Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here!

by Ed McBain

  “Well, looks open and shut to me,” Willis said, and closed his pad. “What do you think, Dick?”

  Genero nodded. “Yeah, looks open and shut to me, too,” he said. He was beginning to think he’d been mistaken about Willis. Was it possible his more experienced partner had really only been after the details of a suicide? He felt vaguely disappointed.

  “Just one more question, I guess,” Willis said, “and then we can leave you alone. Can’t thank you enough for your cooperation. People just don’t realize how much trouble they cause when they decide to kill themselves.”

  “Oh, I can imagine,” Hamling said.

  “We have to treat suicides just like homicides, you know. Same people to notify, same reports to fill out, it’s a big job.”

  “Oh, sure,” Hamling said.

  “Well, thanks again,” Willis said, and started for the door. “Coming, Dick?”

  “Yep,” Genero said, and nodded. “Thanks a lot,” he said to Hamling.

  “Glad to be of help,” Hamling said. “If I’d known you guys were going to be so decent, I wouldn’t have split, I mean it.”

  “Oh, that last question,” Willis said, as though remembering something that had momentarily slipped his mind. “Miss Sobolev…”

  Hamling’s eyes darted to the girl.

  “Miss Sobolev, did you take off your blouse before or after Scott jumped out the window?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said.

  “I guess it was before,” Willis said. “Because you both left immediately after he jumped.”

  “Yes, I suppose it was before,” Sonia said.

  “Miss Sobolev…Why did you take off your blouse?”

  “Well…I don’t know why, really. I mean, I guess I just felt like taking it off.”

  “I guess she took it off because—”

  “Well, let’s let her answer it, okay? So we can clear this up, and leave you alone, okay? Why’d you take it off, Miss Sobolev?”

  “I guess it was…I guess it was warm in the apartment.”

  “So you took off your blouse?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d never met Scott before, but you took off your blouse…”

  “Well, it was warm.”

  “He was on a bum trip, running around the place and screaming, and you decided to take off your blouse.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mmm,” Willis said. “Do you want to know how I read this, Mr. Hamling?”

  “How?” Hamling said, and looked at the girl. Genero looked at both of them, and then looked at Willis. He didn’t know what was going on. He was so excited, he almost wet his pants.

  “I think you’re protecting the girl,” Willis said.

  “Yeah?” Hamling said, puzzled.

  “Yeah. It’s my guess they were balling in that apartment, and something happened, and the girl here shoved Scott out the window, that’s my guess.” The girl’s mouth had fallen open. Willis turned to her and nodded. “We’re going to have to take you with us, Miss Sobolev.”

  “What do you…mean?” she said.

  “Uptown,” Willis answered. “Mr. Hamling, we won’t be needing you for now, but the district attorney may want to ask some more questions after we’ve booked Miss Sobolev. Please don’t leave the city without informing us of your—”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” the girl said.

  “You want to get your coat, please?” Willis said.

  “Listen, I didn’t push anybody out that damn window!” she said, standing suddenly and putting her hands on her hips.

  “Scott was naked, you had your blouse off, what do you expect…?”

  “That was his idea!” Sonia shouted, hurling the words at Hamling.

  “Cool it, Sonia,” Hamling warned.

  “It was his idea to get undressed, he wanted to find the damn…”

  “The damn what?” Willis snapped.

  “The damn money belt!”

  Hamling was breaking for the front door. Genero watched in fascinated immobility. Willis was directly in Hamling’s path, between him and the door. Hamling was a head taller than Willis and a foot wider, and Genero was certain the boy would now knock his partner flat on his ass. He almost wished he would, because then it would be terribly exciting to see what happened next. Hamling was charging for that front door like an express train, and Genero fully expected him to bowl Willis over and continue running into the corridor, down the steps, into the street, and all the way to China. If he was in Willis’s place, he would have got out of the way very quickly, because a man can get hurt by a speeding locomotive. But instead of getting out of the way, Willis started running toward Hamling, and suddenly dropped to his right knee. Hamling’s right foot was ahead of his left at that moment, with all the weight on it, and as he rushed forward, Willis grabbed his left ankle, and began pulling Hamling forward and pushing him upward at the same time, his right hand against Hamling’s chest as he rose. The result was somewhat similar to a football quarterback being hit high and low at the same instant from two opposite directions. Hamling flew over backward, his ankle still clutched in Willis’s hand, his head banging back hard against the floor.

