by Peter Quinn
“Another second.” Dunne knelt and put his hand beneath the highboy. He ran his index finger along the inner rim, from corner to corner, and touched something that had the feel of an old wad of gum stuck underneath a movie seat. He pried it loose with two fingers. It fell into his hand. As he stood, he brushed his pants with his hands and dropped the wad into his pocket. “Nothing,” he said.
The super smiled for the first time. “I told you.”
“Next time I’ll listen.”
“Next time?” The smile vanished. “There ain’t gonna be no next time.” He pulled the door open and stood next to it, mop by his side. “Now get out!”
Dunne stepped into the hallway. He pointed at the mop. “Try it with soap and water. It works better.”
“Kiss my ass, Dick Tracy.” The super flung the door shut.
Skates slung over his shoulder, the kid in the felt cap was on the corner when Dunne came out of the alley. “Find him?”
“Bigger charmer than you let on.” Dunne tossed him a quarter.
“Hey, thanks. Figured you for a cop when you wouldn’t let go a nickel. Them guys is so tight, they squeak a block away. Crawled all over the neighborhood after old lady Lynch was kilt and didn’t spring for a glass of seltzer.” The boy put the quarter in the pocket of his knickers. “Guess I was wrong about you.”
“Cops question you?”
“Questioned everybody.”
“What’d you tell ’em?”
“Gettin’ the feelin’ it’s time for another quarter.”
“Tell me what you told the cops, I’ll tell you what it’s worth.”
“Ain’t worth much, least the fat cop in charge didn’t think so, but Miss Lynch had a brother, a wino bum. Came by every once in a while. Got the neighbors upset, a hobo hangin’ around, but she’d smooth it over, give him a meal and some money, I guess, and send him away before people got too angry. Anyways, I thought I seen him here the day she was kilt, late afternoon like, little after she come home.”
“You weren’t sure?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. Didn’t matter much till Miss Lynch was dead, if it was him or not.”
“That the last time he came around?”
“Was the last time I seen him. Or maybe it wasn’t. Me and my friends, sometimes we go to the river to fish, down by the Hoover Flats, and the bums is lyin’ on the pier sunnin’ themselves. This one time, I thought I seen him there but, hey, like the fat cop said when I told him about thinkin’ I spotted Miss Lynch’s brother, ‘Seen one wino bum, seen ’em all.’”
“Here, buy you and your friends some sodas.” Dunne handed the kid a dollar.
“Man, now I know for sure you ain’t a cop!”
Arriving early at the corner where he’d arranged to meet Elba Corado, Dunne went into the 5 & 10 and ordered a cup of coffee at the luncheon counter. He took the wad from his pocket, laid it on the paper napkin, and pressed it with his finger. There was something hard at its center. He scraped away the gummy covering with his penknife and exposed a key, an embossed circle at one end, two teeth at the other. Its small size seemed fit for a dresser or cabinet drawer. The highboy didn’t have any locks. That narrowed the search down to the several million drawers and cabinets throughout the five boroughs. But somebody had gone to the trouble of hiding it. Perhaps it was what the killer had searched for in Miss Lynch’s jewelry box. At the post office next door, he bought a stamped envelope and mailed the key to himself in the Hackett Building.
Elba Corado arrived in a two-door Ford coupe, a sporty maroon model that looked faster than it probably was. He was barely in the passenger seat when she stepped on the gas. Dunne braced himself against the dashboard.
“I can’t tell you how excited I am that you’ve taken Wilfredo’s case,” Elba said. “It’s the first ray of hope in such a long time.”
She braked at the last moment for a red light. A cab almost slammed into their rear. The driver honked and screamed. She paid no notice. “I have such faith in you, Mr. Dunne. I knew from the minute I saw you, you were the one to help Wilfredo.” She raced ahead, coming to another abrupt stop at the next light.
“Just buy the car?” Dunne asked.
“You can tell?”
“Dress business must be good.”
“Thank God, Mr. Dunne, it’s something I can rely on.” The car moved away from the light at a slower, more deliberate speed. “Where are we going?”
“Where we can talk. Go straight for now.” He lit two cigarettes and handed her one. “What’s Wilfredo’s secret?”
