“Yes.” Eleanor Fay nodded and uncrossed her legs. Willis, at the water cooler, did not miss the sudden revealing glimpse of nylon and thigh.

  “Did he also tell you he’d spent all that time with Loomis first and then with his sister?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Then why didn’t he tell us?” Meyer asked.

  “I don’t know why. Arthur is a person who respects family and friends. I suppose he didn’t want to involve them with the police.”

  “That’s very considerate of him,” Meyer said drily, “especially since he’s being held on suspicion of murder. What’s his sister’s name?”

  “Irene Granavan. Mrs. Carl Granavan.”

  “And her address?”

  “Nineteen-eleven Morris Road. In Riverhead.”

  “Know where I can find this Bret Loomis?”

  “He lives in a rooming house on Culver Avenue. The address is 3918. It’s near Fourth.”

  “You came pretty well prepared, didn’t you, Miss Fay?” Meyer asked.

  “If you don’t come prepared,” Eleanor answered, “why come at all?”

  * * * *

  7

  Bret Loomis was thirty-one years old, five feet six inches tall, bearded. When he admitted the detectives to the apartment, he was wearing a bulky black sweater and light-fitting dungarees. Standing next to Cotton Hawes, he looked like a little boy who had tried on a false beard in an attempt to get a laugh out of his father.

  “Sorry to bother you, Mr. Loomis,’ Meyer said. “We know this is Easter, and —”

  “Oh, yeah?” Loomis said. He seemed surprised. “Hey, that’s right, ain’t it? It’s Easter. I’ll be damned. Maybe I oughta go out and buy myself a pot of flowers.”

  “You didn’t know it was Easter?” Hawes asked.

  “Like, man, who ever reads the newspapers? Gloom, gloom! I’m fed up to here with it. Let’s have a beer, celebrate Easter. Okay?”

  “Well, thanks,’ Meyer said, “but —”

  “Come on, so it ain’t allowed. Who’s gonna know besides you, me and the bedpost? Three beers coming up.”

  Meyer looked at Hawes and shrugged. Hawes shrugged back. Together, they watched Loomis as he went to the refrigerator in one corner of the room and took out three bottles of beer.

  “Sit down,” he said. “You’ll have to drink from the bottle because I’m a little short of glasses. Sit down, sit down.”

  The detectives glanced around the room, puzzled.

  “Oh,” Loomis said, “you’d better sit on the floor. I’m a little short of chairs.”

  The three men squatted around a low table which had obviously been made from a tree stump. Loomis put the bottles on the table top, lifted his own bottle, said “Cheers,” and took a long drag at it.

  “What do you do for a living, Mr. Loomis?” Meyer asked.

  “I live,” Loomis said.

  “What?”

  “I live for a living. That’s what I do.”

  “I mean, how do you support yourself?”

  “I get payment from my ex-wife.”

  “You get payments?” Hawes asked.

  “Yeah. She was so delighted to get rid of me that she made a settlement. A hundred bucks a week. That’s pretty good, isn’t it?”

  “That’s very good,” Meyer said.

  “You think so?” Loomis seemed thoughtful. “I think I coulda boosted it to two hundred if I held out a little longer. The bitch was running around with another guy, you see, and was all hot to marry him. He’s got plenty of loot. I bet I coulda boosted it to two hundred.”

  “How long do these payments continue?” Hawes asked, fascinated.

  “Until I get married again — which I will never ever do as long as I live. Drink your beer. It’s good beer.” He took a drag at his bottle and said, “What’d you want to see me about?”

  “Do you know a man named Arthur Finch?”

  “Sure. He in trouble?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “Well, let’s skip that for the moment, Mr. Loomis,” Hawes said. “We’d like you to tell us —”

  “Where’d you get that white streak in your hair?” Loomis asked suddenly.

  “Huh?” Hawes touched his left temple unconsciously. “Oh, I got knifed once. It grew back this way.”

  “All you need is a blue streak on the other temple. Then you’ll look like the American flag,” Loomis said, and laughed.

  “Yeah,” Hawes said. “Mr. Loomis, can you tell us where you were last night between seven and eight o’clock?”

  “Oh, boy,” Loomis said, “this is like ‘Dragnet,’ ain’t it? ‘Where were you on the night of December twenty-first? All we want are the facts.’ “

  “Just like ‘Dragnet,“ Meyer said drily. “Where were you, Mr. Loomis?”

  “Last night? Seven o’clock?” He thought for a moment. “Oh, sure.”

  “Where?”

  “Olga’s pad.”

  “Who?”

  “Olga Trenovich. She’s like a sculptress. She does these crazy little statues in wax. Like she drips the wax all over everything. You dig?”

