“No. No, that’s not true. Nothing like that was discussed, you are wrong.”
“When she called you back the second time, Martucci, did she tell you it was all taken care of? She’d gotten rid of the bodies?”
Martucci started to rise toward Tim. “All taken care of? I don’t know what you mean. You are wrong in all of this. Kitty loves her children.”
Vito Geraldi planted himself alongside Martucci’s chair, and Martucci sat down again, at the edge. “Who’d you tell her to call, Vince?” Vito put a friendly hand on Martucci’s shoulder and said in a raspy, personal voice, “In the old days, you used to have Louis Galgonzola.”
“Galgonzola? What are you saying? Galgonzola’s been dead for ten, fifteen years. What—”
Vito spoke right over Martucci; he told Tim, “His top hit man in the old days, Captain. They used to call Galgonzola ‘the Beast,’ which will give you an idea of the guy if punks like this one called him a beast.” He turned his full attention again to Martucci. “Who’s your beast now, Vincent? Because it would have to be one helluva beast to have done these two little kids.”
There was a fine line of moisture over Martucci’s upper lip, and he blotted it with the back of a manicured hand, twisting away from Vito’s grip on his shoulder. “Captain Neary, I came here in good faith, hoping I could help, but ...”
I moved Vito away and sat down again next to Martucci, who wasn’t sure if he should try to leave or not. “Look, Vince, I personally think that Vito’s wrong. I think the whole thing was a mistake, an accident.” I turned to Neary. “Tim, remember what we talked about before, how the whole thing might have been just a terrible accident.”
“It’s possible,” Tim said.
“Look, Mr. Martucci,” I said. “The way I figure it, Kitty choked the first kid by accident; hell, it’s easy enough to do to a little kid. Then she gave the second kid sleeping pills, to quiet him down, and then she realized what she’d done and panicked. Then she called you; you’re a good friend, why wouldn’t she call you? So you told her who to call; someone you could trust, who would fake a kidnap-murder, to get her off the hook. Look, I’m not saying what you did was right, hell, I don’t know. Maybe I’d do the same thing in the same situation.”
“If that’s the way it was, Martucci,” Tim Neary said, “tell us now. Right now. Because, technically, you’re an accessory to the fact. Three thousand miles away or not, the minute Kitty called you and told you what happened, you became legally responsible. Keeler will probably be able to get away with manslaughter. She was under emotional pressure; maybe she can even pull off a temporary-insanity plea. But you won’t have anything to go with, Martucci. This one isn’t going to just go away. We’re gonna deal, Vincent; we don’t deal with you, we deal with Keeler.”
He wasn’t buying. Not that anyone expected he would. He realized that no one was going to stop him from leaving this time.
“Since I have nothing further to say, Captain, I am going. The next time we speak, if there is a next time, my attorney will be present. He’ll be very angry that I accompanied your two men here tonight, but I let my concern for Kitty and my sorrow for her children overcome my good sense. It will not happen again.”
He stood up, turned and walked out. Neary nodded at Geraldi, who went to the window and signaled a waiting team of detectives that Vincent Martucci was on his way. They would be with him wherever he went.
“Okay, Vito,” Tim said, “pick up Kitty Keeler and show her what her kids look like.”
CHAPTER 9
I GAVE VITO ABOUT an hour and a half to get up to Yonkers, pick up Kitty Keeler, then drive down to the morgue in Manhattan. By the time I got there, reporters, photographers and TV cameramen were standing around casually as though they had been waiting for a long time.
The old guy behind the desk at the door squinted at my shield, then checked my face and made me sign a sheet of paper attached to a clipboard. In case any stiffs are missing, they know who to question. There were two names between Vito’s and mine, so my timing was pretty good. The old guy looked like a collection of worn-out bones jangling around in a baggy navy-blue uniform. I didn’t ask him if he was a former cop; I was afraid he’d say yes.
I spotted Vito before he saw me. Even from halfway down the long corridor, it was obvious that he was upset. He paced back and forth, head thrust forward and down, one large hand massaging the hell out of the back of his neck. He spun toward me and stamped down the hall. There was a dull red flush in Vito’s face, down his neck into his sweaty shirt collar. He was breathing in loud short snorts and he grabbed my arm and shoved me into an alcove where there was a series of telephones.
