Investigation (29 page)

As I said, Tim Neary trusted Ken Sweeney completely. With a few reservations.

T
IM NEARY HAD BEEN
having mood swings since Ken Sweeney practically guaranteed him the Police Commissioner spot. One minute he was gloating and selecting his deputies, the next he was cracking his knuckles and cursing over the lost state crime commission job. Ken had told him that there was no way, at this time, that he could arrange that appointment for Tim. Support of Kelleher would put Sweeney in a difficult spot statewise, while at the same time strengthening his power in the city. He assured Tim that four years as Police Commissioner would qualify him for greater things than a state appointment. He strongly hinted at the directorship of the F.B.I.

When he was feeling optimistic, Tim generously offered me a spot in his administration: after I had officially retired at the end of November, he would hire me as his civilian deputy commissioner in charge of public relations. With my retirement pay and my commissioner’s salary, I would be pulling in more money than I could ever have dreamed about. Providing, of course, that I didn’t pack up and move to Florida at the end of November. And go to work in the construction business.

Tim assigned me to attend George Keeler’s funeral on the unlikely possibility that the grief-stricken young widow would be so filled with remorse she would blurt out a confession which would wind up the murder case against her. No one at all gave any weight to George’s meticulously written seven-page confession. I hadn’t really studied it carefully yet. I don’t think anyone else had either. The headlines announced:
KITTY K’S HUBBY KILLS SELF: CLAIMS HE KILLED KIDS; DID KITTY “LET GEORGE DO IT”?: D.A. SAYS NO!
;
PALS SAY KEELER NEVER KILLED KIDS.
Most of the follow-up stories more or less featured the case against Kitty and interviews with people who stressed that George loved his wife so much he’d do
anything
to save her.

I figured that if George
did
kill the kids, or if he loved Kitty so much that he was willing to confess and die for her, then he was entitled to get a serious reading of his seven-page confession. He sure as hell wasn’t getting it from the D.A., who announced on the TV news that the confession was “worthless. The poor man was so aggrieved by his children’s death, he obviously didn’t know what he was doing.” I had brought a copy of his confession home; after his funeral I planned to read it. Carefully.

Sam Catalano came into the office to type up a report; Tim had assigned him to check out some minor extortion complaint. Sam looked terrible; George’s suicide really shook him badly. Not that he felt sorry for George or anything. What he felt was more like anger and frustration that George had taken this way to act on Sam’s constant prodding, constant insistence that there was no way to save Kitty except to threaten her with abandonment. George Keeler had loused up Sam Catalano’s best shot at promotion.

There wasn’t much I could do for George Keeler, but there
was
one thing. I could take care of Sam Catalano once and for all. I took a blank file folder and in red ink I marked it
CONFIDENTIAL.
Inside the folder I put a copy of George’s confession and several other incidental case notes. Clipped to George’s confession, so that it would be the first thing seen by anyone opening the file, I put the Xerox copies of the front and back of Marvin L. Schneiderman’s card. I dropped the file into the top drawer of the desk I generally work at when I’m in the office. Before I left for the funeral, I walked over to Sam and spoke to him. Very quietly.

“Sam, I’m sure nobody would go into my papers and things, but would you mind working at the typewriter on my desk? There are a couple of things I don’t want anyone poking around in. I don’t want to lock the desk, because there are things belonging to other guys, you know how it is. If you’ll just hold the fort for me, I’d appreciate it.”

Sam was more than happy to transfer over to my desk; he looked very anxious for me to leave. Driving out to the cemetery on Long Island, I thought about what Sam was probably up to. As soon as he figured it was safe, he would open the confidential file, find the Xerox of Schneiderman’s card; lift it; get his own copy made; return my copy to the file. Then he would break both legs to get up to the top floor to show District Attorney Jeremiah Kelleher what a valuable man he was, delivering Jerry’s enemy into his hands.

But Sam would be just about twenty-four hours too late. Had he been twenty-four hours earlier with the information, as a good spy is supposed to be, Jerry wouldn’t have handed out four commissionerships to Ken Sweeney’s people. Signing those letters put Kelleher irrefutably in Sweeney’s hands for the next four years.