  Genero blinked.

  Willis was stooping over the fallen Hamling now, a gun in his right hand, his handcuffs open in the other hand. He slapped one onto Hamling’s wrist, squeezed it closed. The sawtooth edges clicked shut into the retaining metal of the receiver. Willis pulled hard on the cuffs and yanked Hamling to his feet. He whirled him around, pulled his other arm behind his back, and snapped the second cuff shut.

  Genero was out of breath.

  Danny Gimp was a stool pigeon who told everybody he was a burglar. This was understandable. In a profession where access to underworld gossip was absolutely essential, it was a decided advantage to be considered one of the boys.

  Actually, Danny was not a burglar, even though he had been arrested and convicted for burglary in the city of Los Angeles, California, back in the year 1938. He had always been a sickly person, and had gone out West to cure himself of a persistent cold. He had met a drinking companion in a bar on La Brea, and the guy had asked Danny to stop by his house while he picked up some more money so that they could continue their all-night revel. They had driven up the Strip past La Cienega and had both entered the guy’s house through the back door. The guy had gone into the bedroom and come back a little while later to where Danny was waiting for him in the kitchen. He had picked up several hundred dollars in cash, not to mention a diamond and ruby necklace valued at $47,500. But it seemed that Danny was not the only person waiting for his drinking companion to come out of the bedroom. The Los Angeles police were also waiting. In fact, the way Danny found out about the value of the necklace was that the police happened to tell him. Danny tried to explain all this to the judge. He also mentioned to the judge that he had suffered polio as a child, and was a virtual cripple, and that jail would not be very good for his health or his disposition. The judge had kindly considered everything Danny had to say and then had sentenced Danny and his drinking companion to a minimum of five and a maximum of ten. Danny never spoke to his drinking companion again after that night, even though the men were in the same cell block. The guy was killed by a black homosexual prisoner a year later, stabbed in the throat with a table knife honed to razor sharpness in the sheet metal shop. The black homosexual stood trial for murder, was convicted, and was executed. Danny served his time thinking about the vagaries of justice, and left prison with the single qualification he would need to pursue a profitable career as a snitch. He was an ex-con. If you can’t trust an ex-con, who can you trust? Such was the underworld belief, and it accounted for the regularity with which Danny Gimp received choice bits of information, which he then passed on to the police at a price. It was a living, and not a bad one.

  Carl Kapek had put in a call to Danny that afternoon. The two men met in Grover Park at seven minutes before 5:00. The afternoon was beginning to wane. They sat together on a park be
nch and watched governesses wheeling their charges home in baby buggies, watched touch football games beginning to break up, watched a little girl walking slowly by on the winding path, trailing a skip rope behind her and studying the ground the way only little girls can, with an intense concentration that indicated she was pondering all the female secrets of the universe.

  “Belinda, huh?” Danny said.

  “Yeah. Belinda.”

  Danny sniffed. He always seemed to have a cold lately, Kapek noticed. Maybe he was getting old.

  “And you don’t know Belinda what, huh?” Danny said.

  “That’s why I called you,” Kapek said.

  “She’s a spade, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t read her right off,” Danny said. He sniffed again. “It’s getting to be winter already, you realize that?”

  “It’s not so bad,” Kapek said.

  “It stinks,” Danny answered. “Why do you want this broad?”

  “She mugged a Marine.”

  “You’re putting me on,” Danny said, and laughed.

  “She didn’t do it alone.”

