“Jen? Is that you? What’s wrong, Jen, what’s wrong?”
It wasn’t a “scheduled” phone call and she sounded funny; strange.
“I don’t know, Joe. Maybe you better tell me.”
“Maybe you better tell me what we’re talking about.”
“All right, Joe. I will. About ten minutes ago, Tim Neary called. He wanted to talk to you.”
Terrific. I had had absolutely no reason to think Tim would call me. Even so, I should have covered myself.
“I kept my head, Joe. Don’t worry about it. I told him you had taken a drive out to the construction site of Fred’s new project. Since I didn’t know when I’d be able to reach you. Or if.”
“I’m sorry, Jen. Damn, I should have called you. Look, I’ve caught a private investigation from Johnny Flynn. I didn’t particularly want Tim to know I was moonlighting.” Flynn was a retired cop who’d opened his own agency out in Suffolk County. From time to time, I’d done a few jobs for him. “I’m really sorry I put you on the spot.”
“No problem, Joe. It just took me by surprise, that’s all.”
She really didn’t sound angry; just a little annoyed. No questions, no explanations needed.
“Hey, Jen, do you remember which one of Mike’s friends used to go skin-diving? I got Mike’s old phone book here, but damned if I can remember which kid it was.”
“I think it was Tommy Dawson, wasn’t it? The redheaded boy?”
“Hey, I think you’re right. Wait a minute. Yeah, I’ve got his home phone number. He’s the kid got the scholarship to St. John’s, right?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Great, that’s fine. I need someone to do a little underwater search for me. For the investigation I’m on.” No comment. “You know, I might be able to come down there for a few days at least, soon as I wind this thing up, okay?”
“That’ll be nice, Joe. If you can fit it in.”
I really didn’t need this now; particularly knowing I was in the wrong. I pretended not to have picked up on the sound in her voice.
“Okay, listen, babe, thanks again. I am sorry, I shouldn’t have left you in the lurch like that. You really came through and I appreciate it. Listen, I’ll give you a call toward the end of the week, okay?”
“Fine. Oh. Don’t call Friday, Joe. I’ll be tied up for a long weekend. You better wait an hour or two before you call Tim. He only called here about twenty minutes or so ago. Good-bye, Joe.”
She left me with that long, tied-up weekend. As punishment. Shit.
Goddamn Tim Neary.
I called the Dawson kid’s number and spoke to his mother. At first she reacted very emotionally, remembering I was a policeman.
“Oh my God, has something happened to Tommy?”
I assured her that nothing had happened to him; that he hadn’t done anything to interest the law; that I just wanted to get some skin-diving hints from him before I went on vacation to Florida. She was very relieved and promised that her son would call me later in the day.
I hammered out a few pages of notes and spent an hour or so trying to bring some cohesiveness and sense to the last few days’ work. I gave Tim until about two-thirty for his long lunch, then called the office.
“Joe, you sound like you were right around the corner.”
I thanked God for long-distance dialing. “Well, it’s not costing me ‘from just around the corner.’ What’s doing, Tim? Jen told me you wanted to talk to me about something.”
Tim had had a very strange phone call that morning from Jeremiah Kelleher during the course of which Gorgeous Jerry let Tim know that he had a contract to place a very bright, well-connected, inoffensive young Italian third-grade detective in the D.A.’s Squad. Jerry, always aware of the importance of ethnic balance in a squad, let it drop, not too subtly, that he wouldn’t make any noise if Tim somehow got rid of that “guinea detective, what’s-his-name-Catalano.”
“Can you beat that, Joe? What do you think happened to make Jerry turn on Catalano?”
“What do I think? You’re kidding, Tim. I don’t understand any of the things you political guys get into. When are you planning to unload Catalano?”
“Soon, Joe; very soon. I have about ten valid reasons all lined up. It’s a matter of how I go about it.”
“Very skillfully, I’m sure.”
“Well, tell me, kid, how’re things going?”
I told him Jen and I were in the process of working things out.
