“Well, so, that was over the weekend, and, see, I had this very important appointment for last night, and my car wasn’t ready, and there I was, up the creek. Without a car, do you see?”
She called Kitty Keeler for advice; was advised to hop a cab to Fresh Meadows for the loan of the Porsche. Upon her solemn promise to be very careful.
“Oh, and it’s a beautiful machine, the Porsche, you know.”
“What time did you see Mrs. Keeler yesterday, Patti?”
She had arrived at 4 P.M., stayed with the boys for about forty-five minutes, while Kitty went marketing, then stayed on to have a cup of tea.
“How was Mrs. Keeler, Patti? Was she upset, because George was sick? And she couldn’t go to Phoenix because of that?”
Patti stopped licking the last of the soup from the spoon. “Oh, my, you do know all sorts of things, don’t you? Well, she was upset, some, I’m sure. Because, see, Mrs. Silverberg, the old lady from next door, is in hospital and all—”
“Did Mrs. Keeler ask you if you could stay with the boys?”
Patti laughed indulgently at her own shortcomings. “Oh, noooo, she wouldn’t want me for that period of time. I’m not all that reliable, I admit it on myself, you see.”
“What time did you leave the Keeler apartment?”
“At just after five, it was. Oh, and I drove the Porsche, and I don’t mind telling you, my young man of the night was that impressed.”
Very carefully, I led her into a discussion of the kind of mother Kitty Keeler was. According to Patti, Kitty was about on a par with the Virgin Mary.
“I’ll bet you didn’t know I’m Catholic,” Patti bet me. “Most people are surprised to learn that there are Catholic Scots.”
She sure had me there; I’d never have guessed. She continued her testimonial, then launched into a detailed account of her date, which really sounded terrific.
“So then, this morning, when you put on the radio you heard about what happened to the boys, to Terry and George?”
Patti stopped speaking in the middle of a word; she shrugged her shoulders and shuddered as though a chill ran down her back. Her small eyes filled with tears and they spilled down her round cheeks, leaving long royal-blue streaks of mascara.
“And you haven’t seen or spoken to Mrs. Keeler since ... what was it, five o’clock last night?”
She nodded absently, then jerked her head at me. “Oh, no, wait, that wasn’t what I said, was it?”
“I’m sorry. I must have misunderstood, Patti. Did you see or speak to Mrs. Keeler after five last night?”
She became evasive; her face screwed up with indecision. I leaned forward and reached for her hands; they grasped mine with a surprising tension.
“What’s wrong, Patti? What is it you’re not sure you should tell me?”
“How did you know that?” she asked in wonder. It’s been a long time since I was so impressive.
“Because you’re a nice girl and I can see you’re worrying about something. It’ll be better if you tell me; then you won’t have to worry about it anymore. Patti?”
“Well, you see, last night I drove my gentleman friend to his place and left right away. He’s coming down with the flu and didn’t want me to stay around. He lives in Manhattan, you see, so as I was driving over the bridge to Queens, I fell to thinking that why ever should Mrs. Keeler be without her car in the morning? It was good enough of her to lend it to me; the least I could do was to return it, and take a taxi-cab home you see?”
“Very thoughtful, Patti.” Very carefully, I asked her, “So you went back to Mrs. Keeler’s apartment late last night” What time would that be?”
“It was two-thirty. This morning. I pulled into the parking lot, see I know her parking space, it’s all reserved and all, and I knew it was two-thirty, the news was just coming on and all.”
“And what happened then? You went to Mrs. Keeler’s apartment at two-thirty?”
“Well yes.” She hesitated: this was the tricky part; the part of it that had her worried. I squeezed her hands lightly: they were very cold.
“Did you see her at that time? Patti?”
“Well. No. See, that was the funny thing. I went to the apartment door and tapped. I didn’t want to wake the boys so I didn’t ring the bell at first.”
“What about waking Mrs. Keeler? Didn’t you think she’d be asleep at that time?”
