The Hour of the Cat

by Peter Quinn

  “Where to?” he said.

  “I’m not ready to go home, not yet.”

  “Me neither.” He took the first right over the causeway, pulled into a large, mostly vacant parking lot and stopped in front of a row of skinny saplings.

  “Where are we now?”

  “Orchard Beach. Come on, let’s walk.”

  Ahead was the curved façade of a large bathing pavilion, a structure whose size and sweep belied its simple function as a place to change or go to the bathroom. They emerged through a tunnel that ran beneath the pavilion onto a crescent-shaped beach. A scattering of people sat on towels or stood at the water’s edge. Elba put her hand on his shoulder, steadying herself as she unstrapped and removed her shoes. Dunne took off his suit jacket and laid it down. They sat on it, facing the water.

  The early-evening sky was filtered at its edges with a pinkish blue light, land and water aglow in the sunset, nothing yet lost to the night. They sat and smoked. Elba let a handful of sand run through her fingers. “This is as white as the sand in Cuba, and as fine as the sand in an hourglass.”

  “Or in an ash tray.” He buried his cigarette butt in the sand. “The WPA hauled it here from Long Island when they built the place.”

  “It seems like it’s been here forever.”

  “Nothing in the Bronx has been here forever. Except maybe the rocks. The rest of it, sand, people, and the animals in the zoo, all arrived from somewhere else.”

  “Are you from the Bronx?”

  “Spent time here.”

  “Your childhood?”

  “Mine ended before I got here.” Dunne stood and brushed off his trousers. “Let’s go. Be dark in a minute.”

  He slips into his mother’s bed in the middle of the night. The room is freezing, but it’s warm next to her, beneath the heavy quilt, snuggled into the flannel curve of her nightgown. She draws him close, strokes his head, and whispers, “Your father’s at peace. He’s happy with his parents in heaven. Pray for the repose of his soul.” He watches the flicker of the votive candle in front of the small statue of St. Anthony on the bureau, a steady flame encased in red glass, part of the reassuring warmth that surrounds him. Her breathing purrs on his neck. He prays she won’t die. His father had taken forever to die, relentlessly wasting from the strapping man called “Big Mike” by his friends into a wheezing relic propped on pillows by the fire escape.

  Each night, his mother had waited for the darkness to carry a milk bottle filled with scab-colored sputum down four flights and pour it into the sewer. The shadow next to the window struggled for air, rib cage moving up and down like a pump. She shaved off his mustache. He smiled at the children as she wiped his face, and Maura burst into tears at the sight of the grinning death’s head. Not long after, the visiting nurse removed him to the hospital, where he died.

  During the funeral mass, he keeps looking at his mother. He watches the way she breathes, listens to her sigh. She holds his hand at the graveside.

  “I’m cold,” he says.

  “Offer it up,” she replies softly.

  The priest reads Latin prayers from a book and sprinkles holy water on the coffin. You can tell that it’s almost over the way the gravediggers fidget with their shovels. The priest finishes and closes his book. Dunne tugs at his mother’s hand. He wants to go home. Suddenly, she lets go of his hand, raises both palms to her face, beneath the veil, and releases a sob from somewhere deep inside, from a hidden, private place. She convulses with sobbing. He begins to wail at the choking sound she makes, certain she will die as his father had, retching up her insides.

  Elba stared ahead silently, seemingly lost in a momentary reverie of her own. “It’s so peaceful,” she said. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

  An old-fashioned steam-powered tug chugged toward a small island dotted with a few one-story buildings and a water tower. The tug sounded three high-pitched blasts on its whistle as it approached a concrete pier.

  “What’s that place?” Elba asked.

  “Hart’s Island.”

  “Is it a school?”

  “A prison for the cons who can’t swing it in the pen. Cripples, crazies, geezers, the ones who’d get eaten alive in a regular lockup. The city has them repair furniture and care for the Potter’s Field.”

  “There’s a cemetery there too?”

  “The twin populations of Hart’s Island: cons and cadavers.”

  “You seem to know a lot about the place.”

