Suspects

by William Caunitz

  She had identified the same composite as Thomas Tibbs. Scanlon let his hands fall between his legs, rubbing his palms together. “Mrs. Thorsen, there is a question that I must ask you.”

  She tensed.

  “What were you doing in McGoldrick Park?”

  “I thought that was obvious, Lieutenant. I was sitting on a bench with my child, enjoying a beautiful June day.”

  “I see,” Scanlon said, looking into her beautiful eyes. “Mrs. Thorsen, what is your relationship with Thomas Tibbs?” He watched her fight to keep her composure.

  “Who?” she said.

  “Thomas Tibbs,” he repeated. “I believe that you drove into Manhattan and picked him up, and then drove to Greenpoint to spend some stolen moments together. You couldn’t find a parking space, so you and your baby got out while he searched for a spot.”

  She said nothing; her gaze was unflinchingly fixed on him; her hands squeezed the cushion of the chair.

  He continued. “You and Tibbs have stumbled into a homicide investigation, and until it’s put to bed your lives are in the public domain. The only reason I bring up Tibbs is to advise you that at some point in time someone else might ask you about your relationship with Tibbs. And if that time should come, I’d like you both to be prepared.”

  “Thank you for your concern, Lieutenant.” She got up. The interview was over.

  “Will you discuss the possibility of being hypnotized with your husband?” he asked, walking with her to the door. “I’d really appreciate it if you would.”

  “I will discuss it with my husband,” she said, reaching for the doorknob. “My husband and I discuss everything together—we have no secrets.”

  “I’m glad,” Scanlon said. “That’s how it should be.”

  Watching oncoming traffic for an opening, Higgins said, “How’d you know?”

  “Their statements,” Scanlon said. “She lives in Bath Beach at the ass end of Brooklyn and turns up in Greenpoint with her baby. He works in Manhattan, takes the seven-sixteen from Scarsdale, and then he shows up in Greenpoint in the middle of a business day. You don’t have to be Holmes to figure that one out.”

  A bus passed, enveloping their car in a cloud of carbon monoxide and other noxious fumes. “Will we be able to use them in court?” Higgins said, driving from the space with a scrunch of tires.

  “By the time this caper gets into court, if it ever does, they’ll have their act together.”

  5

  All the ladies had one thing in common: they’d all committed adultery with Lt. Joseph P. Gallagher.

  Scanlon had Higgins telephone them at their homes and ask them to come into the Squad for a chat. Each of them sounded nervous about being associated publicly with the dead police hero. Higgins had assured each of them that they wouldn’t be embarrassed. One of the best ways to secure the help of hostile witnesses is to instill a sense of security, eliminate the fear of exposure. Policemen lie a lot. After about forty minutes of not so gentle coaxing, Maggie Higgins had gotten each of the ladies to agree to come into the Squad and be interviewed. She had scheduled their appointments so that none of the ladies would meet.

  Donna Hunt was a diminutive woman in her early forties. She brought to mind the phrase “pocket Venus.” Her figure was beautifully proportioned and her green eyes perfectly made up. But her clothes and jewelry were just a bit too loud and emphatic. She was obviously nervous and wore a paper-thin smile when she appeared at the squad-room gate and asked to see Detective Higgins. She stood behind the carved gate wringing a lace handkerchief while Christopher went to get Higgins out of the property room.

  After a quick introduction, Higgins led the witness across the squad room and into Scanlon’s office. As soon as the door to the Whip’s office closed behind her, Donna Hunt threw herself into a chair and cried hysterically. Without being asked a question, she blurted out her story.

  Donna Hunt had been married for twenty-six years to Harold, who was an accountant, a good provider, a loving father, and the only man she had ever gone to bed with. At fifty-two, Harold had lost interest in sex. Whenever she initiated lovemaking Harold would inevitably demur on the grounds that he was too tired or not in the mood. She stopped trying. With her two children away at college, Donna Hunt found herself alone more and more. Harold worked late most nights. Clients, he said. But she was beginning to have her doubts.