“Good, terrific, that’s what I wanted to hear. You getting much time out in the sun, lover?”
“You gonna keep checking on me like this, Tim? Want me to ring every hour, or send a report in every day, or what?”
“No, no. But no kidding, Joe, you’re thinking about the future, right? Have you discussed ‘anything,’ you know, with Jen?”
Tim was being discreet; he was positive his phone was tapped and he was probably right.
“We’re discussing a lot of things, Timmy. Listen, you going to want me again? Should I hang around the apartment and wait for your calls?”
Tim promised not to bother me again while I was on vacation. He would hold all the details of his next move until I was back.
Tommy Dawson returned my call that evening. He checked his class schedule. He was free any time until twelve-thirty for the rest of the week.
At the St. John’s student parking lot the next morning, Tommy Dawson transferred his skin-diving equipment from his VW to my Chevy. We drove over to Flushing Meadow Park and I parked on the service road of Grand Central Parkway. There was still an early-morning chill in the air, which was fine. We could do without an audience.
It’s amazing how much difference a year makes. Last spring, when Tommy and Mike graduated from high school, they were both unformed, gawky eighteen-year-olds. Tommy had had short, tightly curled red hair with hardly a sprinkle of beard showing through his freckles. Now, at nineteen, with one year of prelaw under his belt, Tommy had a wild mop of shaggy red hair and a really good, strong bright-orange beard which hid all the freckles. His voice had deepened and he listened closely with a sharp intelligence when I told him what he would be diving for.
“I get the feeling that this is between the two of us, Mr. Peters?”
“Right. For the time being.” Then, answering the question in his narrowing reddish-brown eyes, “Absolutely nothing illegal involved, Tom. Just a little follow-up of an old case on my own time; which means this whole thing, whatever we might come up with, is just between the two of us for now.”
He pulled his jeans off, then his sweatshirt, and got into his wet suit. The rock ledge, “George’s private spot,” gave a complete privacy which wasn’t strictly necessary now, since there weren’t any people around, at least not in this area. However, just to be on the safe side, since a crowd can materialize in about four seconds flat, particularly when you don’t want a crowd to materialize, I gave Tom our cover story.
He was diving to try to recover a model airplane which had crashed and disappeared in this murky water last weekend. Just in case anyone asked.
It was a needle-in-the-haystack situation; I wasn’t even hoping for anything, so I wouldn’t be too disappointed if we came up dry. Tommy Dawson thought that was pretty funny; as soon as he laughed that cackling, high-pitched laugh, I could see last year’s skinny, pale, clean-shaven adolescent.
I picked up a couple of heavy rocks and stood on the stone ledge and tossed straight out as far as I could without too much effort, then as far as I could when trying for distance. There was about a twenty-foot span between the two spots; not to mention the area covered by the possible arc: George could have thrown in any direction. We were just starting with straight out.
Tom got to the first wave of ripples, adjusted his mask and air hose, waved, then disappeared. About four or five minutes later, he broke through the surface, holding aloft a broken model airplane.
“In case we need a cover story, Mr. Peters. I’ll set it down ri
ght here, then if we need it I’ll know where it is.”
We didn’t need it. No more than ten minutes later, Tom shot up to the surface and began to nod his head up and down. He held something up over his head and got a mouthful of water when he yelled, “I got it, Joe, I think I got it!”
He handled it by the barrel and carefully inserted the gun into the heavy plastic bag I had brought along.
“That what we’re looking for, Mr. Peters?” He watched me closely, not too sure of my reaction.
“I’ll tell you, Tom. I’m so damn used to things being hard, I’m a little uncomfortable when something comes as easy as this.”
My diver went back into the water to retrieve the model airplane. It was in terrible condition, but he thought he might be able to salvage the engine, or at least parts of it. While Tommy changed his clothes, I prepared a statement for his signature.
