Transgressions

by Ed McBain

  At 4:30 A.M., Meyer and Carella spoke to a black man who’d been blinded in Iraq. He was in pajamas and a bathrobe, and he was wearing dark glasses. A white cane stood angled against his chair. He could remember President Bush making a little speech to a handful of veterans like himself at the hospital where he was recovering, his eyes still bandaged. He could remember Bush saying something folksy like, “I’ll bet those Iraqi soldiers weren’t happy to meet you fellas!” He could remember thinking, I wun’t so happy to meet them, either. I’m goan be blind the ress of my life, Mr. Pres’dunt, how you feel about that?

  “I heerd a shot,” he told the detectives.

  Travon Nelson was his name. He worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant all the way downtown. They stopped serving at eleven, he was usually out by a little before one, took the number 17 bus uptown, got home here around two. He had just got off the bus, and was walking toward his building, his white cane tapping the sidewalk ahead of him . . .

  He had once thought he’d like to become a Major League ballplayer.

  . . . when he heard the sharp crack of a small-arms weapon, and then heard a car door slamming, and then a hissing sound, he didn’t know what it was . . .

  The spray paint, Meyer thought. . . . and then a man yelling.

  “Yelling at you?” Carella asked.

  “No, sir. Must’ve been some girl.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Cause whut he yelled was ‘You whore!’ An’ then I think he must’ve hit her, cause she screamed an’ kepp right on screamin an’ screamin.”

  “Then what?” Meyer asked.

  “He run off. She run off, too. I heerd her heels clickin away. High heels. When you blind . . .”

  His voice caught.

  They could not see his eyes behind the dark glasses.

  “. . . you compensate with yo’ other senses. They was the sound of the man’s shoes runnin off and then the click of the girl’s high heels.”

  He was silent for a moment, remembering again what high heels on a sidewalk sounded like.

  “Then evy’thin went still again,” he said.

  Years of living in war-torn Afghanistan had left their mark on Gulalai Nazir’s wrinkled face and stooped posture; she looked more like a woman in her late sixties than the fifty-five-year-old mother of Salim. The detectives had called ahead first, and several grieving relatives were already in her apartment when they got there at six that Saturday morning. Gulalai—although now an American citizen—spoke very little English. Her nephew—a man who at the age of sixteen had fought with the mujahideen against the Russians—translated for the detectives.

  Gulalai told them what they had already heard from the short-order cook.

  Her son was loved and respected by everyone. He was a kind and gentle person. A loving son. He had a wonderful sense of humor. He was thoughtful and generous. He was devout. Gulalai could not imagine why anyone would have done this to him.

  “Unless it was that Jew,” she said.

  The nephew translated.

  “Which Jew?” Carella asked at once.

  “The one who killed that other Muslim cab driver uptown,” the nephew translated.

  Gulalai wrung her hands and burst into uncontrollable sobbing. The other women began wailing with her.

  The nephew took the detectives aside.

  His name was Osman, he told them, which was Turkish in origin, but here in America everyone called him either Ozzie or Oz.

  “Oz Kiraz,” he said, and extended his hand. His grip was firm and strong. He was a big man, possibly thirty-two, thirty-three years old, with curly black hair and an open face with sincere brown eyes. Carella could visualize him killing Russian soldiers with his bare hands. He would not have enjoyed being one of them.

  “Do you think you’re going to get this guy?” he asked.

  “We’re trying,” Carella said.

  “Or is it going to be the same song and dance?”

  “Which song and dance is that, sir?” Meyer said.

  “Come on, this city is run by Jews. If a Jew killed my cousin, it’ll be totally ignored.”

  “We’re trying to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Carella said.

  “I’ll bet,” Oz said.

  “You’d win,” Meyer said.

  The call from Detective Carlyle in Ballistics came at a quarter to seven that Saturday morning.

  “You the man I spoke to yesterday?” he asked.

