Jigsaw (87th Precinct), page 5
“It’s open, come in,” Weinberg said.
He opened the door.
Something warned him a second too late. As he opened the door, he could see through into the kitchen, but Weinberg was nowhere in sight. And then the warning came, the knowledge that Weinberg’s voice had sounded very near to the closed door. He turned to his right, started to bring up his hand in protection against the coming blow—but too late. Something hard hit him on the side of his head, just below the temple. He fell sideways, almost blacked out, tried to get to his knees, stumbled, and looked up into the muzzle of a .38 Special.
“Hello there, Stokes,” Weinberg said, and grinned. “Keep your hands flat on the floor, don’t make a move or I’ll kill you. That’s it.”
He stepped gingerly around Brown, reached under his jacket from behind, and pulled his gun from the shoulder holster there.
“I hope you’ve got a license for this,” he said, grinned again, and tucked the gun into the waistband of his trousers. “Now get up.”
“What do you hope to accomplish?” Brown said.
“I hope to get what I want without having to make any cockamamie deals.”
“And when you’ve got it? Then what?”
“I move on to bigger and better things. Without you.”
“You’d better move far and fast,” Brown said. “I’m sure as hell going to find you.”
“Not if you’re dead, you won’t.”
“You’d cool me in your own apartment? Who’re you trying to kid?”
“It’s not my apartment,” Weinberg said, and grinned again.
“I checked the address with…” Brown started, and shut his mouth before he’d said, “the Identification Bureau.”
“Yeah, with what?”
“With your name in the phone book. Don’t try to con me, Weinberg. This is your pad, all right.”
“Used to be, only used to be. I moved out two months ago, kept the same phone number.”
“Then how’d you get in here tonight?”
“The super’s a wino. A bottle of Thunderbird goes a long way in this building.”
“What about whoever lives here now?”
“He’s a night watchman. He leaves here at ten and doesn’t get home until six in the morning. Any other questions?”
“Yeah,” Brown said. “What makes you think I’m in this alone?”
“What difference does it make?”
“I’ll tell you what difference it makes. You can take my piece of the snapshot—oh, sure, I’ve got it with me—but if I am in this with another guy, or two other guys, or a dozen other guys, you can bet your ass they’ve all got prints of it. So where does that leave you? I’m dead, and you’ve got the picture, but so have they. You’re right back where you started.”
“If there’s anybody else in it with you.”
“Right. And if there’s anybody else, they know who you are, pal, believe me. You pull that trigger, you’d better start running. Fast.”
“You told me nobody knew about this.”
“Sure. You told me we had a deal.”
“Maybe you’re full of shit this time, too.”
“Or maybe not. You ready to chance it? You know the kind of heat you’d be asking for? Oh, not only from the cops—homicide’s still against the law, you know. But also from—”
“The cops don’t bother me. They’ll go looking for the guy who lives here.”
“Unless one of my friends tells them you and I had a meeting here tonight.”
“It sounds very good, Stokes. But only if you’ve really got some friends out there. Otherwise, it ain’t worth a nickel.”
“Consider another angle then. You kill me, and you get my piece of the picture, sure. But you don’t get that name you want. That’s up here, Weinberg.” He tapped his temple with his forefinger.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Weinberg said.
“Think about it now,” Brown said. “I’ll give you five minutes.”
“You’ll give me five minutes?” Weinberg said, and burst out laughing. “I’m holding the gun, and you’re giving me five minutes.”
“Always play ’em like you’ve got ’em, my daddy used to tell me,” Brown said, and smiled.
“Your daddy ever get hit with a slug from a .38?”
“No, but he did get hit with a baseball bat one time,” Brown said, and Weinberg burst out laughing again.
“Maybe you wouldn’t make such a bad partner after all,” he said.
“So what do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Put up the gun. Give mine back, and we’ll be on equal terms again. Then let’s cut the crap and get on with the goddamn business.”
“How do I know you won’t try to coldcock me?”
