“Ah, I see,” Bassett said. “I wondered why you were there.”
“Now I’ve got to go up to the office and give Mr. Royce my final answer to his crummy offer.”
A series of waves sloshed against the cribbing, the backwash of the freighter reaching the shore. Waves within waves.
“He offered you MacAndrews’ job?”
Scully nodded. “The oldest trick of management—buy off the opposition.”
“How do the men feel about it?”
“I didn’t ask them,” Scully said. “But I know: they’d like me to take it.”
“Who’ll get it if you don’t?”
Scully shrugged. “They’ll probably bring somebody in from the outside. Like MacAndrews—they brought him in twenty years ago.”
“You can’t blame the men, in a way,” Bassett ventured.
“Maybe you can’t,” Scully said, and his jaw went rigid for a second. “But I hope they bring in a real Simon Legree. Then maybe we’ll get somewhere.”
Bassett turned on the ignition. “It’s such an old-fashioned problem to be fighting out in this day and age. The issue seems so clean, if you know what I mean. I was about to say that I was on your side—but I can’t imagine anyone not being on your side.”
“That’s Hillside,” Scully said.
Bassett waited for a beverage truck to pass and then pulled into the road behind it. “There’s something I want you to think about, Martin, till we get to your place: do you think young Rocco was part of the gang putting on the gambling raid?”
“I’m sure of it,” he said, “which doesn’t mean I could prove it. But he’d be in on anything like that if he didn’t have to go it alone.”
“And MacAndrews’ murder?” Bassett shot the question at him.
This time Scully was slow to answer. “Do you think there’s a connection, sir?”
“I do.”
“Oh, my God,” Scully said quietly, and then repeated, “Oh, my God.” He did not speak again until Bassett stopped the car to let him out. “What about the fire at the Roccos’?”
Bassett said, “It seems a remarkable coincidence, doesn’t it?”
Scully made no move to leave the car. “Something Father Walsh said to me once—he’s our assistant pastor—‘Martin,’ he said, ‘you’re working with the wrong generation. Leave the old men to the likes of me. Get youth on your side. Old men follow young men when you kick the past out from under them.’ It was Father Walsh who got me coaching the kids in track and baseball … But off the field, I’ve got no relationship with them … Funny. Like my cause or whatever you’d call it, I’m old-fashioned, too. No rapport with my own times.”
“What about football?” Bassett said. “Do you do any of the coaching there?”
Scully shook his head. “They’ve got a pro for that.” Then he looked at the detective. “Georgie was Saturday’s hero, wasn’t he?”
Bassett nodded. “It was a brutal game. I saw it. My youngster was on the other team, and I found myself wishing one minute he’d stop running away, and the next thanking God that he did. But it gave me a chance to watch young Rocco play quarterback.”
“Quarterback? That takes brains,” Scully said in undisguised sarcasm. “I wonder where he found them.”
“You seem to have underestimated your future brother-in-law,” the detective said with a purposeful touch of sarcasm of his own.
“Have you talked to him?”
“But not to his sister,” Bassett said in his way of sometimes skipping a direct answer. “Not yet,” he added.
“And you’re going to have to, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
Scully started to say something, changed his mind and got out of the car. There he changed it again. “Tell her …” He faltered.
“Better tell her yourself, Martin. I don’t always get messages straight. Good luck, boy.”
Driving away, Bassett saw a worried young man staring after him. As he drove across the tracks, he caught a last glimpse of Scully, his head back, crossing the street toward the gate of the Graham plant.
The detective doubled back and checked in at the Hillside police station. A thorough search of the Graham machine shop had failed to turn up even a possible murder weapon.
Kearns said that he was glad of that.
“Why?”
The police chief shrugged. “The men are edgy—scared maybe of what’s going to happen at the plant. I feel as though we’re sitting on a dynamite charge myself.”