  One day while she was driving through Astoria on her way to meet her sister for lunch a police car pulled alongside and the driver motioned her to the curb. It was on Steinway Street, she remembered, across from the new Pathmark shopping center. Through her sideview mirror she saw a policeman get out of the car and swagger up to her. He had been polite. She had run a stop sign, he said. She protested that she hadn’t. At some point during the exchange a man in civilian clothes got out of the police car and came over and told the policeman he was in a hurry. The man in the civilian clothes asked her her name and smiled. “I’m Joe Gallagher,” he said, smiling again, and walked back to the police car.

  Around noontime the next day her telephone rang at home and she was surprised when the voice at the other end announced that he was Joe Gallagher. He was a police lieutenant and had gotten her home number by running a make on her license plate, he told her. He was conducting an investigation into a payroll robbery that had occurred around the time she had driven past the Path-mark. Would it be possible for him to interview her concerning this crime? Perhaps they could meet and have a cup of coffee?

  Six days after that first meeting, Donna Hunt went to bed with Joe Gallagher. It was the sort of experience she had fantasized about many times. She remembered lying beside him exulting in herself. A man had wanted her; had pursued her; had enjoyed her. She was a woman again. The affair gave her empty life meaning. She had been surprised at how guiltless she had felt. She had loved every moment of it—at first.

  During one of their noontime rendezvous in Jackson Heights he had gotten out of bed and returned with a vibrator and a pair of anal love beads. Do you like to experiment? he had asked, gently pushing her legs apart. She had been shocked by the ferocity of her newly discovered passion.

  Three days later Gallagher telephoned her at home. Never call before ten A.M., she had warned. Would she be interested in a threesome? he asked. He had a friend who had a friend.

  Donna Hunt looked pleadingly up at Scanlon, who was perched on the edge of the desk staring down at her. Her eyes were swollen, her cheeks streaked black with mascara. Her sobs had turned to heaves, and she was fighting for breath. Higgins, who had been standing against the wall, came over and handed the witness some sheets of Kleenex. The witness smiled weakly and took them.

  Hector Colon, who had slipped into the office while Donna Hunt was talking, left the office and returned with a glass of water.

  After drinking the water, she began to make glass rings on the desk. “I did it,” she whispered.

  “Did what?” Scanlon asked gently.

  “I participated in the threesome. It was with Joe and another woman. I’d never been with another woman that way. I realized that I was out of control. Like being in quicksand, being dragged deeper and deeper. When he called again I told him that it was over. That I’d never see him again. He telephoned several times but I held firm. Finally he stopped calling.”

  “When was the last time you heard from him?” Scanlon asked.

  “Seven months ago.” She looked up at Scanlon. “Harold is an unforgiving man. He’d leave me if he ever found out.”

  Scanlon felt sorry for her. A woman puts a lot on the line every time she spreads her legs, he thought. “Your husband will never know anything from us, Mrs. Hunt. Whatever you tell us will remain confidential.” He didn’t tell her that someday she might have to testify in court. Policemen have to lie a lot. She gripped his hands. “Thank you.”

  He picked up a photograph from the desk, one that he had found in Gallagher’s locker. He held it up to her. “Is this you, Mrs. Hunt?”


  “Oh, God!” She looked away. “He asked me to pose, and I did.”

  “Mrs. Hunt, what was the name of the other woman who participated with you in the threesome?”

  “Luise Bardwell.”

  Scanlon looked at Higgins. The name Luise had been written in Gallagher’s address book in parentheses next to that of George Harris, the sergeant friend of Joe Gallagher who had been brought into the Seventeenth Narcotics District to run Gallagher’s unit for him.

  “Was Gallagher an active participant in the threesome?” Scanlon asked.

  Donna Hunt looked down at her hands. “Joe knelt on the bed watching and masturbating. He, he ejaculated over my breasts.” She craned her head and looked at Higgins. “Is there a ladies’ room?”

  Higgins banged on the bathroom door and hearing no response pushed the door open and stuck her head inside.