“Oh, no. Mrs. Keeler is so used to working late-night hours, at the spa, you see. She hardly ever gets to sleep before three or four, she’d told me that. Besides. I’d seen her bedroom light on around the back, you know, when I came from the parking lot.”
“Okay what happened then?”
“Well, she didn’t come to the door. So finally I rang the bell. I hated to do that, it’s such a loud bell, but, you know, I thought maybe she’d the telly on and couldn’t hear me tapping.”
“Did she come to the door?”
Patti shook her head, staring at our collection of fingers.
“Then what did you do? Did you hear anything from inside? The boys crying or calling out or anything?”
“It was quiet inside. From what I could hear with my ear at the door.”
“Then what did you do?”
“Well, then I drove home. Back to here, and I got ready for bed. And then ...” She wavered; drew her hands onto her own lap.
“Come on, Patti, then what?”
Apparently she couldn’t talk unless I squeezed the words out of her hands. They were still cold, but, at the same time, now they were sweaty.
“Well. I was sort of worried, you know. Her not coming to the door and all. So ... I went out into the hallway there, where the phone is. And I called her. Mrs. Keeler.”
“And ... ?”
“She answered; on the first ring, in fact. I was relieved to hear her voice. That she was ... all right, you know?”
“What time was this, Patti? And what did she say?”
“It was a minute or so after three; the news was on again.” She gestured vaguely toward her table radio. “And so, well, I told her that I had stopped by, with the car for her, and all. But, well, I think she was angry with me. Or annoyed.”
“Why? What did she say when you told her about knocking on the door and ringing the bell?”
“Well, she said that she’d been under the shower and had the radio on in the bathroom and didn’t hear me at the door.”
She looked up at me with her small runny eyes, waiting for me to ask the right question; unwilling to volunteer anything more.
“But you didn’t believe that, right, Patti?” I took a calculated guess. “The bathroom window faces the parking lot, doesn’t it?” She nodded. “Was the light on in the bathroom at that time?”
Patti shook her head. She looked at me hopefully. “Maybe she was bathing in the dark? Do you think that might be possible?”
I shrugged; that made her feel a little better.
“Patti, did you see anyone, anyone at all, either in the parking lot or near the building? Did anyone see you there at two-thirty this morning?”
She hadn’t noticed anyone; it would take days of bell-ringing and hundreds of interviews to determine if anyone in the vicinity could confirm the fact of Patti’s presence in Fresh Meadows at the time she claimed.
When I told her that I’d drive her to the squad office, she smiled, shoved the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hands, and dug through a morass of garments in the small closet until she finally bent down and yanked out a short bright-blue fake-fur jacket. When she put it on, she looked like a stuffed blue teddy bear.
We hit the street just as Sam Catalano got out of his car. He waved and called to me. I waved back, got the Porsche’s keys from Patti, tossed them to Sam just before I got behind the wheel. The Porsche was parked right behind my car.
“See you later, Sam. They’re waiting at the 107th for the Porsche. Try to get back to the squad before Captain Neary.”
I couldn’t hear w
hat Sam was calling out to me, so I just waved as we drove past him.
CHAPTER 5
WHILE I WAS IN Neary’s office giving him the essentials of what Patti MacDougal had told me, Patti was making friends in the squad room. To keep her happy until her statement was typed and ready for her signature she’d been provided with a bag of Burger Kings and a couple of chocolate milkshakes.
“Jesus Joe, let’s get her story confirmed.”
“I’ve notified Wise. And I pulled Collins and Schwartz from the Peck Avenue location and told them to question the owner of every car in the Fresh Meadows parking lot. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
It wasn’t that Tim was generous with his authority as squad commander; he wasn’t. At the point where the case was ready to be all pulled together, he would remind us both that even though I was the senior first-grade detective in the squad, he was the boss so far as credit was concerned. District Attorney Jeremiah Kelleher waited upstairs to remind Tim that in the event of failure it was also all Tim’s.
