Jigsaw (87th Precinct), page 9
“That’s right, Miss Ferguson,” Brown said. “Here come de fuzz.”
“He’s admitting it,” she said in surprise, and then smiled. “Come in. I admire honest men.”
The living room resembled an annex to the gallery—white walls, muted furniture, huge canvases glaring with color, twisted sculptured shapes on pedestals. Gerry swayed across the rug like a dancer, tight little behind jiggling in the blue silk pajama bottoms, black hair caught in a ponytail that bounced between her shoulder blades.
“Would you like a drink?” she asked. “Or is it too early?”
“It’s almost one o’clock,” Brown said.
“Name it.”
“I’m on duty.”
“So? When did cops get so lily-white, you should pardon the expression?”
“I like to keep a clear head when I’m working,” Brown said.
“Okay, keep a clear head,” Gerry said, and shrugged. “I’ll have a drink, though, if you don’t mind. I find Sundays very boring. Once I’ve read the comics and Martin Levin, there’s just nothing exciting left to do.”
“Who’s Martin Levin?” Brown asked.
Gerry went to a bar over which hung a white canvas slashed with jagged black streaks of paint. She poured a liberal shot of bourbon onto the ice in a short glass, lifted the glass, said, “Here’s to improved race relations,” and drank, eying him steadily over the glass.
“Miss Ferguson…”
“Gerry,” she corrected.
“Gerry, a man was killed last night—”
“Who?” she said immediately, and put the glass down on the bar top.
“The man who visited you several times. The one who said he was Al Reynolds. Or Al Randolph.”
“What was his real name?”
“Albert Weinberg.” Brown paused. “Ever hear of him?”
“No,” Gerry said, and picked up her glass again. “What’s your real name?”
“Arthur Brown.”
“You’re putting me on,” she said, and smiled.
“No, that’s it. Detective Second/Grade, 87th Squad. Want to see my shield?”
“Why?”
“You’re supposed to ask for identification.”
“I don’t like to do anything I’m supposed to do,” Gerry said.
“On Wednesday night—”
“How’d we get back to Wednesday?”
“I just took us there,” Brown said impatiently. “On Wednesday night, two men killed each other in a brawl—”
“Who?”
“That’s not important, Gerry. What is important is that one of them had a piece of a photograph in his hand—”
“Are we going to start on that again? I already told you—”
“Miss Ferguson,” Brown said, “I’ve got some questions to ask you concerning murder and armed robbery. I’d like to ask those questions here in comfortable surroundings, but I can just as easily ask them uptown, in the squadroom.”
“What’s that, a threat?”
“No, it’s a realistic appraisal of the situation.”
“After I was nice enough to offer you a drink,” Gerry said, and smiled. “Go on, I promise to be quiet.”
“Thank you. We have good reason to believe that the fragment in the dead man’s hand was part of a larger photograph showing the location of the money stolen from the National Savings and Loan Association six years ago. We also have good reason to believe that you have another piece of that picture, and we want it. It’s as simple as that.”
“What smoked you out, Arthur?” she asked. “What made you drop the phony cover? Are you afraid somebody else might get killed?”
“It’s possible, yes.”
“Me?”
“Possibly. Whoever’s got a piece of that picture is in danger. For your own safety—”
“Bullshit,” Gerry said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The day the cops start worrying about anybody’s safety is the day…” She banged the glass down on the bar top. “Who do you think you’re kidding, Arthur?”
“Miss Ferguson, I’m not—”
“And make up your goddamn mind! It’s either Miss Ferguson or it’s Gerry. You can’t have it both ways.”
“Then I think I’d prefer Miss Ferguson.”
“Why? Are you afraid of me or something? Big strong Superspade afraid of a snippety little girl?”
“Let’s knock off the ‘Superspade’ crap, shall we?” Brown said.
“You ever been to bed with a white girl?” Gerry asked suddenly.
“No.”
