In the Still of the Night (3 page)

He was dog-tired and well into overtime. His partner was asleep on his feet and the suspect was a staggering zombie, but Moran was determined on one more go-round with her. It might be irregular to bring her back to the scene so soon, but he got away with it. He wanted her to see the forensic crew still at work, the scraping and the measuring, the chalked outline of the figure who had lain there. She had been fingerprinted and tested for powder burns. None showed up, but the tar and the polish remover rendered the findings inconclusive. If she was guilty the whole tar and tar removal bit could have been calculated. The long pier had been checked out and at dawn a diving team was scheduled to search the river along the pilings for the gun. She readily admitted knowing there was a revolver in the house. It had been there for years. But she could not account for why it was missing now—unless her husband had taken it to his office. Or the man she’d heard him talking to had got it from him. The last time she had seen it was the night of the break-in when her husband scared off the burglars. The medical examiner had not yet offered any findings on the spent cartridge.

They went through the CRIME SCENE barricade in the first daylight. People on their way to work were routed away from the building and got no more out of the uniformed cops than that a police investigation was going on. But the rumors had it about right and a
Daily News
photographer was on hand. The minute he started shooting pictures the word went up, “That’s her! That’s the wife!”

Moran began what he hoped was the final grilling inside the entrance to the building. He wanted to know where the elevator was when she rang for it.

Mary Ellen swayed, a little dizzy when she looked up at the floor indicator. Her lawyer offered his arm. She threw it off. She was home and that was support enough for now. “It was on the fifth floor. That’s what made me even surer she was up there.”

“You took the elevator to the fourth floor yourself. Why not the fifth?”

“I didn’t want them to hear it stop on our floor.”

“But wouldn’t they have heard it starting down for you? Or wasn’t it right there waiting on the first floor, where you’d left it when you went out?”

“I’ve told you the truth. Are you trying to trap me?”

“I’m trying to help you,” Moran said. “I don’t know that there was a man up there at all unless you convince me there was.”

“I heard him. That’s all I can tell you.”

“Were they arguing? Were they laughing? Come on, lady, you heard something. What was it?”

“Just voices. They were talking.”

“Voices make words. That’s how people communicate. Didn’t you hear one word?”

She shook her head and swayed again.

The lawyer said, “Mrs. Gibbons needs to sit down, sir.”

“So do the rest of us,” Moran snapped. He pressed the button and the elevator door slid open noisily.

Mary Ellen did not allow herself to see that which she did not want to see. She was aware of men at work, the hallway filled with equipment, cigarette smoke, light that was blinding. She longed to be inside the loft with everything else shut out. She fought off the memory of that other return. Over the years she had rehearsed a like scene many times when Red was on the force. She clutched her lawyer’s arm and looked only at the ceiling while they edged their way around the floor tape. Moran allowed her to use the bathroom, given the all-clear by the crew.

There were only three rooms to the loft, the bedroom, the kitchen, and the very large living room. The round table with its four chairs had been dusted for prints. It was available to them. Moran seated the group the way he wanted them, allowing Mrs. Gibbons to keep her back to the area under investigation. If he wanted to make her look there, he could. At the moment he wanted her cooperation, not her collapse. He resumed his questioning; Russo activated a small tape recorder.

“Suppose, just for a minute, Mrs. Gibbons, you had not heard those voices, what would you have done?”

“I’d’ve let myself in real quiet. If there wasn’t a light on in the big room—that’s what we call this room, the big room—if there wasn’t a light on here, I’d have sneaked through and turned on the light switch to the bedroom just as I opened the door.”

“How would you have felt if there was no one there?”

“Don’t answer that,” the lawyer intervened.

“You’d have been disappointed, right?” Moran amended.

“I was disappointed when I heard those voices. Oh, yes. I wanted her to be there with him, if that’s what you want me to say.”

