by Ed McBain
“Yes, in Carey,” Broome said.
“Sure, I remember,” Hawes said.
“So now you’re in trouble again,” Meyer said.
“I didn’t steal her refrigerator!” Broome said.
“Then who did?”
“I don’t know!”
“All right, don’t get so excited.”
“I want a lawyer,” Broome said. “I want to call my mother.”
“Just a little while ago, you said you didn’t want a lawyer.”
“I want one now.”
“Why? You going to tell us what happened?”
“Nothing happened. I didn’t steal her refrigerator.”
“But you did kill some girl, huh?”
“No. What’s one thing got to do with the other?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Broome. Suppose you tell us.”
“I want to call my mother.”
“Why?”
“To tell her…to let her know everything’s all right. To…to…I want to call her.”
“I thought you wanted a lawyer?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Can you afford one, Mr. Broome? Or shall we get one for you?”
“I don’t know any lawyers in this city.”
“Shall we get one for you?”
“Yes. If you’re going to trick me into saying things—”
“We’re not going to trick you into anything,” Meyer said. “Cotton, call Legal Aid. We need a lawyer up here right away.”
“I asked for some coffee,” Broome said. “Where’s my coffee?”
“Breach!” Meyer yelled.
“Coming!” Breach yelled back.
It is difficult to determine why a man who has lived with guilt for such a long time will suddenly decide to tell everything. Go ask Theodor Reik. Perhaps, in the case of Roger Broome, it was merely the sudden appearance of Hawes that convinced him the jig was up. But then, how would that explain his getting up on a barroom table and announcing to the world that he had killed a girl and got away with it?
Now, in the midnight stillness of the squadroom, in the presence of two detectives, a police stenographer, and an appointed lawyer, Roger Broome told them everything, told them without any sense of relief, told them simply and directly and in a flat monotone about the girl he had met one winter, this must have been five years ago, no, it was only four, the month was February, a day or two before Valentine’s Day, he could remember buying a card for his mother and also one for the landlady of the rooming house where he was staying, a woman named Mrs. Dougherty. But that was after he had met the girl, after he had killed the girl.
The girl’s name was Molly Nolan, she had come here to the city from Sacramento, California, to look for a job. She was staying at a place called The Orquidea on Ainsley Avenue, he had met her in a bar, had a few drinks with her, and then had taken her back to his room at Mrs. Dougherty’s. She was a redheaded girl, not pretty, not at all pretty, but he had taken her to bed with him, and had told her she was beautiful, and then—he did not know why—he had suddenly begun hitting her, first in the eye, and then in the nose, making her bleed, and seeing that she was about to start screaming he had reached out quickly and grabbed her throat in his hands and squeezed her until she was dead.
He had carried her out of his room in the dead of night, down to the basement, where he had stuffed her into the old refrigerator after removing all the shelves. He had had to break both her legs to get her inside, he told them, and then he’d carried the refrigerator out to his truck and drove to a bridge someplace, he didn’t remember the name of it but he could show them where it was, he had driven over that same bridge many times since and wondered each time if the refrigerator with the dead girl in it was still in the mud on the bottom of the river where he had dropped it that night so long ago.
He suddenly asked if the detective with the deaf and dumb wife still worked here, surprising them all, and then he began weeping and at last said, “My mother’ll kill me,” and signed three copies of the typed confession.
It was nice to solve old cases.
The lady who had been stabbed, however, the lady named Margie Ryder was still with them.
At 10:00 A.M. on November 1, Detective-Lieutenant Sam Grossman of the Police Laboratory called the 87th and asked to talk to Steve Carella. When Carella got on the line, Grossman told him a joke about a man who opened a pizza parlor across the street from the Vatican, and then got down to business.
“This electric razor,” he said.
“What electric razor?”
“The one we found in the bathroom of the Leyden apartment.”
“Right.”
“We dusted it for prints and discovered something very interesting.”
“What was that?”
“The prints belonged to the killer.”
“To Damascus?”
“Is that his name?”
“Well, let’s say he’s our prime suspect at the moment.”
“Why don’t you pull him in?”
“Can’t find him,” Carella said.
“Well, anyway, the fingerprints on the razor match the ones we found on the shotgun, so how about that?”
“I don’t get it,” Carella said.
“Neither do I. Would you go shoot two people and then shave yourself with the dead man’s razor?”
“No. Would you?”
“No. So why did this guy do it?”
“Maybe he needed a shave,” Carella suggested.
“Well, I guess I’ve heard stranger things,” Grossman said.
“So have I.”
“But why would he have taken such a risk? A shotgun makes a hell of a lot of noise, Steve. Can you imagine a guy firing a shotgun four times, and then leisurely sauntering into the john to shave himself? With an electric razor, no less? It takes an hour to get a shave with one of those things.”
“Well, not that long.”
