The Empty Hours (87th Precinct), page 7
“No, no, it was fine.”
“She had identification. It all seemed very proper.”
“What did she show you?”
“A driver’s license or a passport is what we usually require. But she had neither. We accepted her birth certificate. After all, we did call the company. Is the check no good?”
“It’s fine. But the check was for twenty-five thousand, and we’re trying to find out what happened to five thousand of…”
“Oh, yes. The francs.”
“What?”
“She bought five thousand dollars’ worth of French francs,” the fat man said. “She was going abroad?”
“Yes, she was going abroad,” Carella said. He sighed heavily. “Well, that’s that. I guess.”
“It all seemed very proper,” the fat man insisted.
“Oh, it was, it was. Thank you. Come on, Bert.”
They walked down Hall Avenue in silence.
“Beats me,” Carella said.
“What’s that, Steve?”
“This case.” He sighed again. “Oh, what the hell!”
“Yeah, let’s get some coffee. What was all that business about the francs?”
“She bought five thousand dollars’ worth of francs,” Carella said.
“The French are getting a big play lately, huh?” Kling said, smiling. “Here’s a place. This look okay?”
“Yeah, fine.” Carella pulled open the door of the luncheonette. “What do you mean, Bert?”
“With the francs.”
“What about them?”
“The exchange rate must be very good.”
“I don’t get you.”
“You know. All those francs kicking around.”
“Bert, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Weren’t you with me? Last Wednesday?”
“With you where?”
“The lineup. I thought you were with me.”
“No, I wasn’t,” Carella said tiredly.
“Oh, well, that’s why.”
“That’s why what? Bert, for the love of…”
“That’s why you don’t remember him.”
“Who?”
“The punk they brought in on that burglary pickup. They found five grand in French francs in his apartment.”
Carella felt as if he’d just been hit by a truck.
It had been crazy from the beginning. Some of them are like that. The girl had looked black, but she was really white. They thought she was Claudia Davis, but she was Josie Thompson. And they had been looking for a murderer when all there happened to be was a burglar.
They brought him up from his cell where he was awaiting trial for Burglary One. He came up in an elevator with a police escort. The police van had dropped him off at the side door of the Criminal Courts Building, and he had entered the corridor under guard and been marched down through the connecting tunnel and into the building that housed the district attorney’s office, and then taken into the elevator. The door of the elevator opened into a tiny room upstairs. The other door of the room was locked from the outside and a sign on it read NO ADMITTANCE. The patrolman who’d brought Ralph Reynolds up to the interrogation room stood with his back against the elevator door all the while the detectives talked to him, and his right hand was on the butt of his Police Special.
“I never heard of her,” Reynolds said.
“Claudia Davis,” Carella said. “Or Josie Thompson. Take your choice.”
“I don’t know either one of them. What the hell is this? You got me on a burglary rap, now you try to pull in everything was done in this city?”
“Who said anything was done, Reynolds?”
“If nothing was done, why’d you drag me up here?”
“They found five thousand bucks in French francs in your pad, Reynolds. Where’d you get it?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Don’t get snotty, Reynolds! Where’d you get that money?”
“A guy owed it to me. He paid me in francs. He was a French guy.”
“What’s his name?”
“I can’t remember.”
“You’d better start trying.”
“Pierre something.”
“Pierre what?” Meyer said.
“Pierre La Salle, something like that. I didn’t know him too good.”
“But you lent him five grand, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“What were you doing on the night of August first?”
“Why? What happened on August first?”
“You tell us.”
“I don’t know what I was doing.”
“Were you working?”
“I’m unemployed.”
“You know what we mean!”
“No. What do you mean?”
“Were you breaking into apartments?”
“No.”
“Speak up! Yes or no?”
“I said no.”
“He’s lying, Steve,” Meyer said.
“Sure he is.”
“Yeah, sure I am. Look, cop, you got nothing on me but Burglary One, if that. And that you gotta prove in court. So stop trying to hang anything else on me. You ain’t got a chance.”
“Not unless those prints check out,” Carella said quickly.
“What prints?”
“The prints we found on the dead girl’s throat,” Carella lied.
“I was wearing…!”
The small room went as still as death.
Reynolds sighed heavily. He looked at the floor.
“You want to tell us?”
“No,” he said. “Go to hell.”
He finally told them. After twelve hours of repeated questioning he finally broke down. He hadn’t meant to kill her, he said. He didn’t even know anybody was in the apartment. He had looked in the bedroom, and the bed was empty. He hadn’t seen her asleep in one of the chairs, fully dressed. He had found the French money in a big jar on one of the shelves over the sink. He had taken the money and then accidentally dropped the jar, and she woke up and came into the room and saw him and began screaming. So he grabbed her by the throat. He only meant to shut her up. But she kept struggling. She was very strong. He kept holding on, but only to shut her up. She kept struggling, so he had to hold on. She kept struggling as if…as if he’s really been trying to kill her, as if she didn’t want to lose her life. But that was manslaughter, wasn’t it? He wasn’t trying to kill her. That wasn’t homicide, was it?