Bassett felt like asking him why he didn’t get the hell off it then. But that was an easy thing to say to a man who didn’t know which way to jump.
“You were up at the fire Friday night—after sending MacAndrews to the mortuary. Was there any suspicion of arson?”
Kearns thought for a moment. “I wouldn’t say that. I know Lodini was puzzled as to how it could get such a good start—with both kids in the house—before the alarm was put in.”
“It’s a certain fact that both the kids were in the house?” Bassett said.
“We can go over to the station and check Lodini’s report. He’d have made out a record, you know, in case there was an insurance investigation.”
“Why don’t you do it alone? I’d be conspicuous. A routine sort of check, that’s all.”
“What got you onto this, mind telling me?”
Bassett said easily, “It just seems to me now that we ought to check into every unusual happening in the town from that night on.”
“Fires happen in this town fairly regular,” Kearns said, “specially around early in the heating season. But I guess you’re right. We ought to check.”
“I’ll wait here,” Bassett said.
Kearns was nettled at having to do something at once, but he started out, having instructed Bassett on the operation of the phone board. At the last minute Bassett gave him a cigar. “It ought to be a pretty good one,” the detective said. “My neighbor became a father this morning—first time.”
“They’re generally the best,” Kearns said, presumably of the cigar, for he put it to his nose and nodded confirmation. “Thanks.”
Bassett, sitting in the police office, gradually became aware while he was waiting, of an increase in traffic overhead. The station was on the first floor of the brick building that also housed the town hall. Something was going on. Odd, he thought, that a meeting should convene in the middle of the afternoon. He popped his head out the door in time to see the mayor of the village go upstairs. He heard the scraping of chairs across the floor. Then he was occupied for some moments with the area police checkouts. A bad accident had occurred between a bus and a trailer truck on the highway five miles north. They could manage without Hillside’s help, he decided.
Kearns returned. He handed Bassett a page from a loose-leaf notebook, the handwriting neat and round: a careful entry. “Read it for yourself,” the chief said. “Wasn’t anybody around so I borrowed it.”
You could borrow almost anything in Hillside, Bassett thought, with the possible exception of money. He read:
“Fire reported from telephone number Hillside 6-2724 at 11:33. Second report from alarm box No. 3 at 11:35. First truck on scene 11:40. Fire centered in living room, first floor … Quick spread through flues …”
Bassett skipped to the paragraph starting with the word COMMENTS printed in block letters, and what followed:
“J. Rocco, age 19, upstairs in bedroom when first smelled smoke. G. Rocco, age 17, in basement. G. Rocco says fire might have started from cigaret sister knocked out of his hand in fight. Estimates time at 10:30 o’clock.
“House wooden frame, built 1912, electrified 1920. No record subsequent wiring. Oil heat to furnace in basement. Underground tank sealed off by fireman M. Scully immed. on reaching scene.
CONCLUSIONS:
The report ended without the fire chief having yet filled in any conclusions.
Bassett studied the fairly terse report: several things provoked his curiosity in light
of his present information, the fight between brother and sister, for example. Free swinging quarrels no doubt occurred frequently in most families, even in his own which was far less volatile than the majority of Hillside’s. But in view of Martin Scully’s subsequent difficulty with the sister, it warranted exploration.
He picked up the phone on Kearns’ desk and asked the operator to find out for him whose phone Hillside 6-2724 was. Before he got the information he remembered the old lady’s telling him that she had called the fire department. He asked Kearns, “Has anyone talked to old Mrs. Tonelli?”
“About what?”
It was a good question: to talk to her the interrogator would need to know what he was about. From his own brief encounter with her, Bassett suspected she would tell what she thought suited the occasion, truth or half-truth or, if she thought it appropriate, telling a lie would not faze her. She had the aged crone’s contempt for fact, trusting rather to her own intuition. And having taken the two Rocco children to her lonely hearth, she was likely to be fiercely protective of them. “I just thought she might be the community sage,” he said, “the matriarch to whom younger people might go when they needed advice.”
