“Good. You understand, I can’t make the same offer. What we learn we’ll have to keep to ourselves.”
“I know that.”
“All right. Thanks for giving me the straight story.”
“I always will, Marty.”
“Sure.” He turned away, then looked back and said, “Forget that crack I made, will you?”
“I’ll try.”
“Yeah. So long.”
After he left, Kate came in and said, “You want a cup of coffee? Are you going to work out back?”
“No, I don’t have time now. I’ll phone you later.” I put on a tie and jacket and took the subway to Manhattan.
ten
MY OFFICE WAS A small high-ceilinged room in a very old building across the street from the main library on Fifth Avenue. There was one dusty window with Venetian blinds; looking down from it I could see Fifth Avenue, the shoppers walking, the buses and taxis angling back and forth like a gully of magnets, and off to the right the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Across the street was the huge Greek mausoleum of a library, with its steps and stone lions.
My office was lit by one gigantic globe light hanging far down from the ceiling. Dark green metal shelves had been built on three walls and now stood dusty and empty. The desk was small, wooden, and scarred, with a matching swivel chair. There was a large four-drawer filing cabinet behind the desk, and on a small wheeled metal stand to the left of the desk was an electric typewriter with a sticker on it saying it was rented from Eagle Typewriter & Adding Machine. A wooden chair stood off to one side, and next to the typing stand was a metal wastebasket. That was it for the furniture.
Atop the desk was a black telephone, as dusty as everything else in the room. In the top side drawer of the desk was a stack of white paper, a large yellow legal-size pad, a ballpoint pen, and five new freshly sharpened pencils. The other side drawers were empty, but the center drawer contained a sheet of paper with the list I’d asked Rembek for. There were ten names, each with an address and phone number and occupation, all typed neatly in a row. I looked at them, and then called Rembek. When he came on the line, I said, “I’m in the office.”
“Is it okay?”
“Yes, but the list isn’t.”
“The list I sent over? What’s wrong with it?”
“It doesn’t have Dominic Brono’s name on it.”
“What? My chauffeur?”
“He knew Rita. He drove her places, on your orders.”
“You think it was him? That little bastard—”
“No,” I said. “I talked with him and I’m satisfied it wasn’t him. But his name should have been on this list. Stop thinking like an aristocrat, Rembek, and give me a complete list.”
There were three or four seconds of dead silence, and then he said, “You’re right. Chesterton used that, in the story about the mailman, what’s the title?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said.
He said, “I read it years ago. Now, what was the title? See, that’s going to drive me crazy now. The point of the story was, you don’t see people that are part of the background. Like everybody made up lists of the people that were there, and nobody thought to put the mailman on the list, and naturally it was the mailman that did it.”
“That’s what I want,” I said. “All the mailmen.”
“Let me think some more,” he said. “If there’s anybody else I left out, I’ll send you over a revised list. You want anything else?”
“Yes. I want a legman, somebody to run the office for me.”
“You want a gopher. Check. You’ll have one there within half an hour. What else?”
“Have you got a copy of this list?”
“Naturally.”
“All right. Send some men out to get the alibis for the night before last. The killer could have made the round trip to Allentown and back in about three hours, and he could have arrived out there any time between eleven-thirty Wednesday night and, say, seven Thursday morning. Since she’d just taken a shower, it was probably not very much after midnight.”
“She just took a shower? Before she was killed? I didn’t know about that.”
He was silent, and I knew he was feeling the bite of specific memories. Remembering that apartment, the small green tubless bathroom and the crowded bedroom with the patchwork quilt on the bed, I could visualize approximations of the memories that had their teeth in his neck, but only to an extent; I had never seen Rita Castle’s face.
I said, “An alibi is a story that leaves no three-hour openings between ten o’clock Wednesday night and eight-thirty Thursday morning.”
“Right,” he said. His voice was strange. He cleared his throat and said, in his normal voice, “I’ll try and get it for you sometime this afternoon. You going to be in the office?”
“Yes. Until I get the answer on the alibis. Then I’ll want to interview the ones that are left.”
“Check. What else?”
“A picture of Rita Castle. More than one, if possible, different shots.”
“No problem. What else?”
“Did she ever introduce you to friends of hers from before she met you?”
“What, that Village crowd? No, she knew better.”
“Never? Not one?”
“Not one.”
That was just as well. In the note, she’d said, “I have found a real man,” and that read as though she meant a man she’d met subsequent to meeting Rembek. But I’d wanted to check out the other possibility anyway. This way I was saved some work.
I said, “When you’re sending over new lists, include Dominic Brono’s address and phone number.”
“You do think it was him.”
“No, I don’t. I’m a completist.”
“Is that straight?”
“Rembek, I’ll tell you when I suspect somebody.”
“All right. What else?”
“You said you’d get me the police lab report.”
“It’s on its way to New York right now, you should have it within the hour.”
“Good.”
“You want me to make the appointments for you to talk to these guys?”
“Our suspects? No, wait till the preliminary check is done.”
“Right. What else?”
“Nothing at the moment.”
“Good. May I say something, Mister Tobin?”
“Go ahead.”
“I believe the Police Department made a mistake.”