“I didn’t mean to kill her!” he shouted as they took him into the elevator. “She began screaming! I’m not a killer! Look at me! Do I look like a killer?” And then, as the elevator began dropping to the basement, he shouted, “I’m a burglar!” as if proud of his profession, as if stating that he was something more than a common thief, a trained workman, a skilled artisan. “I’m not a killer! I’m a burglar!” he screamed. “I’m not a killer! I’m not a killer!” And his voice echoed down the elevator shaft as the car dropped to the basement and the waiting van.
They sat in the small room for several moments after he was gone.
“Hot in here,” Meyer said.
“Yeah.” Carella nodded.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Maybe he’s right,” Meyer said. “Maybe he’s only a burglar.”
“He stopped being that the minute he stole a life, Meyer.”
“Josie Thompson stole a life, too.”
“No,” Carella said. He shook his head. “She only borrowed one. There’s a difference, Meyer.”
The room went silent.
“You feel like some coffee?” Meyer asked.
“Sure.”
They took the elevator down and then walked out into the brilliant August sunshine. The streets were teeming with life. They walked into the human swarm, but they were curiously silent.
At last Carella said, “I guess I think she shouldn’t be dead. I guess I think that someone who tried so hard to make a life shouldn’t have had it taken away from her.”
Meyer put his hand on Carella’s shoulder. “Listen,” he said earnestly. “It’s a job. It’s only a job.”
“Sure,” Carella said. “It’s only a job.”
“J”
It was the first of April, the day for fools.
It was also Saturday, and the day before Easter.
Death should not have come at all, but it had. And, having come, perhaps it was justified in its confusion. Today was the fool’s day, the day for practical jokes. Tomorrow was Easter, the day of the bonnet and egg, the day for the spring march of finery and frills. Oh, yes, it was rumored in some quarters of the city that Easter Sunday had something to do with a different sort of march at a place called Calvary, but it had been a long long time since Death was vetoed and rendered null and void, and people have short memories, especially where holidays are concerned.
Today, Death was very much in evidence, and plainly confused. Striving as it was to reconcile the trappings of two holidays—or perhaps three—it succeeded in producing only a blended distortion.
The young man who lay on his back in the alley was wearing black, as if in mourning. But over the black, in contradiction, was a fine silken shawl, fringed at both ends. He seemed dressed for spring, but this was the fool’s day, and Death could not resist the temptation.
The black was punctuated with red and blue and white. The cobbled floor of the alley followed the same decorative scheme, red and blue and white, splashed about in gay spring abandon. Two overturned buckets of paint, one white, one blue, seemed to have ricocheted off the wall of the building and come to disorderly rest on the alley floor. The man’s shoes were spattered with paint. His black garment was covered with paint. His hands were drenched in paint. Blue and white, white and blue, his black garment, his silken shawl, the floor of the alley, the brick wall of the building before which he lay—all were splashed with blue and white.
The third color did not mix well with the others.
The third color was red, a little too primary, a little too bright.
The third color had not come from a paint can. The third color still spilled freely from two dozen open wounds on the man’s chest and stomach and neck and face and hands, staining the black, staining the silken shawl, spreading in a bright red pool on the alley floor, suffusing the paint with sunset, mingling with the paint but not mixing well, spreading until it touched the foot of the ladder lying crookedly along the wall, encircling the paintbrush lying at the wall’s base. The bristles of the brush were still wet with white paint. The man’s blood touched the bristles, and then trickled to the cement line where brick wall touched cobbled alley, flowed in an inching stream downward toward the street.
Someone had signed the wall.
On the wall, someone had painted, in bright, white paint, the single letter. J. Nothing more—only J.
The blood trickled down the alley to the city street.
Night was coming.
Detective Cotton Hawes was a tea drinker. He had picked up the habit from his minister father, the man who’d named him after Cotton Mather, the last of the red-hot Puritans. In the afternoons, the good Reverend Jeremiah Hawes had entertained members of his congregation, serving tea and cakes that his wife Matilda baked in the old, iron kitchen oven. The boy, Cotton Hawes, had been allowed to join the tea-drinking congregation, thus developing a habit that had continued to this day.
At 8:00 on the night of April 1, while a young man lay in an alleyway with two dozen bleeding wounds shrieking in silence to the passersby on the street below, Hawes sat drinking tea. As a boy, he had downed the hot beverage in the book-lined study at the rear of the parish house, a mixture of Oolong and Pekoe that his mother brewed in the kitchen and served in English bone-china cups she had inherited from her grandmother. Tonight, he sat in the grubby, shopworn comfort of the 87th Precinct squadroom and drank, from a cardboard container, the tea Alf Miscolo had prepared in the clerical office. It was hot tea. That was about the most he could say for it.