“Because maybe you’ve got friends, too, same as me.”
“Always play ‘em like you’ve got ‘em,” Weinberg said, and chuckled.
“Yes or no?”
“Sure,” Weinberg said. He took Brown’s gun from his waistband and handed it to him muzzle first. Brown immediately put it back into his holster. Weinberg hesitated a moment, and then put his own gun into a holster on his right hip. “Okay,” he said. “Do we shake hands all over again?”
“I’d like to,” Brown said.
The two men shook hands.
“Let’s see your piece of the picture,” Weinberg said.
“Let’s see yours,” Brown said.
“The Mutual Faith and Trust Society,” Weinberg said. “Okay, we’ll do it together.”
Together, both men took out their wallets. Together, both men removed from plastic compartments the glossy segments of the larger photograph. The piece Brown placed on the tabletop was the one he and Carella had found hidden in Ehrbach’s floor lamp. The piece Weinberg placed beside it was a corner piece unlike any the police already had in their possession.
Both men studied the pieces. Weinberg began moving them around on the tabletop. A grin cracked across his face. “We’re gonna make good partners,” he said. “Look at this. They fit.”
Brown looked.
Then he smiled. He smiled because the pieces sure as hell did fit. But he also smiled because, heh-heh, unbeknownst to his new partner and straight man, there were two additional pieces of the picture in the top drawer of his desk back at the squadroom, and two and two make four, and who knew what these two pieces and those two pieces together might reveal, who indeed? So Brown smiled, and Weinberg smiled, and everybody was having just a wonderful old time putting together the pieces of this old jigsaw puzzle.
“Now the names,” Weinberg said, sounding very much like the MC at the Annual Academy Awards Presentations.
“Eugene Edward Ehrbach,” Brown said, smiling.
“Geraldine Ferguson,” Weinberg said, smiling.
“Ehrbach’s dead,” Brown said, and the smile dropped from Weinberg’s face.
“What?” he shouted. “What the hell kind of…?”
“He was killed Wednesday night. The cops found—”
“Dead?” Weinberg shouted. “Dead?”
“Dead,” Brown said. “But the cops found—”
“Is this a double cross? Is that what this is? Some kind of a double cross?”
“You’ve got to learn to calm down,” Brown said.
“I’ll calm down! I’ll break your head in a million pieces, that’s what I’ll do.”
“He was carrying a piece of the picture,” Brown said softly.
“What? Who?”
“Ehrbach.”
“A piece of our picture?”
“That’s right.”
“Why didn’t you say so? Where is it?”
“The cops have it.”
“The cops! Jesus Christ, Stokes…”
“Cops can be bought,” Brown said, “same as anybody else. Ehrbach’s dead and anything they found on him is probably in a brown paper bag someplace being watched by a police clerk. All we got to do is find out where, and then cross a few palms.”
“I don’t like negotiating with fuzz,” Weinberg said.
“Who does? But to survive in this city, you got to deal with them every now and then.”
“Biggest fuckin’ thieves in the world,” Weinberg said.
“Look,” Brown said, “if even a felony can be squared for a couple of bills, we should be able to lay our hands on Ehrbach’s piece for maybe fifty, sixty bucks. All we got to do is find out where it is.”
“How do we do that? Call the cops and ask?”
“Maybe. I got to think about it a little. Now what about this Geraldine what’s-her-name?”
“Ferguson. She runs an art gallery on Jefferson Avenue. I’ve busted into her apartment maybe six or seven times already, couldn’t find the picture. I wouldn’t be surprised she stuck it up her twat,” Weinberg said, and burst out laughing. Brown laughed with him. They were still good old buddies and still thrilled and amazed by the fact that their two separate pieces fit together as neatly as Yin and Yang.
“Have you got a print of this?” Brown asked.
“Naturally,” Weinberg said. “And you?”
“Naturally.”
“You want to exchange pieces, is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“Done,” Weinberg said, and picked up the section Brown had placed on the tabletop. Brown picked up the remaining section, and both men grinned again. “Now let’s go down for a drink,” Weinberg said. “We got a lot of strategy to work out.”