  “No, this is Carella.”

  “You workin this Arab shit?”

  “Yep.”

  “It’s the same gun,” Carlyle said. “This doesn’t mean it was the same guy, it coulda been his cousin or his uncle or his brother pulled the trigger. But it was the same .38-caliber Colt that fired the bullet.”

  “That it?”

  “Ain’t that enough?”

  “More than enough,” Carella said. “Thanks, pal.”

  “Buy me a beer sometime,” Carlyle said, and hung up.

  At 8:15 that morning, just as Carella and Meyer were briefing Brown and Kling on what had happened the night before, an attractive young black woman in her mid twenties walked into the squadroom. She introduced herself as Wandalyn Holmes, and told the detectives that she’d been heading home from baby-sitting her sister’s daughter last night—walking to the corner to catch the number 17 bus downtown, in fact—when she saw this taxi sitting at the curb, and a man dressed all in black spraying paint on the windshield.

  “When he saw I was looking at him, he pointed a finger at me . . .”

  “Pointed . . .?”

  “Like this, yes,” Wandalyn said, and showed them how the man had pointed his finger. “And he yelled ‘You! Whore!’ and I screamed and he came running after me.”

  “You whore?”

  “No, two words. First ‘You!’ and then ‘Whore!’ ”

  “Did you know this man?”

  “Never saw him in my life.”

  “But he pointed his finger at you and called you a whore.”

  “Yes. And when I ran, he came after me and caught me by the back of the coat, you know what I’m saying? The collar of my coat? And pulled me over, right off my feet.”

  “What time was this, Miss Holmes?” Carella asked.

  “About two in the morning, a little after.”

  “What happened then?”

  “He kicked me. While I was laying on the ground. He seemed mad as hell. I thought at first he was gonna rape me. I kept screaming, though, and he ran off.”

  “What’d you do then?” Brown asked.

  “I got up and ran off, too. Over to my sister’s place. I was scared he might come back.”

  “Did you get a good look at him?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Tell us what he looked like,” Meyer said.

  “Like I said, he was all in black. Black hat, black raincoat, black everything.”

  “Was he himself black?” Kling asked.

  “Oh no, he was a white man.”

  “Did you see his face?”

  “I did.”

  “Describe him.”

  “Dark eyes. Angry. Very angry eyes.”

  “Beard? Mustache?”

  “No.”

  “Notice any scars or tattoos?”

  “No.”

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “Well, yes, I told you. He called me a whore.”

  “After that.”

  “No. Nothing. Just pulled me over backward, and started kicking me when I was down. I thought he was gonna rape me, I was scared to death.” Wandalyn paused a moment. The detectives caught the hesitation.

  “Yes?” Carella said. “Something else?”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come here right away last night, but I was too scared,” Wandalyn said. “He was very angry. So angry. I was scared he might come after me if I told the police anything.”

  “You’re here now,” Carella said. “And we thank you.”

  “He won�
��t come after me, right?” Wandalyn asked.

  “I’m sure he won’t,” Carella said. “It’s not you he’s angry with.”

  Wandalyn nodded. But still looked skeptical.

  “You’ll be okay, don’t worry,” Brown said, and led her to the gate in the slatted wooden railing that divided the squadroom from the corridor outside.

  At his desk, Carella began typing up their Detective Division report. He was still typing when Brown came over and said, “You know what time it is?”

  Carella nodded and kept typing.

  It was 9:33 A.M. when he finally printed up the report and carried it over to Brown’s desk.

  “Go home,” Brown advised, scowling.

  They had worked important homicides before, and these had also necessitated throwing the schedule out the window. What was new this time around—

  Well, no, there was also a murder that had almost started a race riot, this must’ve been two, three years back, they hadn’t got much sleep that time, either. This was similar, but different. This was two Muslim cabbies who’d been shot to death by someone, obviously a Jew, eager to take credit for both murders.

