“Mr Sutherland?”
“Yes, sir,” said Jack.
They introduced themselves, and Jack showed them in and offered chairs.
Amelia came in barefoot and in pajamas and showed every sign of wanting to join them.
“Amelia, honey—Got to leave us alone for a few minutes.” Jack tried to steer her back to her room.
“You said it was a cops ‘n robbers party!”
“The robbers aren’t here yet,” said Jack.
“I won’t!” Amelia said, squirming.
“Sorry,” Jack said to the policemen, one of whom was smiling. “My wife’s out.—Maybe we can go in the bedroom?”
Jack hated the idea, but he didn’t want to lock Amelia up in her own room. Jack brought another chair into the bedroom. The policemen followed. Jack closed the door on Amelia, saying, “We’ve got to talk for a couple of minutes, honey!” knowing his daughter would be listening at the door. Or would she?
Reluctantly Jack sat on the foot of the bed.
“You were a good friend of this girl?” asked the policeman who was new to Jack, the one who had announced himself as Homicide Squad.
“Good friend—not a close friend,” Jack said.
“How long have you known her?”
Jack reflected. “Nearly a year.”
“And how’d you meet her?”
Jack glanced at the bedroom door whose key he had turned, though he had not heard any sound from the other side. “She was working in a coffee shop down on Seventh Avenue. I made a sketch of her on the back of my check there.” He shrugged. “She was living in the neighborhood then, Minetta Street. We said hello on the street.”
“And then?”
Jack felt uncomfortable, wanting to avoid the Linderman part right now. “Then—she met my wife and—my wife recommended her to a photographer. As a model. So she was getting some fashion model jobs that way.”
“She certainly was,” said the Homicide man, a sturdy fellow in his mid-thirties with straight brown hair that looked freshly washed and cut. “You ever heard of any enemies she had? In that business? Jealous people maybe? Jealous men? Angry men?”
Jack shook his head slowly. “Her friend Marion Gill might know—of people. I don’t know any.” As both the cops wrote on their pads, Jack asked, “Did you speak again with Marion?”
“Oh, yeah, just now,” said the other policeman. “She checked in with us and we went down to see her. Very cooperative young lady.”
Jack thought of Fran. “I hope you’ve got some leads by now?”
“We never know,” said the Homicide cop, blandly.
Jack saw the door handle move and tried to ignore it. Though it wasn’t warm, he felt sweat on his forehead again. “What was the weapon? I heard something about a brick—in the downstairs hall.”
“Yes. It was a red brick with a little cement stuck to it,” said the Homicide man, looking at Jack. “Weighing two and a half pounds.”
Jack could imagine what it looked like.
“What’re you thinking about, Mr Sutherland?” asked the Homicide man.
Jack took a breath. “Two things. That a man must’ve—Well, it took some strength—those blows. And I was wondering where the brick came from.” Jack still spoke barely audibly, hoping that Amelia was not listening. “I suppose it doesn’t matter much.”
“We know where it probably came from. Just about ten yards from the door. Couple of ashcans there with debris on top of em.
“In which direction?”
“Direction?” asked the Homicide cop.
“From the door of the house.”
“Oh, downtown. South,” the Homicide cop replied. “The ashcans were downtown direction.–Mr Sutherland, have you any idea—suspicions who could’ve done this?”
Jack wiped away sweat with his palm. “No. I don’t know her crowd. Her circle. I’d like to help. My wife and I were very fond of Elsie.” Jack stood up nervously, impatient with what struck him suddenly as close-mouthedness in the two, a sudden blind-alley atmosphere.
“We’d like to speak with your wife,” said the Homicide cop. “You know when she’ll be back? Or where she is now?”
Jack didn’t know how much to tell them, or why he should hold back, or if he should. “Exactly where she is, I don’t know.”
“She knows about this?” asked the other cop.
“Sure.” Jack said in a near whisper, “I told her around—” He thought of his Linderman visit. “—when I got home from Marion’s this afternoon.”
“But you don’t know where she went tonight? Maybe to Marion’s?—She knows Marion?”