“Right,” Brown said. As they went toward the front door, he said—casually, he thought—”By the way, how’d you happen to get your piece of the snapshot?”
“Be happy to tell you,” Weinberg said.
“Good.”
“As soon as you tell me how you really got yours,” Weinberg added, and began chuckling.
Brown suddenly wondered which of them was the straight man.
It was all happening too quickly and too easily.
If getting seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars was always this simple, Brown was definitely in the wrong racket. He almost wished that he and Weinberg were truly partners. There was something about the big man that Brown liked, despite the fact that he was a felon. He did not leave Weinberg until 2:00 the next morning. By that time, each of the men had consumed a fifth of scotch between them, and were calling each other Artie and Al. They had also decided that Brown should be the one who made the next approach to Geraldine Ferguson. Weinberg had been to her gallery several times with offers to buy the segment he was certain she possessed, but each time she had professed ignorance of the photograph, segmented or otherwise. Weinberg told Brown that he knew the girl had the goods they were after, but he would not reveal how he knew. Brown said that was a hell of a way to start a partnership, and Weinberg said Brown had started in an even worse way, giving him all that bullshit about a lifer at Utah State, man, that was straight out of Mickey Mouse, had Brown expected him to believe it? Brown said Well, I guess we both got our reasons for not wanting our sources known, and Weinberg said Well, maybe when we get to know each other better, and Brown said I hope so, and Weinberg said Man, I never thought I’d be partners with a spade.
Brown looked at him.
It was hip these days, he knew, for white men to call Negroes “spades,” but to Brown this was simply another of the words that had once been considered—and which he still considered—derogatory. Weinberg was smiling in a boozy happy friendly way, and Brown was certain the slur had been unintentional. And yet, the word rankled, the whole fucking thing rankled.
“That bother you?” he asked.
“What bother me?” Weinberg said.
“My being a spade,” Brown said, hitting the word hard.
Weinberg looked him square in the eye. “Did I say that? Did I call you that?”
“You did,” Brown said, and nodded.
“Then I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” He extended his hand across the table. “I’m sorry, Artie,” he said.
Brown took his hand. “Forget it.”
“I may be a shit,” Weinberg said. “I may go around beating up people and doing rotten things, but I like you, Artie, and I wouldn’t hurt you by saying no dumb thing like that.”
“Okay.”
Weinberg was just gathering steam. “I may be the crumbiest guy ever walked the earth, I may have done some filthy things, but one thing I wouldn’t do is call you no spade, Artie, not if I wasn’t so piss-ass drunk and didn’t know what I was saying that might hurt a good friend of mine and a partner besides.”
“Okay,” Brown said.
“Okay, excuse it, Artie. Excuse it. I mean it.”
“Okay.”
“Okay,” Weinberg said. “Let’s go home, Artie. Artie, I think we better go home. I always get in fights in bars, and I don’t want to get in no trouble when we got our little deal cooking, okay?” He winked. “Okay?” He winked again. “Tomorrow morning, you got to go visit little Geraldine Ferguson. Tell her she don’t give us that picture, we’ll come around and do something terrible to her, okay?” Weinberg smiled. “I can’t think of nothing terrible right now, but I’ll think of something in the morning, okay?”
On Saturday morning, Brown put the new photo scrap into an envelope together with Geraldine Ferguson’s name and address, sealed the envelope, and dropped it into a mailbox in the hallway of 1134 Culver Avenue, three blocks from the precinct. The name on the box was Cara Binieri, which was Steve Carella’s little joke, carabinieri meaning fuzz in Italian. They had decided between them that Brown was to stay away from the squadroom, and whereas he hoped to call Carella later in the day, he wanted the information to be waiting for him in the mailbox this morning, when he would pick it up on his way to work.
Brown’s own day started somewhat more glamorously.
It also ended in a pretty glamorous way.