Kearns grunted. Obviously he did not think much of the idea. Nor did he try for subtlety in his next remark, an association with another of Bassett’s bright ideas that had failed to come to anything: “I got to go over and reopen the laundromat. Some people got pretty sore about that.”
The laboratory reports on the contents of the various machines had been negative.
“They ought to be pretty sore about some rather more important things,” Bassett said. He tossed the report across the table. “That can go back any time.” He put on his topcoat. “Johanna Rocco works at the post office, doesn’t she?”
Kearns took the half-smoked cigar from his mouth, looked at it, and threw it into the bucket in the corner. “Why don’t you leave the girl alone? She’s got her hands full—mother sick, no house to bring her home to. Grill the brother, if that’s what you’re after. I’d even say that was a pretty good idea. But Jo’s a real nice girl and I don’t want us making trouble for her.”
Chivalry wasn’t dead in Hillside, Bassett thought. He asked, “Is that an order, Chief?”
“Hell, no. That’s a recommendation, and I don’t guess you’ll be any more likely to take that than you would orders from me.”
“I promise you, I’ll be as gentle as a father with her,” Bassett said.
Kearns snorted at what he knew of parental gentleness. Then he said, “Her old man was one of the best, God rest him. They don’t make ’em that way any more.”
17
JOHANNA HAD WAITED ALL day Sunday, hoping that Martin would call or come. He had not attended the nine o’clock Mass where it was their custom to meet and then go back to her house for breakfast. But Martin had not called. On Sunday afternoon she had gone alone to see her mother, Georgie begging off to do his homework. After all, he’d lost most of his books in the fire and had to borrow Rosie Gerosa’s when she wasn’t using them. Her mother had behaved strangely even for her whose moods were always unpredictable. She had been out of bed, dressed, and tossing her head in derision of the nurses who, she said, wanted to get rid of her. Johanna had proposed that she come to Mrs. Tonelli’s for a few days. And that had sent her mother into a fury. “A son who doesn’t care what happens to me and a daughter licking stamps in a post office. Look at you, Johanna!” And then, suddenly and inexplicably, she had become tender. “My little girl, my beautiful little girl. Don’t waste your life like your mother. Marry a man as good as yourself. The insurance money, take it and go away. Be somebody!”
Money, Johanna thought, counting the pennies in the post office cash drawer. In Hillside people bought one stamp at a time. Martin was right—if money was everything, life was worthless.
“Miss Rocco?”
She glanced at the man outside the window grating and tried to remember where she had seen him before. He had a nice face, and he took off his hat when he spoke to her.
“I’m Ray Bassett, a detective, and I think I can call myself a friend of Martin Scully’s.”
“Has something happened to Martin?”
“No. I’m sorry if I frightened you that way. I didn’t mean to. When I told him I was coming to see you, he proposed to send you a message, but I thought he had better save it until he could bring it in person. I wondered if we could talk for a few minutes, perhaps in the postmaster’s office?”
“Mr. Jacobi is in there now himself.” Johanna remembered now having seen the detective when he was waiting to talk to Georgie Saturday. He had wanted to talk to Georgie about Martin; so her brother had said. Now her. Johanna became even more guarded than was her ordinary way with strangers. But Mr. Bassett knocked on the door marked POSTMASTER, and now Mr. Jacobi came from his office through the inside door and jerked his head at her that she should go in.
“How is your mother?” Bassett asked, indicating the extra chair in the tiny room. He had drawn Mr. Jacobi’s chair from behind the desk and sat down beside her.
“She’s much better, thank you,” Johanna said. She sat very straight, her hands tightly clasped in her lap.
“I’ll tell you what I’m trying to do,” the detective said quietly, almost soothingly. She knew he had noticed her hands, the way she was holding them, as though by keeping them quiet, she could also slow the beating of her heart. “I’m helping in the investigation of the murder at the plant Friday night. At this point, I’m having to go at it backwards, you might say. I’m trying to eliminate one after another of persons who might possibly have been involved.”
