Suspects

by William Caunitz

  The three outside detectives took in the lieutenant’s shield pinned to Scanlon’s sport jacket.

  “We stopped for a taste, Lou,” said the bartender.

  “A taste?” Scanlon said, glaring at the detective with the telephone glued to his ear. “And I guess that’s official business.”

  The detective said quickly into the mouthpiece, “I’ll get back to you,” and hung up.

  The detective who was on the stool put down his glass and slid off.

  “Unless you three super-sleuths have an overwhelming desire to be flopped back into the bag, I’d strongly suggest that you haul ass out of here and do whatever it was you were supposed to be doing.”

  “Right, Lou,” said the bartender, leading the other two detectives from the room.

  Scanlon took in the open liquor bottles. Who the hell wrote those damn supervision texts? he thought. They were never on the Job, that was for sure.

  “A crowbar was used to pry this door open,” explained the forensics man to the group of detectives atop the co-op’s roof. He pointed his bony finger at the gouges in the doorframe. “The claws made characteristic impressions in the molding. We’re going to remove the molding and make casts of the striations.” He looked slyly at the detectives. “If any of you aces come up with the right crowbar I’ll be able to make a positive ID for you.” He moved away and walked up to the first of a file of upturned garbage cans that ran from the door to the edge of the roof. He righted the can and squatted next to a cluster of plaster of Paris that was set into the tar roof. “The warm weather softened up the tar. So when the perp knelt to fire, his toe and part of his sole pressed into the tar.” He pointed. “Here is the heel of his left foot. We added salt to hasten hardening.”

  The detectives gathered in close around the forensics man.

  “This moulage is going to give us the perp’s approximate size and weight. From the position of his foot when he knelt to fire, I can already tell you that the guy you’re looking for is probably right-handed.” He stood, carefully replaced the can over the impression, moved to the next can in line, righted it, bent. “More footprints. We’re going to develop a ‘walking picture’ of this guy.”

  A fat detective who was busy sucking on a toothpick said, “Exactly what is that?”

  The forensics man waved his hand in front of him as he explained. “A lotta things make up the walking picture. The direction line tells us the angle at which this guy put his foot down. The step line, which is the centers of two successive heelprints, is gonna tell us his size and whether he limps.” A hint of humor came into his beady eyes. “All you aces gotta do is bring the hump and his shoes to me and I’ll cement them both onto this roof.”

  “I was wondering why all that garbage was dumped in front of the building,” commented the fat detective with the toothpick, looking down the line of upturned cans that had been brought up to the roof.

  Scanlon stood at the edge of the roof listening to the forensics detective and looking down at the green, windowless ambulance: Department of Hospitals, Mortuary Division. Police vehicles were parked helter-skelter. A line of unmarked vehicles stretched to the corner. Two TV camera trucks were on the scene. Reporters pressed against the cordon, shouting questions at detectives.

  Scanlon strained his calf muscles in an attempt to shoo away the gray numbness that had taken hold of his body. The painful, nagging feeling that he had missed something or had overlooked something he shouldn’t have, that he could have prevented the murders, just would not leave him. A soul-wrenching thought kept going over and over in his mind: he’d fucked-up because his thoughts were concentrated on his personal problems, his limp dick.

  A policeman came out of the town house and fastened open the door. Morgue attendants appeared wheeling collapsible gurneys that had black body bags buckled to them. Policemen helped the attendants get the gurneys down the steps. There was a sudden surge of people against the police lines. Death seems to fascinate civilians; but then they can deal with it from afar.

  The bags were unbuckled and hefted off. The remains of Stanley and Rachel Zimmerman were slid into the body of the ambulance.

  The meat wagon drove off, its siren wailing.

  What’s with the siren? Scanlon thought. There’s no rush, not now.

  “Don’t lay a guilt trip on yourself, Lou,” Biafra Baby said, attempting to flatten inky spikes of hair. “Ain’t no way we could have prevented this.”

  “We missed something,” Scanlon said.

  “That’s a crock of shit,” Lew Brodie responded.

  “We’re only human, Lou,” Higgins said.

  Scanlon walked away, heading for the group of Nineteenth Squad detectives standing around the air vents in the middle of the roof.