“I wish the goddamn Medical Examiner would call. Even with tentative information.” Tim was cracking his knuckles: a sure sign of building tension; “Have you seen the early edition of the Post? They got someone working in my squad or what?”
Some enterprising, ambitious anonymous reporter, trying to earn his byline, had gotten hold of the fact that there were more than a hundred men’s names in Kitty’s pink leather telephone book. And that of the names checked so far, more than half were known to the police in connection with various interrelated criminal matters. That was how this anonymous reporter described it: “various interrelated criminal matters.”
“The paper got that almost as fast as it was relayed to me, Joe.” Tim whistled softly between his teeth, and his eyes glazed over for a moment. Then he blinked and smashed his hand down on his desk. “Hey, where the hell is that dago son-of-a-bitch Catalano?”
Tim Neary has nothing against Italians. His wife, Catherine, is Italian. It was the first thing he told me about her, years ago when he asked me to be his best man: “She’s Italian, Joe, but a terrific girl.”
I convinced him that Sam was safely out of the way. After turning it over in his mind, Neary said, “Good. Good. In fact, Joe, give him a call over at the 107th and tell him he’s to stay with the Porsche. He’s not to let it out of his sight.”
“He’s probably on his way back here by now, Tim.”
Tim smiled tightly. “Good. The minute he gets here, tell him to turn his ass around and get back to the Porsche. The son-of-a-bitch.” Then, just in case, he asked, “You don’t think the car has any connection to the case, do you, Joe?”
“At this point, I doubt it. But someone used a car to carry those bodies over to Peck Avenue. While Jefferson is typing up the girl’s statement, his partner is checking out how and where she spent the night. I’d say she rings true.”
“We gotta keep right on top of this case, Joe. You realize that, don’t you?” For about the third time in three minutes, Tim checked his watch. “If we don’t wind this thing up fast and clean, that bastard upstairs could replace me, Joe. He could justify it, and how the hell would that look in my credentials? Getting bounced over a headline case could screw me up, but good.” Tim stood up, swung around and kicked his wastebasket. It was metal and the ringing sound lasted for about fifteen seconds. Then he shoved his hands into his pockets and turned around to me.
“We’re going upstairs in about ten minutes, Joe, to brief him. From what’s been coming in all day, this Keeler dame is a flat-out tramp. If her husband didn’t help her, and if she didn’t have her car last night, the chances are that the guy who helped her is someone listed in her pink book, right?” He rubbed some coins together inside his pocket and whistled tunelessly. Then, “According to the neighbors, Keeler hardly spent any time at all with her kids. This elderly woman—Mrs. Silverberg?—practically raised them from the time they were born. I want you to talk to Mrs. Silverberg first thing tomorrow, Joe. She’s at the Long Island Jewish Hospital. She can probably give you the lowdown on the little mother and some of her playmates.” His eyes got that glazed look again, then, as though talking to himself, he said, “No one else could have done it. It had to be the mother.”
Tim turned and faced the traffic outside his window on Queens Boulevard and seemed to go into a trance. I glanced absently at the collection of black-framed photographs that took up most of the wall over the green leather couch that Tim’s wife had bought him for a birthday present. Most of the pictures were of Tim shaking hands with someone or other who was in the process of presenting Tim an award in the shape of an engraved brass plaque mounted on wood. Most of the awards were hanging along the back wall of Tim’s office over the long narrow conference table.
There were a few familiar faces in the pictures besides Tim’s: Bobby Kennedy standing off to one side as Tim accepted the Irishman-of-the-Year Award from some hearty-looking Irishman back in the early sixties; Tim and his wife, Catherine, flanking stocky Richard Daley (they had been engaged then and Catherine had been a delegate to Chicago in 1968; the occasion of the picture had been some Communion breakfast in New York). Daley’s expression was murderous, his eyes glinting and tough, and both Tim and Catherine looked reverent and impressed.
