She did not know exactly what she was looking for, but she thought she would know it when she saw it: a house full of grim men in trench coats, maybe, and government-issued furniture. The thought made her smile. And what would she do if she found it? Fear clenched her chest for a moment. Well, keep one foot out the door, and get ready to run. No, don’t be silly. She was an inoffensive volunteer for Ike. No one would give her a second thought.
Her feet hurt, and her face felt stiff from smiling, and she was beginning to resign herself to the fact that whatever house Long had been in was no longer used by the men who took him. She had probably already been in it, the door opened by a boy in a red flannel bathrobe, or a woman in a house dress, the men and their secrets long gone.
She stepped out into the street and counted the houses up the block. Six to go. And then what if nothing shows up? Another dead end.
She straightened her coat, tugged her hair tight, put on her volunteer face, and climbed the stoop to the sixth house in from the corner.
Karl Brandt unwound the bandage from Maxie’s finger and exposed the ragged, bitten wound. She sucked in her breath as the last piece of gauze pulled off. ‘It hurts.’
Brandt turned her hand to the light that hung over the kitchen table at the back of the safe house. ‘Of course it hurts,’ Brandt said. ‘When the body is insulted like this, there is always pain. But it looks much better. You are well on your way to health now.’ He smiled encouragingly, but at the same time he saw Magda’s pursed lips and the small shake of her head. She had seen what he had seen: the wound was an angry color, pus leaked from under the partial scab, and a red line of infection ran up the back of Maxie’s hand. The finger needed to be properly treated, and they did not have the facilities for that. She needed a hospital.
‘I think I should go see a doctor,’ Maxie said.
Brandt smiled and patted her good hand. ‘Maxie, Magda and I are doctors. We are doing what any doctor would do. If you go to someone else there will be questions. Questions and explanations. This would not be good.’
Spencer Shaw leaned against the wall near the sink smoking a cigarette and occasionally sipping his premixed martini. He watched the byplay at the table and said nothing. There was no reason to interfere as long as the doctors controlled the situation.
Maxie turned her hand in the light. ‘It’s infected, isn’t it? I can tell. I’m not an idiot. It’s infected, and someone has to do something.’
‘Maxie,’ Magda said, ‘it may be a little infected, but we have a new antibiotic, tetracycline, which is stronger than the penicillin you have been taking, and we will start you on a course of that today. I’m quite sure this will take care of the problem.’
‘I want to see a real doctor.’
Magda smiled through her annoyance. ‘We are real doctors, I promise you. We will take care of you.’
Shaw stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I think the best thing is for you to stay here in the house until you’re okay. The doctors can keep an eye on you, make sure everything’s going right.’
‘Bullshit. I’m not staying here with these creeps.’
‘Maxie, don’t be a pain in the ass. Do what you’re told, and everything will work out fine.’
She heard the warning note in his voice, but she had enough courage left for one more protest. ‘I want to go to a real hospital. They can come with me, but I want a real hospital.’
‘Maxie, don’t push it.’ The knife in his voice made her look down at the table.
Magda patted her hand again in conciliation. ‘Maxie, let’s start with the tetracycline, and then we’ll clean the wound again. You’ll see, everything will be fine,’ she lied.
The doorbell rang.
‘Expecting anyone?’ Shaw asked. The Brandts shook their heads. Maxie did not respond. ‘I’ll get it,’ Shaw said, and left the room carrying his glass.
Rhonda heard footsteps approaching the door. A safety chain rattled off, and a lock clicked, and the door opened and a man stood in the gap. He was about six feet tall and had hair the color of straw and eyebrows that were nearly red. He carried a martini glass and looked at her with the casual cheer of a man who has decided the world is a comedy. ‘Hello, hello,’ he said. ‘Honey, whatever you’re selling, I’m buying.’
She offered a slight smile. ‘I’m selling Dwight D. Eisenhower for President in November.’
‘And I’m buying. I like Ike.’
She looked down at her clipboard as if to check the questions she was supposed to ask. ‘How many other voters are there in the house?’
‘I’m the only one.’ He took a sip of his martini.
She wrote something on the yellow pad. ‘Are you the owner of the house?’