  Lieutenant Jack Fable, the Whip of the Nineteenth Squad, saw him coming and went to greet him. “Howya doin’, guy?”

  Scanlon cringed inwardly at Fable’s salutation. “Guy” was the common greeting in the Job when the speaker knew the face but not the name. “Scanlon, Jack. Tony Scanlon, Nine-three Squad.”

  Belated recognition brightened Fable’s face. “Oh, yeah. How are ya?”

  Jack Fable wasn’t the lanky, baby-faced kid Scanlon remembered as the class standard bearer. The years of drinking and eating on the arm in the city’s top-drawer hotels and restaurants had taken their toll. A pelican chin sagged beneath Fable’s heavy jaw, and his beefy neck overhung his collar.

  “We were in the Academy at the same time,” Fable said, patting Scanlon’s shoulder. “Too bad you got so old-looking.”

  Scanlon wasn’t in the mood for jokes. “Got anything on this caper?”

  “We don’t have shit,” Fable said, rubbing his chin. “A radio car team discovered the daughter wandering the streets. They managed to get her name and address out of her. The rest is history. All the preliminary canvasses have proved negative so far. Nobody saw or heard nothing. The goddamn doorman was inside the package room making Zs. The perp pranced in and out without anyone seeing him.”

  The lieutenants strolled to the rear of the roof and looked out over a jumble of fire terraces and grilled windows.

  “There’s gotta be a connection someplace with your Brooklyn caper,” Fable said tonelessly.

  Scanlon shrugged, holding out his hands palms upward. “But where?” He glanced around the roof. “Where’s all the brass?”

  “It’s a little early for them. But they’ll all get here eventually. All except the PC. Command and Control can’t locate him. His wife told the sergeant on the Situations Desk that she didn’t know her husband’s whereabouts.”

  Scanlon grimaced. “One of these days he’s going to trip over his own cock.” Scanlon watched a woman in a far-off apartment cupping her breasts and running in place.

  Fable looked at Scanlon. “Wanna tell me what went down in Brooklyn?”

  Scanlon gave a rundown on the Gallagher/Zimmerman case to Fable. When Scanlon was finished, Fable said, “I can’t figure which end is up with this caper.”

  “Welcome to the club. When it first went down I thought that Joe Gallagher was probably the mark. Now? I just don’t know.”

  “What about this Eddie Hamill guy?”

  “Who knows? I guess it could have been a case of mistaken identity. Hamill or someone he hired to hit Ticornelli mistaking Gallagher for the shylock. It’s certainly something that we’re going to have to take a close look at.”

  Fable’s eyes narrowed. “What’s your gut reaction?”

  Scanlon exhaled. “Gallagher.”

  “Tell me why.”

  “Shortly before the time of occurrence we put the perp inside McGoldrick Park. We have him leaving the park about the same time as Gallagher is parking his car.”

  “And you figure that an accomplice signaled the perp that Gallagher had arrived on the scene.”

  “Something like that.”

  “The same accomplice who drove the getaway van,” Fable said.

  “Probably. But w
ho knows? There could have been a third person involved,” Scanlon said, making a mental note of how many times the woman in the apartment had run in place.

  “Why not Yetta Zimmerman as the mark?”

  “Then why wait for Gallagher to come upon the scene? She could have been taken out anytime.”

  “Maybe because someone wanted them taken out together?” Fable said. “An object lesson to others.”

  “I thought of that,” Scanlon said. “And I have to admit that that theory does hold water.”

  Fable scratched his chin. “If Gallagher is the mark, why take out the doctor and his wife?”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Scanlon said. “Unless …”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless we can tie Gallagher and Yetta Zimmerman into some heavy-duty money transactions that somehow spilled over into her family.”

  Reaching down the front of his trousers to scratch his scrotum, Fable nodded and said, “We got a real fucking mystery on our hands here.”

  “It do appear that way,” Scanlon said, wondering where he was going to get the manpower to search for Eddie Hamill, do the other things that needed doing, and still have detectives available to cover the chart. He was going to have to get a couple of precinct anticrime cops on a “steal” for a day or two, he decided.