“All I want you to say is the truth.” Moran drew a deep, raspy breath. He wanted a cigarette, but he’d smoked his last one before leaving headquarters. “Let me tell it the way I see it, Mrs. Gibbons. You were absolutely sure you’d catch them here last night if you came back early. In your bed! In
your
bed. So when you got the chance early in the evening, you took the revolver from the closet shelf, from a shoe box, right? And tucked it into that bag of yours. Lots of room. No problem.” He paused. She was shaking her head. “So what’s wrong with it?”

“I’d’ve been scared Red would catch me taking it.”

“Was he home
all
the time? Didn’t step out for cigarettes, a breath of air? Didn’t get a telephone call that kept him on the line—a call from his other woman, let’s say, so he’d be glad to see you disappear in the bedroom?”

“You’re wrong, wrong, wrong. That just didn’t happen.” She put her head down on her arms on the table.

Moran tucked his hand under her chin and forced her head up. His face close to her, he said, “Let’s go back to the question. If you didn’t hear those voices, what would you have done?”

“I told you I’d have sneaked in.”

Moran interrupted. “And if you’d found them in bed, naked as baboons, making love so hot you could smell it?”

Her whole forlorn expression changed. She smiled, her dead eyes caught fire. “Yes!” she cried encouragingly.

“Yes!”

Christ, Moran thought, she’s enjoying this.

When the medical examiner agreed that the fatal bullet had probably come from the box of cartridges found on the shelf of Gibbons’s closet, pressure mounted within and outside the police department for the arrest of Mary Ellen Gibbons. The insurance representatives kept to the background, but the company made it plain they wanted to see a case developed along the lines of murder for profit, the direction toward which the district attorney’s office was already inclined. While Gibbons had written the policy and paid its premiums by pouring virtually all his commissions into it, Mary Ellen was co-signatory. Indeed their investments and bank accounts were in both names. The only noticeable irregularity in the Gibbons’s finances was that in the past eighteen months he had, on several occasions, failed to deposit their monthly dividend check from mutual funds. This, however, coincided with his extramarital affair with a woman who testified to “his generous care of her.”

As for physical evidence, the weapon itself had not been found. Given the tides, the muck, and the undertow of the Hudson River, this was not surprising. The grappling for it went on. None of the fingerprints brought up in the Gibbons home indicated a visitor that night. There were simply no witnesses to confirm that part of Mary Ellen’s story. Testimony to her erratic behavior was ample. Her distracted behavior at the card party was readily testified to, as was the hour at which she cut out of the game. A young couple came forward who had seen her bumbling around the pier repair site. They were afraid she might fall or jump into the river and turned back themselves, not to be involved. They had intended to report her to the first cop they encountered, but by the time they came on one they decided that their imagination had exaggerated her strange behavior.

Mary Ellen never wavered in her account of that night’s activities. She admitted that although she had known of her husband’s affair for a year, and had found out where the woman lived, she had not until that night tried to confront them. Detective Moran tried to believe, along with almost everyone on the case, that she had contrived the story to cover the murder of her husband. But he could not reconcile her responses under questioning with murder for profit. He was superseded in the case, not taken off it, but dropped down a couple of notches in authority. The Police Benevolent Association was adding pressure: one of their own had been murdered.

Her arrest, Moran knew, was imminent. Without quite realizing how it happened, he found himself back where he had started, on Mary Ellen’s side. As he said to Al Russo, who had answered the complaint with him that night, “You saw that place—all the comforts of a zoo. That money wouldn’t mean much to her if she was to get it.”

“Wait till the lawyer’s bills come in. She’ll need it then.”

Moran thought about what Russo said. It was out of sync. And that was what he felt about the whole case. The money angle would make sense if Mary Ellen was the victim, her husband the one to profit from her death. No one would pay those premiums without expecting to collect. That’s what made it crazy: he paid the premiums. He had to believe she was going to die first. And here she was, about to be charged with his murder, frozen into a story she hadn’t moved a shadow’s length away from.

On Saturday morning Moran went over the prints again. It was the third day after the homicide. Most of the recent prints had been identified, including those of Mary Ellen’s sister—whom she was staying with now—and a plumber. Moran studied Gibbons’s prints on the table. Those marked FRESH were in one place where, he figured out, Gibbons would have been facing the door. He got out the crime scene photos of the table and chairs. He was a few seconds identifying the one item on the table.