“Want to try?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Believe it or not, Miss Ferguson, my fantasies don’t include a big black Cadillac and a small white blonde.”
“I’m not a blonde.”
“I know that. I was merely…”
“Stop getting so nervous. I’ll bet your palms are wet.”
“My palms are dry,” Brown said evenly.
“Mine aren’t,” Gerry said, and turned away from him to pour herself another drink. The living room was silent. “You married?” she asked. “I am.”
“That’s okay. I’ve been to bed with married spades, too.”
“I don’t like that expression, Miss Ferguson.”
“Which? Married?” she asked, and turned to face him, leaning on the bar. “Grow up, Arthur.”
Brown rose from the sofa. “I think maybe we’d better head uptown,” he said. “You want to get dressed, please?”
“No, I don’t,” Gerry said, and smiled, and sipped at her bourbon. “What’ll the charge be? Attempted rape?”
“I don’t have to charge you with anything, Miss Ferguson. I’m conducting a murder investigation, and I’m entitled—”
“All right, all right, don’t start spouting legalities. Sit down, Arthur. Oh, do sit down. I’d much rather talk here than in some stuffy old squadroom.”
Brown sat.
“There, isn’t that better? Now—what would you like to know?”
“Do you have a piece of the photograph?”
“Yes.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“My brother-in-law gave it to me.”
“Louis D’Amore?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Just before the holdup.”
“What’d he say about it?”
“Only that I should hold onto it.”
“How come he gave it to you, and not your sister?”
“My sister’s a scatterbrain, always was. Lou knew who the smart one was.”
“Did he give you the list, too?”
“What list?”
“The list of names.”
“I don’t know anything about a list of names.”
“That’s a lie, Gerry.”
“No, I swear. What list?”
“A list that has your name on it, among others.”
“I’ve never seen it.”
“You’re lying, Gerry. Your partner has half of that list. Where’d he get it?”
“I don’t know anything about a list. What’s it supposed to be?”
“Forget it,” Brown said. “Where’s your part of the snapshot?”
“In the gallery safe.”
“Will you turn it over to us?”
“No.”
“I thought you said—”
“I said I’d answer your questions. Okay. I’ve done that. There’s no law that says I have to give personal property to the police.”
“I can think of one,” Brown said.
“Yeah, which one?”
“How about Section 1308 of the Penal Law? A person who conceals, withholds, or aids in concealing or withholding any property, knowing the same to have been stolen…”
“Is the photograph stolen property?”
“It indicates the location of stolen property.”
“How do I know that? Lou gave me a tiny little corner of a photograph and asked me to hold onto it. That’s all I know.”
“Okay, I’m telling you the photograph shows the location of the NSLA loot. Now you know.”
“Can you prove it?” Gerry said, and smiled. “I don’t think so, Arthur. Until you find the money, you can’t say for sure it even exists. And you won’t find the money until you put the whole picture together. Tch, tch, such a dilemma. Why don’t we go into the other room and ball a little?”
“I’d rather not, thanks.”
“I’d drive you out of your mind, Arthur.”
“You already have,” Brown said, and left.
The dilemma was not quite so horned as Geraldine Ferguson imagined. All Brown had to do was find himself a Supreme Court judge, swear to the judge that upon reliable information and personal knowledge, there was probable cause to believe that a safe at the Ferguson Gallery at 568 Jefferson Avenue contained evidence that could lead to the solution of a crime, and request from the judge a warrant and order of seizure to open the safe, search it, and appropriate the evidence. He couldn’t do that today because it was Sunday, and in the city for which Brown worked, Supreme Court judges were entitled to a day of rest; only the direst of emergencies would have been considered cause for shaking a man out of his bed and requesting a search warrant. Brown was confident, though, that Gerry would not rush down to the gallery and take the photograph out of the safe. He had done nothing to disabuse her notion that he was helpless to open that safe, and he felt certain the photograph would still be there come morning when, armed with his legal paper, he would force her to produce it.
