Killer’s Wedge (87th Precinct), page 13
He never went back to Boston. He met Katherine instead when he was discharged, and he began going steady with her, and he got engaged, and then married, so he never went back to Boston to see the girl named Mary who worked in a sleazy Italian restaurant in Scollay Square.
And now, with his life running red against a Sulfapak, with his body on fire and his head a throbbing black void, he screamed, “Mary!”
Bert Kling put the wet cloth on Miscolo’s forehead.
He was used to death and dying. He was a young man, but he had been through the Korean “police action,” when death and dying had been a matter of course, an everyday occurrence like waking up to brush your teeth. And he had held the heads of closer friends on his lap, men he knew far better than Miscolo. And yet, hearing the word Mary erupt from Miscolo’s lips in a hoarse scream, he felt a chill start at the base of his spine rocketing into his brain where it exploded in cold fury. In that moment, he wanted to rush across the room and strangle Virginia Dodge.
In that moment, he wondered whether the liquid in that bottle was really nitroglycerin.
Angelica Gomez sat up and shook her head.
Her skirt was pulled back over her knees, and she propped her elbows on both knees and shook her head again, and then looked around the room with a puzzled expression on her face, like a person waking in a hotel.
And then, of course, she remembered.
She touched the back of her head. A huge knob had risen where Virginia had hit her with the gun. She felt the knob and the area around it, all sensitive to her probing fingers. And as the tentacles of pain spread out from the bruise, she felt with each stab a new rush of outraged anger. She rose from the floor and dusted off her black skirt, and the look she threw at Virginia Dodge could have slain the entire Russian Army.
And in that moment, she wondered whether the liquid in that bottle was really nitroglycerin.
Cotton Hawes touched his cheek where the gun sight had ripped open a flap of flesh. The cheek was raw to the touch. He dabbed at it with a cold wet handkerchief, a cloth no colder than his fury.
And he wondered for the tenth time whether the liquid in that bottle was really nitroglycerin.
Steve Carella, she thought.
I will kill Steve Carella. I will shoot the rotten bastard and watch him die, and they won’t touch me because they’re afraid of what’s in this bottle.
I am doing the right thing.
This is the only thing to do.
There is a simple equation here, she thought: a life for a life.
Carella’s life for my Frank’s life. And that is justice.
The concept of justice had never truly entered the thoughts of Virginia Dodge before. She had been born Virginia MacCauley, of an Irish mother and a Scotch father. The family had lived in Calm’s Point at the foot of the famous bridge that joined that part of the city with Isola. Even now, she looked upon the bridge with fond remembrance. She had played in its shadow as a little girl, and the bridge to her had been a wondrous structure leading to all the far corners of the earth. One day, she had dreamed, she would cross that bridge and it would take her to lands brimming with spices and rubies. One day, she would cross that bridge into the sky, and there would be men in turbans, and camels in caravans, and temples glowing with gold leaf.
She had crossed the bridge into the arms of Frank Dodge.
Frank Dodge, to the police, was a punk. He’d been arrested at the age of fourteen for mugging an old man in Grover Park. He’d been considered a juvenile offender by the law, and got off with nothing more serious than a reprimand and a JD card. Between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, he’d been pulled in on a series of minor offenses—and always his age, his lawyer, and his innocent baby-blue-eyed looks had saved him from incarceration. At nineteen, he committed his first holdup.
This time he was beyond the maximum age limit for a juvenile offender. This time, his innocent baby-blue-eyed looks had lengthened into the severity of near-manhood. This time, they dumped him into the clink on Bailey’s Island. Virginia met him shortly after his release.
To Virginia, Frank Dodge was not a punk.
He was the man with the turban astride the long-legged camel, he was the gateway to enchanted lands, rubies trickled from his fingertips, he was her man.
His B-card listed a series of offenses as long as Virginia’s right arm—but Frank Dodge was her man, and you can’t argue with love.