  “And you were with her last night?”

  “Yeah. She had like a little session up at her pad. A couple of colored guys on sax and drums and two other kids on trumpet and piano.”

  “You got there at seven, Mr. Loomis?”

  “No. I got there at six-thirty.”

  “And what time did you leave?”

  “Gosssshhhhh, who remembers?” Loomis said. “It was the wee, small hours.”

  “After midnight, you mean?” Hawes asked.

  “Oh, sure. Two, three in the morning,” Loomis said.

  “You got there at six-thirty and left at two or three in the morning? Is that right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was Arthur Finch with you?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Did you see him at all last night?”

  “Nope. Haven’t seen him since — let me see — last month sometime.”

  “You were not with Arthur Finch in a restaurant called The Gate?”

  “When? Last night, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nope. I just told you. I haven’t seen Artie in almost two weeks.” A sudden spark flashed in Loomis’ eyes and he looked at Hawes and Meyer guiltily.

  “Oh-oh,” he said. “What’d I just do? Did I screw up Artie’s alibi?”

  “You screwed it up fine, Mr. Loomis,” Hawes said.

  * * * *

  8

  Irene Granavan, Finch’s sister, was a twenty-one-year-old girl who had already borne three children and was working on her fourth, in her fifth month of pregnancy. She admitted the detectives to her apartment in a Riverhead housing development, and then immediately sat down.

  “You have to forgive me,” she said. “My back aches. The doctor thinks maybe it’ll be twins. That’s all I need is twins.” She pressed the palms of her hands into the small of her back, sighed heavily, and said, “I’m always having a baby. I got married when I was seventeen, and I’ve been pregnant ever since. All my kids think I’m a fat woman. They’ve never seen me that I wasn’t pregnant.” She sighed again. “You got any children?” she asked Meyer.

  “Three,” he answered.

  “I sometimes wish . . .” She stopped and pulled a curious face, a face which denied dreams.

  “What do you wish, Mrs. Granavan?” Hawes asked.

  “That I could go to Bermuda. Alone.” She paused. “Have you ever been to Bermuda?”

  “No.”

  “I hear it’s very nice there,” Irene Granavan said wistfully, and the apartment went still.

  “Mrs. Granavan,” Meyer said, “we’d like to ask you a few questions about your brother.”

  “What’s he done now?”

  “Has he done things before?” Hawes said.

  “Well, you know . . .” She shrugged.

  “What?” Meyer asked.

  “Well, the fuss down at City Hall. And the picketing of that movie. You know.”

  “We don’t know, Mrs. Granavan.”

  “Well, I hate to say this about my own brother, but I think he’s a little nuts on the subject. You know.”

  “What subject?”

  “Well, the movie, for example. It’s about Israel, and him and his friends picketed it and all, and handed out pamphlets about Jews, and…You remember, don’t you? The crowd threw stones at him and all. There were a lot of concentration-camp survivors in the crowds you know.” She paused. “I think he must be a little nuts to do something like that, don’t you think?”

  “You said something about City Hall, Mrs. Granavan. What did your brother —”

  “Well, it was when the mayor invited this Jewish assemblyman — I forget his name — to make a speech with him on the steps of City Hall. My brother went down and — well, the same business. You know.”

  “You mentioned your brother’s friends. What friends?”

  “The nuts he hangs out with.”

  “Would you know their names?” Meyer wanted to know.

  “I know only one of them. He was here once with my brother. He’s got pimples all over his face. I remember him because I was pregnant with Sean at the time, and he asked if he could put his hands on my stomach to feel the baby kicking. I told him he certainly could not. That shut him up, all right.”

  “What was his name, Mrs. Granavan?”

  “Fred. That’s short for Frederick. Frederick Schultz.”

  “He’s German?” Meyer asked.

  “Yes.”

  Meyer nodded briefly.

  “Mrs. Granavan,” Hawes said, “was your brother here last night?”

  “Why? Did he say he was?”

  “Was he?”

  “No.”

  “Not at all?”

  “No. He wasn’t here last night. I was home alone last night. My husband bowls on Saturdays.” She paused. “I sit at home and hug my fat belly, and he bowls. You know what I wish sometimes?”

  “What?” Meyer asked.

  And, as if she had not said it once before, Irene Granavan said, “I wish I could go to Bermuda sometime. Alone.”

  * * * *

  “The thing is,” the house painter said to Carella, “I’d like my ladder back.”

  “I can understand that,” Carella said.

  “The brushes they can keep, although some of them are very expensive brushes. But the ladder I absolutely need. I’m losing a day’s work already because of those guys down at your lab.”