The only outsized memento was the framed, yellowing front page of the old New York Mirror, the thick black headline saying HERO ROOKIES SAVE 10 KIDS IN B’KLYN BLAZE. There we were on the front page, Tim and me, the hero rookies, our faces younger and more innocent than either of us had ever been, handing over the last-saved kid into the arms of an ambulance attendant. Three of the kids died subsequently, but we both got first-class commendations anyway. It was that particular incident that more or less determined the direction of Tim’s future career in the department.
“Hell,” Tim had said to me the next day in the hospital, where he was resting up from smoke inhalation and I was awaiting surgery on the torn cartilage of my right knee, “I’m not going to end up burning my ass for a bunch of little nigger kids left alone by their whore of a mother. I’m signing up at Delehanty’s for the next sergeant’s exam and if you have any brains at all you’ll come with me.”
I spent three weeks on sick leave and then four weeks on light duty while my knee was healing. I was assigned to a desk job at the old Bureau of Criminal Identification, where I made a few useful contacts and performed a few “favors” for a couple of people in positions to reciprocate if and when I needed a favor. Which is something that Delehanty’s doesn’t teach you: how and under what circumstances to pile up favors owed. And when to call in debts.
In the next couple of years, while I worked foot patrol out of the old Twenty-third Precinct in Harlem, Tim was collecting sergeant’s stripes and managed to get himself assigned to a spot in Manhattan headquarters, which gave him plenty of time to study for the lieutenant’s exam. I liked my job; I liked the people up there. It wasn’t the way it is now, when even a black cop’s life is on the line the minute he sets foot outside the precinct house. If you were a good guy, you made a certain number of friends—among the local shopkeepers, ginmill owners and customers, neighborhood working stiffs as well as neighborhood sharpies. It was like any other situation: people were suspicious at first, then once they sized you up, once they accepted you, once you had an established working relationship and people knew what they could expect from you, you knew what to expect from them.
I delivered a lot of babies; broke up a hundred family Saturday-night fights; arrested more than twenty rapists even though I knew that when it’s black on black the case is odds on to be dumped. I saved—or at least prolonged—a couple of lives, using first-aid techniques. I collected twelve more commendations before I killed a man and nearly got killed myself.
I went into a tenement to try and reason with some lunatic who had slashed his wife’s throat, then castrated and stabbed her lover. Before I said one reassuring word, he managed to sink his knife into the side of my neck so that within
seconds we were in close, intimate contact, his knife in me, my revolver dug into the soft tissue of his throat just beneath his jaw. My shot blew half his head off, and as he died he dragged his knife down along my neck and across my chest. I got a first-class commendation for killing that guy, although the general opinion was that I was a dumbbell for having allowed myself to get cut: that I should have come in shooting and saved conversation for later. An opinion with which, of course, I finally agreed.
While I was recuperating, with thirty-six stitches making a jagged pattern down my throat and chest, Tim Neary came to wise me up. He had just passed pretty high on the lieutenant’s list and was already beginning to study for the captain’s exam. Tim was a lot smarter than me in a lot of ways. For instance, he knew how to use what I had collected over the years. About a week after I spoke with Tim, a lieutenant from the Bureau of Special Services visited me on behalf of his newly appointed squad commander, a deputy inspector I had done a favor for when he was still a captain. I followed Tim’s instructions: said all the right things, looked blank at all the right times. I was assigned to the B.O.S.S. as a third-grade detective when my recuperation was over.
The squad handled all kinds of undercover surveillance assignments, ranging from illegal activities of various political dissidents to wildcat-strike threats by leaders of municipal unions, to discreet background investigations of individuals proposed for high city-government appointive office. We acted more as an information-collecting unit than as an enforcement branch of the department. The squad also handled security assignments, and since I spoke a passable French (my wife, Jen, is French-Canadian), I drew a lot of the glamour escort jobs: seeing to the safety of visiting foreign dignitaries or heads of government attending sessions of the U.N.; keeping between the body I had to protect and the various emotional demonstrators who had carried old political grievances to the streets of New York on behalf of citizens still in the mother country.
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