Suddenly caught up in a swirl of emotions, Mr. DeAngeles looked away. “You already talked to Pendowski, I s’pose.”
“You mean the electrician who witnessed it?”
“That’s right.”
“We spoke to him.” Mooney nodded. “He told us essentially the same story he told the guys from Midtown North. It checks out all right.” Mooney stared off at the Jersey skyline so as not to see the teary red eyes of Mr. DeAngeles.
“That kid was just like my own.” The foreman sniffled noisily. “I treated him like he was one of my own kids. I knew his dad, Vinnie. Was a welder, too. Used to work with me over the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Sweetheart of a guy. A real gent. And you know, the kid was just about to get married.”
“That’s rough,” Pickering commiserated, putting on his best long face.
“Planning a Christmas wedding, they were.” The foreman flapped open a crumpled red handkerchief and honked loudly into it.
“Weren’t having no troubles, were they?” Mooney inquired. “No little lovers’ spats?”
“Nothing. Nothing like that.” Mr. DeAngeles banished the notion with an abrupt chopping motion in the frigid air. “These kids were crazy about each other.”
“What’s her name?”
The foreman’s mouth dropped open in puzzlement. “Who?”
“The girl. Mancuso’s girl.”
“Oh.” There was a pause as Mr. DeAngeles resonated into his handkerchief again.
The two detectives watched while he attempted to dredge the name up from the past. “Ain’t that funny? It’s right on the tip on my tongue. Jean. Jane, something. How do you like that? I just saw her yesterday. We was all over to the morgue together. Identifying the remains …”
The mere mention of the word was too much for the man. His eyes filled again. “Oh shit. Man naggia mia. Ain’t this somethin’? You gotta forgive me, goin’ on this way. Thirty years I’m doin’ this work, I never seen nothin’ like this.”
Mooney waited patiently for him to regain his composure. “You were about to tell me the girl s name.”
“The girl? Oh, sure, the girl. I got it right over here in some papers. What’s she got to do with it?”
“Probably nothing.” They started toward a little cubicle, hastily erected and comprised of a desk, a chair, files, and a telephone. “But it wouldn’t hurt to talk with her.” They crowded into the breezy little area, with its desktop littered with ashtrays and paper coffee cups. Mr. DeAngeles, too big for his chair, took his place behind the desk with sudden pomposity. “Couple of weeks ago he asked me to switch the beneficiary on his union life insurance policy.”
Mooney’s ears perked. “He did?”
“From who to who?” Pickering followed up quickly. “To this girl I was telling you about. The one he was marrying. He switched it from his mother.”
The foreman hunched above his file drawers, riffled through them quickly. “Yeah, sure. Here it is. Michael Mancuso, as policy owner, to Janine McConkey, as sole beneficiary. That’s capital M, small c.” The foreman spelled it out with agonizing deliberation.
“Got an address on that, too?” Mooney asked. He was shivering in the blustery, frozen air and anxious to be gone.
“Sure. That’s one twelve East One Hundred and Third Street. But take my word for it: these kids are clean. Both of them.”
“Sure,” Mooney said, extending his hand. “Thanks for your time.”
“Very nice people. Very quiet. Never had no problems with them. Respectable. Polite. Always paid their rent on time.”
The building manager at 103rd Street and Madison Avenue on the fringes of Carnegie Hill was a dignified black gentleman by the name of Mr. Tudor. They sat in the tidy coziness of his ground-floor office, drinking coffee as an electric floor heater hissing away warmed their frozen feet.
“It’s a coincidence your coming in here just now,” Mr. Tudor continued. “I just found this on my desk this morning.”
He slid a small white envelope across the desktop toward Mooney. The detective picked it up, holding it tentatively between two fingers. “Is it okay if I read it?”
“If it weren’t, I wouldn’t have offered it.” Mr. Tudor’s toothy smile glowed warmly.