She drove with one hand; held the cigarette to her lips with the other. “Secret?”
“He’d rather go to the chair than reveal it, whatever it is.”
“He told you that?”
“Didn’t have to. It was obvious.”
“So you think he killed Miss Lynch?”
“Whatever his secret, it’s not that obvious.”
She pulled over to the curb, drew deeply on the cigarette. “This is very emotional for me. Would you mind driving?”
“Sure.” He came around and opened the driver’s door. She slid across the seat.
“You have a license, don’t you?”
“Been a while since I’ve been behind the wheel, but I’ll be fine.” He re-entered the stream of traffic and glanced in the rearview mirror. A beer truck was right on their tail. The driver honked twice.
“He wants you to go faster.”
“Faster it is.” Though he’d never bothered with the formality of a driver’s license, it came back to him quickly, the feel of shifting the clutch, up and down, in and out. The engine responded smoothly.
“You drive well,” Elba said.
“Thank Uncle Sam for that. I learned in the army.”
His first time behind the wheel was in France. They’d marched through a blizzard in the same uniforms issued the previous summer. Next morning, the sun came out and turned the roads to pudding-like slime. In the early afternoon, weary from trudging though miles of muck, they sat on the side of the road as a motorcade went past, a roaring, sputtering caravan of British and French touring cars, Rolls-Royces, Emersons, Grand Days, Courbots, and Renaults, each with one or two army brass, dry and warm inside and oblivious to the exhausted, sodden, mud-splattered soldiers on the roadside.
The troops grumbled and complained, then resumed their march. Dunne remembered what Vincent Coll said in the Protectory when they’d managed to get out of slaving in the laundry and were assigned to Brother Flavin’s garden detail. Gettin’ what you want, that’s the game, Fin, not grousin’ about not havin’ it. Soon as they were quartered in a local village, Dunne went to the garage next to the church and drafted the rotund, gray-haired proprietor into teaching him to drive. The Frenchman knew only one abbreviated English phrase: “Eyes on zee road!” But thanks to his impassioned pantomime, Dunne got the hang.
By evening, they were ripping across moonlit roads and lanes, the Frenchman yelling what Dunne chose to interpret as encouragement. For the next month or two, Dunne chauffeured regimental officers to historic churches and handsome bordellos, until the fighting started and every available man went into the trenches.
Dunne turned onto Riverside Drive. “Where you taking me?” Elba asked. “Canada?”
“Farther. The North Pole.” He glanced at her.
A rush of air shook the frilly collar on her dress, tugged at her hat, and rippled across the soft waves of black hair beneath it.
Tempted to leave his gaze fixed on her, Dunne remembered: Keep your eyes on the road. He looked ahead.
Without any prompting, she began talking about her brother and herself. She was nearly twenty years younger than Wilfredo. They had the same father, but Wilfredo’s mother died when he was a boy; Elba’s died giving birth to her. Their father died in a boating accident soon afterwards. She was raised by her maiden aunt and, in a way, by Wilfredo, who had always seemed more an uncle than a brother. The family was well supported by a sugar busine
ss they’d owned for more than a century. Wilfredo trained to be a lawyer, and had even come briefly to New York to attend Columbia University School of Law. Eventually, instead of joining the family business, he became a professor of law at the University of Havana and advisor to the Student Federation.
“Do you know anything about Cuba?” she said.
“Rum, cigars, best nightclubs in the world.” He drove across the 225th Street Bridge into the Bronx, turned right onto Kingsbridge Road, and went up Marble Hill.
“Have you ever heard of Machado?”
“A brand of cigars?”
“Oh God, you’re such a typical yanqui! Machado was the president of Cuba. He turned himself into a dictator and ruled with the support of the army and the rich. Wilfredo helped lead the movement to reform the university and open its doors to the children of the poor. Before long, Wilfredo sought to consolidate an even wider coalition to seek real democracy and true independence.”
Dunne braked at the light where Kingsbridge Road passed beneath the Jerome Avenue El, in a patch of track-striped Bronx sunshine. “Would you light me another cigarette, please?” she asked. He lit two simultaneously and handed her one.