In September 1953, Frank Dodge held up a gas station. The attendant yelled for help and it happened that a detective named Steve Carella, who was off-duty and driving toward his apartment in Riverhead, heard the calls and drove into the station—but not before Dodge had shot the attendant and blinded him. Carella made the collar. Frank Dodge went to prison—Castleview this time, where nobody played games with thieves. It was discovered, during his first week of imprisonment that Frank Dodge was anything but an ideal prisoner. He caused trouble with keepers and fellow prisoners alike. He constantly flouted the rules—as archaic as they were. He tried to obtain his release, but each attempt failed. His letters to his wife, read by prison authorities before they left the prison, grew more and more bitter.
In the second year of his term, it was discovered that Frank Dodge was suffering from tuberculosis. He was transferred to the prison hospital. It was in the prison hospital that he had died yesterday.
Today, Virginia Dodge sat with a pistol and a bottle, and she waited for the man who had killed him. In her mind, there was no doubt that Steve Carella was the man responsible for her husband’s death. If she had not believed this with all her heart, she’d never have had the courage to come up here with such an audacious plan.
The amazing part of it was that the plan was working so far. They were all afraid of her, actually afraid of her. Their fear gave her great satisfaction. She could not have explained the satisfaction if she’d wanted to, could not have explained her retaliation against all society in the person of Steve Carella, her flouting of the law in such a flamboyant manner. Could she not, in all truth, in all fairness, simply have waited for Carella downstairs and put a bullet in his back when he arrived?
Yes.
In all fairness, she could have. There was no need for a melodramatic declaration of what she was about to do, no need to sit in judgment over the law enforcers as they had sat in judgment over her husband, no need to hold life or death in the palms of her hands, no need to play God to the men who had robbed her of everything she loved.
Or was there a very deep need?
She sat now with her private thoughts. The gun in her hand was steady. The bottle on the table before her caught the slanting rays of the overhead light.
She smiled grimly.
They’re wondering, she thought, whether the liquid in the bottle is really nitroglycerin.
“What do you think?” Bucky said.
“I think it’s a bunch of crap,” Jim said. “Let’s go get the Spanish girls.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Bucky said. “Don’t just brush this off. Now just wait a minute.”
“Look,” Jim said, “you want to play cops and robbers, fine. Go ahead. I don’t. I want to go find the Spanish girls. I want to find Mason Avenue. I want to curl up on somebody’s big fat bosom. For God’s sake, I wanna get laid, for God’s sake.”
“All right, that can wait. Now suppose this is legit?”
“It isn’t,” Sammy said flatly.
“Damn right,” Jim said.
“How do you know?” Bucky asked.
“In the first place,” Sammy said, his eyes bright behind his spectacles, “anybody looking at the thing can see it’s a phony right off. ‘Detective Division Report!’ Now what kind of crap is that?”
“Huh?” Bucky said.
“I mean, Bucky, for crissakes, be sensible. ‘Detective Division Report!’ Now, you know what this is, men?”
“What?” Bucky said.
“This is a thing, you send away the top of a carton of Chesterfield’s to Jack Webb, and he sends you back a bunch of blue sheets together with a Dragnet gun and a whistle so you can keep everybody in the neighborhood up nights.”
“It looks legitimate to me,” Bucky said.
“It does, huh? Do you see the name of the city anywhere on it? Huh? Tell me that.”
“Well, no, but—”
“When are you going to grow up, Bucky?” Jim said. “This is the same kind of stuff you get from Buck Rogers. Only his say ‘Space Division Report,’ and he sends you a disintegrator and a secret decoder.”
“What about the message?” Bucky said.
“What about it?” Sammy wanted to know. “Look at it. A woman with a gun and a bottle of nitroglycerin. Boy!”
“What’s the matter with that?” Bucky said.
“Completely implausible,” Sammy said. “And tell me something. If this crazy dame is sitting there with a gun and a bottle of TNT, how in the hell did this Detective Whatever-His-Name-Is manage to type up this note and get it out on the street, huh? Implausible, Bucky. Completely implausible.”