“Yes.” What had Marion said about Natalia? “Matter of fact, she went off to see—to see what she could find out about Elsie,” Jack said, still softly. “She went to St Vincent’s first.”
“Did she?” said the Homicide man. “Your wife’s very concerned then.”
“Yes. Everyone loved Elsie. Everyone.” Jack did not sit down again. He wished they would leave, get on with the business of finding the killer.
“You saw a lot of her?” said the Homicide man.
“No-o. My wife and I invited her to a couple of parties we went to.”
“Were you in love with her, Mr Sutherland?” The question from the Homicide man was in a flat and polite tone.
“No,” Jack said.
“Easy to be, I’d think,” said the other cop to his colleague, smiling.
“Will you—” The Homicide cop pulled a card from his clipboard. “—get in touch with us when your wife comes back? You expect her tonight.”
“Oh, sure.”
They were getting up. Jack opened the door. Amelia was not in sight. The Homicide cop gently closed the door again, almost, so they were all inside the bedroom still.
“There was a lesbian relationship between the victim and the girl Marion. You knew about that?”
“Oh, yes, I’d heard,” Jack said.
The Homicide cop started to put his cap back on and didn’t, then opened the door, and they all went out.
“You work here?” asked the other cop, looking around as if for the first time.
“Yes,” Jack said.
“Dad-dee!” Amelia was suddenly out of her room, but now it didn’t seem to matter. “Where’re the robbers?” She advanced toward Jack. “Have you got a lot of parking tickets?”
One cop laughed. The other cop wanted to see Jack’s workroom. They all went down the hall, the cops commenting on Jack’s handgrips, asking him how he reached them, and Jack obligingly jumped for them and brought them down to convenient height for turning flips, though he didn’t turn one.
“You keep in good form,” said the cop who was not Homicide.
Jack pulled back the half-parted curtain of his workroom. There was his painting-in-progress, not on the easel but on his worktable, because he preferred the light there sometimes. His brush lay to the left, pink paint drying on it. The smell of turpentine hung in the air, and Jack poured a bit of turps into a tin can and stuck the drying brush in.
“Workin’ on something?”
Jack gestured. “This was when the phone rang. Marion.” He led the way out.
“Isn’t that—” said the Homicide cop, going toward the two or three photographs of Elsie thumbtacked to drawing boards on the right side of his table. “That’s the girl, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Jack said.
“She’s a beaut. Was,” the non-Homicide cop said, shaking his head.
Jack scowled at this cop and wagged a finger near his lips. Amelia stood in the hall, listening, and Jack wondered how soon she would pick up what had happened. He sensed his little daughter’s antennae all out.
“Thank you, Mr Sutherland,” said the Homicide cop firmly at the doorway. “Your wife can call us any time tonight—if we don’t see her first.” He smiled a little. “You going away somewhere?” He had glanced at the suitcase in the hall, its lid propped against the wall.
“Yes, in a week or so. M
y wife and I.—Yugoslavia,” said Jack, thinking of the tickets in his passport case. Would Natalia still want to go?
When the door closed, Jack reproached himself for not having asked them some questions. Had Marion mentioned Fran, for instance? Jack pressed his hands against his damp face, then went to the kitchen in quest of cool water.
“Have you got parking tickets, daddy?”
“Lots of ‘em!” Jack said. “But the cops were very nice about it.”
“You have to pay a lot of money.” Amelia said it as if it were a fact.
“Yes. Yes, that’s true.”
“How much?”
“They haven’t even figured out yet.” Jack shook his head sadly.
Amelia ran off.
He heard the TV set come on, and went into the living-room. “No TV tonight, honey. Cut it off. Time to go to bed.”
“It’s not even ten!” Amelia had a Swatch wristwatch.
“No argument. Brush your teeth and let’s go. No foolin’!” He took her hand firmly.
His firmness worked.
Jack went into his workroom and cleaned all the pink out of his brush, because he didn’t want to see the pink tomorrow. Then he looked around for something to read, knowing he would not be able to sleep for a long while.