  “A guy was in it with her?”

  “Yeah. She played up to the Marine in a bar on Seventeenth, indicated she wanted him to follow her. When he did, she led him to her partner, and they put him out of action.”

  “Is the guy a spade, too?”

  “No, he’s white.”

  “Belinda,” Danny said. “That’s a pretty name. I knew a girl named Belinda once. Only girl I ever knew who didn’t mind the leg. This was in Chicago one time. I was in Chicago one time. I got people in Chicago. Belinda Kolaczkowska. A Pole. Pretty as a picture, blonde hair, blue eyes, big tits.” Danny demonstrated with his hands, and then immediately put them back in his pockets. “I asked her one time how come she was going out with a guy like me. I was talking about the limp, you know? She said, ‘What do you mean, a guy like you?’ So I looked her in the eye, and I said, ‘You know what I mean, Belinda.’ And she said, ‘No, I don’t know what you mean, Danny.’ So I said, ‘Belinda, the fact is that I limp.’ So she smiled and said, ‘You do?’ I’ll never forget that smile. I swear to God, if I live to be a hundred and ten, I’ll never forget the way Belinda smiled at me that day in Chicago. I felt I could run a mile that day. I felt I could win the goddamn Olympics.” He shook his head and then sniffed again. A flock of pigeons suddenly took wing not six feet from where the men were sitting, filling the air with the sound of their flight. They soared up against the sky, wheeled, and alighted again near a bench further on, where an old man in a threadbare brown coat was throwing bread crumbs into the air.

  “Anyway, that ain’t the Belinda you’re looking for,” Danny said. He thought a moment longer, and then seemed to suppress the memory completely, pulling his head into his overcoat, thrusting his hands deeper into his pockets. “Can you give me a description of her?” he asked.

  “All I know is she’s black, and well built, and she was wearing a red dress.”

  “That could mean two thousand girls in this city,” Danny said. “What about the guy?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Great.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re very good for a chuckle on a Sunday when winter’s coming, that’s what I think.”

  “Can you help or not?”

  “Let me listen a little, who knows? Will you be around?”

  “I’ll be around.”

  “I’ll get back.”

  There are times in the city when night refuses to come.

  The afternoon lingers, the light changes only slowly and imperceptibly, there is a sense of sweet suspension.

  This was just such a day.

  There was a briskness to the air, you could never confuse this with a spring day. And yet the afternoon possessed that same luminous quality, the sky so intensely blue that it seemed to vibrate indignantly against encroachment, flatly resisting passage through the color spectrum to darkness. When the streetlights came on at 5:30, they did so in vain. There was nothing to illuminate, the day was still bright. The sun hung stubbornly over the buildings to the west in downtown Majesta and Calm’s Point, defying the earth’s rotation, balking at extinction behind roof copings and chimney pots. The citizens of the city lingered in the streets bemused, reluctant to go indoors, as though witnessing some vast astronomical disorder, some realized Nostradamus prediction—it would be daytime forever, the night would never come; there would be dancing in the streets. The sky to the west yielded at last.

  In Herbert Gross’s apartment, the light was beginning to fade.

  Carella and Brown had been in there for close to three hours now, and whereas they had searched the place from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, timber to toilet tank, they had not found a single clue that told them where Gross had been heading when he hopped that uptown bus.

  The clue was everywhere around them. They just hadn’t found it yet.

  The apartment was a contradiction in itself. It was small and cramped, a cubicle in a crumbling tenement surrounded by warehouses. But it was crowded with furniture that surely had been purchased in the early thirties, when solidity was a virtue and inlaid mahogany was the decorative rule. In the living room, a huge overstuffed sofa was upholstered in maroon mohair, its claw feet clutching the faded Persian rug that covered the floor. The sofa alone would have been quite enough to overwhelm the dimensions of the small room, but there were two equally overstuffed easy chairs, and a credenza that seemed to have wandered in from an ornate dining room someplace, and a standing floor lamp with a pink, fringed shade, and an ornately framed painting of snow-clad mountain peaks towering over a placid lake, and a Stromberg-Carlson floor model radio complete with push buttons and a jukebox look, and mahogany end tables on either side of the sofa, each with a tiny drawer, each carrying a huge porcelain lamp with a shade covered in plastic.