Vito’s eyes were blazing and he flexed his heavy jaw a few times, like he was testing it for biting. “Jesus Christ, Joey. Swear to God, this bitch is iron, Joe. I tell ya, she’s iron and stone.” He positioned himself for a good view of the corridor.
“What happened, Vito? Where is she? You been downstairs yet?”
“Yeah. We been downstairs. Where is she? I’ll tell ya where she is, Joe. She’s in the ladies’ room, Joe, fixing her makeup. Swear to God, Joe, fixing her makeup. She says, ‘I have to fix my makeup for those cameramen.’ How about that, Joe, huh?”
Vito bit the end off a cigar and spit it to the floor. He drew on the cigar and finally, behind a haze of bitter smoke, he decided to tell me what made him so upset.
“It was like this, Joey, see, we go downstairs.” He interrupted himself. “Jeez, I hate this damn place, ya know? Like the minute I walk into this building, it gets to me. Okay, okay, so we’re headin’ downstairs, this bitch and me, and I’m beginning to feel, like tight inside, ya know, Joe? and I look at her and nothin’, Joe. No expression; nothin’. Like, she knows where we are by now, she knows what we’re gonna see; so I’m thinkin’, Okay, lady, just wait. Then that guy down there, Jenson, Johnson, whatever, that little guy in charge of the stiffs, Jeez, he looks like somethin’ out of a Frankenstein movie, right, so he comes and takes us to where the boys are.”
Vito swiped his hand over his wet red forehead, then blotted it on the side of his jacket. He dropped his cigar and covered it with his huge shoe absently. “Joey, I gotta tell ya, I seen those kids yesterday and I thought it was pretty bad then. But it’s worse today, Joe. Them little kids ... them corpses, they’ve been working on them, Joe. They been slicin’ and cuttin’ them all up for the autopsy. I could hardly look at them myself. I felt a little sorry for her, Joe, God’s honest truth I did. So I moved aside for her and she stands there and she looks at what’s left of her two kids. They was beautiful kids, Joe. I seen the pictures of them, they was dolls. And she looks at them and then she looks at me, swear to God, Joe, she says to me, ‘They’re so dirty. Couldn’t someone clean them up?’ ” His voice was a bitter imitation of a woman’s. Vito squeezed my arm, just below the elbow, to relieve some of the horror he was feeling. “On my mother’s grave, Joe, that’s what she said—‘They’re so dirty. Couldn’t someone clean them up?’ That’s what bothered her, Joe. They was dirty.”
I tapped Vito’s hand and he released my arm just before the bone could snap. “Maybe she was just in shock, Vito.”
“Shock my ass,” he muttered. “That dame didn’t bat an eye, Joe, God’s truth. She says then, ‘Where’s the ladies’ room, I gotta fix my makeup for those cameramen.’ ” He moved his foot, then stared at the crushed, shredded cigar in surprise. “Jesus, Joe, that was my last one. Gimme a cigarette.”
Kitty Keeler walked toward us, a slash of electric blue against the sick-green walls; her platform shoes clicked and echoed in the empty corridor.
Vito turned away. “I’ll see you back in the office, Joe, I don’t wanna look at her right now. Swear to God, this bitch makes me sick to my stomach.”
She had her hair pulled back softly at the sides, and her eyes picked up the color of her dress with a hint of green from the walls. She stood nearly three inches taller in her platform shoes, and she held her hea
d to one side, waiting for me to say something.
“Mrs. Keeler, you weren’t supposed to be brought down here. Your husband already made the necessary identification. Your being here was a mistake.”
“Really? Is that what it was?”
I offered her a cigarette and she let her hand rest on mine as she touched the cigarette to the match. Her touch was cold and dry and she looked up at me as she blew the first smoke from her lungs.
Vito had been wrong. She wasn’t iron and stone, though she hardly seemed flesh and blood. Beneath the fresh layer of makeup she had just applied, she was the color of putty. It showed through just a little, along the edges and sides of her face. There was a fine blue-white circle around her mouth, which glistened with a bright, moist lipstick. And there was something in her eyes, not easily seen, but it was there. Some touch of horror or expectation which I had seen just before George and I left the apartment to identify her dead sons.