‘No. I rent.’ He took another sip of the martini while watching her over the rim of the glass. She looked up in time to see something change in his eyes. When he took the glass away, his smile was wider. ‘How about a drink? I make a great martini, and as much as you like Ike, it’s got to be pretty goddamn dull work volunteering. You need a pick me up.’
The cop’s girlfriend. Cassidy’s goddamn girlfriend. She was with him the other night when I followed them home. What the hell is she doing here?
‘No, thanks. I can’t, really. I’m not allowed.’ A smile of apology. ‘How long have you lived here?’
‘A couple of years.’
She doesn’t know who I am. Or she’s awfully good and isn’t showing it. What the hell is she doing here? What’s she after? Did the cop send her? How did he know about the place? Is she a cop? No. The NYPD doesn’t hire women who look like this. Get her inside. Give her some of the stuff. Ask her.
‘Look, I know you’ve got more questions, why don’t you come inside so I can shut the door and keep the cold out and the warmth in. Otherwise I vote for Stevenson.’ He offered a hand.
‘All right. I do have a few more questions.’ It would be good to get out of the cold for a moment, and then on to the last five houses. She stepped in, and Spencer Shaw closed the door behind her. She checked her list. ‘Do you think that Ike was right to keep Richard Nixon as his vice-president?’
‘Tricky Dick? I don’t know. He could have done worse, I guess. Could’ve done better. What do you think?’
She shook her head and ticked off the question. ‘What is the most important problem Ike faces in the second term?’ There was almost no furniture in the parlor off the hall. What there was looked shabby and mismatched as if it had been put there as stage dressing.
‘The Reds. No question. Let me get you that drink.’
There was something dark under his smiling, genial exterior. Suddenly she felt hemmed in by the shadowed hall. Rhonda took a half-step back, smiling to soften any offense. ‘I really can’t. I’ve got blocks to go still. But thanks.’ She heard voices coming from somewhere at the back of the house. But he had said he was alone.
‘Stick around. One drink.’
‘I really do have to go.’ She opened the door. He put his hand on it to stop it from opening wide.
‘One drink. What’s the harm?’
‘I don’t want a drink.’ She pulled at the door, but he held it so she could not move it.
‘Please.’
‘I think you should stay.’ He took her arm and pulled her away from the door. She tried to jerk away, but he was too strong. ‘Let me go.’
‘Yeah, sure. In a minute.’
Fear made her heart stumble. She swung the clipboard at his head. He blocked it easily. ‘Come on, honey, don’t do that. It’s going to be okay. I just have a few questions to ask you.’ He dragged her further from the door. She fought him, but he was too strong. She hit him with the clipboard again. ‘You bitch. Cut it out.’ He slapped her hard. Her sight dimmed, and her head rang.
Somewhere at the back of the house a piece of furniture crashed. It was followed by a man’s shout of alarm and a woman’s cry of anger. Shaw turned in time to see Maxie burst out of the back hall. Her wounded hand trailed gauze like a
pennant. Shaw released Rhonda and turned with his arms spread to stop her.
Rhonda kicked Shaw in the back of his left knee. The leg crumpled, and as he lurched to one side, the girl with the half-bandaged hand cannoned into him, and they both crashed against the wall and went down in a tangle with girl on top. She tried to crawl over him, but he grabbed her by the leg. She yelled and kicked, but she could not get loose.
Rhonda threw a look at the door, at escape. But she couldn’t leave the girl. She ran back down the hall and took the girl’s hand to pull her free. The girl screamed and pulled her wounded hand away, and Shaw yanked her back and put a hand on her chest to push himself up. Rhonda ran. She jerked open the front door and half fell, half jumped down the steps. She caught a heel and went down on the sidewalk, ripping a stocking and skinning her knee. She pulled herself up by the wrought-iron fence at the base of the stoop and took off in a hobbling, high-heeled run, sure that the man would be after her. At the corner, she had the courage to look back. The man limped out the front door and stood at the top of the stoop looking for her. She flattened herself in a doorway, and after a moment, the man turned and went back inside and closed the door.