  The first bedroom had a huge double bed with mahogany headboard and footboard and an unmade mattress. A heavy mahogany dresser of the type that used to be called a “bureau” when Busby Berkeley was all the rage, complete with its own mahogany-framed mirror, was on the wall opposite the bed. A taller version of it—the male counterpart, so to speak—with longer hanging space for trousers and suits and a row of drawers one atop the other for the storing of handkerchiefs, cufflinks, and sundries (Jimmy Walker would have called it a “chiffonier”), was on the window wall.

  The second bedroom was furnished in more modern terms, with two narrow beds covered with simple throws, a Mexican rug hanging on the wall over them. A bookcase was on the wall opposite, alongside a closet without a door. With the exception of the kitchen and the bathroom, there was one other room in the apartment, and this room seemed to have escaped from Arthur Miller’s play The Price. It was literally packed from floor to ceiling with furniture and china and glassware and marked and unmarked cartons (among those marked was one lettered with the words “WORLD’S FAIR 1939”) and piles of books tied with twine, and cooking utensils, and even old articles of clothing draped over chairs or cartons, a veritable child’s dream of an attic hideout, equipped with anything needed to serve whatever imaginary excursion suited the fancy.

  “I don’t get this place,” Carella said.

  “Neither do I,” Brown said. He turned on the floor lamp in the living room, and they sat opposite each other, tired and dusty, Carella on the monstrous sofa, Brown in one of the big easy chairs. The room was washed with the glow of the pink, fringed lampshade. Carella almost felt as if he were sitting down to do his homework to the accompaniment of “Omar the Mystic” flooding from the old Stromberg-Carlson.

  “Everything’s wrong but that one bedroom,” he said. “The rest of it doesn’t fit.”

  “Or maybe vice versa,” Brown said.

  “I mean, who the hell has furniture like that nowadays?”

  “My mother has furniture like that,” Brown said.

  Both men were silent. It was Carella w
ho broke the silence at last.

  “When did Goldenthal’s mother die?” he asked.

  “Three months ago, I think the report said. He was living with her until then.”

  “You think all this crap might have been hers?”

  “Maybe. Maybe he moved it all here when he left the other apartment.”

  “You remember her first name?”

  “Minnie.”

  “How many Goldenthals do you suppose there are in the telephone book?”

  They did not even consider looking in the directories for Bethtown, Majesta, or Calm’s Point, because Gross had been heading uptown, and access to all those other sections of the city would have required going downtown. They did not consider looking in the Riverhead directory, either, because Gross had taken a bus, and bus transportation all the way to Riverhead was a hell of a slow way to go, when there were express trains running all day long. So they limited their search to the Isola directory alone. (There was one other reason they consulted just this one phone book; it happened to be the only one Gross had in the apartment.) There were eight Goldenthals listed in the Isola directory.

  But only one of them was Minnie Goldenthal—now deceased, poor lady, her name surviving in print only until next year’s directory would be published by the telephone company.

  Sic transit gloria mundi.

  The building in which Minnie Goldenthal had lived was a twelve-story yellow-brick structure bristling with television antennae. It was fronted by a small cement courtyard flanked by two yellow-brick pillars, atop which sat two stone urns that were probably planted with flowers in the spring, but that now contained only withered stalks. Enclosing this courtyard were the two wings of the building, and a row of apartments connecting both wings, so that the result was an architectural upside-down U facing the low, flat entrance steps to the courtyard. The mailboxes for each wing were in the entryway to the right and left. Carella checked one entry, Brown the other. There was no listing for Goldenthal, Minnie or otherwise.