Ghost of a Chance (4 page)

Harry said, “Everybody thought the world and all of Pop.” Jeff said, “Did he ever mention a wife? Or a sister?”

“He never mentioned anything about himself,” the bartender said. “Maybe because nobody ever thought to ask him. I know I never did. And now he’s dead. It just goes to show.”

“It makes you think,” Harry said.

“I’d like to know,” somebody said, “where Pop was going on a subway.”

“Yeah,” the bartender said, “I don’t understand that.”

Jeff didn’t enlighten him. He said, “It would help if we could find out where he lived.”

“For God’s sake,” Harry said. “Cook! Sol Cook!”

“Why, sure,” the bartender said. “Sol takes him home every night.”

“Every night without a miss except Wednesdays since I don’t know when,” Harry said.

“Did Pop need taking home?” Jeff asked.

“I see you still don’t understand,” the bartender said. He was a little annoyed. “Pop wasn’t drunk, he was a stew. Sol took him home because he is a cabbie and he rode Pop home because Sol is a nice guy and he liked Pop. Sol stops in here for a last drink on his way to the garage.”

“He comes in about ten,” Harry said.

A frowzy matron sitting alone before an empty glass of beer suddenly began to weep, noisily, grotesquely. Everyone turned to look at her.

“Shut up,” Harry said.

“Let her alone,” somebody said. “She’s cryin’ for Pop.”

“She never knew Pop,” Harry said. “This is her first time here.” He went to the woman. “Shut up.”

“It ain’t a natural way to die,” the woman said, sniveling. “God never meant no one to die under a subway.”

“You’re right about that,” Harry said, “but shut up. For my money when they finish tearing down the elevateds, they can rip up all the subways. Every one of them including the Lexington Avenue and especially the Lexington Avenue. Shut up.”

It was a little after ten when the bartender introduced Jeff and me to Sol Cook. I thought it was shocking that Sol smiled while he listened to the news of Frank Lorimer’s death, but after a minute I realized that the smile was engraved on his hard, peaked face like a scar. His voice when he spoke to us was flat with indifference.

“I don’t know exactly where Pop lived. I always dropped him off at the corner of Great Jones Street and Bolton. Come on, I’ll show you.”

“Sol,” the bartender said, “finish your drink.”

“No, thanks,” Sol said.

He led us to his dilapidated cab and nursed open its crippled left door. He climbed into his seat and reached for the meter. His hand stopped halfway there and went back to the steering wheel. The flag stayed down. It took us ten minutes to get to Great Jones and Bolton and for ten minutes Sol cursed the inefficiency of New York’s snow clearance system which is the most efficient in the world and works miracles. He didn’t have a word, good or bad, to say about Frank Lorimer, and his strident monologue prevented us from even mentioning the name.

He halted the cab across the mouth of a narrow alley. He said, “This is where I always left him. Bolton’s a short, dead end street. You oughtn’t to have any trouble findin’ Pop’s place.”

Jeff tried to tell him that we appreciated his help, but Sol shut him up with an angry look. He sat there behind the wheel, making no move to drive on. We stood beside him in the snow.

“Do you want to come with us?” Jeff asked.

Sol ignored his question.

“I was always on my way to the garage,” he said, “so naturally there was never no question of him bein’ a fare. But one night he made me clock it from the bar to here and it run forty-five cents. From then on he always tipped me. Ten percent, a nickel. Every night he give me a nickel. I had to take it. He’d drop it on my lap and then walk away into that lousy lookin’ street there.”

“Did he ever talk to you about himself?” Jeff asked.

“It wouldn’t surprise me none if he talked more to me than anybody. But never much about himself. Two things he hated and griped like hell about all the time. One was automobiles. If he wasn’t dead tired by ten o’clock, I don’t think he’d ever set foot in this hack. He used to sit on the edge of the seat back there cursin’ automobiles to hell and back. Don’t ask me why. And he hated cops. Even if he seen a cop helpin’ an old woman across the street he hated that cop.”

“You don’t know why?”

Sol shook his head. “Nope. Now, I hate cops. It’s part of my business to. But with Pop it was different. He hated cops and automobiles like it was his religion. I used to get sick of listenin’ to him and I’d tell him so. Then he’d shut up for as long as he could. He was a thoughtful old guy. He never wanted to cause no one any trouble.”