Rhonda hurried east on Jane Street and north on Greenwich Avenue to put distance between herself and the house on West 4th. Every time she looked back, she expected to see the man with the straw-colored hair, but he was never there. She finally made herself stop at a phone booth at Jackson Square Park. She looked up the number of the police station on Charles Street, but the phone was busy. She hung up and waited while she counted to thirty. She tried again. Busy. Again. Busy. Again. Busy. She had to do something. The woman in the house was in trouble. She looked for a cab, but every one she saw had fares.
It took ten minutes walking fast to get to the Ninth Precinct station house. She went in through the big, stone-columned doorway looking for help.
She found chaos.
A man in the rough work clothes of a longshoreman lay groaning in pain on the tile floor while a uniformed cop tried to staunch the bleeding wound in his side using a handful of toilet paper as a compress. The desk sergeant shouted into a phone for ambulances, and five cops carrying shotguns stampeded past Rhonda and out the door. Cops behind a partially shut door to a back room shouted to each other the way men do in crisis.
Rhonda pushed her way to the desk, but the desk sergeant waved her away as he yelled into the phone, ‘We’ve got two cops down, and the fucker’s barricaded himself in the storeroom. Send me everybody you’ve got.’
Rhonda tried again.
‘Beat it, lady,’ the sergeant barked. ‘I don’t have time.’
A gray-haired uniformed cop took her arm and, not unkindly, moved her away from the desk. ‘Miss, you’re going to have to come back later. There’s been a shooting at a bar over on Washington. We’ve got a couple of officers hurt, and the man’s locked himself in with a gun and some hostages.’ The cop led her toward the door. He had a drinker’s belly, broken veins in his cheeks and nose, and the sad eyes of a man disappointed by life.
Rhonda stopped and pulled free of his weak grasp. ‘A man in a house on West Fourth tried to kidnap me. And he already had another woman in the house, and she’s hurt.’
‘Uh-huh. Well, that’s not good.’ He looked around at the chaos. ‘Why don’t we find a place where you can sit down, and I’ll get you a pad, and you can write it all down?’
‘Sure. Great. I’ll write it. You’ll read it and then pass it off to someone else to read, and by that time that woman might be dead.’
He held up a hand in protest. ‘Look, lady, you don’t understand, we’ve got a situation here. I can’t be running off. Somebody’s got to be here in case something comes up.’
‘Something has come up. I’m the something. Don’t you get it? Someone tried to drag me into a house by force. He already had a woman in there, and she is hurt. What more do you need?’
‘Have we got a problem, here?’ A man in a tan gabardine coat and a fedora had stopped near them. The shiny skin of a burn scar covered his left cheek and chin and pulled that corner of his mouth up in a permanent crooked smile.
‘Lieutenant, this lady’s reporting a guy who she said tried to attack her over on West Fourth. She says he may have another gal in the house and she may be hurt.’
‘He did attack me, and he does have another woman in the house, and she is hurt. I was lucky to get away.’ She raised her skirt enough so the lieutenant could see her skinned knee. He looked from her to the gray-haired cop.
‘We’re just trying to figure out what’s best to do,’ the older man said.
‘Best go take a look, don’t you think, Seeley?’ The lieutenant’s voice was mild, but the command was unmistakable.
‘Yes, sir,’ relieved that someone else had made a decision.
The lieutenant touched his hat brim with a forefinger and went out the door with two men in shirtsleeves carrying fire axes.
Rhonda said, ‘Let’s go,’ to Seeley, and left without waiting to see if he followed. Her knee had begun to stiffen, but she walked fast, and after a couple of blocks she could hear Seeley puffing to keep up.
‘Jesus, lady, take it easy. Let me catch my breath for a second.’ He stopped and bent over with his hands on his knees. ‘I’m eleven days away from thirty years in, eleven days from my retirement, and you’re going to kill me.’
‘That girl in the house may already be dead.’
‘So what good is it going to do her if I’m dead out here?’
Rhonda checked her impatience. ‘All right. Tell me when.’
When his breath slowed, he nodded to her and they set off again. Rhonda slowed her pace, but he was half a block behind when she stopped at the bottom of the stoop of the house on West Fourth. The windows of the front rooms were dark, and no lights showed in the higher floors of the house. The carriage lights on either side of the door were unlit. Seeley arrived, puffing, and stood with her at the bottom of the stoop.