Inside, Mooney found the check with three months’ rent and a letter of sketchy explanation. When he finished, he stared up at the building manager. “She left in an awful big hurry, didn’t she? She give any reason? She leave a forwarding address? Anything?”
“All I know is what you got right there in your hand.”
“From the letter it sounds like she plans to be back in, maybe, three months.”
“Sounds that way. Awful business the way that boy died like that. I guess it shook her up pretty bad.”
“I guess so.” Mooney nodded and there was a somber moment of obligatory silence to acknowledge the awfulness of things in general. “Still,” Mooney persisted, getting back to the nitty gritty of business, “she was sole beneficiary of his life insurance policy, a hundred thousand bucks, face value. And she did pull out of here awful fast.”
“Could be she just went off to stay with relatives awhile.” Mr. Tudor preferred a more charitable explanation.
“Or could be she was scared of something and had to get out quick,” Pickering suggested.
They were silent for a moment, all of them regarding each other warily.
“I don’t suppose we could have a look at the apartment?” Mooney asked.
“I’m not supposed to let anyone into any apartment without authorization from the tenant direct.”
“Or a warrant from the district attorney’s office,” Mooney added pointedly.
Mr. Tudor caught the implied threat in the detective’s voice.
“I could have one in twenty-four hours,” Mooney went on solicitously, full of sympathy for Mr. Tudor’s predicament. “But it’s a shame to lose time while the trail’s hot.” The building manager frowned his disapproval. “That girl’s done nothing wrong. You’re wasting your time, lieutenant.”
“Maybe,” Mooney conceded. “But I’m still gonna have a look at that apartment to put my own mind at rest. Either now or twenty-four hours from now.”
“She’s not a suspect, is she?”
“Not in this Mancuso business, which isn’t in my jurisdiction anyway. But she may very well be in something else I’m working on at the moment, and which I’m not at liberty to disclose. So, as of now, I’m treating Miss McConkey as a suspect.”
Mr. Tudor looked back and forth from Mooney to Pickering, his face marked clearly with the conflict he was trying to resolve. At last he spoke: “Let me make a call, will you?”
While they sat there across from him, he called the landlord’s office, explained the situation, and was granted permission to open the apartment.
Several minutes later they had ascended in a rickety coffinlike elevator to the sixth floor and were rummaging about in the cramped confines of the little studio dwelling.
It consisted of a single room and a kitchenette. It took them barely any time to go through it. As they went about their work, Mr. Tudor hovered in the background, clearly uneasy with the part he was playing there.
She had undoubtedly left in a great hurry. The drawers were still full. Food had been left in the refrigerator, which was still cool, even though it had been disconnected.
Mooney had started with the closets, Pickering with the drawers. There was one large, battered old chifforobe. The upper two drawers contained male clothing: socks, handkerchiefs, underwear, etc.; the lower two were female.
Pickering discovered nothing there and moved on to a desk. The top drawers contained bills, check stubs, and a stack of American Express receipts bound with a thick rubber band. There were, in addition, pens and pencils and paper clips.
The drawers on either side of the well were filled with manila folders upon the front of which a variety of categories had been entered in large bold capital letters: HOUSE PAPERS, PERSONAL PAPERS, INCOME TA
X. One had been designated WEDDING PAPERS and contained contracts executed with a catering hall in Brooklyn, two airline tickets to Bermuda, blood tests from the Board of Health, and various related documents. Sifting through it all, Pickering had found nothing.
Meanwhile, Mooney had moved on into the kitchen where Pickering joined him, followed by Mr. Tudor, looking quite glum by then.
Mooney at that moment was going through the upper cabinets. Pickering turned his attention to the lower ones. For the most part, they contained no more than the most prosaic of cooking utensils: pots and pans, cookie sheets, Pyrex plates, several Mason jars. As he went about his work, Pickering had been kneeling, his knees feeling the effect of cramp. Mooney had quit the upper cabinets and was back in the living room running his big, meaty hands beneath upholstery cushions and drapery cornices.
