No, the evidence I expected to find now would be obvious. Overlooked, not hidden. Not recognized because both the police and I had been neatly turned in the wrong direction. At least, that was my hunch. The stain of blood on the rug had been scrubbed, but it still showed. It told me nothing new. I went through the big old apartment until I found Kezar’s bedroom.
In my mind I pictured that night in January when Sid Meyer had died. The way I had come into the lobby for a time, the way Kezar had made the janitor open the lobby door for him. A witness to his coming out before the three shots. The way he had come out in a raincoat. Kezar had changed coats. Because it had been snowing, obviously. Right? Wrong—I hoped.
The clothes in his bedroom closet weren’t as good or as numerous as in his Central Park West apartment. The velvet-collared gray Chesterfield was there—cleaned, pressed and put away in a plastic bag. But I found what I wanted anyway.
The cloth had been torn under the middle button. A small tear that might happen if someone grabbed the button. Sewn up, not expertly, but so that it hardly showed in the herringbone pattern. Herringbone looks gray, but it is really made up of contrasting threads of white and black—and Sid Meyer had had black thread under a fingernail.
Natural for a man to change into a raincoat in the snow. Because of that, and because someone had taken a minute to mend the small tear, none of us had noticed the change of coats, or studied the Chesterfield. My fault. Gazzo hadn’t even known that Kezar had changed coats.
In the living room I pulled the heavy drapes away from the windows. The broken pane had been fixed. I raised the bottom frame all the way open as it had been on the night of the murder, studied it. On both sides of the new pane there was a faint groove in the old wood. Something had dented the frame after the pane was broken, the glass out. As if some heavy weight had been hooked over the wood of the raised window.
Obvious, again, that when Sid Meyer went out the window his head had broken the glass. But Sid Meyer had been a very small man. Literally blown out the window, he should have been sprawled backwards as he fell, his head nowhere near the raised window. Maybe he hadn’t hit the glass at all, something else had. Unless it had simply been broken on purpose for a reason.
I stepped back, sighted from some five feet away through the new pane. The building across the narrow alley was a five-story brownstone, its roof parapet just below the level of the Kezars’ windows. The roof of the brownstone was cluttered with a kind of tool shed, a wooden pigeon coop, and the tall brick doorway shelter down. The pigeon coop was in direct line with the repaired windowpane.
I went down in the elevator, along to the building across the alley, and up to the roof door. I used my keys to open it, stepped out into the sun. The Kezars’ open window was just across the alley, the wooden pigeon coop was at least six feet wide. I went over every inch of the coop. It had been four months, there had been snow and rain, the wood of the coop was old and soft, and the bullet had gone in cleanly. But I saw it.
High up on the rear wall of the coop through the wire mesh and above the top roost. It was that close to having missed the coop and flying so far no one would ever have found it. Life can be a matter of an inch. A large bullet, from the look of it, buried in the gray wood and almost invisible even up close. No one could have seen it from Kezar’s window, even if anyone had been looking. No one had. Not until now.
A vital bullet. Not three shots that night, but four. I had heard only three, so when had the fourth been fired? Why hadn’t I heard it? Now I was getting excited.
I went down, back to Kezar’s building, and up to the sixth floor again. The door to the stairs was close to the door of 6-C. I went down the stairs to the landing where the one gun, the .45 automatic, had been found. I searched the floor and the walls as high as I could reach. I looked for any crevice, anything loose, any hiding place. There was nothing.
I hung out the window on three landings. Nothing was loose outside, nothing was hanging—the police wouldn’t have missed anything hanging anyway. I lit a cigarette, studied the stairwell that stretched silent up and down. If I’d just shot a man, was in a hurry to leave a gun on the stairs as if dropped, what would I have done? Just thrown it down.
I went up to the turn of the stairs between the landings of the fifth and sixth floors. A gun thrown from here would have been found on the fifth floor where it had been. I looked around the bare half-landing. There was noth … the banister post! One of those heavy metal posts spaced along all stairway banisters, hollow, six to seven inches square, with a domed metal cap!
I pulled at the cap, cursing my one hand. It shifted, but wouldn’t come off. If I couldn’t get it off …? I looked closer at the cap. There was a recent dent where the sleeve fitted over the post, holding the cap tightly on.
