Jigsaw (87th Precinct), page 8
Carella got to his feet, turned on the lights, and went into the small bathroom off the kitchen. When he turned on the lights there, an army of cockroaches scurried for cover. Fighting nausea, Carella washed his bloody right hand, dried it on a grimy towel hanging on a bar over the sink, and then went into the other room to call the precinct. A radio motor-patrol car arrived some five minutes later. Carella filled in the patrolmen, told them he’d be back shortly, and then headed crosstown and uptown to Irving Krutch’s apartment. He did not get there until 3:15 A.M., two and a half hours before dawn.
Krutch opened the door the moment Carella gave his name. He was wearing pajamas, his hair was tousled, even his mustache looked as if it had been suddenly awakened from a very deep sleep.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Just a few questions, Mr. Krutch,” Carella said.
“At three in the morning?”
“We’re both awake, aren’t we?”
“I wasn’t two minutes ago,” Krutch said. “Besides…”
“This won’t take long,” Carella said. “Did you speak to Arthur Brown tonight?”
“I did. Why? What…?”
“When was that?”
“Must have been about…eight o’clock? Eight-thirty? I really can’t say for sure.”
“What’d you talk about, Mr. Krutch?”
“Well, Brown told me you’d found a piece of that photograph in Ehrbach’s apartment, and he said you’d also got another piece from Weinberg. I was supposed to come up to the squadroom tomorrow morning and see them. In fact, you were supposed to show them to me.”
“But you couldn’t wait, huh?”
“What do you mean, I couldn’t—”
“Where’d you go after you spoke to Brown?”
“Out to dinner.”
“Where?”
“The Ram’s Head. The top of 777 Jefferson.”
“Anybody with you?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“A friend of mine.”
“Man or woman?”
“A girl.”
“What time’d you leave the restaurant?”
“About ten-thirty, I guess.”
“Where’d you go?”
“For a walk. We looked in the store windows along Hall Avenue. It was a beautiful night and—”
“Where were you along about midnight, Mr. Krutch?”
“Here,” Krutch said.
“Alone?”
“No.”
“The girl came back here with you?”
“Yes.”
“So she was with you between what time and what time?” Carella said.
“She was here when Brown called at eight—or whenever it was.” Krutch paused. “She’s still here.”
“Where?”
“In bed.”
“Get her up.”
“Why?”
“One man’s been assaulted and another’s been killed,” Carella said. “I want her to tell me where you were when all this was happening. That all right with you?”
“Who was killed?” Krutch asked.
“You sound as if you know who was assaulted,” Carella said quickly.
“No. No, I don’t.”
“Then why’d you only ask who was killed? Aren’t you interested in who was beaten up?”
“I’m…” Krutch paused. “Let me get her. She can clear this up in a minute.”
“I hope so,” Carella said.
Krutch went into the bedroom. Carella heard voices behind the closed door. The bedsprings creaked. There were footsteps. The door opened again. The girl was a young blonde, her long hair trailing down her back, her brown eyes wide and frightened. She was wearing a man’s bathrobe belted tightly at the waist. Her hands fluttered like butterflies on an acid trip.
“This is Detective Carella,” Krutch said. “He wants to know—”
“I’ll ask her,” Carella said. “What’s your name, Miss?”
“Su…Su…Suzie,” she said.
“Suzie what?”
“Suzie Endicott.”
“What time did you get here tonight, Miss Endicott?”
“About…seven-thirty,” she said. “Wasn’t it seven-thirty, Irving?”
“About then,” Krutch said.
“What time did you go out to dinner, Miss Endicott?”
“Eight or eight-thirty.”
“Where’d you eat?”
“The Ram’s Head.”
“And where’d you go afterwards?”
“We walked for a little while, and then came here.”
“What time was that?”
“I guess we got here at about eleven.”
“Have you been here since?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Did Mr. Krutch leave you at any time between seven-thirty and now?”
“Yes, when he went to the men’s room at the restaurant,” Suzie said.
“Happy now?” Krutch asked.
“Overjoyed,” Carella answered. “Are you familiar with timetables, Mr. Krutch?”
“What do you mean? Train timetables?”
“No, investigating timetables. You’re an insurance investigator, I thought you might…”
“I’m not sure I’m following you.”
“I want you to work up a timetable for me. I want you to list everything you did and the exact time you did it from six P.M. until right this minute,” Carella said, and paused. “I’ll wait,” he added.
There’s nothing like a little homicide to give an investigation a shot in the arm. Or the chest, as the case may be. Albert Weinberg had been shot in the chest at close range with a .32-caliber pistol. His demise caused Brown to have a heated argument with the hospital intern who kept insisting he should be kept there under observation, and who refused to give him back his trousers. Brown called Carella, who brought his partner a pair of pants, a clean shirt, and his own spare gun. The two men had a hurried consultation while Brown dressed, deciding that Carella should go out to Calm’s Point for a chat in Italian with Lucia Feroglio, the late Carmine Bonamico’s sister-in-law. In the meantime, Brown would go over to the Ferguson Gallery, presumably closed on a Sunday, let himself into the place (against the law, but what the hell), and do a little snooping around. The nurse came in as Brown was zipping up his fly.