“Well, it looks legitimate to me,” Bucky said doggedly.
“Look…” Jim started. And Sammy interrupted with, “Let me handle this, Jimbo.”
“Well, it looks legitimate to me,” Bucky said doggedly.
“Is it signed?” Sammy said. “Do you see a signature?”
“Sure,” Bucky said. “Detective second gr—”
“It’s typed. But is it signed?”
“No.”
“So?”
“So what?”
“So, look. You want to stew about this thing all night?”
“No, but…”
“What’d we come up here for?”
“Well…”
“To play space patrol with Buck Rogers?”
“No, but…”
“To waste our time with phony cops and robbers messages typed up by some kid on his brother’s typewriter?”
“I’m gonna ask you a simple question, man,” Sammy said. “Plain and simple. And I want a plain and simple answer, man. Okay?”
“Sure,” Bucky said. “But it looks legit…”
“Did you come up here to get laid or didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“Well?”
“Well…”
“Come on. Throw that away. Let’s get started. The night is young. Huh?” Sammy grinned. “Huh? Come on man. Come on, huh? What do you say? How about it? Huh? Okay?”
Bucky thought it over for a moment.
Then he said, “You go ahead without me. I want to call this number.”
“Oh, for the love of holy Buddha!” Sammy said.
The telephone in the squadroom rang at 6:55.
Hal Willis waited for Virginia’s signal, and then picked up the receiver.
“87th Squad,” he said. “Detective Willis speaking.”
“Just a second,” the voice on the other end said. The voice retreated from the phone, obviously talking to someone else in the room. “How the hell do I know?” it said. “Turn it over to the Bunco Squad. No, for Christ’s sake, what would we be doing with a pickpocket file? Oh, Riley, you’re the stupidest son of a bitch I’ve ever had to work with. I’m on the phone, can you wait just one goddamn minute?” The voice came back onto the line. “Hello?”
“Hello?” Willis said. At the desk opposite him, Virginia Dodge watched and listened.
“Who’m I speaking to?” the voice asked.
“Hal Willis.”
“You’re a detective, did you say?”
“Yes.”
“This the 87th Squad?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah. Well then, I guess it’s a crank.”
“Huh?”
“This is Mike Sullivan down Headquarters. We got a call a little while ago, clocked in at…ah…just a second…” Sullivan rattled some papers on the other end of the line “…six forty-nine. Yeah.”
“What kind of a call?” Willis said.
“Some college lad. Said he picked up a DD report in the street. Had a message typed on it. Something about a broad with a bottle of nitro. Know anything about it?”
At her desk, Virginia Dodge stiffened visibly. The revolver came up close to the neck of the bottle. From where Willis stood, he could see her trembling.
“Nitro?” he said into the phone, and he watched her hand, and he was certain the barrel of the gun would collide with the bottle at any moment.
“Yeah. Nitroglycerin. How about that?”
“No,” Willis said. “There’s…there’s nothing like that up here.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured. But the kid gave his name and all, so it sounded like it might be a real squeal. Well, that’s the way it goes. Thought I’d check anyway, though. No harm in checking, huh?” Sullivan laughed heartily.
“No,” Willis said, desperately trying to think of some way to tell Sullivan that the message was real; whoever had sent it, the damn thing was real. “There’s certainly no harm checking.” He watched Virginia, watched the trembling gun in her hand.
Sullivan continued laughing. “Never know when there’ll really be some nut up there with a bomb, huh, Willis?” Sullivan said, and he burst into louder laughter.
“No, you…you never know,” Willis said.
“Sure.” Sullivan’s laughter trailed off. “Incidentally, is there a cop up there by the name of Meyer?”
Willis hesitated. Had Meyer sent the message? Was it signed? If he said “Yes,” would that be the end of it, and would Sullivan make the connection? If he said “No,” would Sullivan investigate further, check to see which cops manned the 87th. And would Meyer…
“You with me?” Sullivan asked.