Back in 6-C, I searched the kitchen until I found a hammer. On the half-landing again, on my knees, I hit up at the cap on the hollow post. Once, twice. It flew off and fell with an echoing clang and clatter down the silent stairwell. I stood up.
The small, foreign automatic was wedged down inside the hollow post. Everyone wanted a bonanza. I had mine!
I pulled the gun out by the barrel, wrapped it in my handkerchief. It could still have fingerprints. It would have been hidden in a hurry, time needed to bang the banister cap tight, probably with the heavy .45 the police had found.
Up in 6-C again, I went to the telephone. I called Captain Gazzo. He was out. I talked to his female sergeant, “Get him on the radio, it’s urgent. Tell him I found the second gun that shot Sid Meyer. Tell him to find Irving and Jenny Kezar, pick them up, bring them to their apartment on East Seventieth.”
I hung up, sat down to wait. I was nervous. If I was right, I’d solve more than just Sid Meyer’s murder. I’d close the books on all the murders. The whole answer.
My throat was dry as a desert. I went out to the kitchen to see if the Kezars had a cold beer in the refrigerator. Two steps into the kitchen, I sensed the shape behind me. Too late.
Weak from the months in the hospital, the blow on my head knocked me flat. Out for maybe a minute, then aware of movement in the living room, the outer door closing. I struggled up. Too late, no way to catch whoever it had been now. Kezar? Jenny? Who else? Someone who had come in and hidden while I was on the stairs.
I swayed out into the living room. The small automatic was gone from the table near the telephone—handkerchief and all. In the kitchen I found some beer, drank it in gulps. They had the gun. Did I have enough without it? I wasn’t sure. I …
The telephone rang. Calling to gloat? No—Captain Gazzo.
“I picked them up, Dan. Be there in half an hour.”
“You found them? Both? Where?”
“Kezar at his office, Jenny at his club. I’m on my way.”
I hung up, sat. They couldn’t have hit me and been where Gazzo found them. Then who had hit me, taken the gun? Why? I sat and went over it all in my mind. I was sure. Yet …?
Someone had the gun, but as the day darkened outside toward evening, I realized that I had one advantage—Kezar and Jenny couldn’t know I’d lost the gun. With the rest, and a little luck and fast talking, it could be enough to corner them.
When the outer door opened and Gazzo herded them both in, I looked straight at Irving Kezar.
“I’ve got the whole thing, Kezar,” I said. “I know it all.”
CHAPTER 27
If I needed more proof, Jenny Kezar’s ashen face would have been it. The heavy, ugly woman aged another ten years in the cheap old blue coat she wore again. Irving Kezar had more experience, his round, acne-scarred face told me nothing.
“What the hell do you know?” Kezar said.
Gazzo let me talk. I told them the whole story of the big deal in Wyandotte—Ramapo Construction, Ultra-Violet Controls, Mr. Kincaid, Charley Albano, Kezar, Lawrence Dunlap and all. Even Andy Pappas’s laughing remarks to Stella, that showed Andy knew all about the dirty affair. Gazzo nodded. Kezar shrugged.
&nb
sp; “So what, Fortune?” the pudgy lawyer said. “It’s not your business, and New Jersey isn’t even Captain Gazzo’s jurisdiction. Anyway, we’re all legal, all covered if no one talks.”
“Murder in New York is Gazzo’s jurisdiction,” I said.
“What murder?” Kezar said.
“Sid Meyer’s. There weren’t any gunmen. Meyer wanted to be cut in on your Wyandotte affair, so you killed him.”
“You’re crazy, Fortune. You saw me leave.”
“Clever,” I said. “When you got here with Meyer, Jenny was in another room. Sid pulled his ace threat on you. You got into a fight and shot him. Probably a mistake, but he was dead, and you and Jenny were with him. You’d spotted me tailing, knew I’d be downstairs. But you got lucky. A small gun, close to Meyer, the windows closed with the drapes shut, and me in the lobby at the moment—the shot wasn’t heard. You sweated, but when I didn’t come up, you cooked a plan right then to use me.