At 3:00 P.M. Sunday afternoon, he met with Carella in the squadroom and went over what they now had. By combining Krutch’s half of the list (which he claimed to have received from Lucia Feroglio, but which she claimed she had not given him) with the half found in Kahn’s cash box (which Geraldine Ferguson claimed she knew nothing about), they were able to piece together seven names:
ALBERT WEINBERG
DONALD RENNINGER
EUGENE E. EHRBACH
ALICE BONAMICO
GERALDINE FERGUSON
DOROTHEA MCNALLY
ROBERT COOMBS
The first four people on the list were already dead. The fifth person had admitted having a piece of the photograph, and they hoped to get that from her in the morning. Now, with the telephone directories for the five sections of the city spread open before them, they began searching for the remaining two names.
There was a Robert Coombs in Riverhead, and another Robert Coombs in Bethtown.
There were 164 McNallys scattered all over the city, more than enough to have started a revival of the clan, but none of them were named Dorothea, and there was only one listing for a McNally, D.—on South Homestead, off Skid Row.
“How do you want to hit them?” Carella asked.
“Let’s save Bethtown till tomorrow morning. Have to take a ferry to get out there, and God knows how they run on Sundays.”
“Okay,” Carella said. “Why don’t I take the Coombs in Riverhead, and go straight home from there?” “Fine. I’ll take the McNally woman.” “How come you’re getting all the girls lately?” “It’s only fair,” Brown said. “We never get them on television.”
It was a city of contrasts.
Follow Esplanade Avenue uptown to where the Central & Northeastern railroad tracks came up out of the ground and, within the length of a city block, the neighborhood crumbled before your eyes, buildings with awnings and doormen giving way to grimy brick tenements, well-dressed affluent citizens miraculously transformed into shabby, hungry, unemployed victims of poverty. Take any crosstown street that knifed through the 87th Precinct, follow it across Mason, and Culver, and Ainsley, and you passed through slums that spread like cancers and then abruptly shriveled on the fringes of fancy Silvermine Road, with luxurious, exclusive, wooded, moneyed Smoke Rise only a stone’s throw away. Head all the way downtown to The Quarter, and find yourself a bustling middle-class bohemian community with its fair share of faggots and artsy-craftsy leather shops, its little theaters and renovated brownstones glistening with sandblasted facades and freshly painted balustrades and fire escapes, shuttered windows, cobblestoned alleys, spring flowers hanging in gaily colored pots over arched doorways with shining brass knobs and knockers. Then follow your nose west into Little Italy, a ghetto as dense as those uptown, but of a different hue, take a sniff of coffee being brewed in espresso machines, savor the rich smells of a transplanted Neapolitan cuisine merged with the aroma of roasting pork wafting over from Chinatown, not a block away, where the telephone booths resembled miniature pagodas and where the phones—like their uptown cousins—rarely worked. (How nice to have an emergency number with which to dial the police, three fast digits and a cop was on your doorstep—if only the phones would work.) Then walk a few blocks south, crossing the wide avenue where the elevated train structure used to stand, its shadow gone now, the flophouses and soup kitchens, the wholesale lighting fixture, restaurant supply, factory reject, party favor, and office equipment establishments draped with winos and exposed in all their shabby splendor to the June sunshine.
D. McNally lived in a building two blocks south of the wide avenue that ran for better than half a mile, the city’s skid row, a graveyard for vagrants and drunks, a happy hunting ground for policemen anxious to fill arrest quotas—pull in a bum, charge him with vagrancy or disorderly conduct, allow him to spend a night or two or more in jail, and then turn him out into the street again, a much better person for his experience. Brown walked past two drunks who sat morosely on the front stoop. Neither of the men looked up at him. Sitting on the curb in front of the building, his feet in the gutter, was a third man. He had taken off his shirt, black with lice, and he delicately picked the parasites from the cloth now, squashing them with his thumbnail against the curbstone. His skin was a pale sickly white in the glare of the sunshine, his back and arms covered with sores.