It was a crumpled paper bag. His association was instantaneous. Now. Not originally. The bag had gone to the lab. It would take time to bring up prints on the rough paper. Moran tore through the transcripts of Mary Ellen’s statements—when questioned she did not remember the paper bag at all. Her husband might have gone out after she left the house, but not before it. Moran turned to the autopsy report: there had been no food intake after that night’s early dinner. Gibbons did not smoke. The inventory of personal effects showed his wallet to have contained ninety-eight dollars. It was still in his pocket when he was shot. Eighty cents in change had spilled out on the floor. Moran turned everything around and made himself assume Mary Ellen to be telling the truth. The paper bag fit the payoff tradition. Someone had come to the loft with it, or for it? The man whose voice Mary Ellen claimed to have heard was real. He had been there. So what went wrong between him and Gibbons? If they’d been quarreling she’d have known that much at least from the pitch of their voices.

Moran went back to the monthly dividend checks Gibbons had failed to deposit. They totaled $5,100. But something else showed up: Mary Ellen was not as ignorant of their finances as he had supposed. On several occasions she had requested a bank printout of their accounts. So she would have been aware that Gibbons was siphoning off the occasional dividend check. She
could
have been aware. Was it one more example of her masochism to have known and been silent?

Yet another possibility occurred to the detective. Suppose a killer hired by Gibbons had gone to her and told her he was being paid $5,000, say, to kill her. Say he asked her to make it ten and he would turn the gun on Gibbons. Would she finally, finally, have taken the offense against her husband and said, “Go ahead. Kill the bastard!”?

Phillips had run down the four flights of stairs that night knowing he should have gone back into the apartment and taken the paper bag. But too much blood had spattered and there was too little time. When Gibbons failed to pick her up at ten she’d come home on her own. Poor sick woman, he had done her a good turn and he hoped she’d appreciate it some time. Now he had to forget Mary Ellen and make new plans for himself.

On the street he stood a moment sucking in the air to clear his head of the reek of gunpowder. His hearing was coming back. A noisy argument was building mid-block. The cops would be close at hand when Mary Ellen wanted them. He went the other way and set himself an ambling gait with little simian spurts now and then. If anyone noticed him at all in the twenty blocks uptown and the two long blocks west, he’d be taken for a harmless drunk. In fact, he picked up an empty wine bottle, discarded it, and kept the brown bag it was wrapped in. He worked the revolver into the bag without taking it from his pocket.

It wasn’t ten o’clock yet when he reached Mickey’s Place, the hangout of the Rooneys. Rooney was out of town, Phillips was glad to hear. Fitz Fitzgerald was the one he wanted to see, without Rooney putting his nose in. Fitz was shooting pool. He had three more balls to clear the table. Phillips went into the back room, called the “conference room,” and waited for him. He tried to remember the names of the former gang members whose initials were carved in the table. Fitzgerald came in flushed with a win. He looked scrubbed and, as usual, wore a white shirt and striped tie. He looked like a bank teller, and his daytime job wasn’t far from that mark: he worked in a check-cashing shop. He looked no more like a gun fence than Phillips looked like a killer. The first thing he asked was if the gun was hot.

“Plenty. You don’t get it unless you got a place for it outside the U.S.A. And I don’t mean Ireland.”

“You know I ain’t political, Billy. Let’s have a look at it and you can tell me how much you want.”

“Half what you can get for it, and I’m willing to wait for mine.” He slipped the gun from the bag.

Fitzgerald’s face went white. He knew a police special when he saw one. He began to back off.

“It’s okay with me if you put it on ice for a while,” Phillips cajoled. “I’m going out to the West Coast tracks in the morning. Just put it on ice and I’ll check with you at the end of the week.”

Fitzgerald moistened his lips. “Rooney won’t like it, Billy. He keeps saying, ‘Some of my best friends—’”

Phillips cut in, “Does he have to find out? It’s you and me doing business here.”

“He finds out most things, don’t he?”