“Your gun is registered to you, I’ll bet, but you had another gun around that couldn’t be traced—from a hood friend, I expect. Meyer was a little man. You opened the window, propped it up, broke a pane, and hung Meyer on the frame with a wooden coat hanger. Meyer had ripped your Chesterfield, you didn’t want to be wearing it when the police found you, so you changed coats. You broke the door chain, went down to the lobby, made sure the janitor saw you leave as well as me.
“Up here, Jenny gave you a few minutes—sewed your Chesterfield while she waited. Then she shot Meyer again with the forty-five, unhooked the coat hanger, pushed him out. A big gun, the windows open now, the shots would be heard at least by me. She got out fast down the stairs with both guns. You knew about the loose cap on the banister post. Jenny slipped your gun inside the post, hammered it tight with the forty-five, dropped the forty-five on the fifth floor, went down to another floor, and waited until she heard me go up. Then she appeared as if she’d just come in.”
Kezar licked his lips. “Christ, I sound real smart. So why not just carry my own gun away if it was so dangerous?”
“I might have stopped you downstairs, kept you with me after the faked shots until the police came. There you’d be, with the gun. You don’t take unnecessary risks. That’s why you left the gun in the post all these months. It hadn’t been found, it was safer to leave it than risk moving it with the police watching.”
Kezar’s face glistened. He looked at Gazzo, tried to grin. “I’d get so mad over Sid wanting a piece of the action that I’d kill him? No way. Why not cut him in, plenty to go around.”
“He used his big threat,” I said. “He told you what he knew, threatened to tell Pappas or Charley Albano. That did it.”
“What did Sid know?” Gazzo said, watching Kezar.
“That Kezar’s an F.B.I. informer,” I said. “Paid, of course. Regular reports on all he knows, hears, and does. Selective, he probably juggles all sides, tells the F.B.I. as little as he can, and never before he’s collected his share of any action. I’ve seen him meet with them, one of them tails him around a lot.”
Jenny Kezar began to cry. She covered her battered face.
“Shut up!” Kezar raged.
“No use,” I said. “The thread under Sid Meyer’s nails will match your coat. There’s a mark on the window from the hanger, and a fourth bullet in a pigeon coop on the roof across the alley. There had to be an extra shot to cover the first shot that no one heard. I had to hear enough shots to match the number of bullets in Meyer’s body, and that meant one extra no matter how you sliced it. It’ll match the bullets in Sid from one of the guns.”
“Irving?” Jenny Kezar said. “I told you. The schemes.”
The acne scars stood out purple on his heavy face. He held onto a chair back, couldn’t seem to think of anything to say now, any way out. Jenny watched him.
“We’ve got the motive, and your gun,” I said, hammered at him and hoped he didn’t make me show the gun. “Motive enough for a lot of murders—that Andy Pappas might suspect your F.B.I. connection. When you’ve killed once, it’s easy to kill again for the same motive.”
His voice cracked. “Again? You mean … No!”
“Yes,” I said, “and Jenny’ll talk now. Why shouldn’t she, the life you gave her? Why should she go down with you?” I looked at the woman old long before her time. “Jenny, it all happened the way I said, didn’t it?”
Kezar held to his chair back, seemed to want to say something, but it wouldn’t come out. Plead with her, but too aware of how he’d treated her all the years? Gazzo watched us all, waited. Jenny Kezar sat down, looked at her still-young hands.
“Yes, it all happened just like you said. All of it,” she said. She looked up. “Except it was me. I killed Sid.”
Sometimes a silence can feel like the whole world is pushing down. A weight, no air anywhere. And sometimes you can be so sure of what you’ve seen and know, that when it turns out to be not at all the way you thought, it’s a slap, the bottom drops away. Gazzo stared at her. Kezar gripped the chair he leaned on. As surprised as we were, or worried for her? Wrong there, too?
“I killed Sid,” Jenny Kezar said. “I didn’t mean to.”
I had seen a louse who treated her like a bug, sneered at her, cheated on her in every way, beat her. She had to be miserable with him, hate him. But she wasn’t miserable, I saw that now. She was happy with him, and she loved him. Maybe because she was ugly, unsure, needed someone. Her man, no matter what else he was. Or maybe I was wrong again, judging from my own feelings. Maybe she just liked him, liked everything about him I hated. You can never be sure what people have inside.
