Investigation

by Uhnak, Dorothy

Tim paused significantly to let me consider the timing of the call; before I could say anything, he held his hand up, looked down at a second slip on his desk, then up at me.

  “She called him a second time, person to person, from three-ten A.M. to three-twenty-five A.M., Thursday morning, April seventeenth.”

  We stared at each other, then Vito slammed me on the back. “Wadda ya think, Joey?”

  I sat down on one of the chairs in front of Tim’s desk; slouched way down with my legs going under the desk and my shoulders even with the top of the chair. There was no portion of me that Geraldi could punch, pinch, jab or pat.

  “Run through it, Joe.”

  I closed my eyes and started. “First kid is killed between eleven and midnight Wednesday. Kitty calls George at his bar at eleven-twenty.” When I opened my eyes, I saw that Tim was checking me against a page of jotted notes. He nodded when I continued. “We can assume the first kid was killed sometime between eleven and eleven-twenty, right? She can’t get to speak to George. She calls Martucci and talks to him between eleven-thirty and twelve-five midnight. At around this time, the older boy, Terry, has apparently ingested a certain amount of a barbiturate, so he’s either dead or comatose at this time.”

  “Comatose,” Tim said. “He was still alive when he was shot; the M.E. confirmed the tentative times of death and that the thirty-eight was the cause of death of the second boy.”

  “Right. Then this Scotch girl—”

  “Scots girl,” Tim said coldly.

  “Right. Patti MacDougal claims she was at the Keeler apartment at two-thirty A.M. Apparently, no one home; at least no one came to the door and she didn’t hear anyone inside. Still not confirmed, Tim?”

  “No, but presuming the girl had no reason to lie, she then returned to her apartment and called Kitty at three A.M.” He nodded at me to continue.

  “Right. Kitty talks to Patti at three A.M.; says something about having been under the shower earlier. Then at ... what? Three-ten?”

  Vito came behind me and rested a hand on my shoulder. He began to squeeze his encouragement. “From three-ten to three-twenty-five, Joe, she and Martucci talk on the phone again.”

  “By which time both of her children are dead, Joe.” Tim stood up and shoved his hands into his pockets and began clinking coins together; he stared out the window for a moment, then turned and leaned against the sill. “My guess would go something like this, Joe. In some kind of ... anger, maybe, she strangles the first kid. Probably didn’t mean to do it; give her the benefit of the doubt, at this point. The other kid witnessed it; maybe he starts to cry, is all upset, so she gives him a couple of sleeping pills.” He interrupted himself. “No question that the sleeping pills came from Keeler’s medicine cabinet: Doriden. She just picked up the prescription about a week ago. That’s what ‘someone’ gave to little Terry. Okay. Now let’s say she’s in a panic; calls George to come over to help her out. Can’t connect. Calls Martucci in Phoenix and they talk for more than half an hour.”

  “Did he call her at any time?”

  Vito massaged my numb shoulder. “No, Joe, we checked with the Phoenix P.D. Martucci didn’t make no New York calls, no one from the spa made any long-distance calls those two days.”

  “He probably calms her down.” Tim sounded like he was talking to himself; his eyes were glassy and unfocused. “Tells her who to call for help; who’ll help her get rid of the bodies.” He stopped speaking and just stared, then rubbed the back of his neck and looked up at me. “Her own kids, Joe. Jesus, this girl has got to be cold-blooded.”

  “She’s nothin’ but a little whore, Tim, wadda ya expect?” Vito declared. He dug at me with his thick fingers. “Time of death for the second kid, Joe, from the bullet: estimated sometime between two and three A.M. Thursday morning.”

  “It can even be narrowed down,” Tim said. “To sometime between two-twenty and three A.M. Figuring they were out of the apartment before two-thirty and Kitty was back by three. Takes maybe five minutes to load the kids into a car, drive them down to Peck Avenue, dump them, shoot Terry, drive back. Kitty gets out of the car and back into the apartment and answers the phone at three.” He rubbed his face roughly, first down, then up. His eyebrows were all rumpled. “What we have to find now is who helped her. That’ll pull it all together.”