Jeff said, “Did he ever mention any particular woman to you?”

“Huh?” Sol gave Jeff a long look; he seemed to think he was being kidded. “No,” he said, “he never mentioned no particular woman. It never struck me that there was any women in Pop’s life one way or another. Pop was old.”

“I was thinking of a relative,” Jeff said. “A sister. Or maybe even a wife.”

“I’d be willin’ to bet,” Sol said thoughtfully, “that if Pop had any part of a family, he wouldn’t have spent his life in a lousy saloon. I can tell things like that about a man. Well, the mechanics are waitin’ to paste this old crate back together again.”

He pummeled the old crate into gear and drove abruptly away. Jeff and I turned toward the gray hole that was the entrance to Bolton Street. We walked slowly into it.

One side of the alley was completely taken up, from the corner to the dead end, by a warehouse of one of the big department stores. We concentrated on the other side. We passed the dark fronts of a plumbers’ supply house, a tinner’s shop, an empty store. Then we halted before a shoddy, bleak old building left over from the long-ago residential days of this part of the city. It was three stories high with a slanting roof that sported two jaunty but slightly askew dormer windows. This had to be the place where Frank Lorimer had lived. Between it and the dead end stood three mates to this house, but they were discarded, boarded-up derelicts.

A dim light seeped from the hallway of Frank Lorimer’s home and touched up a square of the trampled snow before the two-step stoop. I followed Jeff into the vestibule. There were no mail boxes, no bells. The door was unlocked.

Jeff pushed it open and we stepped into the hallway. Ahead of us was a narrow staircase, on each side of us a door. Jeff knocked on one of them; there was no response. He turned to the other. A piece of sash weight was tied to the heating pipe beside it. Jeff used it for what it was obviously intended, but the clank of the weight on the pipe brought no answer. He knocked on the door and it swung open under his fist. The room was dark.

“Let’s go in,” Jeff said.

“I’d rather not,” I whispered. “There might be someone sleeping in there.”

“Hello!” Jeff called. No one answered. “It’s empty, Haila. And Frank’s room would be empty.”

“Lots of rooms might be empty. It’s only ten-thirty.”

“All right, we’ll inspect all the empty rooms. If we can.”

We located the string that hung from a chandelier. The forty-watt bulb in it did little to cheer up the place. A lovely old carved mantle emphasized the dinginess of the furnishings, the iron bed, a chair, a table, a bureau that would have made a junk dealer turn up his nose. The wall paper was peeling, the floor was scuffed raw. The few pictures on the walls were so faded that, in the dim light, their subjects were not discernible. As we looked about us we could see nothing that even indicated the sex of the room’s tenant. Jeff opened the door of a lopsided wardrobe.

A man’s suit and a light overcoat sagged limply from two hangers. There were several pairs of old shoes, an umbrella. On the shelf was an ancient high silk hat, a collar box, a stack of newspapers. That was all I had time to see. An angry voice from the doorway made us both jump. A heavy-set, ill-kempt woman glared at us and repeated her question.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Jeff said, “Are you the landlady?”

“Maybe I am. Who are you? Coming in here, breaking into Mr. Culligan’s room! I should call the police.”

“No, you shouldn’t,” Jeff said. “I’m afraid we’ve got bad news for you. One of your roomers has been in an accident. He’s dead, he was killed in a subway station. Frank Lorimer.”

The woman stared at him.

“I’m sorry,” Jeff said, “to be blunt.”

“Killed,” the woman said. “Who was killed?”

“Frank Lorimer.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know him. There was no Frank Lorimer here.”

“People called him Pop. He was an old man.”

Jeff described him to her, but she kept shaking her head. “No one here like that.”

“But he’s got to live here, he…”

“I know who I rent my rooms to!” The woman was angry, her voice loud and rasping.

“I mean,” Jeff said, “that Frank Lorimer lived on this street. And this is the only house on this street where he could possibly have been.”

The woman heard the concern and the urgency in Jeff’s voice and it quieted her. She said, “I wish I could help you. But there’s nobody named Frank Lorimer here, nobody that looks like that old man. I know, it’s my house. I have six roomers now. Mr. Culligan, the Smalley brothers, Corson, Highley and Voldi. And I’d thank you to step out in the hall, please, before Mr. Culligan should come home.”