She made a subtle but determined effort to shield herself in anger, not unlike the sort of anger she had directed at me when I had first questioned her. Before the boys were found. She fixed the anger coldly on her face and along her thin, rigid shoulders as we walked briskly through the mob of newsmen. I was puzzled by what was under this crisp, controlled façade, but I knew, even if Vito didn’t, that she had been affected by what she’d seen.
Assistant District Attorney Ed Quibro had probably been the kind of kid other kids punched around when they had nothing else to do. The first thing he did when Kitty Keeler and I arrived at Tim’s office was to consult his wristwatch, elaborately, pointedly, and even then he had to say it. “We expected you at least fifteen minutes ago.”
“Well, we’re here now.”
He was a precise, compact man and he carefully checked the various cards and papers he had meticulously set out on Tim’s desk. He looked like a large midget with that peculiar tissue-paper skin wrinkling around his pale button eyes. He could be anywhere from an old twenty-five to a young fifty and he was probably somewhere in the middle. His thinning black hair, worn in an old-fashioned style with short sideburns, was combed straight back from his high forehead; it looked damp. He wore a dark suit with a buttoned-up vest on which was displayed his Phi Beta Kappa key, which he frequently fingered. The collar of his white shirt was as stiff as cardboard and dug into his neck, causing an angry red mark. While everyone in the room waited and watched, Quibro went through a ceremony involving his steel-rimmed eyeglasses, breathing on each lens a predetermined number of times, scrubbing them with a large, clean linen handkerchief. Finally, glasses clean and in place, he pulled some heavy rubber bands from several stacks of three-by-five index cards, which he then tapped on the desk.
“Now. For the purposes of this interrogation,” he informed the stenotypist, a hulking mountain of a guy who hunched over his machine like it was a delicate toy, “let it be noted that present besides myself—that’s Assistant District Attorney Edward M-for-Martin Quibro, that’s Q-U-I-B-R-O—on this date, Friday, April eighteenth, 1975, at, yes, at eight-forty P.M., was Captain Timothy Neary, commanding officer of the District Attorney’s Special Investigating Squad, and Detectives ...”
Quibro snapped his fingers at us; Geraldi, Jefferson, Walker and I gave our names and shield numbers.
Slowly, methodically, chronologically, Quibro led Kitty Keeler through a recitation of her activities and the activities of her children on the night of Wednesday, April 16, beginning at 7 P.M. with the arrival of Dr. Friedman. He stopped her response at several points, demanding more specific information.
“What, besides hamburgers, did you and your son, Terry, have for supper that night, Mrs. Keeler?”
She had been answering softly in a flat tone, the way a kid repeats something that has been memorized. This question puzzled her and she leaned forward slightly. “What else did we have for supper?” When Quibro nodded, she broke the rhythm she had established for herself. “What difference does that make? What does that have to do with anything?”
She drew on her anger, carefully, just testing for the sound of it.
Quibro took off his glasses and directed his blank beige eyes at Kitty. In a nasal monotone, as though reading a set of directions, he said, “It is essential that we know what food or other matter was consumed by your children to your knowledge. Then this information will be checked against the contents of their stomachs when they were found.”
Her mouth fell open and she brought her hand up, but dropped it to her lap before it made contact with her lips. “The contents of ... their stomachs?” She clenched her teeth and pressed her lips together.
Quibro tapped his index cards lightly against the desk and continued to wait. No one said anything and I was about to move when I caught something from Tim: Let this come from me, not you.
“Mrs. Keeler,” Tim explained, “there is the possibility that whoever took the boys might have given them something to eat, some candy or cookies or something. If we know, for a fact, that you didn’t feed them something they apparently ate that night, well, that gives us just one more thing to work with.”
