Mitchell Smith (4 page)

This old man had rattled on-he had not, however, gone into the apartment to see what was smelling like that.

“-Smells like cookin’, don’t it? Took the nigger maid’s word for that.

Super’s business, anyway.” Didn’t discuss his hundred dollars a month, either, and didn’t have to.

It was typical doorman’s wages for letting johns go nicely by-no glances, smirks, or difficulties of any kind. A hundred for him, another for the night man. Circumspection in these matters being enforced by His. Gaither’s ownership of her apartment, the management had confided to Maxfield first thing-not simply a tenant at all.

Two detectives were across the river talking to the night man-not with any hope. Neither that man nor Driscoll had seen anyone come to visit.

Nobody asking for Gaither Saturday night, or all day Sunday. A slow day, Saturday must have been for Sally, a slow night, too, no doubt.

But, according to Greenstein, a very busy Sunday morning. -And the delivery door had been wide open at the back of the building all day.

Carpet cleaners scheduled to work weekends for the month-and now, of course, to be closely questioned.

As for the sturdy super, Correa-who had loudly prayed over the dead woman when he found her, prayers punctuated by the black lady’s screams from the hall-he was under some suspicion because of these same prayers; Maxfield and Keneally of the opinion they showed an unhealthy interest in the dead woman’s spiritual welfare which Correa might, for example, have sought to guarantee by an early departure to purgatory. District Homicide had seen many stranger motives than that.

Mr. Correa, blissfully unaware of his equivocal status, performed now as super, and with a long-shanked screwdriver, forced a simple skeleton lock on the bedroom closet door-though the key no doubt lay somewhere about the room. Mr. Correa had also wanted to shut off the hot water showering down on the corpse upon discovery, both. to spare the dead woman further insult, and-it was his job-to save hot water. The building boiler,,a wonder when new, was now very old and uncertain. He’d wanted to shut the water off, but fortunately for Correaas-suspect, had not.

The big closet was packed with clothes, and Ellie, with some pleasure, thanked Correa, and stepping into an air of rose potpourri, and out of one less pleasant, leafed through a tow of crowded hangers one by one, fingering swiftly for little bags pinned among the cloth, or perhaps a heavy pocket sagging a suit. Sally Gaither had had good taste-and been a sharp shopper for it-almost all discount copies, downtown sales and clearances. Only twelve uptown labels, and none of these in the gaudy row of a hinge-shop at Saks or Bendel’s. Neat, and close with a buck.

Ellie smelled something of the woman among her clothes, and found with that faint odor a momentary fantasy of Sally Gaither with a client, or perhaps two doing something awkward, with a groan.

Ellie had noticed, when she’d swiftly looked, still-faced, into the bathroom at Sally, and seen the small woman’s predicament, that her delicate finger and toenails had been neatly painted a pale, pale pink.

Her hair, a soaked clot of yellow, soggy on a spoiling scalp, had slipped a little backward from her brow, from under which cooked eyes with wrinkled whites gazed up.

Ellie imagined the woman alive, naked, slight and lythssom, at play with one man-tall, with humorous ways,—on the broad bed, while another, stockier, looked on.

Ellie took two bandboxes down from the closet shelf, and went through a heap of scented handkerchiefs-Irish lace along the edges, a tiny S

embroidered at a corner (money spent on those, at least)-and a stack of boxes of costume jewelry, necklaces, pins, brooches r and bracelets in all styles. To one small ornamented hair clip a single strand of ash-blond hair still clung, fine as a child’s.-It occurred to Ellie that the man who’d killed this prostitute had wrecked a particularly lovely creature-and it seemed odd to her that men, willing so often to murder to possess such perfection, could just as willingly destroy it.

The second bandbox held (tucked under pack d panty age hose) fourteen thousand dollars in cash, divided and stacked, each denomination circled by a narrow band. Ellie counted the money twice, the box out into the living room.

Maxfield was talking to another of his detectives (a in an Ellie didn’t know) while the fingerprint team was finishing up in the living room just ahead of Nardone and Keneally, who were searching side by side. Two CSJU men were having a discussion with Correa at the apartment door.

Correa appeared upset.