The open, mesh-covered windows of the squadroom admitted a mild spring breeze from Grover Park across the way, a warm seductive breeze that made him wish he were outside on the street. It was criminal to be catching on a night like this. It was also boring. Aside from one wife-beating squeal, which Steve Carella was out checking this very minute, the telephone had been ominously quiet. In the silence of the squadroom, Hawes had managed to type up three overdue DD reports, two chits for gasoline, and a bulletin-board notice to the men of the squad reminding them that this was the first of the month and time for them to cough up 50¢ each for the maintenance of Alf Miscolo’s improvised kitchen. He had also read a half-dozen FBI flyers, and listed in his little black memo book the license-plate numbers of two more stolen vehicles.
Now he sat drinking insipid tea and wondering why it was so quiet. He supposed the lull had something to do with Easter. Maybe there was going to be an egg-rolling ceremony down South Twelfth Street tomorrow. Maybe all the criminals and potential criminals in the 87th were home dyeing. Eggs, that is. He smiled and took another sip of the tea. From the clerical office beyond the slattered rail divider that separated the squadroom from the corridor, he could hear the rattling of Miscolo’s typewriter. Above that, and beyond it, coming from the iron-runged steps that led upstairs, he could hear the ring of footsteps. He turned toward the corridor just as Steve Carella entered it from the opposite end.
Carella walked easily and nonchalantly toward the railing, a big man who moved with fine-honed athletic precision. He shoved open the gate in the railing, walked to his desk, took off his jacket, pulled down his tie, and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt.
“What happened?” Hawes asked.
“The same thing that always happens,” Carella said. He sighed heavily and rubbed his hand over his face. “Is there any more coffee?” he asked.
“I’m drinking tea.”
“Hey, Miscolo!” Carella yelled. “Any coffee in there?”
“I’ll put on some more water!” Miscolo yelled back.
“So what happened?” Hawes asked.
“Oh, the same old jazz,” Carella said. “It’s a waste of time to even go out on these wife-beating squeals. I’ve never answered one yet that netted anything.”
“She wouldn’t press charges,” Hawes said knowingly.
“Charges, hell. There wasn’t even any beating, according to her. She’s got blood running out of her nose, and a shiner the size of a half-dollar, and she’s the one who screamed for the patrolman—but the minute I get there, everything’s calm and peaceful.” Carella shook his head. “A beating, officer?” he mimicked in a high, shrill voice. “You must be mistaken, officer. Why, my husband is a good, kind, sweet man. We’ve been married for twenty years, and he never lifted a finger to me. You must be mistaken, sir.”
“Then who yelled for the cop?” Hawes asked.
“That’s just what I said to her.”
“What’d she answer?”
“She said, ‘Oh, we were just having a friendly little family argument.’ The guy almost knocked three teeth out of her mouth, but that’s just a friendly little family argument. So I asked her how she happened to have a bloody nose and a mouse under her eye and—catch this, Cotton—she said she got them ironing.”
“What?”
“Ironing.”
“She said the ironing board collapsed and the iron jumped up and hit her in the eye, and one of the ironing board legs clipped her in the nose. By the time I left, she and her husband were ready to go on a second honeymoon. She was hugging him all over the place, and he was sneaking his hand under her dress, so I figured I’d come back here where it isn’t so sexy.”
“Good idea,” Hawes said.
“Hey, Miscolo!” Carella shouted. “Where’s that coffee?”
“A watched pot never boils!” Miscolo shouted back cleverly.
“We’ve got George Bernard Shaw in the clerical office,” Carella said. “Anything happen since I left?”
“Nothing. Not a peep.”
“The streets are quiet, too,” Carella said, suddenly thoughtful.
“Before the storm,” Hawes said.
“Mmmm.”
The squadroom was silent again. Beyond the meshed window, they could hear the myriad sounds of the city, the auto horns, the muffled cries, the belching of buses, a little girl singing as she walked past the station house.
“Well, I suppose I ought to type up some overdue reports,” Carella said.
He wheeled over a typing cart, took three Detective Division reports from his desk, inserted carbon between two of the sheets, and began typing.
Hawes stared at the distant lights of Isola’s buildings and sucked in a draught of mesh-filtered spring air.
He wondered why it was so quiet.
He wondered just exactly what all those people were doing out there.
Some of those people were playing April Fool’s Day pranks. Some of them were getting ready for tomorrow, which was Easter Sunday. And some of them were celebrating a third and ancient holiday known as Passover. Now that’s a coincidence that could cause one to speculate upon the similarity of dissimilar religions and the existence of a single, all-powerful God, and all that sort of mystic stuff, if one were inclined toward speculation. Speculator or not, it doesn’t take a big detective to check a calendar, and the coincidence was there, take it or leave it. Buddhist, atheist, or Seventh Day Adventist, you had to admit there was something very democratic and wholesome about Easter and Passover coinciding the way they did, something that gave a festive air to the entire city. Jews and Gentiles alike, because of a chance mating of the Christian and the Hebrew calendars, were celebrating important holidays at almost the same time. Passover had officially begun at sunset on Friday, March 31, another coincidence, since Passover did not always fall on the Jewish Sabbath; but this year, it did. And tonight was April 1, and the traditional second seder service, the annual reenactment of the Jews’ liberation from Egyptian bondage, was being observed in Jewish homes throughout the city.
Detective Meyer Meyer was a Jew.