“Martin isn’t a murderer.”
Bassett smiled a little. “I’m as convinced of that, Miss Rocco, as you are.” He looked away from her, the quick relief in her dark eyes too painful. Whatever the trouble between her and Scully, she was still in love with the young man. Which made the detective’s job at once simpler and more difficult. But who ever said a cop’s job was easy? “Certain things have been happening in Hillside—perhaps you heard of the gambling raid Saturday night?” He watched her carefully, putting that question.
“No.”
He would swear that she had answered him truthfully. Odd, the Vigilantes reportedly having taken home the money to their womenfolk. But Georgie would be saving his for his mother, of course. “A number of the boys of the town of, say, your brother’s age, took it upon themselves to clean out the card games. They did it with a show of violence—and certain other characteristics that worry the police. I want to ask you: what time did your brother get home Friday night?”
“Saturday night. You said Saturday night.” Johanna did not realize herself the urgency with which she corrected him. Bassett was well aware of it.
“We want to start with Friday night,” he said as though oblivious to her reaction. “That’s because, well, all our troubles seem to have started from then.”
She did not look at him as she answered. “He’s supposed to be home at ten.”
“And was he?”
“I didn’t look at the clock,” she said, grateful that that much was the truth. In her heart, Johanna tried to pray: “Lord, help me not to have to lie. Please, Lord.”
“I understand you and your brother had a quarrel. Do you mind telling me what that was about?”
“We often quarrel,” she said, glancing furtively at him and then away. Then she forced herself to meet his eyes. “I’m responsible for him in a way if he’s done something wrong. He hasn’t really had the supervision a boy his age needs. And my mother … but you know that. You asked about her. I’m not trying to make excuses for Georgie. Or for myself.” She paused and took a deep breath. “What has he done, Mr. Bassett?”
“He doesn’t take you into his confidence?”
“Only when it suits him,” she said.
“But you are reasonably sure he was home by ten o’clock Friday night?”
It was after ten, she knew, wh
en Father Walsh had come, for she was already looking then for Georgie and wondering what she would do if he didn’t come by midnight as had often been the case since her mother had gone to the hospital.
“Miss Rocco?”
“I was trying to remember,” she said, and in that she knew at once that she had lied, for she was trying to forget. But Father de Gasso had told her in confession to forget, to put it out of her mind as though it had never happened. And Georgie had said, “Remember, sis, I was home at ten. That way, I didn’t see a thing.” Put it out of your mind, child, as though it never happened.
The detective let it go. “Did he call the hospital after he got home?”
The girl was surprised. “I don’t think so, sir. But I went upstairs. I guess he could have.”
“Is he in the habit of calling your mother?”
“No, sir.” Then, by way of justifying her brother, she added, “Mother doesn’t have a telephone in the room.”
“Is your brother on an allowance?”
Johanna thought then that she understood. Perhaps some money had been stolen, and she knew Georgie had been spending freely. “I give him a dollar a week,” she said, “but after the fire, Mrs. Tonelli—we’re staying with her for a few days—she gave him some money to buy things we might need. I don’t think Georgie needed everything he’s been buying. But that’s where he got the money, Mr. Bassett. He doesn’t really get enough for himself. Or he doesn’t think so.”
“Most youngsters think they have that problem,” the detective said. “And if they don’t, they have a worse one.”
She smiled, for the first time freely. It was a charming smile and it made Bassett ache a little. He would have wished her and Martin Scully free and clear of this mess. But he was deeply afraid that they were far from free of it. And he would have preferred not to have to ask his next question; yet he put it with all the deceptive cunning that his job demanded. “This may seem like a crazy question, but I’m asking it of all the girls: have you been missing any stockings lately?”
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