A Dog's Ransom (14 page)

15

O
n Friday—not at 3 p.m. as promised but after four—a serious, dumpy brunette of about forty called on Kenneth at his Morton Street room. She had a large brown leather handbag, and a large notebook of the kind called ledgers. Her tone was distant and polite, and the words that came out of her might as well have been those of a recorded message.

“You are settling down? . . . What have you been doing?”

“I read. I keep busy.”

“You are unemployed now.” She sat on the edge of the arm-chair’s seat, and kept consulting her notes and writing notes of her own, seldom even looking at him.

“I have not been employed in five years. I had an injury to my foot. My toes.”

“Do you get along all right with your landlord?”

Kenneth thought it best to say he did.

“Where do you have your meals? . . . Do you go out a few times a day?”

Kenneth had been going to complain about the lack of a stove, but he thought it might up his rent if they moved him to another room or to another place with a kitchen.

Soon she looked at her wrist-watch and said she would be going, and would he sign on this line? Kenneth signed in slow but jerky and angular handwriting below the notes she had just taken. He tried to read them, but the writing was difficult and full of abbreviations, and the woman rudely pulled the ledger from him.

“I will call on you again on Tuesday at three. Will you make a note of that so you won’t forget?”

She was gone.

No mention of Macdougal Street! So much for Dummell’s threats!

In good spirits now, Kenneth put on his hat and overcoat and headed towards Macdougal Street. He had a plan. At the first liquor store he came to, he bought a bottle of wine—not an expensive bottle, only a dollar twenty-nine plus tax, and anyway he intended to keep it. He took one of the business cards of the store, which were in a little box on the counter. On Macdougal he walked more slowly, watching for the girls who might be on the street. He hoped she was on the street, walking away from her house. Then as he stepped on to the curb of the girl’s block, he saw her coming out of her house door, with a dark-haired fellow. She was in blue jeans. From the way the fellow was looking at her, he was another boyfriend. A popular girl! Kenneth at once went into the street where the delicatessen was, and walked as quickly as he could, while still doing his best to conceal his limp. Kenneth circled the block, and when he again approached the house, the girl and the young man were not in sight.

He peered at the names beside the bells in the foyer, and chose one to ring: Malawek. This resulted in a buzz, and Kenneth entered the house.

“Who is it please?” a woman’s voice called down.

Kenneth climbed the stairs, not wanting to shout. “Delivery,” he said. “Got to deliver a bottle to a young lady who was just in the shop.” He showed the woman the store card. “The store got her address but not her name. A reddish-haired girl. In pants.”

“Marylyn? Sounds like Marylyn,” said the woman. “She’s third floor front. One up.”

“Marylyn who?”

“Marylyn Coomes.”

“Thank you,” Kenneth said, and climbed the stairs. In case the woman below was listening, he knocked on Marylyn’s door. No answer. Kenneth did not want to push his luck too much in case the woman was waiting below (she probably was) to see that he left the house, so he set the bottle on the threshold of the door and went down the stairs.

The woman was waiting, looking through the crack of her own door.

In the foyer, Kenneth looked over the names again and saw Coomes, and how to spell it. He went out and turned right, away from the direction Miss Coomes and boyfriend had taken. He walked back to his room on Morton Street.

Kenneth bolted his door, got out his writing tablet and his ball-point pen. Now he felt like himself again. He addressed an envelope to Miss Mariline Coomes, then he wrote:

New York

Dear Mariline,

Enjoy the wine! It is too bad you did not seem to like me our first meeting but I am doing you a faver steering you away from that crooked cop boy friend. He will be caught and dishonnerably discharged if he is not allready. Stay away from him and
all cops
! They are crooked pigs, very dangerous men with guns. Better to carry on your busness (ha-ha) without them.

A Friend

He wrote it in his ordinary handwriting. If Dummell ever saw it, what could he do about it? He was warning a young girl to stay away from a crooked pig. Kenneth had a small reserve of stamps, and he stamped his envelope and went out to look for a box. He had not felt so happy in many days. And he found himself glancing at people on the street, wondering if they would make good recipients for an unsigned letter or two—meaning would they scare easily, get upset? Start suspecting the wrong people? Now Phil—
There
was a likely customer and right under his nose, so to speak, meaning Kenneth could watch him. What was Phil’s last name? How about worrying Mr. Phil with an anonymous threat to set his house on fire? That would drive him nuts.