She turned out the light and ushered us from the room. I looked helplessly at Jeff; he was looking at the landlady. He said, “For years a friend of Frank’s has been bringing him to this street. This is the only house on it that…”

The woman was impatient again. “I know, you told me that. And I still can’t help you. I’m sorry this friend of yours got killed, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Thanks,” Jeff said. “Sorry to have bothered you.”

We stood in the center of Bolton Street and looked again at the blackened windows of the few stores, the boarded-up windows of the derelict houses, the flat expanse of warehouse wall.

I said, “Jeff, where do we go now? Where can we go?”

“To the cops,” Jeff said. “By now they may have something on him. Someone might even have come to the morgue to identify him. A woman maybe.”

“Troy, Troy,” the lieutenant
detective said, “I thought you were a big enough boy now not to be taken in by a drunk.”

“Frank Lorimer was not a drunk.”

“His body was full of alcohol.”

“But he never got silly, sloppy or careless drunk,” Jeff insisted. “He didn’t fall in front of that subway. He was pushed. He was murdered.”

“Murdered,” Detective Hankins said. He turned to me. “Mrs. Troy, take your husband home and put him to bed.”

“I think that Frank Lorimer was murdered, too. And I think that proves that the woman he told us about is going to be killed. If she hasn’t been already.”

“Don’t be gruesome, Mrs. Troy.” Hankins laughed and wagged his head. “You two kids delight me. An old soak gets an hallucination and you fall for it head over heels. Jack and Jill. Look, a drunk falls in front of a subway every other day.”

“So it was a coincidence,” Jeff said. “He had this hallucination and then he just happened to fall in front of this subway.”

“Any guy drunk enough to dream up what he did, I’d expect something like that to happen to him sooner or later, if he wasn’t careful.”

“He wasn’t drunk!” Jeff shouted. “Haila and I saw him at the Belfast Bar. He was as steady as you are.”

Hankins grinned. “Now you’re accusing me of being spiffed. Now, now, Troy, don’t get sore. We’re old friends.”

“Yeah, and what’s a couple of murders between friends? Listen, if there’s one chance in a hundred that you can keep a woman from dying, isn’t it worth working on? What the hell else have you got to do?”

“Now, Troy, you’re going to make me sore.”

“Sore enough to take your big feet off that desk?”

Hankins slammed down his feet and the floor of the little office shook. He stuck his chin at Jeff; he was livid. “I take a lot of guff from a lot of irate tax-payers,” he roared, “but I’ll be damned if I’ll take it from you!”

“All right,” Jeff said.

“I’m a good cop, I do my job. And if there was any job here for me to do, I’d do it.”

“Sit down,” Jeff suggested.

“We get hundreds of things like this a year and one of them out of a hundred turns out not to be crack-pot. But what can we do about it? Why don’t you get the city budget changed? You’re a voter. Fix it so there are ten thousand more men on the Homicide Squad.”

“I’ll try,” Jeff said.

“Thanks,” Hankins said. He sat down. “Then I can have a longer vacation. Damn you, Troy.”

“You like me again.”

“I love you again. You’re going to get murdered some day, you know you arc. And I promise to find the guy that done it. To thank him for doing it.”

“Has that thought cheered you up enough,” Jeff asked, “to help me some more with Frank Lorimer?”

Hankins groaned. “Anything you say, anything.”

“You’ll keep the pressure on the boys. To keep them working on Frank’s identification.”

“They’ll do that anyway. It’s routine.”

“You’ll see that his description is sent out.”

“To everywhere in the world,” Hankins said wearily.

“Just make it the United States and Canada.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“And you’ll send out his fingerprints?”

“Honest, Troy, honest I will.”

“And,” Jell said, “will you call the morgue again? To see if anything new has developed?”

“No, Mr. Troy, I won’t. I called them ten minutes ago.”

“There must have been something on him that meant something,” Jeff argued. “There had to be. It’s unusual for a man not to have a wallet, something.”

“You rolled the poor old drunk, Troy,” Hankins said. “You got all his money. You probably took everything. I ought to lock you up.”

“Listen,” Jeff said, “why can’t you trace the tattoo on his arm? Find out how old it is, where it might have been done, who did it.” Hankins guffawed. “You’ve been reading the Sunday supplement again, kid. Modern police methods, huh? Oh, brother! Trace a tattoo! Put that on the agenda for the next election, Troy. A tattoo tracing department.”