and a customer. Although she could afford to go elsewhere, Miss Dee buys most of her clothes at my dress shop. She’s been through the whole ordeal of the trial with me. She convinced me to stay away from the courtroom. She said the press would only use my presence to make an even greater sensation.”

  “Roberta Dee who lives on Grand Army Plaza?” Dunne half expected her to smile or laugh.

  “Of course,” she said. She seemed to be choking back tears. “I’ll show myself out.” She didn’t bother to close the door.

  Jerroff poked his head into the office. “If there’s a divorce involved, and Miss Corado should seek advice on financial matters, I’ll give her my special rate.”