“However long,” Grossman said. “You shoot two people, your first instinct is to get the hell out. You don’t go take a shave with an electric razor.”
“Unless you know that the old lady across the hall is deaf and the only other apartment on the floor is empty.”
“You mean to tell me nobody else in the building heard those shots?”
“They heard them.”
“And?”
“The usual. Nobody called the police.”
“In any case, the killer must have known he’d made a lot of noise. He should have run.”
“But you’re saying he didn’t.”
“I’m saying he took a shave.”
“So what do you think?”
“I think you’re dealing with a psycho,” Grossman said.
Gloria Leyden lived in a midtown apartment house on the edge of the River Dix. There was a doorman downstairs, and he stopped Carella and Kling in the lobby and then phoned upstairs to let Mrs. Leyden know who was there. She promptly advised him to send them up, and they were whisked to the seventeenth floor by an elevator operator who kept whistling “I Don’t Care Much” over and over again, off key.
The apartment overlooked the river, with wide sliding glass doors that opened onto a small terrace. The place was done in Danish modern, the walls white, the rugs beige. There was a clean, well-ordered look to everything. The four cats with whom Mrs. Leyden shared the apartment seemed to have been chosen because they harmonized with the color scheme. They moved suspiciously in and out of the living room as the detectives questioned Mrs. Leyden, stopping to sniff at Kling’s cuff, and then at Carella’s shoe, one after the other, as if they themselves were detectives checking and rechecking a doubtful piece of evidence. They made Kling nervous. He kept thinking they could smell Anne Gilroy on him.
“Mrs. Leyden, we just wanted to ask you a few question
s,” Carella said.
“Yes,” Mrs. Leyden said, and nodded. It was 11:00 in the morning. She was wearing a belted housecoat, but she was clearly corseted beneath it. Her hair did not seem as violently lavender as it had that day in the mortuary. She sat perched on the edge of a chair covered in a nubby brown fabric, her back to the glass doors.
“To begin with, did you ever hear either your son or your daughter-in-law speaking of a man named Walter Damascus?”
“Walter what?”
“Damascus.”
“No. Never.”
“Walter anybody?”
“No. None of their friends were named Walter.”
“Did you know many of their friends?”
“Some of them.”
“And your son never mentioned—?”
“No.”
“Nor your daughter-in-law?”
“I rarely spoke to my daughter-in-law,” Mrs. Leyden said.
“Does that mean—”
“Never confidentially, anyway.”
“But you were on speaking terms?”
“Yes, we were on speaking terms.”
“Didn’t you get along, Mrs. Leyden?”
“We got along, I suppose. Are you asking me if I liked her?”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“I see.”
“I assure you, young man, that I do not know how to use a shotgun.”
“No one suggested—”
“My son was killed along with her, are you forgetting that?”
“Did you get along with him, Mrs. Leyden?”
“Splendidly.”
“But not your daughter-in-law?”
“No. Not from the very beginning.”
“Which was when?”
“He brought her home from one of his trips. This must’ve been seven or eight years ago.”
“Where did she come from originally?”
“Alabama. He brings me home a Southern girl. You should have seen her. It was the summertime, she came into this very room wearing a tight yellow dress, straight out of Scarlett O’Hara. Some first impression.”
“What was her maiden name?”
“Rose Hilary Borden. They use all three names in the South, you know. She kept telling me about all her cousins, all of them with three names, Alice Mary Borden, and David Graham Borden, and Horace Frank Borden, straight out of Scarlett O’Hara, you should have heard her. She was an only child herself, you know, but she had these thousands of cousins scattered all over the countryside, eating corn fritters and chitlings, I suppose. I told my son immediately that I didn’t like her. Well, what can you do? He loved her, he said. Gave him a little poontang, I suppose, down South there on one of his lonely trips, men are all alike.”
Carella glanced at Kling. Neither of them said a word. Mrs. Leyden nodded her head in agreement with her own philosophy, and then said, “He was a very handsome boy, my son, he could have had any girl he wanted. Whenever he was on the road, the phone would ring every ten minutes, always another girl calling to ask when Andrew would be back. So he brings home Rose Hilary Borden in her tight yellow dress.”
“He was living here with you before they got married, is that it?” Kling asked.
“Yes, certainly. My husband passed away, poor soul, when Andrew was still a boy. You wouldn’t expect a person to leave his widowed mother all alone, would you?”
“How old was he when he got married?” Carella asked.
“This was eight years ago, he was thirty-two.”
“And you said he met Rose down South, in Alabama?”
“Yes, Montgomery.”
“We understood his territory was in the West.”
“Not at that time. He was transferred three or four years ago, after they were married.”
“Tell me, Mrs. Leyden, did you know your son would be coming home last weekend?”
“No.”
“He didn’t call you?”
“No.”
“Did you speak to your daughter-in-law anytime last weekend?”
“My daughter-in-law never called me when Andrew was away,” Mrs. Leyden said. “And I never called her, either.”