  “Then she calls Martucci back at three-ten until three-twenty-five, to tell him the score,” Vito told me.

  “What’s the matter, Joe?” Tim’s voice was sharp and tight. I wasn’t nodding enough or something. “What the hell’s going on inside your head?” He made it sound like treason. Which is how Tim acts when he’s satisfied with a solution and you don’t agree with him with enthusiasm. Which could also mean he’s just a little shaky and needs reassurance from everyone.

  “Just trying to get it straight in my head is all, Tim.”

  His jaws tightened as he clenched his teeth and the thin whistling started. The whistling and his stare were directed right at me.

  “Just wondering ...”

  “Wondering what?” He waited, daring me to have any questions about anything. At all.

  “Just wondering why they dumped the kids so close to home. And why ... Kitty didn’t realize how easy it would be for us to trace the long-distance calls. And ... why she didn’t come up with a better story than just ‘I went to bed. Got up. They were gone.’ Period.”

  “That’s what’s bothering you, Joe?”

  Vito began explaining. “The girl acted in a panic, Joe. She musta got somebody just as scared as she was; just got rid of the bodies at the first possible spot. Dumped them, shot the older kid, to make it look like a kidnapping or something. Then came back and wanted to tell Martucci about it. He probably told her to stick with as simple a story as possible.”

  Tim watched me, but I didn’t move a muscle. This guy has had my loyalty and my reassurance from the time we were in the second grade. It was time he started acting like a big boy.

  Finally Tim asked, “Doesn’t that sound reasonable, Joe?” This sounded more like a question than a demand.

  “Yeah, Tim, I’d say so.”

  Vito wasn’t sure what the hell was going on and he looked a little puzzled, then figured whatever it was was between Tim and me. And it was finished; for the time being, anyway.

  “Martucci is coming into Kennedy via TWA in less than an hour, Joe. Vito has the flight information. You guys are going to pick him up and bring him back here.” Tim leaned forward and squashed a cigarette into his large black onyx ashtray. “I want us to be very well prepared when we question Kitty Keeler later tonight.”

  “Right, Captain. Absolutely.”

  Tim turned that over for the needle and decided not to acknowledge it. He was absorbed in jotting down notes when Vito and I left.

  On the way to the airport I read through the folder Vito had given me. Vincent Martucci’s yellow sheet began with his first arrest for felonious assault when he was eighteen years old. The mug shot showed a close-cropped, unformed young face, mouth self-consciously pulled into a tough-guy sneer. He’d been sent to Elmira for two years; was out in fourteen months. Despite a total of nineteen additional arrests on charges ranging from auto theft to murder, Martucci had never again been convicted of any criminal charge.

  According to a background report prepared by Paul Sutro, Vincent Martucci was a man of many business interests. He was a sixty percent owner of the New World Health Spa Systems, Inc.; he had a fiscal or controlling interest in several real-estate and land-development companies; owned a women’s-dress manufacturing company, a few machine shops, a small printing company; a substantial interest in a scrap-metal yard, a private garbage-collecting company, two industrial laundries, four bowling alleys, three restaurants, a large well-known caterer’s in Brooklyn, an equally well-known, classier caterer’s in Nassau County; a piece of a luxury hotel in Miami; interest in a couple of racehorses; a fifty percent interest in an up-and-coming welterweight, a commercial paint-manufacturing com
pany as well as three retail outlets for the paint, a heavy trailer-parts supply company and a demolition company.

  Outright, he owned a food-supply organization that catered exclusively to concessionaires in all the major racetracks and indoor sports arenas within a fifty-mile radius of New York City.

  Several of the organizations in which he held a substantial interest had ongoing and future contracts with various city and state governmental agencies. A company in which Martucci owned thirty percent of the stock supplied all bed linens and towels to all municipal hospitals in New York City. Another company in which he held an undetermined interest had been awarded, through competitive bidding, the purchase of major Transit Authority scrap iron for a period of two years; given all his other interests, it wouldn’t be hard for Martucci’s company to underbid more legitimate organizations.