The entryway was dark; after the brilliant sunshine outside, it hit the eyes like a closed fist. Brown studied the row of broken mailboxes and found one with a hand-crayoned card that read D. McNally, Apt. 2A. He climbed the steps, listened outside the apartment door for several moments, and then knocked.
“Yes?” a woman’s voice said.
“Miss McNally?”
“Yes?” she said, and before Brown could announce that he was The Law, the door opened. The woman standing in the doorway was perhaps fifty years old. Her hair had been dyed a bright orange, and it exploded about her chalk-white face like Fourth-of-July fireworks, erupting from her scalp in every conceivable direction, wildly unkempt, stubbornly independent. Her eyes were a faded blue, their size emphasized by thick black liner. Her lashes had been liberally stroked with mascara, her brows had been darkened with pencil, her mouth had been enlarged with lipstick the color of human blood. She wore a silk flowered wrapper belted loosely at the waist. Pendulous white breasts showed in the open top of the wrapper. Near the nipple of one breast, a human bite mark was clearly visible, purple against her very white skin. She was a short, dumpy woman with an overabundance of flabby flesh, and she looked as though she had deliberately dressed for the role of the unregenerate old whore in the local amateur production of Seven Hookers East.
“I don’t take niggers,” she said immediately, and started to close the door. Brown stuck his foot out, and the closing door collided with his shoe. Through the narrow open crack, D. McNally said again, emphatically this time, “I told you I don’t take niggers.” Brown didn’t know whether to laugh himself silly or fly into an offended rage. Here was a run-down old prostitute who would probably flop with anyone and everyone for the price of a bottle of cheap wine, but she would not take Negroes. He decided to find it amusing.
“All I want’s a blow job,” he said.
“No,” D. McNally said, alarmed now. “No. Go away!”
“A friend of mine sent me,” he said.
From behind the door, D. McNally’s voice lowered in suspicion. “Which friend?” she asked. “I don’t suck no niggers.”
“Lieutenant Byrnes,” Brown said.
“A soldier?”
“No, a policeman,” Brown said, and decided to end the game. “I’m a detective, lady, you want to open this door?”
“You ain’t no detective,” she said.
Wearily, Brown dug into his pocket and held his shield up to the crack between door and jamb.
“Why didn’t you say so?” D. McNally asked.
“Why? Do you suck nigger detectives?”
“I didn’t mean no offense,” she said, and opened the door. “Come in.”
He went into the apartment. It consisted of a tiny kitchen and a room with a bed. Dishes were piled in the sink, the bed was unmade, there was the stale stink of human sweat and cheap booze and cheaper perfume.
“You the Vice Squad?” she asked.
“No.”
“I ain’t hooking no more,” she said. “That’s why I told you to go away. I been out of the game, oh, must be six, seven months now.”
“Sure,” Brown said. “Is your name Dorothea McNally?”
“That’s right. I put ‘D. McNally’ in the phone book and in the mailbox downstairs because there’s all kinds of crazy nuts in this city, you know? Guys who call up and talk dirty, you know? I don’t like that kind of dirty shit.”
“No, I’ll bet you don’t.”
“When I was hooking, I had a nice clientele.”
“Mm-huh.”
“Gentlemen.”
“But no niggers.”
“Look, you didn’t take offense at that, did you?”
“No, of course not. Why should I take offense at a harmless little remark like that?”
“If you’re going to make trouble just because I said—”
“I’m not going to make any trouble, lady.”
“Because if you are, look, I’ll go down on you right this minute, you know what I mean? A cock’s a cock,” Dorothea said, “white or black.”
“Or even purple,” Brown said.
“Sure, even purple. Just don’t make trouble for me, that’s all.” She paused. “You want me to?”
“No. Thanks a lot,” Brown said.