Geraldine Ferguson was a white woman, petite, with long straight black hair and brown eyes and a generous mouth. She was in her early thirties, wearing purple bell-bottom slacks and a man-tailored shirt done in lavender satin. She had big golden hoops looped into her earlobes, and she greeted Brown with a smile nothing less than radiant.
“Good morning,” she said. “Isn’t it a beautiful morning?”
“It’s a lovely morning,” Brown said.
“Are you here for the Gonzagos?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” Brown said. “What are the gonzagos?”
“Luis Gonzago,” she said, and smiled again. “He’s a painter. I thought you might have wanted to see his stuff, but we’ve already taken it down. Will you be going to Los Angeles?”
“No, I hadn’t planned to,” Brown said.
“Because he’ll be having a show at the Herron Gallery out there starting next Tuesday. On Sepulveda.”
“No, I won’t be going to Los Angeles.”
“That’s a shame,” she said, and smiled.
She was perhaps five-two or five-three, with a perfectly proportioned figure for her size. She moved with a swift feminine grace that he found delightful, her brown eyes flashing in the sunlight that streamed through the front plate-glass window, the smile breaking as sharp and as fast as a curve ball. She threw her arms wide, and said, “But we’ve got loads of other stuff, so if you’d like me to help you, I’d be happy to. Or you can just look around on your own, if you like. What were you interested in? Paintings or sculpture?”
“Well,” Brown said, and hesitated, wondering exactly how he should play this. “Is this your own gallery?” he asked, stalling.
“Yes, it is,” she said.
“Then you’re Miss Ferguson. I mean, this is the Ferguson Gallery, so I guess…”
“Well, Mrs. Ferguson, really,” she said. “But not really,” she added, and the smile broke again, swift and clean. “I was married to Mr. Ferguson, Mr. Harold Ferguson, but Mr. Ferguson and I are no longer sharing bed and board, and so whereas I’m still Geraldine Ferguson, I am no longer Mrs. Ferguson. Oh hell,” she said, “why don’t you just call me Gerry? What’s your name?”
“Arthur Stokes,” he said.
“Are you a cop, Arthur?” she asked flatly.
“No,” he said. “What gave you that idea?”
“You’re big like a cop,” she said, and shrugged. “Also, you carry a gun.”
“Do I?”
“Mm-huh. Right there,” she said, and pointed.
“I didn’t think it showed.”
“Well, Harold was in the diamond business, and he had a carry-permit, and he used to wear this enormous revolver in a shoulder holster, right where yours is. So I guess when your husband wears a gun all the time, you get used to the way it looks, and that’s how I spotted yours right away. Why do you wear a gun, Arthur? Are you in the diamond business?”
“No,” he said, “I’m in the insurance business.”
He figured that was a fair enough beginning, even though he had borrowed the occupation from Irving Krutch who, to his knowledge, did not carry a gun.
“Oh, do insurance men wear guns?” Gerry asked. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yes,” he said, “if they’re insurance investigators.”
“Don’t tell me!” she squealed. “Someone’s had a painting stolen! You’re here to check on authenticity.”
“Well, no,” he said. “Not exactly.”
“Arthur,” she said, “I think you’re a cop, I really do.”
“Now why would a cop be visiting you, Miss Ferguson?”
“Gerry. Maybe because I charge such exorbitant prices,” she said, and smiled. “I don’t really. Yes, I do really. Would you like to see some pictures while you decide if you’re a cop or not?”
She led him around the gallery. The walls were white, with recessed overhead lighting fixtures that illuminated the hanging paintings and standing pieces of sculpture. Her taste in paintings was a bit far-out for Brown, wildly colorful, non-objective geometric tangles that overpowered the eye and defied analysis. The sculpture was of the junkyard variety, automobile headlights welded to Stillson wrenches, a plumber’s red-cupped plunger wired to the broken handle and frayed-straw brush of a broom.
“I can see we’re hardly eliciting any wild response,” Gerry said, and smiled. “What kind of art do you like?”