Kenneth dropped his letter to Mariline in a box.

C
LARENCE, ON
M
ONDAY MORNING AROUND ELEVEN
, found a letter in his mailbox addressed in Marylyn’s handwriting. He ripped the envelope open, saw there was another letter besides hers in it, and at a glance thought it was from the Pole, though his was in script. Clarence’s stomach seemed to drop several inches. He read Marylyn’s letter with close attention.

Dear Clare,

Am sending this to you though I wanted to take it to the first police station but there I thought it might get lost. Since you seem to hate this creep, why don’t you work on this? There was a bottle of wine on my doorstep Friday and I mean
inside the house
at my apartment door. Molly tells me the shit said he was a delivery man and asked for my name and she gave it to him. There’ll be telephone calls next. Now what am I supposed to do—move from here? I am thinking
seriously
of moving and what a stinking bore that is, finding another place at rent I can afford.

M.

Clarence read Rowajinski’s note, then went back upstairs to telephone Marylyn. But he hesitated, not sure of what he was going to say. He could report it to MacGregor, of course. Manzoni would hear about it, no doubt. Clarence didn’t want Manzoni hanging around Macdougal. Yet Marylyn deserved protection, his protection. Rowajinski had to be stopped, and locked up.

Or maybe he should take Rowajinski’s letter to Bellevue. This seemed a better idea. Clarence dialed Marylyn’s number.

“Hello!” Clarence said, delighted that she had answered. “I just got the letter, darling. I’m going to take it to Bellevue now.”

“Bellevue?”

“Bellevue released him. They’re the ones responsible just now. More so than the police.”

“Oh, the
police
,” she groaned.

“I’ll try to get him back in,” Clarence said, wishing he could put on a uniform for this errand. “Darling, I’m sorry. It’s awful, it’s creepy, I know.”

“Creepy? That guy’s nuts! A monster! And walking the streets! I can’t understand it. I’m afraid to go out and buy a bottle of milk. A fat lot anybody on the street would do if that guy grabbed my arm—or anything else.”

“I know,” Clarence said miserably.

“I don’t go out in the evening now unless I’m with people who’ll see me home.”

Men, Clarence thought. He wondered if she had looked up Dannie again, a half-Italian fellow who lived on West 11th Street and was a ballet dancer. Curiously enough for a ballet dancer, he wasn’t queer. “I’m going to Bellevue, darling. I’ll call you back later.”

Clarence went to Bellevue, where he had to wait apparently over a lunch period in order to see the right person, a Dr. Stifflin or something like that. Clarence sat in a white-tiled foyer through which interns and nurses went back and forth, and bandaged people were pushed along in wheelchairs or on rolling tables. Other people waited on straight chairs against the walls, and had lugubrious or fearful expressions on their faces. Arms, legs, feet, faces, necks were in bandages or plaster casts. How on earth did so many people get injured, Clarence wondered. And yet, he ought to know. Bellevue, also, wasn’t the only hospital in Manhattan. The amount of pain in the world was really appalling. And why did most people want to go on living? This thought shocked Clarence, not for any religious scruples, but simply because to Clarence it had seemed normal to want to live, until this instant.

A nurse told Clarence he could see Dr. Stifflin, and took him to a room full of chairs and what looked like sterilizing equipment. Dr. Stifflin was young, and wore white.

“Yes, Rowajinski,” he said, consulting a tablet. “Some organic brain damage. Paranoia, aggression. One of those pain-in-the-neck types but not likely to be really violent. Not a bad IQ.” He smiled. “He’s being visited twice weekly by an out-patients’ psychotherapist.”

“You probably know,” said Clarence, “that he killed a dog in Riverside Park for no reason and extorted two thousand dollars’ ransom for it.”

“No.—Oh, yeah, I heard about that. That’s a problem for the police.”

Couldn’t he kill a child next? Clarence wanted to ask, but he produced the letter from Marylyn instead. “Also a poison-pen letter-writer, and this is his latest. Sent to a young woman twenty-two years old named Marylyn Coomes.”

Dr. Stifflin read it, then smiled slightly. “Hates police. Yeah, that follows. How’d you get this?” He handed it back.

