Make Room! Make Room! (10 page)

“Did you mean that—what you said about Mike?” Shirl asked, after the door had closed. In a plain white dress and with her hair pulled back she looked very young, even innocent, despite the label Mary Haggerty had given to her. The innocence seemed more realistic than the charges.

“How long did you know O’Brien?” Andy asked, fending the question off for a moment.

“Just about a year, but he never talked about his business. I never asked, I always thought it had something to do with politics, he always had judges and politicians visiting him.”

Andy took out his notebook. “I’d like the names of any regular visitors, people he saw in the last week.”

“Now you are asking the questions—and you haven’t answered mine.” Shirl smiled when she said it, but he knew she was serious. She sat down on a straight-backed chair, her hands folded in her lap like a schoolgirl.

“I can’t answer that in too much detail,” he said. “I don’t know that much about Big Mike. About all I can tell you for certain is that he was some sort of a contact man between the syndicate and the politicians. Executive level I guess you would call it. And it has been thirty years at least since the last time he was in court or behind bars.”

“Do you mean—he was in jail?”

“Yes, I checked on it, he’s got a criminal record and a couple of convictions. But nothing recently, it’s the punks who get caught and sent up. Once you operate in Mike’s circle the police don’t touch you. In fact they help you—like this investigation.”

“I don’t understand….”

“Look. There are five, maybe ten killings in New York every day, a couple of hundred felonious assaults, twenty, thirty cases of rape, at least fifteen hundred burglaries. The police are understaffed and overworked. We don’t have time to follow up any case that isn’t open and shut. If someone gets murdered and there are witnesses, okay, we go out and pick the killer up and the case is closed. But in a case like this, frankly, Miss Greene, we
usually don’t even try. Unless we get a make on the fingerprints and have a record on the killer. But the chances are that we don’t. This city has a million punks who are on the Welfare and wish they had a square meal or a TV or a drink. So they try their hand at burglary to see what they can pick up. We catch a few and send them upstate on work gangs, breaking up the big parkways with pickaxes to reclaim the farmland. But most of them get away. Once in a while there is an accident, maybe someone comes in while they are pulling a job, surprises them while they are cleaning out the place. If the burglar is armed there may be a killing. Completely by accident, you understand, and the chances are ninety-nine out of a hundred that something like this happened to Mike O’Brien. I took the evidence, reported the case—and it should have died there. It would have if it had been anyone else. But as I said, Big Mike had plenty of political contacts and one of them put on some pressure to make a more complete investigation, and that is why I am here Now—I’ve told you more than I should, and you’ll do me a big favor if you forget all about it.”

“No, I won’t tell anyone. What happens next?”

“I ask you a few more questions, leave here, write up a report—and that will be the end of it. Lots of other work is piling up behind me and the department has already put more time into the investigation than it can afford.”

She was shocked. “Aren’t you going to catch the man who did it?”

“If the fingerprints are on file, we might. If not—we haven’t got a chance. We won’t even try. Aside from the reason that we have no time, we feel that whoever did Mike in performed a social service.”

“That’s terrible!”

“Is it? Perhaps.” He opened his notepad and was very official again. He had finished with the questions by the time Kulozik came back with latent prints from the cellar window and they left the building together. After the cool apartment the air in the street hit like the blast from an open furnace door.

It was after midnight, a moonless night, but the sky outside the wide window could not equal the rich darkness of the polished mahogany of the long refectory table. The table was centuries old, from a monastery long since destroyed, and very valuable, as were all the furnishings in the room: the sideboard, the paintings, and the cut-crystal chandelier that hung in the center of the room. The six men grouped around the end of the table were not valuable at all, except in a financial sense, although in that way they were indeed very well off. Two of them were smoking cigars, and the cheapest cigar you could buy cost at least ten D’s.

“Not every word of the report if you please, Judge,” the man at the head of the table said. “Our time is limited and just the results will be all we need.” If anyone there knew his real name they were careful not to mention it. He was now called Mr. Briggs and he was the man in charge.