By being late with this information, Sam Catalano would lose the backing of his only supporter, the D.A. And, best of all, Sam would never know why. Which goes to prove, if you’re going to be a spy, you damned well better be a good one.

As a suicide, George Keeler was not entitled to be buried in hallowed ground alongside his two young sons. As a World War II vet, he was entitled to be buried in Pinelawn Cemetery out on Long Island. There weren’t many people present; just family and friends. The sensation seekers were left behind at the funeral home; not many of them could be bothered to take the long car trip for another glimpse of Kitty, in black. They would have to be satisfied with the TV news shots and stills in the newspaper. Kitty’s oldest brother stood alongside her, not touching, just within reach. Her mother stood far off, with Kitty’s three other brothers and her sisters-in-law between them. Every person there seemed oddly alone, isolated, solitary.

Nothing of Kitty showed; she was just an anonymous black-clad figure, behind dark veils and glasses. Not one trace of her was revealed; she stood motionless during the final, abrupt prayer, and when it was over she turned quickly and, followed by her brother, headed for the limousine. Jay T. Williams and his assistant, Jeff Weinstein, had been standing off to one side; they followed her, and Jaytee leaned forward for a few minutes, speaking to her, as she sat on the back seat of the long black car. He ducked inside the car, apparently to give her a short hug or a word of comfort. Her brother started to enter the car, but Kitty stopped him. After a few seconds of conversation, he backed off and slammed the limo door; and as though that was the signal the driver had been waiting for, the car pulled off down the cemetery lane and headed for the Long Island Expressway.

I went back to the office to write up the required brief description of George Keeler’s funeral. Tim had gone for the day; Sam was gone. The tiny shred of white thread I had placed strategically on my “confidential” file folder was gone; whatever was going to happen to Sam Catalano was in the works. I collected my folder, exchanged wisecracks with a couple of squad men, then went home.

I sat with a cup of coffee and George’s confession, but the memory of Kitty Keeler at the cemetery began to bother me. Or at least to distract me. She had seemed so isolated, disconnected, solitary, remote even from the Kitty I had seen before. I wondered what the heavy black veil and glasses and clothing were hiding; or were they hiding anything at all?

Even as I began to read George’s tightly controlled, specific document, Kitty intruded. I thought about her annoyance with George that first morning when Sam and I responded to George’s call; in retrospect, it seemed like the kind of annoyance a girl like Kitty would feel toward a man like George for pulling the same trick twice: c’mon, George, bring the kids home! But George, on the same morning, right from the start, had evidenced a kind of anguish; a dread.

When I first questioned her that morning, she transferred her annoyance and anger from George to me; but those were the only emotions she had displayed. Certainly not panic or dread. And when the bodies had been found, Kitty’s concern, her hard sudden tenderness and protection of George, were at odds with all the things we were supposed to believe about Kitty.

During later interrogation, by which time the names of her lovers had been sensationalized, along with glamour pictures of Kitty, and when her public image had been publicly accepted, Kitty had steeled herself behind a wall of anger. But I
had
penetrated it, fleetingly, a few times: at the morgue, her eyes had blazed out a kind of agony which Geraldi thought was callousness; at her apartment, when she selected the clothing for her dead sons, there was a terrible raw pain revealed before she pulled the tough skin of anger around herself; at the funeral for the boys, she had remained rigidly calm and controlled until the moment she stared from one dead face to the other, then had tried to alter reality by saying they were not her sons.

Geraldi and the others, including the news-media people and the crazy sensation seekers who dogged her wherever she went, claimed she had never shed one tear for her sons and would not grieve for her husband. But they were wrong. For whatever it was worth, for whatever reasons, Kitty Keeler was grieving deeply: a locked-in, private kind of grief which she had been able to control by tensely drawing strength and determination from the constant crowd around her who were waiting, watching, hoping to see her finally break down. They interpreted everything she did, every word she uttered, every outfit she appeared in, as evidence not only of her heartlessness but of her guilt. When she wore pink to her sons’ funeral, voices had called out “Whore”; when she wore black to her husband’s funeral, they called out “Hypocrite.”