  “Work the homicide detail long enough, you know about criminals and corpses, and where they get sent.” He reached his hand down to her. “Come on, it’s against the law to sleep on the beach.”

  She got to her feet without taking his hand. He picked up his jacket, shook it free of sand, and started toward the car.

  “Wait, Fin.” He held her shoes in his hand. “Just a moment longer.”

  The lights in the buildings gave the appearance of a ship anchored off shore, a ship with nowhere to go, and a cargo nobody wanted. His brother Jack was over there on the island. He had gone quickly, with no fuss. That’s the kind of kid he was, a six-year-old with shriveled legs, a haunted look. Never caused a stir. There was no money for a grave. The priest who said the funeral mass promised to do what he could. Whether he tried or forgot, John Francis Dunne ended up on the tug to Hart’s Island, to a pauper’s grave, laid to rest in the children’s section beneath a single granite cross and its one-size-fits-all inscription:HE CALLETH HIS CHILDREN BY NAME

  Sleep tight, Jack.

  “I’ll be in the car,” he said.

  She wasn’t long in coming. Dunne was already in the passenger seat, so she drove. Once they were out of the Bronx, he nodded off. She poked him awake at 86th Street and Broadway. They were pulled over in front of a newsstand. “I don’t know where you live,” she said. For an instant, he weighed spending another night at Cassidy’s, but decided against it. Too many nights on cots and couches, his back went flooey. He looked at his watch. There was time for one more stop. That way he’d get home late enough that any cop watching the place would probably have packed it in and gone back to the station.

  “Go down Broadway.”

  “How far?”

  “Till I tell you to stop.”

  Once they crossed Canal Street Elba said, “There’s not much of Broadway left. Pretty soon we’re going to be at the Battery.” The streets were empty, the office buildings dark and locked. He told her to make a left on Worth and to stop in front of a squat building in which the lights were still on.

  “Mind if I ask where you’re going?”

  “To see a doctor.”

  “Are you ill?”

  “No, but I’ll be a while.”

  She took an envelope from her pocketbook and handed it to him. “I know we haven’t agreed on formal terms, but this is intended as a retainer and as partial remuneration for the time you’ve already spent.”

  He jammed the envelope in his pocket. A hefty feel. “I’ll mail you a contract.”

  “I don’t know if anything I told you is useful. I appreciate what you’re doing.” She leaned across the seat and gave him a quick, sisterly peck.

  “Can’t solve a puzzle without the pieces. The more pieces, the better the odds. Get home safe.” He slammed the door and went into the building.

  Doc Cropsey was in the same office as the last time Dunne had seen him, his final morning as a homicide detective, nine years earlier. Same green walls, battered desk. “So, the Prodigal Son returns.” The Doc’s frown hadn’t changed, either. “I thought you died. Or got married and moved to New Jersey. Not that there’s much difference.”

  “I went out on my own. Matrimonial stuff.”

  “I hope you didn’t come looking for clients.” He nodded at the opposite wall, at a clock and a calendar hung next to each other, at crooked angles. “I’m scheduled to be at the morgue in half an hour, so whatever brings you here, make it quick.”

  “Friend of mine asked me to look into the
murder of Mary Catherine Lynch.”

  “Not much of a friend.”

  “The Professor told me you did the autopsy.”

  “That drunk is losing his grip. Understandable, I guess, after a career spent slinging slops in that trough called the New York Standard. Instead of waiting for cirrhosis to eat their livers away, he and his cronies should toss themselves in the river and get the job done quick. Drowning can be a fast way to die, long as you don’t resist.”

  “Who examined her?”

  “One of the so-called scientists now in charge of this place. Today it takes a week to do what once took a day. When I started, in ’08, the coroner was elected, and we got paid ten dollars per inquest. Most of us were good Tammany men, and we all had practices on the side. Get the job done in a flash and be off to see your own patients. Then they installed all this civil service flummery, exams, reviews, keep you all day filling out forms. Isn’t an autopsy any more, but a ‘scientific inquisition of the dead body.’ Lotta crap, you ask me.” He pointed at the calendar. “Another ninety days or so, I’ll have my thirty years. Anyone tries to stand in my way will have a heel print in the middle of his forehead. Miss Lynch was the last straw.”