‘It don’t look like anyone’s home,’ he said. ‘No lights.’
‘They might be in the rooms at the back.’
‘Waiting for the cops to arrive?’ He saw her look, and held up a hand and said, ‘Okay, okay. I’ll go see. You hang back.’
He trudged up the steps to the front door. After a moment, Rhonda followed. Seeley looked over at her for a moment but said nothing. He loosened the gun in his holster and then took a deep breath and stabbed the bell push with a thick finger. A bell bonged somewhere deep in the house. They waited. No footsteps approached down the hall. Seeley stabbed the bell again. No one came to the door.
Seeley, relieved, said, ‘Okay, then, no one here,’ and moved for the stairs. Rhonda reached over and turned the doorknob, and the door swung open to the dark front hall. Seeley hesitated for a moment until the demand of the open door became clear, then he drew his gun.
The gun in his hand changed something in him, recalled who he had been at some younger moment when the uniform had fit. With one arm he barred Rhonda from going in, pushed open the door with his foot, and followed the gun into the house. Traffic noise from Eighth Avenue came to her: a bus wheezed to a stop at a corner, horns blared, a car door slammed, a loose manhole cover banged up and down as a car rolled over it. A car passed behind her on West Fourth, the radio playing through an open window.
The hall light clicked on. Through the open door she could see Seeley pressed against the wall at the base of the stairs, his gun pointed down the hall toward the back of the house. He waved her back when she stepped through the door, but she ignored him. He slapped a hand at her, urging her to get out, but she did not retreat. He shook his head and went down the narrow hall toward the kitchen with his gun out in front.
She waited where she was. Her heart tripped in her chest, and she found it hard to get full breaths. She strained for sounds from in the house. Was there anyone upstairs? Where was Seeley? All she could hear were city noises through the open door. Should she close it? She looke
d out to the lighted houses across the street, to life going on normally and knew she did not have the courage to shut herself away from that. Where was Seeley?
A metallic crash at the back of the house was followed by a curse. Footsteps started toward her. She edged toward the open door. A light came on down the hall, and Seeley appeared holstering his gun. ‘Nobody back there. I think they’ve gone.’
‘What happened? I heard something fall.’
‘I knocked a pot off the stove in the dark.’
‘What about upstairs?’
‘There’s a phone in the kitchen. I’m going to call the stationhouse and see if they’ve got anyone to send for backup. I don’t think there’s anyone up there, but I’m not going up those stairs alone.’
She followed him back toward the kitchen. A ball of bloody gauze lay against the baseboard. ‘That’s from the woman I saw,’ Rhonda said. ‘There was something wrong with her hand. It was bleeding.’
Seeley picked up the phone on the wall near the kitchen door and dialed. Rhonda surveyed the kitchen. The pot Seeley had hit lay on the floor near the stove. There were a few glasses and plates on shelves above the sink, and an empty bottle of wine on the counter. The sink held four dirty glasses. She opened the refrigerator and found a piece of cheese wrapped in waxed paper, a partial bottle of milk, and some bottles of Coca-Cola. The freezer held two ice trays and a bottle of Gilbey’s gin. No one lived here. They camped out.
‘Seeley, here. I’m at that house the woman said someone tried to grab her.’ He shifted the phone to his other hand. ‘Yeah, she’s with me. No, so far nobody, but I only cleared the first floor. There are a couple more floors, but I’m going to need some backup.’ He listened. ‘Yeah, fine. I’ll hold tight.’ He hung up the phone. ‘They’re sending a couple of guys over. We’ll wait for them.’
Detective Osgood was a stocky, balding man whose maroon wool suit pants showed below the hem of a gray tweed overcoat. When he took off his fedora he revealed an iron-gray brush-cut and ears that stuck out like side-view mirrors. Seeley introduced him to Rhonda and told him about her encounter with the blond man and the woman with the wounded hand. He gave her a brief handshake and a sour look. The patrolman with him was a beefy blond kid with bright blue eyes who looked like he had wandered in off the farm. His name was Warshak, and he greeted Rhonda with a bashful bob of his head.
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