Just on the verge of quitting, Pickering’s wrist happened to dislodge a copper omelet pan from its place, revealing beneath it a small square of crumpled white paper that had been folded neatly into eighths. He unfolded it and proceeded to read the writing that appeared there. A minute or two later he was back out in the living room, flagging it excitedly at Mooney.
“Dear Janine,” Mooney started to mumble half beneath his breath. “I still think of you. Don’t be scared. Not in the bad old way, but the way it was …”
When he finished reading he looked up, the crumpled square of paper trembling in his hand.
Pickering was grinning broadly. “Did you get a load of the handwriting?”
Mooney gazed back at him blankly, not answering the question. Instead, he shot back, “Let’s get an all-points out on this McConkey kid right away.”
THIRTY-ONE
ARLETTE COLES MOVED SMARTLY DOWN Smith Street in the Marble Hill section of Brooklyn. Despite the fact that it was two in the morning and the streets were deserted, she was not uneasy. It wasn’t her custom to be uneasy. In her time, she’d been in a lot more questionable situations and always managed to come out on both feet.
A striking, statuesque black woman, she’d never married and did not regret the fact. For a girl who’d barely finished high school, at thirty-six she’d come a considerable way. Having served two years in Panama with the U.S. Army, she’d parlayed her mustering-out pay into a prosperous little beauty salon in this rapidly gentrifying area and was looking for another location to open up a second.
If she had one great passion in life, it was ballroom dancing, which was frequently the cause for her arriving home at such late hours. She was an assiduous participant in dance competitions all about the city.
That morning the sound of her heels with the metal taps on the toes rang through the vacant streets. Her shoes made rapid, vibrant clicks on the concrete, almost as though they were still joyously battering the dance floor. If she was feeling particularly good that evening, she had reason to. She’d come off with the second prize trophy (a twelve-inch dipped bronze figurine of a fandango dancer) in a hotly contested tango competition.
The trim little brownstone, enclosed by its freshly painted white wrought-iron fence, that served as her home glowed its welcome to her at the top of the hill. She’d just purchased it the year before from its former owner with a 40 percent down payment to the bank and a twenty-year mortgage.
For a child who’d grown up in hard times with no advantages other than loving parents who’d been able to bequeath her only a strong sense of her own personal worth, Arlette had done herself proud.
She’d left lights on in the front parlor, as she always did on these late evenings. Glowing there in the chill of early morning, they imparted to the little brick three-story brownstone a kind of dollhouse miniature grandeur.
Fumbling for the key in her purse, she found it and inserted it into the lock. Simultaneous with that action, even as her wrist turned, she felt a pair of palms flat on her back and then a fierce shove. The door swung open, and before she could cry out, a pair of powerful hands, smelling faintly of rubber, gripped her around the throat and pushed her in. It was as though she’d been sucked down a black hole by the sudden creation of a vacuum. The door slammed behind her, and, in the next instant, something dark and faceless was swarming all over her.
A stream of words, mostly vile and abusive, hissed hotly into her ear. From that point on, a fierce struggle ensued as she grappled with the dark, shapeless thing that clawed at her, tearing at her clothing.
Before she knew what was happening, she was flat on her back, the figure sitting astride her chest, the rubbered fingers closing inexorably around her throat, slowly cutting off her air.
“Shut up and you won’t get hurt.”
Until the words had come, she hadn’t connected her assailant with anything human. Now for the first time she opened her eyes and found herself staring into a pair of large dark eyes that smiled down upon her. She was struck by how kind the eyes were, making what the hands were doing at the same time seem a cruel paradox.
She felt the grip on her throat loosen and air rush back into her lungs. Then the hands were gone, but only for an instant. When they reappeared, one of them, the right, held a shaft of long, glinting steel she immediately recognized as a steak knife, feeling its razor-sharp point piercing the skin of her throat.