“I have fourteen thousand dollars here, Lieutenant,” Ellie said, and showed the box. Maxfield, bittersweet brown, elegant in his sharkskin suit, looked over, frowned, and noddea. Homicide had no great reputation as thieves; still, cash was cash, and deserved to be treated less publicly. When Ellie went back into the bedroom, Keneally burrowing under the sofa cushions—stood and leaned over to speak with Nardone, who lay stretched on the floor examining the bottom of an end table (he had found the world full of cute cabinetry, little hidey-holes here and there). “-That’s some partner you got. You ain’t going’ to get rich, pal.”

They found no book, Not in the living room, the bedroom-(Fingerprints pouting at the handled bandboxes: “Look, the perp already did a wipe …

will you people pretty-fuckin-‘-please stop addin’ to the problem?”)-nor in the bath. The folding chair (one of a set of four from the tiny breakfast nook) and its attendant twisted coat hangers remained in the tub. The small chair’s blue vinyl seat had cheerfully shed the hours of scalding water, the steam, Sally’s sticky flesh and feces. It looked like new.

Not in the kitchen, either. Ellie and the nameless detective went over it carefully, unloaded the refrigerator shelves, the cabinets, stripped off shelf paper, checked under the counter, took the top off a large coffee . maker there, and every pot and pan, dumped mayonnaise and strawberry jam into the sink in search of a safe-deposit hiding place.

They even dumped the ice cubes into the sink as well, and Melted them into the hot water.

They found no book, and no way to it.

“We have a number of cases of this kind the Chief of the Department had said earlier that afternoon, “-all unsavory.” The Chiefs chins crowded the collar of his uniform shirt. He was a short, dark man, shaped like a bar of soap that had softened, then hardened again. “An individual, a prostitute of the more expensive type, has been the victim of a homicide.”

“Today . . . ?”

“Discovered today.“The Chief of the Department gave Ellie a surprised look, as if he weren’t certain he’d seen her before. He stared at her for a moment. In three years on the Squad, Ellie had not discovered what the Chief thought of her-if indeed he thought of her, or any of the Squad, at all. Delgado was not close to his people. His round body, his warm brown eyes, his easy, coarse old New York accent, all misled.

The Chief was cold as the moon and as remote. It was rumored the Commissioner was very fond of him-but it was difficult to see how that could be so. Most of Delgado’s business dealt with the day-to-day direction of the New York City Police Department, particularly its uniformed men, and there were very few of the approximately thirty thousand employees of that massive and stony organization who did not fear him. The less important ‘ very peripheral tasks of his office, such as the nominal supervision of the Squad, the Chief left to his clever captain, Anderson. It was highly unusual for any Squad member, including its commander, Lieutenant Leahy, to be called upstairs and down the corridor to Delgado’s big corner office-invariably curtained from daylight-to walk the deep-pile gray carpet, to sit in the leather-bottomed straight-backed chairs.

Ellie had sat in the office that afternoon, her fourth time there in three years, with Nardone and a detective named Morris Classman.

Classman was a painfully thin, quiet, thoughtful man who’d been involved in a shooting.

“Righteous,” as television policemen, and perhaps Los Angeles policemen say, but odd nonetheless. He had, as a veteran patrolman more than a year before, killed two young perpetrators in the Bronx as these young men were exiting Colonial Liquors-the first with a paper bag filled with small bills, and, in his other hand, a .22 caliber revolver made in West Germany. He had a close friend with him, armed with a more formidable American-made .44 caliber weapon.

Classman had come upon the scene on foot patrol—car men were usually safer from such encounters-had called the first man and killed him when he offered fight. So far, SO fine. Then witnesses began to differ.

One, a black lady, stating that the second “perp” had whirled and presented his Continental Bulldog-two other witnesses, however, that this sad turkey, unmanned by the death of his friend, had begun to weep, leaned down and put his expensive handgun on the sidewalk-and had then, standing, unarmed and in tears, been shot to death by Patrolman Classman, whose face looked strange.

The Department-and, after a pause, the newspaper decided to believe the lady. Even so, Classman would have been a goner, headed for a career clerking at the Queen’s auto pound-but for an uncle, Inspector Michael Classman, a Fordham graduate and ex-head of Central Robery Division.