  “We might get lucky,” Fable said, leading Scanlon away from the edge of the roof, over to the upended garbage cans. He righted one, and the two lieutenants squatted around the rough piece of drying plaster.

  Higgins came over and hunkered down beside Scanlon.

  “When the lab boys lift this impression and clean it off, we’re going to have a pretty good portrait parlé of the perp,” Fable said.

  Hector Colon wandered over to the three squatting figures. His eyes fell to Higgins’s opened knees, and his lustful gaze darted under her dress.

  “There’s something funny about this footprint,” Higgins noted, suddenly conscious of an intrusive presence. Her eyes flicked up and she brought her legs together and replaced the garbage can over the plaster.

  Colon came up to her. “Señorita Higgins, you are indeed a very beautiful woman.”

  “Why thank you, Hector. Did you like what you saw?”

  He moved in close to confide, “Very much. Latin men are turned on by hairy women.” He looked around to make sure no one was listening, and said, “If you ever have the urge to change your luck, call me. I’d love to come inside you.”

  She patted his cheek. “How thoughtful of you, Hector. But to tell you the truth, I don’t think you could come if I called you.”

  The lieutenants moved off by themselves. “Do you think we should form a task force to work both cases?” Fable asked.

  Taking in the chiseled outline of Manhattan, Scanlon replied, “Off the top of my head, no. Task forces are cumbersome. Too many chiefs pushing their weight around, and too many Indians looking to get lost.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Fable said. “We’ll work together, coordinate over landline. You and me are a couple of old hairbags who ain’t goin’ nowhere in the Job. There shouldn’t be any ego problems with us.”

  “You’re right. I’ll send you copies of my Fives and you send me yours. If anything heavy goes down, I’ll get on the horn to you.”

  “And I’ll do the same.”

  Deputy Chief McKenzie arrived on the scene a little after 0800 hours. He went directly to the edge of the roof and stared down into the Zimmermans’ bedroom window. After a few minutes he turned, scanned the crowd, and called out to Scanlon.

  Scanlon heard him and came over to him.

  McKenzie was solemn. “Thank God we’re off the hook with Gallagher.” He wiped the back of his neck with his handkerchief. “It’s obvious that Gallagher was just a poor slob who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “That’s not so obvious to me.”

  “Whaddaya wanna make problems for, Scanlon? Let it go, for Chrissake.”

  Scanlon’s voice was full of barely controlled anger. “We got four DOAs. One of whom was a police lieutenant. We have a little girl who has been orphaned. And you got the balls to tell me to let go of it?”

  “Scanlon, the Nineteenth caught this one. The solution to both cases is across the street in that bedroom. Be reasonable, bang out a Five, and transfer your Sixty-one to the Nineteenth. They’ll combine both cases. We’ll be off the hook and you’ll be able to take an exceptional clearance on your case.”

  “The answer is no. I’m one of those old-fashioned detectives who still believes in clearing homicides by arrests, not by statistical flim-flam.” He stormed off.

  McKenzie went after him. “I’ve been approved by the promotion board. This Gallagher thing is a Roman spear that can turn on all of us. Drop it!”

  “No.”

  “You’re an obstinate wop, you know that, Scanlon?”

  With his right forefinger and middle finger pressed into his thumb, Scanlon shook his hand in McKenzie’s face in an Italian gesture of contempt and said, “Va’ffa’n’culo.”

  “Whaddaya say?”

  “I said that I’d love some capicola. That’s an Italian cold cut that’s made out of salami and mortadella. You people usually eat it on white bread with mayonnaise.” He walked away leaving the deputy chief pounding fists against the sides of his legs.

  Chief of Detectives Alfred Goldberg appeared, half an hour after MacAdoo McKenzie, accompanied by his usual retinue of Palace Guard flunkies.

  Fable and the rest of the Manhattan South brass rushed up to the CofD to fill him in on the preliminary investigation.

  Scanlon motioned to his detectives to make themselves scarce.

  Nine-three Squad detectives began to drift toward the stairwell. Scanlon noticed Colon lean into Higgins and whisper something. Higgins’s elbow smashed into Colon’s ribs.