“We were just wondering if he’d told her he was coming. Apparently there’d been a change of plans—”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Mrs. Leyden said. “She didn’t even tell me the time she was pregnant. I only found out after she lost the baby, and that was because Andrew mentioned it.”
“When was this?”
“In May.”
“She was pregnant and lost the baby?”
“Yes, in her second month.”
“Mrs. Leyden, forgetting the name Walter Damascus for the moment, do you know of any of their friends who—?”
“No.”
“…might have harbored a grudge or—”
“No.”
“…for any reason whatever might have done something like this?”
“No,” Mrs. Leyden said.
“And you’ve never heard of Walter Damascus?”
“No.”
So that was that. The cats sniffed around a bit longer, Mrs. Leyden told the detectives again what a bitch her daughter-in-law was, and it was suddenly time for lunch.
It had been reasoned, perhaps incorrectly, that Walter Damascus might possibly return to his apartment to pick up the check he had left in his dresser drawer on the night of the Leyden murders. The theory behind such reasoning was simple: A man on the run needs money. So Detective Arthur Brown was assigned to a plant in Damascus’s slovenly pad, and he sat alone there that Friday afternoon, a tall burly Negro who was darker than the darkness around him, wearing a blue cardigan sweater over a blue sports shirt, gray flannel slacks, his overcoat thrown over the back of a kitchen chair, his gun in his hand.
Brown did not like solitary plants, and he particularly disliked this one because the apartment stank and because there was nothing to see but the mess Damascus had left behind him. In an automobile stakeout, people kept coming and going, you watched the passing show, it was interesting. Even when you were planted in the back of a store, you could hear customers out front, you had a sense of life steadily moving, it was reassuring. Here, there was nothing but semidarkness and silence. Damascus, whatever else he was, was most certainly a slob, and the smell in the apartment, combined with the darkness and the solitude, made Brown wish he had joined the Department of Sanitation instead. If he had, he would at this moment be riding a garbage truck that could not possibly stink as badly as this apartment did, and besides he would be outdoors in the crisp November sunshine. He debated raising the shades on the windows, decided against it, made himself comfortable in the wooden chair at the kitchen table, and was beginning to doze when he heard the key being inserted in the lock.
He was instantly awake and alert.
He rose and flattened himself against the kitchen wall as the door to the apartment opened. There was silence. The door closed again, cutting off the light from the corridor outside. There were footsteps into the room. They moved closer toward the kitchen doorway.
Brown hesitated only an instant longer, and then came around the door frame, gun extended, and curtly said, “Hold it right there!”
He was looking into the startled face of a beautiful redhead.
Her name was Amanda Pope, and she asked the detectives to please call her Mandy. She had come willingly to the station house, driving her own yellow Buick, Brown sitting beside her with his gun in his lap. She had chatted pleasantly with him on the short drive over, and now she sat pleasantly in the squadroom surrounded by three cops who meant business, and she asked them to call her Mandy, and when advised of her rights said she had no need of a lawyer, she had done nothing wrong.
“What were you doing in that
apartment?” Carella asked.
“I came to see Wally,” she said.
“Wally who?”
“Damascus.”
“Who gave you the key?”
“Wally did.”
“When?”
“Oh, months ago.”
She was a beautiful young lady, and she was well aware of her good looks, and she used them to expert advantage, charming the cops right out of their shoes. Her hair was a deep auburn, striking in combination with her fair complexion and large green eyes. Her nose was perfectly turned, tip-tilted and saucy. Her mouth was generous, she wore no lipstick, she sat in a straight-backed chair in a green woolen dress that swelled over her breasts and her hips. Her legs were crossed, splendid legs, her feet were encased in high-heeled green leather pumps that accented her slender ankles. She looked up at the policemen and smiled dazzlingly, and each of them separately thought he would like to be questioning her alone in the Interrogation Room, instead of sharing her here in the squadroom with his horny colleagues.
“What’s your relationship with Damascus?” Kling asked.
“Oh, you know,” she said, and lowered her eyes demurely.
“Suppose you tell us,” Brown said.
“Well, we see a lot of each other,” Mandy said.
“How much?”
“A lot.”
“You living with him?”
“Not really.”
“What do you mean by that?”
They were finding it difficult to be stern with Amanda Pope because she was really so breathtakingly lovely and because feminine beauty is somehow associated with fragility and they did not want to run the risk of breaking or cracking or even chipping something as delicate as this. They felt enormously ashamed of the grubby surroundings to which they had introduced her, the grimy apple-green paint on the squadroom walls, the scarred desks, the dusty water cooler, the rusting metal grilles on all of the windows, the somber filing cabinets, the detention cage fortunately empty at the moment. It was not often that beauty walked softly into these premises, and so they stood about her asking stern questions in their sternest manner, but they were beguiled, they were in fact almost hypnotized.