  Meyer didn’t know whether he dreamt it, or whether it was a brilliant idea he’d had before he fell asleep at nine that morning. Dream or brilliant idea, the first thing he did when the alarm clock rang at three that afternoon was find a fat felt-tipped pen and a sheet of paper and draw a big blue Star of David on it.

  He kept staring at the star and wondering if the department’s handwriting experts could tell them anything about the man or men who had spray-painted similar stars on the windshields of those two cabs.

  He was almost eager to get to work.

  Six hours of sleep wasn’t bad for what both detectives considered a transitional period, similar to the decompression a deep-sea diver experienced while coming up to the surface in stages. Actually, they were moving back from the midnight shift to the night shift, a passage that normally took place over a period of days, but which given the exigency of the situation occurred in the very same day. Remarkably, both men felt refreshed and—in Meyer’s case at least—raring to go.

  “I had a great idea last night,” he told Carella. “Or maybe it was just a dream. Take a look at this,” he said, and showed Carella the Star of David he’d drawn.

  “Okay,” Carella said.

  “I’m right-handed,” Meyer said. “So what I did . . .”

  “So am I,” Carella said.

  “What I did,” Meyer said, “was start the first triangle here at the northernmost point of the star . . . there are six points, you know, and they mean something or other, I’m not really sure what. I am not your ideal Jew.”

  “I never would have guessed.”

  “But religious Jews know what the six points stand for.”

  “So what’s your big idea?”

  “Well, I was starting to tell you. I began the first triangle at the very top, and drew one side down to this point here,” he said, indicating the point on the bottom right . . .

  “. . . and then I drew a line across to the left . . .”

  “. . . and another line up to the northern point again, completing the first triangle.”

  “Okay,” Carella said, and picked up a pen and drew a triangle in exactly the same way.

  “Then I started the second triangle at the western point—the one here on the left—and drew a line over to the east here . . .”

  “. . . and then down on an angle to the south . . .”

  “. . . and back up again to . . . northwest, I guess it is . . . where I started.”

  Carella did the same thing.

  “That’s right,” he said. “That’s how you do it.”

  “Yes, but we’re both right-handed.”

  “So?”

  “I think a left-handed person might do it differently.”

  “Ah,” Carella said, nodding.

  “So I think we should call Documents and get them to look at both those cabs. See if the same guy painted those two stars, and find out if he was right-handed or left-handed.”

  “I think that’s brilliant,” Carella said.

  “You don’t.”

  “I do.”

  “I can tell you don’t.”

  “I’ll make the call myself,” Carella said.

  He called downtown, asked for the Documents Section, and spoke to a detective named Jackson who agreed that there would be a distinct difference between left- and right-handed handwriting, even if the writing instrument—so to speak—was a spray can. Carella told him they were investigating a double homicide . . .

  “Those Muslim cabbies, huh?”

  . . . and asked if Documents could send someone down to the police garage to examine the spray-painting on the windshields of the two impounded taxis. Jackson said it would have to wait till tomorrow morning, they were a little short-handed today.

  “While I have you,” Carella said, “can you switch me over to the lab?”

  The lab technician he spoke to reported that the paint scrapings from the windshields of both cabs matched laboratory samples of a product called Redi-Spray, which was manufactured in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, distributed nationwide, and sold in virtually every hardware store and supermarket in this city. Carella thanked him and hung up.

  He was telling Meyer what he’d just learned, when Rabbi Avi Cohen walked into the squadroom.

  “I think I may be able to help you with the recent cab driver murders,” the rabbi said.

  Carella offered him a chair alongside his desk.

  “If I may,” the rabbi said, “I would like to go back to the beginning.”

  Would you be a rabbi otherwise? Meyer thought.

  “The beginning was last month,” the rabbi said, “just before Passover. Today is the sixteenth day of the Omer, which is one week and nine days from the second day of Passover, so this would have been before Passover. Around the tenth of April, a Thursday I seem to recall it was.”