It’s funny how your initial approach to a person can determine your feelings toward them,
no
matter what facts develop later on. Vito Geraldi hated Kitty Keeler. That had been his job, right from the very beginning. No matter what might turn up, if somehow it was proven that Kitty was an innocent martyr suffering for all our sins, to Vito she would always be a murderer, a bitch, a whore.

My assignment had been to offer her a shoulder to lean on, a sympathetic ear to confide in, a sort of refuge from the anger of all the others around her.

There was no way I could concentrate on George’s confession. Because of Kitty. And the way my mind kept drifting toward her and the way she looked this morning out at Pinelawn Cemetery. She had seemed to be enclosed inside a vacuum, unable to touch or be touched. What I wanted to do then, what I wanted to do now, was break through the wall of that vacuum and reach out to Kitty and hold her against me. Just hold her and feel her come alive. Because, emotionally, Kitty Keeler was in the process of dying. And it seemed to me there was no one close enough to her to notice what was happening. Or, if someone did notice, no one cared.

I don’t know why I cared; not exactly. Maybe because I had done what Tim Neary assigned me to do. I played good guy to Vito’s bad guy, so I saw Kitty differently from all the others. She
let
me see her, in a few exhausted, unguarded moments. Now I was paying a price for having encouraged her confidence in me, for letting her turn to me: help me, Joe; get me out of here, Joe.

I felt a responsibility to her. I had to either help her carry her pain or help her get rid of it.

And, of course, it went deeper than that. There was more to it than that. There was Kitty herself, with her physical beauty, her special electric strength and energy; her tough challenging pose that didn’t really hide her vulnerability but somehow enhanced it.

I wanted to protect her from the kind of mindless hostility thrown at her by street crazies; from the cold emotionless damage of the indictments against her; from the hopeless finality of death that seemed to be overcoming her, little by little. She needed me. There was something of value I could offer her at a desperately barren time in her life. And in my own.

About three weeks before his suicide, George and Kitty had moved to a smaller, more private apartment in a luxury high-rise not far from my own place near the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium. It was a fully furnished sublet in a building that had a large number of short-term tenants: airline personnel, Japanese businessmen, U.N. attachés, high-priced call girls. I drove over to her building, pulled into the underground garage, showed the attendant my shield. He told me her apartment number and, as I instructed, did not announce me.

Without asking who was there or checking the peephole, Kitty opened the door about two seconds after I rang the bell. When she saw it was me, she turned and walked into the kitchen, where she was boiling water for instant coffee.

“You should be more careful, Kitty. Might have been anyone at the door: thief, rapist, reporter.”

“Or cop,” she said flatly. She was still wearing the black funeral dress. There was an odd, vacant expression, emphasized by dark circles beneath her eyes.

“Do I have to go with you, Joe? Did you come for—me?” She said it with a tired resignation; she was too exhausted to fight anymore.

I turned the flame off under the glass pot of boiling water, fixed two cups of instant coffee. “I’ll tell you what, Kitty. You go inside and change your clothes. You look like hell in black. Put on something blue, that’s more your color. And take your hair down.” She had it twisted in a tight intricate bun at the nape of her neck.

She shrugged without asking any questions at all; took her cup of black coffee with her. When she came back from her bedroom, she looked like a college girl: she wore a blue-and-white checked blouse, with a matching kerchief on her head, her pale hair flowing down her back; a blue denim skirt; blue crepe-soled shoes; a large, soft leather shoulder bag slung on her arm.

When we exited the elevator at the garage level, the parking attendant gaped at Kitty as though she was an ax murderess on the prowl. She never even noticed him.

“I thought you might like to get out of Queen County for a little while, Kitty. Shall we head upstate for some fresh air?”

She shrugged and whispered, “Wherever. Wherever. I don’t care.”

I glanced at her from time to time, but neither of us spoke for well over an hour. It was getting dark, and when the radio music ended for a station break and the news I reached across her and jabbed at a button for an all-music station. She never batted an eye.