  Vincent Martucci didn’t deserve to look the way he did. At fifty-three years of age, he had a full head of carefully styled black hair with gray at the sideburns. He had black eyebrows over startlingly blue eyes, and even white teeth which flashed in his Arizona-suntanned face. He wore a conservative, expensive dark suit, immaculate white shirt with small gold cuff links and a carefully knotted dark silk tie. At the end of a five-hour flight he left the plane looking crisp and fresh, and pleased to leave behind him a group of pretty smiling stewardesses. When they called out cheerfully to him, “You come back soon, now, you hear?” they sounded like they meant it, and he seriously promised that he would.

  He spotted us the second he set his foot on the ramp, but he didn’t even bat an eye as we approached him. He finished his conversation with an impressed-looking businessman, and they exchanged cards and good wishes before Martucci acknowledged us.

  He glanced at our shields, nodded politely, then spoke to someone behind us. “Willie, you follow behind us, I’ll ride with these gentlemen.” He said it as though it was a decision he had made. “We’re going to Kew Gardens, yes? You will wait for me outside the court there, Willie.” And then, as if reassuring a child, he told his chauffeur, “Go, go, it’s all right, Willie.”

  He settled himself comfortably in the back seat as though we were his employees acting on his orders.

  We let him sit in the squad room for about twenty minutes, but it was a waste of time. When Geraldi finally brought him into Tim’s office, he was cool and polite.

  He leaned over Tim’s desk, hand extended. “I am Vincent Martucci. Anything that I can do to help in this matter, anything, I will be willing to do.” When Neary ignored the outstretched hand, Martucci just smiled and shrugged slightly. He glanced behind him. “May I sit down?”

  Tim’s eyes got that glassy look they get when he’s giving someone the business. “Sit down, Martucci,” he said. “This is an informal meeting, Martucci. You are here on an entirely voluntary basis, is that right?”

  “Yes, of course.” Then, with a slight smile that could have meant anything Martucci said, “Let us both remember that fact, Captain Neary, is it?”

  “Exactly what is your relationship with Kitty Keeler?”

  Martucci remained absolutely motionless, but there seemed to be a tightening process going on; everything about him was rigidly still. Quietly, in an intimate voice, he said, “With Kitty, as I’m sure you’ve learned already, it is a ‘special thing.’ ”

  “Explain what that means,” Tim said coldly, not accepting any mutual knowledge between them.

  Martucci smiled; his right shoulder moved just a fraction of an inch, an elegant shrug. “Very well. You could say that she is my mistress.”

  “Really? Well, from what we’ve learned, Kitty Keeler has a ‘special thing’ with a lot of men besides you. Which leads me to believe that the ‘lady’ isn’t very ‘special’ at all.”

  “You pimp for her?” Vito asked roughly.

  Martucci’s head snapped toward Vito and his eyes narrowed and considered the large, squat man, then dismissed him with a soft click of his tongue against his teeth and turned back to Tim as though expecting to find an ally.

  “Detective Geraldi asked you a question,” Tim said. “I haven’t heard your answer, Martucci.”

  Martucci’s eyes, fastened on Tim, seemed less blue now; grayer; icier. His hands tightened on the chair arms and he became rigid with control. He gave off waves of emotion, tightly held back, clenched between his teeth and under the palms of his hands.

  Vito moved menacingly toward Martucci. “I asked you a question, buster.” Then Vito said something in Italian; an expression I’d never heard before, but the impact was immediate and obvious. Martucci went two shades lighter beneath his tan; his lips pulled back into what looked like a snarl. He started to rise from the chair but Vito put one hand flat against his chest, didn’t seem to exert any pressure at all, and Martucci hit the chair so hard he almost went over backward.

  “Sit down, Vito, c’mon, take it easy.” I pulled Vito away just as he seemed about to go for Martucci again. Vito turned away from me with a sound of disgust, then concentrated on lighting a mashed cigar end.

  Martucci started to straighten his jacket, then let his hand drop to the arm of the chair, refusing to acknowledge that Vito had had any impact on him. He pulled back his lips into what wasn’t quite a smile, though that’s what he seemed to be trying for.

  “Do not play games with me, Captain.”