  “Thought you said you didn’t do her autopsy.”

  “It was complete by the time I came in. Botched it good.” Cropsey came from behind the desk, removed his medical apron from the back of the door, and stuck it in his briefcase. “For chrissake, this boy genius missed she was strangled as well as stabbed. Even in my drinking days never made a boner that bad. Hyoid bone in the throat crushed, hemorrhaging between the broken fragments, and engorgement of the mucous membrane of the wind pipe, and he didn’t see it.”

  “You add it to the report?”

  “I wasn’t about to reopen the inquest and start another round of paperwork.”

  “Was that all that was left out?”

  “Wasn’t that enough? Sorry, Fin, can’t stay and chat. Got my job to do. I was you, I’d stick to the divorce business. The one they got for the Lynch murder will fry sure as sunshine follows rain.”

  “Always had an eye like no other.”

  “The eye isn’t what it was. Saving what’s left for the fish. I still got the shack in Southold. Once I leave here, that’s where you’ll find me, gutting porgies and blues.”

  “Seems like someone wanted to make sure Miss Lynch was dead, strangled and then stabbed her. One did the job, don’t you think?”

  “Think?” Cropsey walked to the wall and straightened the calendar. “Something like 75,000 people died in this city last year. Almost 15,000 got referred to the Medical Examiner’s Office. That’s forty-three cases a day, everything from infectious diseases to falls, car accidents, fires, suicides, homicides, you name it. After a while, it isn’t much different from gutting fish. You don’t think anything.”

  “Nothing else you noticed?”

  “Depends on what you mean by ‘noticed.’” He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jacket. “Seen a lot of stab wounds, especially before the war, when the fashion was more the stiletto than the gun. Whenever sex is involved, the savaging is more pronounced, which was evident in the Lynch case. But there was also what might be described as, well, an incision from the suprasternal notch to the symphysis pubis. I was a bit surprised this sex-crazed, liquored-up Latin could cut her up in such a careful, dispassionate way. But there’s no explaining everything a killer does, is there, Fin?”

  “That’s what I need to figure out.”

  “When you get tired, come see me in Southold. Be glad for the company.”

  The lone taxi careening across Worth Street screeched to a halt when Dunne hailed it. He got out a block from his apartment building and smoked a cigarette in the doorway across the street. No sign of a tail. He walked the three flights to his apartment. As he put his key in the lock and thought of that other key and the possibility that it was what Miss Lynch’s killer had been looking for, the reason he’d searched her jewelry box and cut her open, he became aware of footsteps; not ordinary footsteps, but the relentless clump of a heavy-set flatfoot, the registered trademark of Robert I. Brannigan.

  “Hi, Fin.” Spoken over his shoulder, directly into his ear, the words were simultaneously accompanied by the descending whap of a leather slapjack, several ounces of lightly cushioned lead, crashing down on the right side of his head. Another part of the trademark. He came to in his own bathroom. Matt Terry, Brannigan’s sidekick and deputy goon, held him lightly by the shoulders so he wouldn’t fall off the toilet. Brannigan put his fist under Dunne’s chin and raised his head.

  “You came home drunk and fell down the stairs. Lucky for you we were passin’ by and found you. You mighta’ lay there all night,” Terry said.

  “Thanks. You’re regular Good Samaritans.”

  Brannigan removed his fist, took a pail from beneath the sink, filled it with cold water, and dumped it over Dunne’s head. “There, a little dousing and you’ll be like new.”

  “Already been baptized.”

  “Keep jerking me around, it’ll be the last rites.” Brannigan shook the last drops from the pail and threw it in the tub. The clatter sharpened Dunne’s sensation that a hot spike was embedded in his skull. Terry gave him a towel. Dunne touched the towel to the side of his head. What he thought was water dripping down behind his ear was blood. It blotched the towel. Terry grimaced when Dunne handed it back to him.

  “What’s with you, Fin, that you have to go and make it hard on everybody?” Brannigan stood with his legs spread wide, jacket hanging open. “Matt and me are done in from trying to find you.”