“Surely, Mr. Briggs, that will be easy enough,” Judge Santini said, and coughed nervously behind his hand. He never liked these sessions at the Empire State Building. As a judge he shouldn’t be seen here too often with these people. Besides, it was a long climb and he had to think about his ticker. Particularly in this kind of weather. He took a sip of water from the
glass in front of him and moved his glasses forward on his nose so that he could read better.

“Here is what it boils down to. Big Mike was killed instantly by a blow on the side of the head, done with a sharpened tire iron that was also used to break into the apartment. Marks made on a jimmied-open basement window match the ones on the door and they both fit the jimmy, so it looks as though whoever did it got in that way. There were clear fingerprints on the iron and on the basement window, the same prints. So far the prints appear to be of a person unknown, they do not match any of the fingerprints on file in the Bureau of Criminal Identification, nor are they the prints of O’Brien’s bodyguard or girl friend, the ones who found the body.”

“Who do the fuzz think done it?” one of the listeners asked from around his cigar.

“The official view is—ah, death my misadventure you might say. They think that someone was burgling the apartment and Mike walked in and surprised him, and Mike was killed in the struggle.”

Two men started to ask questions but shut up instantly when Mr. Briggs began to speak. He had the gloomy, serious eyes of a hound dog, with the matching sagging lower lids and loose dewlaps on his cheeks. The pendant jowls waggled when he talked.

“What was stolen from the apartment?”

Santini shrugged. “Nothing, from what they can tell. The girl claims that nothing is missing and she ought to know. The room was taken apart, but apparently the burglar was jumped before he finished the job and then he ran in a panic. It could happen.”

Mr. Briggs pondered this, but he had no more questions. Some of the others did and Santini told them what was known. Mr. Briggs considered for a while then silenced them with a raised finger.

“It appears that the killing was accidental, in which case it is of no importance to us. We will need someone to take over Mike’s work—what is it. Judge?” he asked, frowning at the interruption.

Santini was sweating. He wanted the matter settled so he could go home, it was after I A.M. and he was tired. He wasn’t used to being up this late any more. But there was a fact that he
had to mention, it might be important and if it was noticed later and it came out that he had known about it and said nothing … it would be best to get it over with.

“There is one thing more I ought to tell you. Perhaps it means something, perhaps not, but I feel we should have all the information in front of us before we—”

“Get on with it, Judge,” Mr. Briggs said coldly.

“Yes, of course. It’s a mark that was on the window. You must understand that all the basement windows are coated with dust on the inside and that none of the others were touched. But on the window that was jimmied open, through which we can presume the killer entered the building, there was a design traced in the dust. A heart.”

“Now what the hell is that supposed to mean?” one of the listeners growled.

“Nothing to you, Schlacter, since you are an American of German extraction. Now I am not guaranteeing that it means anything, it may just be a coincidence, meaningless, it could be anything. But just for the record, just to get it down, the Italian word for heart is
cuore.”

The atmosphere in the room changed instantly, electrified. Some of the men sat up and there was a rustle of shifting bodies. Mr. Briggs did not move, though his eyes narrowed. “Cuore,” he said slowly. “I don’t think he has enough guts to try and move into the city.”

“He’s got his hands full in Newark. He got burned once coming here, he’s not going to try it again.”

“Maybe. But he’s half out of his head I hear. On the LSD. He could do anything….”

Mr. Briggs coughed and they were all quiet on the instant. “We are going to have to look into this,” he said. “Whether Cuore is trying to move into our area or whether someone is trying to stir up trouble and blaming it on him; either way we want to find out. Judge, see to it that the police continue the investigation.”

Santini smiled but his fingers were knotted tightly together under the table. “I’m not saying no, mind you, not saying it can’t be done, just that it would be very difficult. The police are very shorthanded, they don’t have the personnel for a full-scale investigation. If I try to pressure them they’ll want to know why. I’ll
have to have some good answers. I can have some people work on this, make some calls, but I don’t think we can get enough pressure to swing it.”