She glared at Neary. “One more thing to work with? You mean one more thing besides my telephone book?” She slid around in the chair and blazed at the men standing on the side of the room. “You bastards been having fun? Listen, you,” she turned back to Neary, “you want to know about my love life, my sex life, you just ask me. Ask me and I’ll tell you whatever the hell you want to know to get your kicks, to make your day.” She leaned back in the chair, folded her arms, tilted her head to one side. “And that’ll save you time, so you won’t have to send all these goddamn overpaid sons-of-bitches digging into my private life. And then maybe, maybe, you can start finding out who killed my kids!” Her anger fed itself, generated an even greater fury, strengthened her, made her more than equal to deal with all of us. She gave each of us one quick, scornful glare; she passed Quibro with a small, bitter laugh. “That’s what this is supposed to be all about,” she told us tightly. “Or did you forget that two little boys were killed? You so caught up in my sex life that you just forgot all about my kids? You all so fuckin’ hard up you gotta get it secondhand?”
Vito Geraldi pulled away from the windowsill, lowered his head bull-like. “You’re really all broke up about them kids, aren’t you, Kitty?”
She made a deep gagging sound, like she’d just been hit in the throat, but she pulled out of it and concentrated all of her energy and strength at Vito. She stood up, rigid, and jabbed an index finger at him. She whispered something harshly in Italian; all I could make out were the words “your mother.” Geraldi seemed to swell toward her rather than lunge. I caught him full against my chest and heard Kitty, behind me, saying coldly, “You keep that fat mother-fucking bastard away from me!”
Vito’s face had gone purple, and when I put my hand on his shoulder and tried to kid him out of it he pulled away, crossed the squad room and headed toward the men’s room. When Vito played bad guy, he went all out. Walker, Vito’s young partner, came from Neary’s office.
“Captain wants ya, Joe. Jeez, Vito got sore, didn’t he? She shouldna said that about his mother.”
“John, any guy over fourteen who takes that kind of remark to heart has a problem.”
Walker started to protest, but I went past him back into Tim’s office. Quibro was collecting his index cards, and Tim told me he’d called a ten-minute coffee break. Apparently Ed Quibro didn’t trust us with his cards and he checked his watch just before leaving the room. Neary went to the electric coffee pot and poured two mugs which he brought over to Kitty, setting one on the edge of his desk. He took one sip from his cup, looked up, and excused himself when Walker called to him through the opened door. Tim closed the door quietly behind him.
“You want the coffee?”
She waved a hand at me. “Go ahead, drink it.”
“Can I get you something else?”
Kitty Keeler dragged on her cigarette, pursed her lips an
d blew the smoke in a steady beam right at me. She pulled her mouth to one side thoughtfully. “It’s a helluva way you people have of making a living. Do you have a lot of fun digging into people’s private lives?”
I thought about it for a minute, then told her, “Not much.”
“It really shakes the hell out of you. All of you. Doesn’t it? That a woman can have a full, active sex life. It’s different when it’s one of the boys, right? Then you all think, boy, this guy’s great. But let a woman live the way she wants and—”
“Mrs. Keeler, you’re talking to the wrong guy. All I want to know is what happened to your boys. Anything else, I couldn’t care less. It’s you, not me. Right?”
She ran her tongue around the inside of her cheek and studied me carefully, shrewdly. A small dimple worked in and out of her cheek and she pointed a finger at me and said in a phony sweet voice, “Hey, now I got it. You’re the good guy. The rest of them,” she waved her arm around the room, “all the rest of them are the bad guys. And that pig, that Geraldi, he’s the bull, the main bad guy, right? And you’re the soft-soap artist, the one I turn to, right? Joe Peters, that’s your name?” There was nothing soft left in her, and her voice was ice. “Well, I’m wise to you, Peters. I’m wise to all of you.”
For some reason, it really got to me; made me really sore as though she wasn’t right about anything. I shoved the chair back and said, “Look, lady. I don’t know what the hell games you think we’re playing or what games you’re playing. I don’t give a damn about you, your sex life, your life style or any other goddamn thing. I’m a cop and I’ve been assigned to find out who the hell killed your kids. With or without your cooperation. I’ve been working my ass off for the last two days trying to get some leads. It would probably be easier with your help, but with it or without it, we’ll find out what happened.”
She said softly, “What’s the matter, Peters, did I hurt your feelings?”
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