The telephone rang an hour later, when Jack, after another shower, was lying atop the sheets with a book. He picked up the phone on Natalia’s side of the bed.
“Hi, Jack, this is Marion,” said Marion’s voice calmly. “Natalia’s here. Want to speak with her?”
“Well—she’s okay?—What’s new?”
“They’ve got Fran. They’re talking with her.”
“Really!—You’re sure? The police’re sure?”
“Oh, she’s got some half-assed alibi.” Marion sounded a bit slurry, either tired or a little drunk. “One of her shitty friends called up here—threatening me, the fuck.”
“The police are charging her?”
“I don’t know about that, but they’re interested.”
“Good,” Jack said, feeling a surge of satisfaction. “What’s Natalia doing?”
“Natalia’s been wonderful.—She’s sitting on the bed—having an iced coffee. Christ, what a night! It’s not over.”
“When is she coming home? Or is she?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask her.—Natalia?”
Natalia came on. “Hello, Jack…Oh, I’m all right, never mind,” she said in a tone of impatience. “Yes, I saw her…Just by asking,” she said in response to Jack’s question.
Jack heard the cool self-assurance that could cover fury in Natalia, and which he had seen make strong people cringe. “Marion says they’re onto this Fran. What’s her last name?”
“Dillon. She uses a couple of names.”
“Are they really holding her?”
“Could be. I gather they’ve got her at some station, and she’s full of POP or something tonight.”
“The cops said that?”
“M-m—implied. And one of her girlfriends called up Marion tonight, pretty high on something.”
Jack gathered that Marion had gone back to Greene Street around 7, after the police had seen Marion again at Myra’s, as Marion had given the police Myra’s number. So Natalia had been able to reach Marion at home. Then “a thug chum” of Fran’s had called up to curse Marion out, because Marion had given Fran’s name to the police as possible killer, and Marion had been able to name a girl at whose house Fran might be staying, and Fran was. Then the police had come to see Marion again, and had left just ten minutes ago—whether the same pair who had visited him, Jack couldn’t tell and didn’t ask. Natalia said that she and Marion had also telephoned Elsie’s parents in upstate New York.
“The police had already told them,” Natalia said. “They’re coming tomorrow morning.”
“Christ!—That must’ve been awful!” Jack said.
“The father sounded pretty steady, the mother was upset.—Well, my God!—I got a hotel room for them for tomorrow.”
Natalia was staying the night at Marion’s, she said, because it would be awful for Marion to be alone here, and the police wanted to know where she was, and were giving her some protection, a guard on the street. And both of them were exhausted.
After he hung up, Jack lay with his eyes open, staring at the corner of white walls and ceiling. Genevieve called up, Natalia had said at the last. It’s on the radio and TV. In the papers already. Don’t buy any, it’ll make you sick. In the papers. He supposed the papers would seize on the fashion photos of Elsie.
Around midnight, Elaine Armstrong called. They had just been to a movie, and they had seen the headlines when they came out. Did Jack and Natalia know? Yes. Natalia was with a friend of Elsie’s now, Jack said. And no, they weren’t yet sure who had done it, but they had a suspect. Who?
“Some hoodlum,” Jack said.
32
At about the same time, Ralph Linderman, on duty at the Hot Arch Arcade, and standing to the right of the entrance, inside, caught sight of the tabloid held by Willy Shapiro across from him on the other side of the wide entrance. The girl in the big photo on the front page resembled Elsie, and Ralph at once moved toward it. Yes, Elsie, with her blond hair pulled back, her full underlip, black dress in this picture, and the bold black headlines above said: MODEL SLAIN!
Ralph seized one side of the paper, open-mouthed.
“Hey, Linderman, what the hell’re you—” Startled, Willy Shapiro yanked the paper back.
“That girl! I just want to see the—”
“Well, ask to see it!” Willy yelled. “‘S matter witcha, heat’s gotcha?” Willy, a half-owner of the Arcade, a plump, balding man much shorter than Ralph, got off his stool, defending his newspaper, which Ralph had already torn.