  Donna Hunt stopped just inside the doorway and took in the urinals. There was one doorless stall with a lot of crushed cigarettes and newspapers, and girlie magazines strewn around the base of the bowl. A large cardboard sign was on the wall: Female POs are to throw their sanitary napkins in the waste barrels and not in the toilet. Auth. C.O. 93 Pct.

  Higgins saw her aversion. “Pretty disgusting, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t you have a ladies’ room?”

  “The newer station houses have. We have to put up with unisex johns.”

  “But aren’t they ever cleaned?”

  “Every morning. But they don’t stay clean long.”

  She looked around in disgust. “Men are such pigs.”

  “You’ve noticed,” Higgins said, leaning her back into the door, preventing anyone from intruding.

  “We wondered why we didn’t find any personal things of yours in his apartment,” Higgins asked her while she was still in the toilet stall.

  “Joe wouldn’t permit it,” she responded. “He said that he didn’t want me to leave anything incriminating. Not even in his medicine cabinet.” The toliet flushed and the witness walked out of the stall, heading for the sink on the other side of the bathroom.

  “Did he ever mention his wife?”

  “No,” Mrs. Hunt said, taking a handful of brown paper towels from the shelf above the sink and cleaning off the sink and the soap-splattered mirror. “I asked Joe if he was seeing any other woman and he assured me he wasn’t. I was concerned with catching something.” She balled up the towels and tossed them into the cardboard waste barrel next to the sink. Then she washed her face and hands.

  Higgins remained on guard duty. “Did Joe ever mention any of his business dealings?”

  Donna Hunt applied lipstick. “Nooooo.”

  “What ever possessed you to pose for those photographs?”

  Donna Hunt lowered the stick from her lips, studying her reflection in the mirror, pondering the question. “I really don’t know. He asked me to do it and I did. I never thought of the consequences.”

  Mary Posner was the next witness. She arrived thirty minutes after Donna Hunt had left. Posner was elegantly dressed in a white linen suit and heavy summer jewelry. She had short chestnut hair and a mature face that had retained much of its former beauty. Scanlon put her in her early fifties.

  “Why the hassle?” Mary Posner said, crossing her legs and tucking her skirt under.

  “No hassle,” Scanlon said. “We’d just like to ask you a few questions concerning your relationship with Joe Gallagher.”

  Mary Posner reached into her leather pocketbook and removed a box of foreign cigarettes and lit one. “I don’t like men very much. I wonder sometimes why I keep going to bed with them.”

  “It has something to do with the genes.”

  Mary Posner chortled. “You’re cute for a cop.” A look of concern came over her. “Before I answer your fercockta questions I want to know if you found a photograph of me in Gallagher’s home-away-from-home.”

  “We did.”

  “I want it back.”

  “That can be arranged.”

  “Arranged my ass. No pitchee, no talkee.” She flipped ash off to the side.

  He watched her, not talking.

  She took another drag on her cigarette and coughed. “I take it back, you’re not cute.”

  He waited.

  She tapped her foot, annoyed. At length she said, “Look, Lieutenant. I got a problem and I can use your help.”

  “We all have problems, Mary. A police lieutenant and a candy store lady have been murdered. That’s a problem.”

  “I sure as hell didn’t kill them.”

  “No one said you did.”

  She leaned out of her seat and reached for the brown department-issue ashtray on his desk. Thoughtfully stubbing out the cigarette, she said, “Sy Posner is my husband. He’s one of the biggest factors in the garment district. Sy finances a lot of the rags that are made there. He’s my last shot in life. I’ve been married three times before Sy and have been knocking around since before the Boer War. Sy and I have only been married three years. His first wife died five years ago. They’d been married for thirty-seven years and in all that time Sy had never been unfaithful.” A disbelieving smile parted her lips. “Sy was probably the only faithful Jew on Fashion Avenue. Sy never had a big sex drive, and now that he’s older …”

  “I understand,” Scanlon said. “Tell me about you and Joe Gallagher.”