  MacAdoo McKenzie ambled over to Scanlon. “Why don’t you make yourself scarce before Goldberg spots you? He’s bound to ask you questions about Gallagher. Questions that the PC don’t want you to answer.”

  “What a way to run a police department,” Scanlon said, moving off toward the stairwell.

  “Hey, Scanlon, I wanna talk to you,” Goldberg shouted from inside a circle of detectives.

  Scanlon sighed and started to go to the CofD.

  “Wait there. I’ll come to you,” Goldberg yelled, dismissing the others with a mere flick of his finger.

  Scanlon rested his fake leg on the rim of a skylight and waited.

  Goldberg stopped several times to ask questions of forensics technicians. Scanlon noticed that the CofD talked out of the side of his mouth. The CofD worked hard trying to enhance his public image as a tough guy. But within the Job he was known as a guy with short arms and deep pockets who got his fashionable clothes on the arm from his friends in the garment district.

  He was shorter than most of his contemporaries and tried to compensate with platform shoes and by smoking big cigars. He was in his middle fifties and wore his hair stretched across his head like a starched rug. He only patronized the city’s best hair stylists, and he always went to great pains to tell the owners of the salons to send their bills to his office at police headquarters. The bills never came, and Goldberg never inquired why.

  Goldberg shifted the oversize cigar over his thick, protruding lips. “I don’t see your friend Bobby Gomez,” he said threateningly to MacAdoo McKenzie.

  “I guess the PC got stuck someplace else,” McKenzie said. “There’s a triple homicide in the Bronx—he’s probably there.”

  “Bullsheeit. He’s probably in El Barrio sucking on some cuchifrita’s cunt,” Goldberg said.

  “That don’t make him a bad person,” Scanlon said. “Besides, I’m sure there’s a good reason for him not being here.”

  Goldberg looked at McKenzie. “You’re a long way from Brooklyn, Chief.”

  “Command and Control notified me what went down here. I thought I might be able to help,” McKenzie
said, wiping his brow.

  “That shows a high degree of professionalism, Chief. But I really don’t think we’re going to be needing your expertise on this one. But thanks anyway.”

  “Right,” McKenzie said and left.

  Scanlon took a deep breath of the cool morning air, looked up to the soft blue sky, and thought of Jane Stomer. He wondered if she ever thought about him, and hoped that she had not been with another man. He wondered, not for the first time, what life must be like for men with normal jobs and families. He suddenly felt terribly sad and very old. He came back to the present and saw Goldberg looking at him strangely.

  “McKenzie thinks this double homicide washes out yours. But we know better, don’t we?”

  “Do we?”

  Goldberg pulled the cigar from his mouth and pointed the wet end at Scanlon. “You, McKenzie, and Bobby Boy are trying to keep the lid on the Gallagher case. Bobby Boy’s escapades are beginning to leak into print. He can’t afford any more scandals. A little shove and El Spico is out.”

  Scanlon made a noncommittal shrug. “I don’t know where you get your information from, but—”

  “Cut the shit, Scanlon. Gallagher’s rep for broads was well known in the Job. He used to score pussy on city time.” He pumped the cigar back into his mouth. “I’d like you to tell me exactly what you’ve come up with on Gallagher.”

  Scanlon made a gesture of helplessness. He was trapped in a private war between the PC and the CofD. It was not because the PC had told him not to tell Goldberg the details of the case that Scanlon decided not to say anything. It was because he did not want to drop the match that would start a wildfire of rumor about Joe Gallagher. Gallagher was no straight arrow, but he was a cop, and he was the cop who was responsible for Scanlon’s being able to stay in the Job after he lost his leg. He owed Gallagher. And Italians don’t forget. It’s all a matter of honor. “It’s all in my Fives, Chief.”

  A nasty smile was his reward. “I’ve read every Five you’ve sent in on the Gallagher/Zimmerman case.” His voice stretched thin in anger. “They all read like Alice in Wonderland. I’ve spent most of my life reading Fives. All I have to do is glance at one to know if a score has been made on a case, or whether some sharp-ass detective or squad commander is not putting everything he knows down on paper.” He moved in close, said, “Why dontcha tell me about Gallagher?”