  I don’t know how Tim can go that long without blinking, but he’d never stopped his stare right at Martucci, who finally seemed aware of it and seemed just a little uncomfortable, which is the effect Tim tries for when he pulls that bit.

  “I am not a pimp,” Martucci said.

  “Not anymore, huh?” Vito noisily fingered through Martucci’s yellow sheet, making obscene comments after every page.

  “Tell me something that puzzles me, Martucci,” Tim said in a reasonable voice, but without blinking. “You say that Kitty Keeler’s your ‘mistress.’ Well, apparently you’re a well-informed man, no one can put something over on you. You must know that Kitty fucks around a helluva lot.” He waited for the reaction to his words; there was none. Martucci’s face had hardened into a steely blankness; the color of his eyes, over which he had no conscious control, had changed again, just slightly; gone a little more gray. “Doesn’t that bother you, Martucci? I mean, if she’s your mistress, doesn’t she owe you more loyalty than that?”

  “I don’t own Kitty. She is free to do as she pleases, when she pleases, with whoever she pleases.”

  “Jesus, you’re just another George Keeler, ain’t ya?” Vito said.

  Martucci deserved a couple of points for style; no question about it. His eyes had gone almost as colorless as his lips. The rest of his body had tightened, but the minute he became aware of the white-knuckled grip of his hands on the ends of the chair arms he made his fingers relax, go slack. There was a visible easing of the tensed muscles of his body. His breathing, which had become sharp and fast and audible, slowed to a more natural, silent rhythm. He raised his chin slightly, swallowed once and reset his face into an expectant, interested, well-mannered half-smile. I wondered if he displayed his polite good manners to his victims, maybe an elegant shrug of his shoulders and a soft apology just before he blew their brains away. I wondered if it had made any difference to his victims.

  Tim blinked once; his eyes went directly to me. I responded by pulling a chair up alongside Martucci and leaning toward him.

  “What did you and Kitty Keeler talk about when she called you on Wednesday night? Between eleven-thirty and twelve-five midnight, what did you two talk about?”

  “Business,” he said quietly, showing no surprise at the question. “Kitty wanted to know all about the opening; how things were going and all. She would have been there but for the illness of her child. She wanted to know everything that was happening.”

  “She talk business to you again when she called you a second time? What did you have to talk about from three-ten until three-twenty-five on Thursday morning?”

 
; Martucci turned to me and smiled; man to man. He showed his white teeth, but his light eyes weren’t smiling at all. “You know how it is.”

  “I don’t know how it is,” Tim Neary said. “You tell me.”

  Martucci faced Neary and spoke softly, politely, as though explaining an obvious situation patiently to a stupid child. “Kitty had been planning for a long time to attend the Phoenix opening. It was an exciting event; we had many movie people there, and many politicians. I can give you the guest list, if you wish.” When no one asked him for it, he continued. “Kitty was to have been not only the hostess but the assistant manager of the spa. It was to be a training period for her, Phoenix was. If she could handle it, I’d promised her that position when our Westchester spa is open and functioning.” Neary was staring again; this time he was also tapping his thumbnail against his front teeth and softly whistling. When he didn’t ask any further questions, Martucci went on, almost against his will. “Kitty was naturally disappointed that she was unable to be there. She is, in some ways, like a child. She wanted to hear everything, to know what was going on.” A bit impatiently, he explained, “There is, as you know, a time difference, New York to Phoenix. It was only eight-thirty Phoenix time when she first called; it was only after midnight Phoenix time when she called the second time. She just wanted to know all the details of the opening. Nothing unusual in that.”

  Tim’s eyes moved about an eighth of an inch toward me.

  “When Kitty called you the first time, Vincent,” I waited until he turned his head to me, “when she called you at eleven-thirty, New York time, did she tell you then that she had just strangled her son Georgie?”

  Martucci gasped as though he’d been hit in the stomach. He shook his head, said first to Neary, then to me, “That is crazy! That is insane. Kitty loves her children. She stayed home with them because the little one was sick. She has always been a devoted mother, she—”

  “And did she tell you at the time,” Tim’s voice was hard and cold and he’d stopped staring, “did she tell you that she’d given Terry sleeping pills? And that she was afraid he was dead, too?”