Mike-Classman had made many friends in his thirty years on the Force-besides having once, in 1962, subdued and rescued from the top of the Manhattan tower of the Brooklyn Bridge a large man shouting a personal message from the prophet Zoroaster, and preparing to validate this communication by leaping to his death. Mike Classman had balanced along a cable, up there with the wind and the gulls, and had then abruptly fallen upon this proselyte, taken a severe cut across the face from the fellow’s butcher knife, and, sneezing bright blood, had subdued and rescued him.

Inspector Classman’s many friends were not about to see Mike humiliated in the year of his retirement.

Morris Classman, therefore, went to the Squad, where an occasional eye was kept on him, more because of his puzzling dullness-a nasal niceness that never varied than because of any sudden odd humors, any toying with his new, short-barreled detective’s revolver. He proved an exemplary investigator, careful and hardworking, and, after almost a year, the younger officers were convinced that the black woman had been the reliable witness in the affair.

The older men didn’t believe it for a minute, and were carefully courteous whenever they spoke to him.

This thin, stooped man, who wore spectacles for reading, and lounged like a plain Henry Fonda playing a Jew, had sat, like Ellie and Nardone, painfully upright in his straight-backed leather-bottomed chair and listened to what the Chief of the Department had to say. The three of them were the shortest time-in-grades on the Squad, except for two young black men assigned temporarily and hardly seen in the squad room at all.

Captain Anderson, standing behind Delgado’s right shoulder, smiled down at them in a friendly way. He had never seemed to hold against Ellie her lack of response to his caressing hand.

She thought of it almost every time she looked at him, but he seemed not to remember it at all.

“This woman might have kept a client book of some kind,” Delgado had said, his gaze drifting away from Ellie to touch Nardone, ‘-lists of johns, descriptions, charges. If she did keep that sort of record-and some prostitutes with limited clientele do not-we want that material sequestered. From long experience, we’ve found these situations tend to become very involved, affect a number of people who might be embarrassed for little cause. . . .” He slid a red-veined marble paperweight slightly back and forth on the glossy walnut desktop.

“-We think it best that any book, or diary or notes or whatever, if they exist, don’t circulate for the pleasure of the press. If the perpetrator has that material, we want it. -If somebody else has it, we want it.” He glanced at Classman. “I understand this officer has a source that might be helpful to you. . . .” The gaze, mournful, muddy, cold as deep water, swung back to Ellie and Nardone.

“Now, it’s your case-you two have it. Keep in mind this is to be a focused investigation, confidential, concentrating on this woman’s killer-not peripheral issues. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir,” Nardone said.

“Captain Anderson will be fully informed by Lieutenant Leahy as to progress-in detail.”

“Yes, sir,” Nardone said again. Lieutenant Leahy had not been invited to the office for this meeting.

After a few moments, it had seemed Delgado had nothing more to say, and first Nardone and then Ellie and Classman got to their feet and started out of the room. When they reached the door, the Chief cleared his throat, and they stopped to listen to him. He paused, however, to light a cigarette. Delgado smoked heavily and an amused Anderson had described to Lieutenant Leahy the Chief’s response in the Four Seasons when the maitre d’ had asked him not to.

With the three detectives pausing at the door, Delgado had drawn a faintly wheezing drag on a Winston and said, “If you do find paper-don’t make any copies.”

Behind his master, Anderson had smiled and made a friendly face.

It would be unpleasant, after such extraordinary, ranking attention, to disappoint, and since Ellie and Nardone had found nothing-and the patrolman first on scene had not stolen it, as he hadn’t-then the whore’s book (that handy list of suspects) likely didn’t exist at all, or, if it did, might be snug in the insulation of the coil compartment of the killer’s refrigerator, might be nested in his mattress springs.

Might have gone to the sanitation people in a sack of garbage Or to the landfill in the Bronx, or barged out for debris to litter the ocean floor.

“I don’t give a damn what crap is comin out of down town, about you People taking this case,” Maxfield said to Ellie and -her ‘partner as they prepared to leave the scene, both looking forward to a different air, though they hadn’t said so to each other, “-if you find some thing-you find out something, you pass it to us right-a fuckin’ way-and no pages missing! I don’t care if she was balling the mar’s boyfriend!”