“What are you doing out of bed?” she asked.
“I’ll get back in, if you’ll join me,” Brown said, grinning lecherously, and the nurse fled down the corridor, calling for the intern. By the time the intern got to the room, the detectives were in the main lobby downstairs, setting up plans for contacting each other later in the day. They nodded to each other briefly, and went out into the June sunshine to pursue their separate pleasures.
Carella’s pleasure was the Church of the Holy Spirit on Inhurst Boulevard in Calm’s Point. He had first stopped at Lucia Feroglio’s garden apartment where he was told by her neighbors that the old lady went to 9:00 Mass every Sunday morning. He had then driven over to the church, where Mass was in progress, and asked the sexton if he knew Lucia Feroglio, and if he would mind pointing her out when Mass broke. The sexton seemed not to understand any English until Carella put five dollars in the box in the narthex. The sexton then admitted that he knew Lucia Feroglio very well, and would be happy to identify her when she came out of the church.
Lucia must have been a beauty in her youth; Carella could not understand how or why she had remained a spinster. A woman in her seventies now, she still walked with a tall, erect pride, her hair snowy white, her features recalling those of ancient Roman royalty, the aquiline nose, the full sensuous mouth, the high brow and almond-shaped eyes. The sexton nodded toward her as she came down the broad sunwashed steps. Carella moved to her side immediately and said, “Scusi, Signorina Feroglio?”
The woman turned with a faint half-smile on her mouth, her eyebrows lifting in mild curiosity. “Sì, che cosa?” she asked.
“Mi chiamo Steve Carella” he answered. “Sono un agente investigativo, dal distretto ottanta-sette.” He opened his wallet and showed her his detective’s shield.
“Sì, che vuole?” Lucia asked. “What do you want?”
“Possiamo parlare?” Carella asked. “Can we talk?”
“Certo,” she said, and they began to walk away from the church together.
Lucia seemed to have no aversion to holding a conversation with a cop. She was warm, open, and cooperative, speaking in a Sicilian dialect Carella understood only incompletely, promising him she would tell him everything she knew about the photographic segment she had inherited from her sister. As it turned out, though, she knew nothing at all about it.
“I do not understand,” Carella said in Italian. “Did you not tell the insurance investigator that the full picture reveals where the treasure is?”
“Ma che tesoro?” Lucia asked. “What treasure?”
“The treasure,” Carella repeated. “Did you not tell Mr. Krutch about a treasure? When you gave him the list and the photograph?”
“I know nothing of a treasure,” Lucia said. “And what list? I gave him only the little piece of picture.”
“You did not give him a list with names on it?”
“No. Nor has Mr. Krutch given me the thousand dollars he promised. Do you know this man?”
“Yes, I know him.”
“Would you ask him, please, to send me my money? I gave him the picture, and now it is only fair to expect payment. I am not a wealthy woman.”
“Let me understand this, Miss Feroglio,” Carella said. “Are you telling me that you did not give Mr. Krutch a list of names?”
“Never. Mai. Never.”
“And you did not tell Mr. Krutch about a treasure?”
“If I did not know it, how could I have told him?” She turned to him suddenly, and smiled warmly and quite seductively for a woman in her seventies. “Is there a treasure, signore?” she asked.
“God only knows, signorina,” Carella answered, and returned the smile.
The best burglars in the world are cops.
There are three types of alarm systems in general use, and the one on the back door of the Ferguson Gallery was a closed-circuit system, which meant that it could not be put out of commission merely by cutting the wires, as could be done with the cheapest kind. A weak current ran constantly through the wires of the closed-circuit system; if you cut them, breaking the current, the alarm would sound. So Brown cross-contacted the wires, and then opened the door with a celluloid strip. It was as simple as that, and it took him no longer than ten minutes. In broad daylight.
The gallery was empty and still.
Sunshine slanted silently through the wide plate-glass windows fronting Jefferson Avenue. The white walls were pristine and mute. The only screaming in the place came from the colorful paintings on the walls. Brown went immediately to the blue door on the far wall, opened it, and stepped into Bramley Kahn’s office.
He started with Kahn’s desk. He found letters to and from artists, letters to patrons, a rough mock-up of a brochure announcing the gallery’s one-man show to come in August, memos from Kahn to himself, a letter from a museum in Philadelphia, another from the Guggenheim in New York, a hardbound copy of Story of O (the first few pages of which Brown scanned, almost getting hooked, almost forgetting why he had come here), a trayful of red pencils and blue pencils, and in the bottom drawer a locked metal cash box—and a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson. Brown tented his handkerchief over the revolver, picked it up by the butt, and sniffed the barrel. Despite the fact that Albert Weinberg, his late partner, had been slain with a .32-caliber weapon, this gun did not seem to have been fired lately. Brown rolled out the cylinder. There were six cartridges in the pistol, one in each chamber. He closed the gun, put it back into the drawer, and was reaching for the cash box when the telephone rang. He almost leaped out of Steve Carella’s borrowed trousers. The phone rang once, twice, again, again, again. It stopped suddenly.