“Sid said he knew about the F.B.I., would tell Pappas,” she said. “Irving had his gun. Sid grabbed at it, tore the button. They wrestled, the gun fell on the floor. I picked it up. Sid grabbed a poker, was going to hit Irving. I shot him. I didn’t mean to hit him, I just shot, and he fell. He was dead. The rest was like Fortune told.”
Gazzo said, “We’ve got the gun, Mrs. Kezar. It’ll show—”
“Irving held it, too. It’ll have both our prints on it,” Jenny Kezar said. “An accident, you know? My own brother, but he was going to tell on Irving, maybe get him killed.”
True or not, if she stuck to it there wasn’t any way I could disprove it—not even with the gun, but certainly not without it. Kezar thought as fast as I did, probably faster. He analyzed the situation in a second, moved into action. He went to Jenny, put his hand on her shoulder, and his voice was soothing.
“It’s all right, Jenny, don’t say any more. We’ll fight it. Sid scared you, threatened us,” Kezar said. “Read her the rights, Captain, then I’ll talk to my client alone.”
Gazzo read Jenny her rights, and Kezar took her into another room. Gazzo made sure there was no other way out.
“She’s lying,” I said to Gazzo. “Kezar shot him.”
“You won’t prove it. Your evidence is good, Dan. It’ll convict, and it’d be harder on Kezar. I think she knows that. She figures to protect him. Where’s the gun?”
I had to tell him. He looked stunned—even suspicious.
“Tricks, Dan? A sellout, all this an act? Who would want that gun besides Kezar or Jenny?”
“I don’t know, and I didn’t sell it, Captain.”
“Christ,” Gazzo swore. “Will it stand up without the gun?”
“We know how it happened.”
“You know, I know, and Jenny confessed. But when Kezar finds out we don’t have the gun, he’ll deny the confession. The rest might get us a guilty plea to low manslaughter.”
“I’ll try to get the gun back,” I said. “Right now, I want some time with Kezar. Can I have it?”
“Why?”
“I don’t think Sid Meyer was the only one Kezar got killed. Maybe I can sweat it out of him before he knows we don’t have the gun. I can try.”
“I can keep him here, but I can’t make him talk to you.”
“That I’ll handle,” I said.
Gazzo wen
t for Jenny. He told Kezar that the lawyer couldn’t go downtown with his wife.
“I don’t owe you free transportation. She’s being held for questioning right now. You can be there when we charge her.”
“I’ve got friends, Gazzo!” Kezar said. “Judges.”
“You better talk to them then,” Gazzo said.
We went out leaving Kezar alone. Gazzo took Jenny down. I waited a moment, then stepped quietly back to the door of 6-C. I could hear Kezar dialing inside. I used my keys again, slipped inside, closed the door behind me. Kezar put down the phone.
“What do you want now?” he said. “Get out of here!”
“No,” I said.
I walked toward him. It was night outside the windows now, and the room was lost in shadows with only the small telephone stand light on.
“She saved you for one murder,” I said. “She won’t save you for the others.”
CHAPTER 28
“No you don’t,” Kezar said, came away from the telephone. “You don’t accuse me of any more. We’ve got laws, Fortune!”
“You had the motive,” I said. “Pappas must have been suspicious. Only a little, maybe, but enough to look into you.”
“Pappas knew nothing! Sid never got to him!”
There was something ghostly about the shadowed room, the open window where Sid Meyer had gone out. We didn’t believe in ghosts, Irving Kezar and I, but I felt more behind me now than my own anger at a moral pimp like Kezar, and his hands shook as he tried to face me down.
“No, Sid never got to him,” I said. “Because you killed Sid. I know you did it. Okay, Jenny’ll take the fall for you. Maybe she loves you, who knows? Maybe she’s just smart, and knows she’ll look better in court, get off easier. Her own brother, a tragic mistake. Or maybe she just figures you can’t make money in jail, so she’ll take a few years so you can build the cash. But she can’t help you for Pappas and Diana Wood.”
“I told you to get out!”
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