“I know that girl! I want to know if she’s dead!” Ralph yelled back, furious himself.
“This one? You know her?—Says here she’s dead!” Willy again swung the paper out of Ralph’s reach.
Ralph had a longer reach and got the paper, had just time to read Elsie Tyler’s name below the big photo of her with earrings and a champagne glass near her lips, when he felt a punch in his abdomen. Ralph bent for an instant, more with shock than pain.
“That for your goddam rudeness!” cried Willy Shapiro, scowling with defiance and pride at having hit a bigger man. “You’re cracked, Linderman! You’re a nut!”
“Go back—” Linderman gasped “—back to Israel, you greasy little kike!”
“I never was in Israel, you fuckin’ Nazi! An’ you’re fired! You hate this place anyway, and as of this minute, you’re fired!”—Hey, Eddie! Eddie!” Willy Shapiro’s voice blasted down the Arcade, louder even than the juke boxes, arresting for a few seconds the human din around them. “Eddie! Give this guy the bum’s rush and pronto!”
“What d’y’mean?” Eddie was a taller fellow than Ralph, a gangling man who emptied the slot machines for Willy and was therefore able to take care of himself with his fists.
“He’s fired and I want him out! Now!”
“No sweat,” Ralph said to Eddie and to Willy. He added to Willy, “Bye-bye, Artful Dodger.”
Unknown attacker…multiple blows with a brick…were some of the words Ralph had just glimpsed below the picture of his lovely Elsie. In his state of shock, the image of John Sutherland came—and his wrath gathered. He got his jacket from his locker in a room behind the cash register. Eddie hovered, looking not so much hostile as puzzled, but Ralph said not a word to Eddie. Ralph moved steadily, doing what he had to do, signing himself out at 00.22 in the book. Ralph quit the Hot Arch Arcade without a word or a glance at anyone.
He bought a copy of the tabloid Willy Shapiro had been reading from the next vendor on Eighth Avenue, and read it under a streetlight. It had happened in the afternoon around 4. In the very doorway of her apartment house on Greene Street! In broad daylight!…fractured skull…There were two more photos on the inside pages. Beautiful she was,
shining like a light! Ralph trembled.
The wily Sutherland had come to see him just minutes after the deed, and in a sweat of guilt! Sutherland asking him where he’d been in the afternoon! Asking him in order to try to nail the crime on him! Plain as day, Sutherland’s tactics! Sutherland was in love with Elsie, and either jealous of another man whom Elsie preferred, or afraid that Elsie would tell his wife the extent of their—their doings, maybe. Had Elsie refused to marry Sutherland? Or to go away with him somewhere? Had she possibly been pregnant? Revolting thought!
Oh, the price she had paid for her loveliness!
He would tell the police about Sutherland. And maybe the police knew already, maybe they had Sutherland at this minute. Which police station should he speak to, the one in the Greene Street area or the one nearest his place of residence? Ralph was then walking toward the subway entrance, but seeing a policeman on the sidewalk, he veered toward him.
“Excuse me, officer. I want to report something in regard to a murder. This murder, this girl.” Ralph pointed to the front page picture on the tabloid. “Or do you know if he is already caught—Sutherland.”
The youngish cop shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Can you take the name down? He’s the man who killed her!”
The cop looked uncertain, even uninterested. “Where d’you live, mister? Got a fixed address?”
“Certainly. I live on Bleecker Street.”
“Well, you go to your nearest precinct station down there and tell ‘em what you have to report. Okay?” The cop walked on.
Ralph rode homeward on the subway, a raincoat over his arm, a bulging plastic bag in hand with muffler and rain boots and the sandwich and fruit that he had brought for his snack around midnight or 1 a.m., a sandwich he had made before Sutherland’s visit, and which he intended to throw away. He saw at least three other copies of the same tabloid being read by passengers in the subway car, and more on the platform where he switched at Seventy-second Street to an express train. At Fourteenth Street, he took a local to the Christopher Street station, then walked straight to his house. His nearest precinct station was at Tenth Street and Hudson, he saw in the telephone book.
Found in the Street Page 26