His beard was still dripping as he carefully read what I had prepared: a simple acknowledgment that on this date, at this time and in this location, he, the. undersigned, did in the presence of Det. Joseph Peters, Shield #4513, retrieve subject gun from beneath the water at said location.
“Do we have anything to mark the gun with, Mr. Peters?”
“No, I didn’t think of that. Frankly, I didn’t think we’d have any need to mark anything. Guess you’ll have to trust me that this will at all times remain the gun in question. Like it says, thirty-eight-caliber Colt; five bullets in the chamber; one empty chamber. Go ahead, take a good long look at the gun, Tom.”
I carefully slid the gun from the plastic bag, rested it on the towel the kid had brought along for his wet hair. He studied it thoughtfully and glanced up at me from time to time. Then he took the statement and read it again.
“I might have to testify in a case, about finding this gun?”
I had the damnedest feeling that this kid thought he’d been set up. There was nothing adolescent about the suspicion in his eyes or in the reluctance to commit himself to something without knowing exactly what it was. This was a very admirable attitude, but it was also a pain in the ass.
“This is a gun that may or may not be involved in a homicide, Tom. Working on information received,” he didn’t bat an eye at the jargon, just watched me closely, “I determined the possibility that the weapon in question might be located just about where you did locate it. Until I run some ballistic tests, I have no way of knowing whether or not this is the gun I’m looking for. Which is why, at this point, I want to keep the whole thing just between you and me. If it is the gun in question, there is a very strong possibility that you’ll be called on to testify; to verify exactly what we did here today. If you’re not happy with the statement I jotted down, you prepare your own statement. It would probably be better that way, anyhow.”
He thought that over and nodded. “I’d rather do that, Mr. Peters. I could bring it over to you tonight, or tomorrow. Will that be all right?”
I wondered which law professor he wanted to check with; he jotted down my address and agreed to send his statement to me. When I handed him the twenty-dollar bill we had agreed on before we started, he was reluctant to take it for only a half hour’s work.
“Look, if it had taken you twenty hours, the price still would have been the twenty we agreed on.”
He thought that was valid. I dropped him back at the St. John’s University parking lot; we shook hands solemnly and I’m not too sure what the long searching look was supposed to discover, but I do know that, if needed, Tom Dawson would be one hell of a witness.
I’m not sure of the basis of suspicion on the part of a nineteen-year-old with little or no experience of the world, but I do know what was making me uneasy. After nearly twenty years on the job, there are certain truths: the witness you have to interview never lives on the first floor of a walk-up building, it is always the top floor; if there is a stack of fifty records containing the one important piece of information, it will be found in the forty-eighth or forty-ninth, never in the first ten or twenty; if you restrain and try to subdue some nut who is beating hell out of his wife, said wife will immediately grab the first thing handy and try to beat the hell out of you for interfering.
I’m sure somewhere in the world it is taken for granted that you’ll be successful at whatever you attempt the first time out. It was a new experience for me and it seemed too damn easy.
I went down to a gunshop in lower Manhattan, waited until a couple of customers left, then asked the owner of the shop if he’d set up a test fire box for me. He had a small shooting range in the basement, and while he prepared the heavy lead box with batting material I dusted the Colt for fingerprints. Nothing; a bunch of smudges, not even partially usable. I slipped one of the bullets I had removed back into a chamber and fired it off. Considering that I hadn’t done anything more than dry the gun, I was a little surprised that it fired. I wrapped the retrieved spent bullet in a tissue, gave the storeowner five dollars for a three-dollar notebook and told him we were even.
I called the Police Lab and found out that my friend, Harry Sullivan, was on a day off. He’d be working an 8-A.M.-to-4-P.M. the next day.
Then I went back to my apartment; called Kitty, told her there was nothing new and that she might not hear from me for a couple of days, but I was out there, working.
Then I called Benjamin the Cuban, who reluctantly agreed to meet with me later that night; then I ate some cottage cheese, drank some milk and caught a few hours’ sleep. I’d be out late and needed something to fall back on.