  “You’re a little fatter, that’s all. Otherwise you look nasty as ever.”

  Matt Terry stepped between Brannigan and Dunne. “You know better than to keep the Chief waitin’.”

  Brannigan shoved Terry aside and grabbed Dunne by the tie. Dunne knocked his hand away and tried to stand, but the instant onset of dizziness made him fall back on the toilet seat. Brannigan seized his tie again, twisting it around the thick knuckles of his fist. “This is your last warning.” He twisted tighter and lifted Dunne off the seat. “You ever get in my way again, I’ll make sure . . .”

  “Chief,” Terry interrupted, “I don’t think he can breathe.”

  Brannigan loosened his grip. Dunne took a deep breath. As he let it out, he vomited. Above, the black sky was interwoven with swirls of light. A storm approached.

  When he came to, his head was in the sink. Terry poured another pail of water over it. “Gotta be more careful, buddy, seems you’re accident prone.”

  “Nice to know I got you to rely on.” Once Terry had been a friend, decent, if always a little too willing to please the higher-ups. They’d been pals together in the regiment, in France, in 1918. Now, half driven by fear of Brannigan and half seduced by basking in the glow of his boss’s power, he was nothing more than the hireling who swept up behind Brannigan like one of those circus workers who followed the elephants on their annual parade up Eighth Avenue from Penn Station to Madison Square Garden.

  Brannigan bent close. “Sorry about this, Fin. But it’s your own fault. Mrs. Babcock said you knew nothing about her intent to kill her husband. So, you see, there never was no reason to put Matt and me to all this trouble.” He patted Dunne’s shoulder. “Which means everything is square between us.” Brannigan’s voice fell to a whisper, harsh and intimate. “Just don’t let me hear any more about you poking your nose into the Grillo case. It’s over and done. Finished.”

  The impact of Brannigan’s fist against the side of his head sent Dunne off the toilet onto the floor. In the night sky, the constellations waltzed in electric circles. Mister Moon rose over the horizon. He had Charlie Chan’s countenance. Beyond Mister Moon, a star bore the impression of Roberta Dee’s face. The star directly behind had a face too. He couldn’t make it out. There was a rumble of thunder. The storm was getting closer. The wind picked up. A wave broke over Dunne’s head. He felt himself sinking int
o a lightless, noiseless void. Charlie Chan was laughing. So was Roberta Dee.

  ABWEHR HEADQUARTERS, BERLIN

  He’d slept no better the previous night than those before. In the morning, as soon as he appeared in his office, Gresser reminded him that a foreign visitor, another Englishman, was scheduled to arrive in a few minutes and inquired whether tea should be served. Canaris shook his head. This wouldn’t be a long interview. He agreed to it only because he’d been asked by the Minister of Propaganda himself, Dr. Göbbels. The occasion was a reception for foreign journalists hosted by Göbbels several nights ago on Peacock Island, a pristine enclave on the outskirts of the city that Göbbels first used for entertaining during the ’36 Olympic Games. Staying just long enough to satisfy protocol, Canaris was in line to retrieve his hat when he heard a scraping sound on the gravel path behind.

  “There you are!” Dr. Göbbels rapidly approached, his lame leg dragging over the small stones. He took hold of Canaris’s wrist. “I need a favor of you. This time instead of trying to avoid the press, I wish you to talk to one of them. My office will arrange it.” In the hope of encouraging Anglo-German amity, Göbbels explained, he wanted Canaris to speak with an English journalist who was writing a book about the naval engagements in the last war.

  Göbbels interrupted Canaris’s protest that he’d just met with the British naval attaché. “The British love to talk.”

  “It’s not my practice to give private interviews to journalists,” Canaris said.

  “I understand,” Göbbels said. “Yes, they’re all part-time spies, these journalists, but I’m confident you’ll impress him with the soldierly dedication of the German military, and I’m sure you won’t give any secrets away!” He poked a finger in Canaris’s shoulder, playfully, as though giving him an injection, and laughed. “You know what the penalty is!” A flashbulb popped as a staff photographer took their picture. Göbbels let go Canaris’s wrist and shuffled away with the same scuffing hobble.