She took a quick, deep drag. “You Americans are so ignorant of what goes on in Cuba, or what your government supports,” she said. “For you Cuba is a playground. ‘Cigars and nightclubs’ as you put it, along with casinos and brothels. You behave there the way you can’t here. For us, it’s a struggle for self-rule and democracy. It’s impossible to understand who Wilfredo is, how incapable he is of the crime he’s been convicted of, without knowing the role he played in our homeland.”
Dunne blew a trio of smoke rings out the window toward the looming bulk of the Kingsbridge Armory. A nice notion: hometown hero can’t turn out to be a criminal. The history of crime said otherwise. So did the jury that condemned Wilfredo. He kept the thought to himself and drove straight ahead when the light changed.
She reached in the glove compartment and took out a photograph. At the next light she handed it to him. “This was taken of Wilfredo in Havana, when he was a professor. No matter the changes, this is how I’ll always picture him.”
A tall, thin gentleman in an elegant white suit posed on a battlement beside a cannon. The sea was behind him. He had his hat in one hand and leaned on a cane in a lighthearted way that made clear it was there for fashion, not support. A broad smile pushed his mustache out toward his ears. It was a handsome, enthusiastic face, devoid of the resignation that had stared across the table at Dunne in Sing Sing. He had the same wide, intelligent eyes as his little sister, and in Wilfredo’s youthful face, the resemblance between the two was particularly striking.
The car behind honked. The light had changed. Dunne saw in the rearview that the impatient horn belonged to a patrol car. He handed the photo back to Elba and drove at what he hoped was an unsuspicious speed, not too fast, not too slow.
“This was taken in the last of the happy times,” Elba said. “Soon after, President Machado canceled the election, closed the opposition’s newspapers, arrested the union leaders and shut the university. Wilfredo was among those who organized a protest. The authorities broke it up. There was violence and shooting. Wilfredo was indicted for treason and went into hiding. They searched our house, smashed the furniture, ripped apart books and bedding. My aunt was so frightened her heart gave out and she had to be taken to the hospital. Our whole world was collapsing.”
The thin whine of a siren rose into a wail. The traffic on Fordham Road made it impossible to think about escape. He slowed down. The patrol car swerved past and zoomed left on to Third Avenue, the siren trailing away in the distance.
“I thought for a moment they were after us,” Elba said. “But we’ve done nothing wrong, have we?”
“Not today.”
She propped the photo of Wilfredo on the dashboard. “And he’s done nothing wrong either. It’s important to remember that.”
Dunne threaded his way through the congestion. Wilfredo’s photo sat on the dashboard like one of those holy cards people kept to ward off accidents and flats. Dunne couldn’t remember the photo the newspapers used of Walter Grillo when he was arrested, but it was a safe bet it didn’t bear any resemblance to a holy card. More likely it wasn’t any different from the unholy pose beloved of Brannigan and company, handcuffed defendant, head bowed, cop on either side, each holding an arm, the accused convincingly transformed into guilty-as-sin perpetrator. Pop goes the flashbulb: Hey, Grillo, say cheese, say whiskey, say guilty until proven innocent.
“At the trial,” Elba said, “there was barely a mention of his stature in Cuba.”
“I know. I read the transcript.”
“Roberta Dee convinced me not to attend. She said the press would hound me and that would only make things worse for Wilfredo.”
“She was right.”
“Still, I felt guilty that I wasn’t there.”
“You do whatever Roberta Dee tells you?”
“She’s been very kind to me.”
“How’d you meet?”
“She came into my shop soon after it opened.”
“Out of the blue?”
“She was in the neighborhood, shopping. She’s a very stylish woman. She became a steady customer. Now she’s a good friend.”
“How’s she support herself?”
“She’s a widow. Her husband was in the garment business. He left her comfortably provided for.”
“She tell you that?”
“Yes, she told me.” The tone of annoyed frustration Elba had used in their first meeting, at Dunne’s office, returned. “Why must you always sound so doubtful, Mr. Dunne? I’m trying to save my brother’s life. Why would I lie?”
“It’s my job to be skeptical. Don’t take it personally. And by the way, there’s no need for ‘Mr. Dunne.’ Fin, that’s what everybody calls me.” He’d wanted to tell her that since he got in the car.