In the initial melee (it had seemed to her it had gone on forever, but its actual duration was little more than a minute), she managed to hold on to her trophy (not out of fear that it was going to be taken, but that it might get broken). All the while she was being assaulted, she continued to hold the trophy, swathed in silver wrappings above her head, out of harm’s way.
In the cozy orange glow of the parlor lights, the features of her assailant came gradually into focus. The face was a soft oval. It was an attractive face, she thought, except for the row of broken teeth that imparted to the lower portion of the face a wild, rather feral appearance. They looked as though they could rip one open.
“You just do what I tell you,” he said, leaning forward and putting his warm face up close to her cheek, while one hand held the knife at her throat and the other proceeded to grope beneath her skirt.
That evening she’d chanced to wear a rather spectacular black sequined gown for which she’d paid $700. Purchased from a highly regarded designer collection, it was her pride and joy. All she could feel now was the rude thrusting hand clawing at the lining beneath the skirt, his intention clearly to pull it over her head like a sack, thus pinning her arms inside. The skirt was well above her thighs by then and the bodice had ripped, sending a blizzard of sequins spilling into her armpits and onto the floor. As the man with his wild plunging motion continued to hoist the material up around her, the sequins cut and scratched her legs.
In matters of sex Arlette was not prudish. She could bear the rough hands and the steady stream of vile filth that poured from her assailant’s mouth. But this sheer, wanton destruction of her beautiful dress was a bit much for her.
In the next moment the arm carrying the tango trophy rose and swung sharply downward, clipping her assailant solidly on the jaw. The weight on her chest instantly shifted to one side, then just as quickly righted itself. Suddenly, she found herself looking into a pair of stunned, rather hurt eyes, as if she had done her attacker a tremendous injustice.
Dazed, he sat there unsteadily atop her, rubbing his jaw. She took advantage of the unguarded moment to squirm out from beneath him and scramble to her feet. Still holding the tango trophy, she brandished it above her head. He stood there in a half-crouch, watching her warily, waving the long kitchen knife in wide, slow loops before him.
At first, when she’d been shoved unceremoniously through the front door and had no idea what manner of thing was swarming all over her, she was frightened. But seeing finally the instrument of her fear to be no more than a mere mortal man, not all that big at that, the paralyzing terror of her imagination fell from her like something weightless and inconsequential. Suddenly, she was calm.
“Okay, you got yourself in here, slime; now you
better turn your ass around and slither right back out.”
The smile, once so benign, had turned to an impudent grin. He continued to wave the knife in the air and started to move slowly toward her.
Her voice was calm and quiet as she spoke: “I’m gonna count to three. If you ain’t outta here by then, you gonna hear some real shoutin’. Shoutin’ to wake the dead. I read all about you, motherfucker. I know what you are. You don’t scare me none.”
He came on smiling, almost hypnotically, cutting long, graceful loops through the air with his glittering blade.
“Come on, you fucker.” She beckoned him with her free hand, while the other hefted the trophy more securely above her head. “You may get me, but you gonna pay dear for it.”
Even before she’d gotten the last words out, he hit her broadside across her middle. A flying tackle, lightning swift. They went down together in a loud crash, a tumbling, windmilling, thrashing scuffle that ranged over the parlor floor. The trophy toppled from her hand. He tried to pin her to the floor with his knee, but she wriggled out again, swatted at him with her hands. She caught hold of a clump of hair and yanked hard. He shrieked and slammed his fist hard up against her temple. She felt her eyes rattle.
A floor lamp went down behind them with a loud crash, projecting huge shadows, humped and whirling large against the spinning ceiling.
The whole front of her bodice had been torn and hung down in shreds against the bare skin beneath. Once again the hand was pawing her, trying to caress her, while the other held the knife point against her throat, just below the chin.
Straining beneath that heaving weight, as though she were caught in the gears and sprockets of some demonic machine, she looked around the room, searching for an object, a weapon with which to fend off her attacker.
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