“What? Oh, yes.”
“Answer him!” Virginia whispered.
“We sometimes get a lousy connection,” Sullivan said, “I thought maybe we’d got cut off.”
“No, I’m still here,” Willis said.
“Yeah. Well, how about it. Any Meyer there?”
“Yes. We have a Meyer.”
“Second grade?”
“Yes.”
“That’s funny,” Sullivan said. “This kid said the note was signed by a second grade named Meyer. That’s funny, all right.”
“Yes,” Willis said.
“And you got a Meyer up there, huh?”
“Yes.”
“Boy, that sure is funny,” Sullivan said. “Well, no harm in checking, huh? What? For God sake’s, Riley, can’t you see I’m on the phone? I gotta go, Willis. Take it easy, huh? Nice talking to you.”
And he hung up.
Willis put the phone back into the cradle.
Virginia Dodge put down her receiver, picked up the bottle of nitro and slowly walked to where Meyer Meyer was sitting at the desk near the window.
She did not say a word.
She put the bottle down on the desk before him and then she brought her arm across her body and swung the gun in a backhanded swipe that ripped open Meyer’s lip. Meyer put up his hands to cover his face, and again the gun came across, again, again, numbing his wrists, forcing his hands down until there was only the vicious metal swiping at his eyes and his bald head and his nose and his mouth.
Virginia’s eyes were bright and hard.
Viciously, cruelly, brutally, she kept the pistol going like a whipsaw until, bleeding and dazed, Meyer Meyer collapsed on the desktop, almost overturning the bottle of nitroglycerin.
She picked up the bottle and looked at Meyer coldly.
Then she walked back to her own desk.
“I hated the old bastard and I’m glad he’s dead,” Alan Scott said.
He seemed to have lost all the shocked timidity with which he’d greeted Carella yesterday. They stood in the gun room of the old house, on the main floor, a room lined with heads and horns. A particularly vicious looking tiger head hung on the wall behind Alan, and the expression on his face now—as contrasted to his paleness yesterday—seemed to match that of the tiger.
“That’s a pretty strong admission to make, Mr. Scott,” Carella said.
“Is it? He was a vicious mean bastard. He’s ruined more men with his Scott Industries, Inc., than I can count on both hands. Was I supposed to have loved him? Did you ever grow up with a tycoon?”
“No,” Carella said. “I grew up with an Italian immigrant who was a baker.”
“You haven’t missed anything, believe me. The old bastard’s power wasn’t quite absolute, but he had enough to make him almost absolutely corrupt. As far as I’m concerned he was a big chancre dripping corruption. My father. Dear old dad. A murdering son of a bitch.”
“You seemed pretty upset by his death yesterday.”
“Only by the facts of death. Death is always shocking. But there was no love for him, believe me.”
“Did you hate him enough to kill him, Mr. Scott?”
“Yes. Enough to kill him. But I didn’t. Not that I probably wouldn’t have sooner or later. But I didn’t do this job. And that’s why I’m willing to level with you. I’ll be damned if I’m going to get involved in something I had nothing to do with. You do suspect murder, don’t you? That’s why you’re hanging around so long, isn’t it?”
“Well…”
“Come on, Mr. Carella, let’s play it straight with each other. You know the old bastard was killed.”
“I know nothing for sure,” Carella said. “He was found in a locked room, Mr. Scott. In all truth, it looks pretty much like suicide.”
“Sure. But we know it isn’t, don’t we? There are a lot of clever people in this rotten family who can do tricks that’d make Houdini look sick. Don’t let the locked room throw you. If somebody wanted him dead badly enough, that person would find a way of doing it. And making it look like suicide.”
“Who, for example?”
“Me, for example,” Alan said. “If I’d ever decided to really kill him, I’d work it out, don’t worry. Somebody just beat me to it, that’s all.”
“Who?” Carella said.
“You want suspects? We’ve got a whole family full of them.”
“Mark?”