“All right then, ‘Fin’ it is.” She smiled.
Wide and green, Pelham Parkway had far less traffic than Fordham Road. He stepped on the gas. The picture of Grillo fell from the dashboard and fluttered to the floor. She picked it up. “This photograph was the only reminder I had of Wilfredo when he left Cuba. He escaped on a cruise ship to New York. He wrote us and promised that as soon as Machado was overthrown, he’d return. But when Machado was kicked out, it was by Fulgencio Batista and his army buddies who, with the blessing of the American government, installed a puppet of their own. One gang of thugs replaced another. Wilfredo stayed where he was.”
“And you came here to be with him?”
“I stayed in Cuba another year, then my aunt died and I had no one. Wilfredo was afraid for me. He wired the money for me to come to New York. I was shocked when I saw him. His face was puffy and sickly. He was drinking heavily. He’d cut himself off from the other Cuban exiles in New York. He was bitter and alone. He was also afraid, I think, that Batista might use his friends in the Mafia to eliminate him.”
“You lived with him?” Dunne couldn’t picture Elba in the dungeon that Henry Draub now occupied. An orchid in a coal bin.
“Wilfredo was deeply embarrassed by where he lived and his job as a janitor. He’d arranged for me to reside as a student at Mount Saint Vincent College. I don’t know where he found the money, but he did. The nuns were strict. I hardly left the campus. When summer came, I got a job in a dress shop in Manhattan and shared an apartment with two other girls from the college. In the autumn, I refused to go back. Wilfredo was very angry, but we have the same blood in our veins, and I can be as stubborn as he. I stayed at the dress shop. The owner made me assistant manager. I had a flair for the business. I began to save for the day I’d own my own shop. It was my dream, and I shared it with Wilfredo. One day he met me after work and handed me a check. He’d received a settlement of my aunt’s estate in Cuba and he wanted me to have it all, his share as well as mine, so that I could open my shop. ‘If your dream comes true,’
he said, ‘mine does too.’ That’s the kind of brother Wilfredo is.”
Crossing the City Island causeway, Dunne shifted into second and slowed the car. The salty tang of low tide tainted the air. Using a handkerchief from her pocketbook, Elba wiped her eyes and softly blew her nose. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But each time I think of what has happened to him, the wound becomes fresh.”
In the distance, the towers of the Whitestone Bridge, bright and new as the chrome on Elba’s car, poked above the foliage of Throg’s Neck. “Where are we?” she asked.
“City Island.”
“It’s so quiet, so quaint. We could be in New England.”
“Don’t worry. You’re safe. We’re still in the Bronx.” He drove slowly down the leafy, uncrowded street. A few women were out shopping. Workmen from the nearby shipyards lolled outside a tavern. She put away the handkerchief.
He’d seen her kind of wound before: beneath the outward sophistication, woman’s shape, makeup so expertly applied, a young girl’s hurt at discovering the world’s indifference to her hopes and dreams. Sooner or later, to one degree or another, everybody got taught that lesson and was disabused of their belief in the inevitable triumph of the good and the true. Roberta Dee thought she could preserve Elba’s innocence. But she couldn’t. Nobody could.
They parked at the very end of the street, in front of a cinder-block snack bar with a veranda facing Eastchester Bay. At a white enameled table, beneath a frayed, sun-bleached umbrella, Dunne ordered a bucket of boiled shrimp and a pitcher of beer. Elba nibbled at a few shrimp and took a single sip of beer. She talked more about her girlhood in Cuba, itemizing her memories, the way people recalling an especially happy (or unhappy) time will do: doors and windows that open on the blue-white expanse of the Caribbean sky, sun-drenched balcony, wooden jalousies rattled rhythmically by a gentle, constant, flower-scented breeze.
“Oh, Fin, you can’t imagine how beautiful Cuba is.”
They walked past a row of sail shops and clam chowder joints. She went into a second-hand clothing store, and he followed. She wandered the aisles, fingering pea jackets and yellow rain gear. “With the right design,” she said, “this could be an attractive line of women’s wear.” After the store, they proceeded slowly down the leafy street. He sensed her reluctance to return immediately to the city. He shared it. It was early evening by the time they were finally ready to leave. She asked him to drive again.