Brown kept watching the instrument.
It began ringing again. It rang eight times. Then it stopped
Brown waited.
The phone did not ring again.
He lifted the gray metal cash box from the bottom drawer. The lock on it was a simple one; he opened the cash box in thirty seconds. It contained anything but cash. He found a partnership agreement between Kahn and Geraldine Ferguson, a certificate for 200 shares of IBM stock, Kahn’s last will and testament, three United States Savings Bonds in fifty-dollar denominations, and a small, white, unmarked, unsealed envelope.
Brown opened the envelope. There was a slip of white paper in it:
However lousy a bank robber Carmine Bonamico may have been, he was sure good at cutting out paper dolls. If this wasn’t the second half of the list Krutch had brought to the squadroom, Brown would eat the list, the photograph, the first chapter of Story of O, and maybe O herself. He quickly copied the names in his notebook, replaced the fragment in its envelope, put the envelope and everything else back into the cash box, locked the box, and replaced it in the bottom drawer of the desk. His attention was captured by the painting of the nude on the opposite wall. He went to it, lifted one edge, and peeked behind it. Reaching up with both hands, he took the heavy painting off the wall. There was a small black safe behind it. Brown knew that people who used safes or combination locks with any frequency would often leave the dial just a notch or two to the right or left of the last number. This facilitated constant opening, since all you then had to do was give the dial a single twist each time, rather than going through the whole boring rigmarole. He was moving the dial a notch to the left of the number showing when he heard the back door of the gallery being opened. Swiftly, he moved behind the door of Kahn’s office, and threw back his jacket.
The butt of Carella’s borrowed .38 protruded from a holster at his waist. He drew the gun now and stood silently listening to the footsteps that clattered across the white tile floor toward Kahn’s office. The footsteps stopped just outside the open door. Brown held his breath. The man was in the doorway now, his shadow falling into the room across the gray rug. Brown did not want the man to be Bramley Kahn. Breaking and entry was breaking and entry, and Brown did not want a suit filed against the city; Brown did not want to get kicked off the force; Brown did not want to be smothered again by the ghetto he had escaped.
The first things that registered were the thick handlebar mustache and the glinting blue eyes.
“Hello, Krutch,” Brown said.
Irving Krutch whirled.
“Hey,” he said. “Hi.”
“Didn’t you see that decal on the back door? ‘These premises are protected by the Buckley Alarm System.’ ”
“I cross-contacted the wiring,” Krutch said.
“That makes two of us. Was it you who called ten minutes ago?”
“Yes. I wanted to make sure nobody was here.”
“Somebody was here,” Brown said.
“So I see.”
“What do you want, Krutch?”
“The same thing you want. We’re in this together, remember?”
“I thought you were letting us handle it.”
“I figured you might need a hand.”
Brown holstered the gun, went to the safe again, moved the dial a notch to the left, then two notches, then three, trying to open it after each move, and getting no results. He tried the same sequence to the right, and when he got nothing, he turned to Krutch and said, “I do need a hand. Grab one end of this painting.”
“Have you found anything?” Krutch asked.
Brown hesitated. “No,” he said.
They lifted the painting and hung it in place. Brown stepped back from it, walked over to the wall again, and tilted one corner of the frame.
“A little to the other side,” Krutch said.
“How’s that?”
“Perfect.”
“Let’s go,” Brown said.
“I’d sure like to know what’s in that safe,” Krutch said.
“So would I. What’s your guess?”
“A little piece of a picture.”
“How are you on safecracking?”
“Lousy.”
“So am I. Let’s go.”
“Where are we going?” Krutch asked.
“You’re going to fix those alarm wires. I’m going to visit Geraldine Ferguson.”
“Fix the wires? I can get arrested if I’m caught doing that.”
“I may arrest you, anyway,” Brown said. “You’re in here illegally.”
“So are you.”
“An off-duty cop on the prowl. Cruising by, saw the back door ajar, came in and discovered a burglary in progress.”
“I’m your partner,” Krutch protested.
“I had another partner, too. Albert Weinberg, who right now is on ice downtown.”
“I had nothing to do with that,” Krutch said.
“Who suggested you did?”
“Carella.”
“Well, maybe he’s just a suspicious person,” Brown said.
“How about you? What do you think?”
“I think you were with a young lady named Suzie Endicott from seven-thirty until whenever it was Carella came to see you. That’s what you told him, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“So why would I have any reason to doubt you?”
“Look, Brown…”
“I’m looking.”
“I want that lost NSLA money; I want it very badly. But not badly enough to kill for it. Nothing’s worth that much. Not even my career.”
“Okay.”
“I just want to get that straight between us.”
“It’s straight,” Brown said. “Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
Geraldine Ferguson was in her pajamas when she opened the door.
“Oh, hell,” she said.