  As the rabbi remembers it. . .

  This young man came to him seeking guidance and assistance. Was the rabbi familiar with a seventeen-year-old girl named Rebecca Schwartz, who was a member of the rabbi’s own congregation? Well, yes, of course, Rabbi Cohen knew the girl well. He had, in fact, officiated at her bat mitzvah five years ago. Was there some problem?

  The problem was that the young man was in love with young Rebecca, but he was not of the Jewish faith—which, by the way, had been evident to the rabbi at once, the boy’s olive complexion, his dark brooding eyes. It seemed that Rebecca’s parents had forbidden her from seeing the boy ever again, and this was why he was here in the synagogue today, to ask the rabbi if he could speak to Mr. Schwartz and convince him to change his mind.

  Well.

  The rabbi explained that this was an Orthodox congregation and that anyway there was a solemn prohibition in Jewish religious law against a Jew marrying anyone but another Jew. He went on to explain that this ban against intermarriage was especially pertinent to our times, when statistics indicated that an alarming incidence of intermarriage threatened the very future of American Jewry.

  “In short,” Rabbi Cohen said, “I told him I was terribly sorry, but I could never approach Samuel Schwartz with a view toward encouraging a relationship between his daughter and a boy of another faith. Do you know what he said to me?”

  “What?” Carella asked.

  “ ‘Thanks for nothing!’ He made it sound like a threat.”

  Carella nodded. So did Meyer.

  “And then the e-mails started,” the rabbi said. “Three of them all together. Each with the same message. ‘Death to all Jews.’ And just at sundown last night. . .”

  “When was this?” Meyer asked. “The e-mails?”

  “Last week. All of them last week.”

  “What happened last night?” Carella asked.

  “Someone threw a bottle of whiskey with a lighted wick through the open front door of the synagogue.”

  T
he two detectives nodded again.

  “And you think this boy . . . the one who’s in love with Rebecca . . .?”

  “Yes,” the rabbi said.

  “You think he might be the one responsible for the e-mails and the Molotov . . .”

  “Yes. But not only that. I think he’s the one who killed those cab drivers.”

  “I don’t understand,” Carella said. “Why would a Muslim want to kill other Mus . . .?”

  “But he’s not Muslim. Did I say he was Muslim?”

  “You said this was related to the . . .”

  “Catholic. He’s a Catholic.”

  The detectives looked at each other.

  “Let me understand this,” Carella said. “You think this kid . . . how old is he, anyway?”

  “Eighteen, I would guess. Nineteen.”

  “You think he got angry because you wouldn’t go to Rebecca’s father on his behalf. . .”

  “That’s right.”

  “So he sent you three e-mails, and tried to fire-bomb your temple . . .”

  “Exactly.”

  “. . . and also killed two Muslim cab drivers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? The Muslims, I mean.”

  “To get even.”

  “With?”

  “With me. And with Samuel Schwartz. And Rebecca. With the entire Jewish population of this city.”

  “How would killing two . . .?”

  “The magen David,” the rabbi said.

  “The Star of David,” Meyer explained.

  “Painted on the windshields,” the rabbi said. “To let people think a Jew was responsible. To enflame the Muslim community against Jews. To cause trouble between us. To cause more killing. That is why.”

  The detectives let this sink in.

  “Did this kid happen to give you a name?” Meyer asked.

  Anthony Inverni told the detectives he didn’t wish to be called Tony.

  “Makes me sound like a wop,” he said. “My grandparents were born here, my parents were born here, my sister and I were both born here, we’re Americans. You call me Tony, I’m automatically Italian. Well, the way I look at it, Italians are people who are born in Italy and live in Italy, not Americans who were born here and live here. And we’re not Italian-Americans, either, by the way, because Italian-Americans are people who came here from Italy and became American citizens. So don’t call me Tony, okay?”