“I happen to know Miss Coomes. I’m a police officer,” Clarence added. “What I would like to ask you, Dr. Stifflin, is—can you arrange to have him confined somewhere? He’s been out just a few days now, and he’s started the same things again.”

“There’s no room for him here. Not to sleep here.”

“I understand, but doesn’t he need watching? Can’t he be put in some other institution?”

Dr. Stifflin shrugged slightly. He had appeared to have time to talk at first, but suddenly he wanted to be off. “That’ll depend on the out-patients’ psychotherapist’s report. We didn’t find him violent.”

“Who is he—the psychotherapist?”

“Probably a woman. I can find out—”

“Can’t you find out now?”

“Hasn’t that been sent to the police? We usually send that kind of information to the precinct that picked the person up.”

“All right. That’s my precinct. I’ll check.” There were people in straitjackets here at Bellevue, people in cells with barred windows to prevent their jumping out. Compared to them Rowajinski was practically sane, Clarence supposed. “And if the psychotherapist’s report isn’t favorable, he can be put away?”

“Sure. Of course.” Dr. Stifflin was opening the door to leave. “I’m on duty now. So long.”

He left the door ajar for Clarence.

Clarence went out into the chill, overcast day. He wanted to ring Marylyn and say something constructive, say that he’d accomplished something. It was Clarence’s usual dilemma: when to be persistent, when not to be, and still gain his objective? It was possible to lose by being too persistent, in any situation, Clarence thought. The great wisdom of life seemed to be to judge when to be persistent, and this went for situations involving women, too. If one was not persistent enough, one was considered weak, and if too persistent, uncivilized. Thus one ran the risk of being defeated by men, and dropped by women. It was indeed hard to live. Clarence knew that at the moment he was considered weak by Marylyn and had been therefore dropped. Only temporarily, Clarence hoped.

Like a flash of inspiration, it occurred to him to speak with Edward Reynolds now. It was a quarter to two. Mr. Reynolds probably had long business lunches. Clarence went into a coffee-shop on Third Avenue, put in his order, then went to the telephone at the back of the shop. The directory was filthy, the front pages were missing up to the Cs, which themselves were grimy and curled at the corners, but Cross and Dickinson was there, and he memorized the number. He ate his food, then walked uptown. Mr. Reynolds’s office was in the Forties. Clarence went into a bar on Third Avenue and telephoned.

Mr. Reynolds’s secretary told Clarence that Mr. Reynolds could see him at 3:15.

At three, Clarence went to the Cross and Dickinson offices which occupied three floors of the building. There were books on shelves in the lobby, rubber plants, attractive girl receptionists and secretaries in abundance. Clarence was soon called by a blond girl who said she was Mr. Reynolds’s secretary and would show him to his office.

“Hello, Mr. Duhamell,” said Mr. Reynolds, standing up behind his desk. “And what’s up now? Sit down.”

Clarence sat down in a green leather chair. The office was book-lined, except for tomato-colored panels that held drawings, and there was also a big Castro poster, not the same one Marylyn had. “I was just at Bellevue because of a letter written by Rowajinski to a friend of mine,” Clarence said. “I think it’s easier if I show you the letter.” Clarence got up and handed the letter to Mr. Reynolds.

Ed read it, standing behind his desk. “Who’s Mariline?” he asked, pronouncing it to rhyme with Caroline.

“Marylyn. He spelled it wrong. She’s a friend of mine who lives on Macdougal Street. This is why I went to Bellevue just now, to speak to the doctor who was seeing Rowajinski when he was there. Bellevue has no room for him, they said. My point is, Mr. Reynolds, I think if you put in a word with my Captain—especially Captain MacGregor, he’s the one you met—and maybe also to someone at Bellevue, we might get this man locked up. Otherwise he’s just roaming the streets again. If I mention this—this letter, my Captain might think I’m making too much out of it—just because Marylyn happens to be a friend.”

Ed put the letter on the corner of his desk, where the young man could reach it. “This man has been watching you?—Apparently.”

“He must’ve seen me with Marylyn—maybe on Macdougal Street. I’ll tell my Captain about it, but you see my point, I hope, Mr. Reynolds. If you could back me up a little—”

Ed was reluctant. “To get him locked up,” Ed said with a sigh, and sat down. “For how long, I wonder?”