“ You
can’t get enough pressure, Judge,” Mr. Briggs said in his quietest voice. Santini’s hands were tembling now. “But I never ask a man to do the impossible. I’ll take care of this myself. There are one or two people I can personally ask to help out. I want to know just what is happening here.”

Through the open window rolled the heat and stench, the sound of the city, a multivoiced roar that rose and fell with the hammered persistence of waves breaking on a beach; an endless thunder. In sudden punctuation against this background of noise there came the sound of broken glass and a jangled metallic crash; voices rose in shouts and there was a long scream at the same instant.

“What? What …?” Solomon Kahn grumbled, stirring on the bed and rubbing his eyes. The bums, they never shut up, never let you grab a little nap. He got up and shuffled to the window, but could see nothing. They were still shouting—what could have made the noise? Another fire escape falling off? That happened often enough, they even showed it on TV if there was a gruesome picture to go with it. No, probably not, just kids breaking windows again or something. The sun was down behind the buildings but the air was still hot and foul.

“Some lousy weather,” he muttered as he went to the sink. Even the boards in the floor were hot on the soles of his bare feet. He sponged off some of the sweat with a little water, then turned the TV on to the Music-Time station. A jazz beat filled the room and the screen said 18:47, with 6:47 P.M. underneath in smaller numerals for all the yuks who had dragged through life without
managing to learn the twenty-four-hour clock. Almost seven, and Andy was on day duty today, which meant he should have been through by six, though they never left on time. Anyway, it was time to get the chow going.

“For this the Army gave me a fine fifteen-grand education as an aviation mechanic,” he said, patting the stove. “Finest investment they ever made.” The stove had started life as a gas burner, which he had adapted for tank gas when they had closed off the gas mains, then had installed an electric heating element when the supplies of tank gas had run out. By the time the electric supplies became too erratic—and expensive—to cook with, he had installed a pressure tank with a variable jet that would burn any inflammable liquid. It had worked satisfactorily for a number of years, consuming kerosene, methanol, acetone and a number of other fuels, balking only slightly at aviation gas while sending out a yard-long streamer of flame that had scorched the wall just before he could adjust it. His final adaptation had been the simplest—and most depressing. He had cut a hole in the back of the oven and run a chimney outdoors through another hole hammered through the brick wall. When a solid-fuel fire was built on the rack inside the oven, an opening in the insulation above it let the heat through the front ring.

“Even the ashes stink like fish,” he complained as he shoveled out the thin layer of powdery ash from the previous day. These he threw out the window in an expanding gray cloud and was gratified when he heard a cry of complaint from the window on the floor below. “Don’t you like that?” he shouted back. “So tell your lousy kids not to play the TV at full blast all night and maybe I’ll stop dumping the ashes.”

This exchange cheered him, and he hummed along with
The Nutcracker Suite
which had replaced the nameless jazz composition—until a burst of static suddenly interrupted the music, drowning it out. He mumbled curses under his breath as he ran over and hammered on the side of the TV set with his fist. This had not the slightest effect. The static continued until he reluctantly turned the TV off. He was still muttering angrily when he bent to fire up the stove.

Sol placed three oily gray bricks of seacoal on the rack and went over to the shelf for his battered Zippo lighter. A good lighter that, bought in the PX when?—must be fifty years ago. Of course most of the parts had been replaced since that time,
but they didn’t make lighters like this any more. They didn’t make lighters at all any more. The seacoal spluttered and caught, burning with a small blue flame. It stank—offish—and so did his hands now: he went and rinsed them off. The stuff was supposed to be made of cellulose waste from the fermentation vats at the alcohol factory, dried and soaked with a low-grade plankton oil to keep it burning. Rumor had it that it was really made of dried and pressed fish guts from the processing plants, and he preferred this to the official version, true or not.

His miniature garden was doing well in the window box. He plucked the last of the sage and spread it out on the table to dry, then lifted the plastic sheeting to see how the onions were doing. They were coming along fine and would be ready for pickling soon. When he went to rinse off his hands in the sink he looked quizzically at his beard in the mirror.