CHAPTER 10
I PARKED ALONGSIDE THE garbage cans in front of Benjamin the Cuban’s apartment building. There were only a few cars still parked on that side of the street. If they didn’t relocate by eight o’clock the next morning, they’d be hit with a stiff alternate-side-of-the-street-parking fine.
Benjamin looked almost like a stage prop: he leaned languidly against a lamppost, his long legs stretched out to show off his handsome leather boots with high heels. An unlighted king-size cigarette dangled from his lips. During the next forty-five minutes, Benjamin worried that cigarette to shreds. When he saw the group of women approaching, he tossed it away, pulled out a fresh cigarette, lit it and inhaled practically to the soles of his feet.
“I’ll give them up completely by tomorrow,” he told me, sucking in the smoke for courage as the seven or eight women moved toward us.
They were accompanied by two tall skinny boys from St. Anthony’s High School. It was the only way the church could continue its twice-weekly bingo games: by providing escort service at the end of each evening of play.
I had to jab Benjamin twice before he reacted. His voice sounded very thin and shaky. “Hey, Mrs. Deluca. Mrs. Deluca, could I see ya for a minute? Please?”
The whole group of women stopped, turned, gave us coordinated, expert once-overs with sharp dark eyes. Most of them were dressed in nondescript black clothing; their faces, in the dim street light, were uniformly suspicious and wary and tough, mouths were tightened into readiness as they moved in a body toward us, their shoulders and arms touching, forming a solid mass. The two kid bodyguards were shoved to the rear of the group, a fact for which they seemed grateful.
“Who is that?” a shrewd, rough voice called out. “Is that that little bum, Benjamin?”
It took me a good five minutes to convince the ladies that everything was all right. That I was a police officer; that I wanted to discuss some unimportant matter with Mrs. Deluca and that I would personally escort her to her apartment when we finished talking. The whole thing was settled when Mrs. Deluca promised to tell everyone what it was all about the next morning when they met at the market.
Mrs. Deluca and her sister, Mrs. Romero, waited impatiently and skeptically, glaring with hard eyes at Benjamin, anxious to hear what trouble he was in.
“Mrs. Deluca, you’ve heard about the young mother who is accused of killing her two little boys? Mrs. Kitty Keeler?”
Mrs. Deluca’s right hand shot up to c
over her mouth; her black pocketbook dangled against her body. Her eyes flashed to her sister.
“You see, Lucy, you see? I told you it was the same girl. I told you, didn’t I?” She leaned around me, trying to see Benjamin. “This one, this little bum, was he involved?”
I assured her that Benjamin was not involved; that I just wanted to know if she remembered something that Benjamin had told me about that night.
She remembered in detail. She had seen the little bum with a pretty young woman one night as she was coming home from the games. It was later than usual because she had stopped off at a friend’s house to pick up some embroidery thread. She reenacted how she had come along, seen Benjamin with this young woman. She remembered what she had said to him; and that she had called to the young woman, who had rushed into the apartment hallway.
“That bum is no good, I told her. Ask my daughter, she’ll tell you about Benjamin, I told her.” She stopped and nodded at her sister. “It was the woman. The woman in the newspapers. Because the next morning, I met him, this bum, and before I could ask him if he had ruined another girl, like he did my daughter, he showed me the picture in the News and he said it was the same girl. He said her children had been murdered and I took the newspaper right upstairs to my sister, and I showed her the picture.” The sister nodded. “And I told her, ‘Lucy, I seen her, this girl, the mother, last night, with this bum, Benjamin.’ ”
The sister said, “I didn’t believe her, but we went anyway to the church and lit candles for the poor children.” She crossed herself.
Mrs. Deluca was the kind of woman who would remember any unusual event in her life down to the smallest detail. There weren’t many unusual events to clutter up her memory, so she hung on to the ones she had. She might not have remembered this girl at all, she said, if Benjamin hadn’t shown her the picture the next day.
Did she know that Kitty Keeler had been accused of killing her children?
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