  Mary Posner sighed in resignation and began to recount her first meeting with the dead police lieutenant. Gallagher had used the same old traffic-stop ploy to meet her, the one that many cops use to meet women. But unlike Donna Hunt, this witness was no novice at infidelity. She had played the game from both sides of the street, as the wife and as the girlfriend. Her relationship with Gallagher had been brief. “I don’t like kinky men.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  She told Scanlon of Gallagher getting up out of the bed and returning with the vibrator and anal love beads, and asking her if she liked to experiment. “I looked him right in the eye and said, ‘Listen, kiddo, I’ve done all the experimenting I intend to do. The only thing that gets into my behind is suppositories.’ I told him that if he was so hot on anal love he could string the goddamn beads up his own ass.”

  “What was his reaction?”

  “He laughed and claimed he was only kidding. But I saw that tense look he was wearing. Your dead lieutenant was a sicky, a weirdo in blue. He proved that later.”

  “What happened later?”

  She looked at her hands, examining brown spots. “We made love and then he dozed off. After a while he awoke and we went at it again. But this time when he was ready he withdrew and dirtied my stomach. Then he went down between my legs and licked up his own mess. I’ve been with a lot of men and none of them ever went in for anything like that. Your dead hero was a fag.”

  Scanlon exhaled. He looked over at Higgins and Colon, who both shrugged.

  “Can you tell me anything else?” Scanlon asked.

  The witness told how Gallagher had slid from the bed and gone to the closet and taken out a Polaroid camera and snapped her picture. She told of leaping naked from the bed trying to get the camera away from him. He was too strong for her. She never saw him again after that. She half expected him to try to blackmail her, sell the photograph back to her. But she never heard from him again.

  “How long ago was that?” Scanlon asked, watching her face for the lie.

  “Seven, eight months ago.”

  “Did you always go to his Jackson Heights apartment?”

  She scoffed. “Some dump.”

  “Did he ever ask you for money?”

  “I don’t give men money. It usually works the other way around, presents and stuff.”

  Scanlon opened the top drawer of his desk and took out one of the Polaroids that he’d found in Gallagher’s locker. He held it up to her. “You?”

  “Me,” she said in a disgusted tone. “Look at those thighs and that flab. I’m going on a diet.”

  “I can’t
let you have this back now. But I promise you that as soon as the case is over, I’ll get it back to you.”

  “Are you going to have to use that photo in court?” she asked with a worried tone.

  He held out a calming hand. “No way. I promise you that.” He saw her relax and wondered why Donna Hunt had not asked him to return her photograph.

  C. Aubrey White was one of the legal carnivores who show up each morning before the start of court to prey on the distressed relatives and friends of prisoners who were arrested the night before and were scheduled for morning arraignment. The arresting officer was the usual shill. He’d introduce the relative or friend to the lawyer and then discreetly leave to draw up the complaint, giving the lawyer time to discuss his fee. After being retained and extracting as much money up front as he could, the eminent member of the bar would then be most punctilious in his adherence to the most sacred of judicial ethics: bleed ’em and plead ’em. During one of the numerous defense-requested adjournments the arresting officer would be slipped his fifteen percent finder’s fee, in cash, of course.

  Scanlon was taken aback when he saw the silver-haired lawyer, accompanied by a woman in her early twenties, enter the squad room. He did not like C. Aubrey White or the rest of the legal carnivores, or the cops who did business with them, but like so many cops Scanlon realized there was nothing that he could do about it. The practice of “steering” had been going on for years, a practice that every judge and every district attorney in criminal justice was aware of and deplored, a practice that enhanced the contempt that honest cops felt for the system.

  C. Aubrey White gripped his silver-topped cane and shifted his considerable weight forward, resting on it. “Tony, ol’ friend, comrade in arms, this child is my dear sister’s daughter, Rena Bedford. She asked her uncle Aubrey to accompany her to the Bastille in the hope of straightening out whatever minor unpleasantness might exist concerning her relationship with the departed hero, Joe Gallagher.”

  Rena Bedford was a pretty young thing with long hair the color of almonds. She had brown eyes and the bemused look of eternal virginity. Scanlon found it hard to imagine her getting it on with Joe Gallagher.