  “Well, you see —”

  “I go back to the synagogue this morning, and my ladder and my brushes and even my paints are all gone. And what a mess somebody made of that alley! So this old guy who’s sexton of the place, he tells me the priest was killed Saturday night, and the cops took all the stuff away with them. I wanted to know what cops, and he said he didn’t know. So I called headquarters this morning, and I got a runaround from six different cops who finally put me through to some guy named Grossman at the lab.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant Grossman,’ Carella said.

  “That’s right. And he tells me I can’t have my goddamn ladder back until they finish their tests on it. Now what the hell do they expect to find on my ladder, would you mind telling me?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Cabot. Fingerprints, perhaps.”

  “Yeah, my fingerprints! Am I gonna get involved in murder besides losing a day’s work?”

  “I don’t think so,” Carella said, smiling.

  “I shouldn’t have taken that job, anyway,” Cabot said. “I shouldn’t have even bothered with it.”

  “Who hired you for the job, Mr. Cabot?”

  “The priest did.”

  “The rabbi, you mean?” Carella asked.

  “Yeah, the priest, the rabbi, whatever the hell you call him.” Cabot shrugged.

  “And what were you supposed to do, Mr. Cabot?”

  “I was supposed to paint. What do you think I was supposed to do?”

  “Paint what?”

  “The trim. Around the windows and the roof.”

  “White and blue?”

  “White around the windows, and blue for the roof trim.”

  “The colors of Israel,” Carella said.

  “Yeah,” the painter agreed. Then he said, “What?”

  “Nothing. Why did you say you shouldn’t have taken the job, Mr. Cabot?”

  “Well, because of all the arguing first. He wanted it done for Peaceable, he said, and Peaceable fell on the first. But I couldn’t —”

  “Peaceable? You mean Passover?”

  “Yeah, Peaceable, Passover, whatever the hell you call it.” He shrugged again.

  “You were about to say?”

  “I was about to say we had a little argument about it. I was working on another job, and I couldn’t get to his job until Friday, the thirty-first. I figured I’d work late into the night, you know, but the priest told me I couldn’t work after sundown. So I said why can’t I work after sundown, so he said the Sabbath began at sundown, not to mention the first day of Peace— Passover, and that work wasn’t allowed on the first two days of Passover, nor on the Sabbath neither, for that matter. Because the Lord rested on the Sabbath., you see. The seventh day.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “Sure. So I said, ‘Father, I’m not of the Jewish faith,’ is what I said, ‘and I can work any day of the week I like.’ Besides, I got a big job to start on Monday, and I figured I could knock off the church all day Friday and Friday night or, if worse came to worse, Saturday, for which I usually get time and a half. So we compromised.”

  “How did you compromise?”

  “Well, this priest was of what you call the Conservative crowd, not the Reformers, which are very advanced, but still these Conservatives don’t follow all the old rules of the religion is what I gather. So he said I could work during the day Friday, and then I could come back and work Saturday, provided I knocked off at sundown. Don’t ask me what kind of crazy compromise it was. I think he had in mind that he holds mass at sundown and it would be a mortal sin if I was outside painting while everybody was inside praying, and on a very special high holy day, at that.”

  “I see. So you painted until sundown Friday?”

  “Right.”

  “And then you came back Saturday morning?”

  “Right. But what it was, the windows needed a lot of putty, and the sills needed scraping and sanding, so by sundown Saturday, I still wasn’t finished with the job. I had a talk with the priest, who said he was about to go inside and pray, and could I come back after services to finish off the job? I told him I had a better idea. I would come back Monday morning and knock off the little bit that had to be done before I went on to this very big job I got in Majesta — it’s painting a whole factory; that’s a big job. So I left everything right were it was in back of the church. I figured, who’d steal anything from right behind a church. Am I right?”

  “Right,” Carella said.

  “Yeah. Well, you know who’d steal them from right behind a church?”

  “Who?”

  “The cops!” Cabot shouted. “That’s who! Now how the hell do I get my ladder back, would you please tell me? I got a call from the factory today. They said if I don’t start work tomorrow, at the latest, I can forget all about the job. And me without a ladder!”

  “Maybe we’ve got a ladder downstairs you can borrow,’ Carella said.

  “Mister, I need a tall painter’s ladder. This is a very high factory. Can you call this Captain Grossman and ask him to please let me have my ladder back? I got mouths to feed.”

  “I’ll talk to him, Mr. Cabot,” Carella said. “Leave me your number, will you?”

  “I tried to borrow my brother-in-law’s ladder — he’s a paper hanger — but he’s papering this movie star’s apartment, downtown on Jefferson. So just try to get his ladder. Just try.”

  “Well, I’ll call Grossman,” Carella said.

 

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