We hung up then, and I went to work at the electric typewriter, making a preliminary report, putting down a summary of everything that had happened so far. I broke off in the middle of it when I remembered to call Kate. I phoned her, gave her the number here, told her I didn’t know when I’d be home, and went back to the report.
I was finishing up when there was a knock at the door. When I called “Come in,” the door opened and my gopher entered.
It was funny; he looked like a gopher, small and brown and nervous, with the shaky actions of a sporadic drunk. He told me his name was Mickey Hansel, and I told him I wanted him to go out and buy some things. He looked alert.
“A box of file folders,” I said, “to fit that cabinet there.” I took my notebook from my pocket. “Two notebooks like this. And coffee and Danish for both of us.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. “File folders. Notebooks. Coffee and Danish.”
“And tell the elevator operator we’ll want a worktable in here for you.”
“Yes, sir, will do.” He gave me a nervous half-salute and a nervous half-smile and went away again.
The worktable came in before my gopher came back. (You understand, they’re called gophers because they go for things.) Two men in undershirts carried the table in and set it in the corner and went out again. It was a rectangular wooden table, as old and beaten and scarred as my desk.
When Mickey Hansel came back, I said, “What do you know about what’s going on?”
Promptly he said, “Not a thing, sir.”
&nb
sp; “Oh, come on, they must have told you something when they sent you over here.”
“Yes, sir. They give me the address, they said you was an ex-cop and still square but you was doing a job for Mister Rembek and I should do whatever you wanted.”
“The first thing I want,” I said, “is for you to know the story. A man works better when he knows what the job is all about.”
He looked unconvinced, but he said, “Yes, sir.”
I gave him the report I’d just finished. He pulled the chair over to his worktable, sat down, and read it slowly and carefully, moving his lips and making sibilant sounds on the esses. While waiting for him to be done, I stood at the window and watched Fifth Avenue.
When he finished he put the report back on my desk and said, “Yes, sir. I’m done.”
“You’ve got the picture now?”
“Yes, sir. That’s a real shame about that Miss Castle, she was an awful good-lookin girl.”
“You knew her?”
“Sometimes Mister Rembek would have me bring stuff up to her place. You know, presents and all.”
That was good. Now I had a control for Rembek’s revised list. If Mickey Hansel’s name didn’t show up on it, I’d know Rembek still wasn’t thinking right. Not that there was much chance Mickey was Rita Castle’s “real man.” But I’d asked for a complete list, wanting the right to make my own decision about who should be considered and who not, and a complete list would have to include Mickey Hansel.
Now I asked Mickey if he had any questions about what he’d read, and when he said he didn’t, he thought he understood what was going on, I put him to work making up file folders for each of the ten names on Rembek’s first list. Eleven, including Dominic Brono.
While Mickey was working on that, a kid in a leather jacket brought me a bulky manila envelope containing photocopies of the medical and lab and police reports from Allentown. I sat down and read them while Mickey laboriously printed names on folder tabs.
Rita Castle had been killed sometime between midnight and three A.M. on Thursday morning, struck down by a single blow on the back of the head. The blow had been struck with a great deal of force, fracturing the skull. Microscopic bits of metal in the wound, plus the violence of the impact, led police to suspect the weapon had been a hammer or some similar tool. No trace of the weapon had been found.
There were no witnesses to the arrival or departure of the killer, who had presumably used an automobile but who might have left it parked a distance away and come on foot. There were no significant usable fingerprints on anything. Rita Castle had no known contacts or acquaintances in the Allentown-Bethlehem area. The pale blue Ford Mustang parked outside her motel room was registered to her in the state and city of New York. The rest was material I already knew.
While I was still reading these reports, another messenger arrived, this one bringing a manila envelope containing photos of Rita Castle. There were four photos, all eight-by-eleven glossies, each with a mimeographed résumé of her acting credits pasted to the back. One showed her looking soulful in a white gown, with misty lighting and a shadowy background. Another had her looking healthy and girl-next-door, smiling directly at the camera, wearing a bulky sweater, with trees and foliage in the background. The third, with a dead-white background, showed her in a stylish black dress and a strand of pearls, looking perkily over her shoulder, a somewhat arch smile of pixie good humor on her face. The fourth was a composite, four photos spaced around the available area, showing her demonstrating a variety of expressions, all while wearing a man’s white shirt and sitting on a modernistic sofa.
She had been quite a beautiful girl but very much of a type. One connects that kind of good looks with television commercials set in ski lodges. In two of the photos I saw very clearly the “dumb bunny” that Roger Kerrigan had described, but in the other pictures too much brain showed behind the eyes. This had been a smart and clever and capable girl, self-assured and unworried.
Why had such a girl chosen to take off like that in the first place? It seemed very much out of character. I decided I would have to ask the man when I found him.
About four o’clock Rembek called me. “I’ve got the new list,” he said.
“Good.”
“I’ve also got the rundown on the first ten. Three of them are clear, they got alibis there’s no question on. What do we do about the rest now?”
I said, “There’s a chance we can eliminate some more. This medical report here narrows the time down. Any one of those people who can prove he was in town during the half-hour period around one-thirty Thursday morning is in the clear.”
“How come?”
“It takes a minimum of an hour and a half to get to Allentown from here. She was killed between twelve and three. That means, if she was killed at the earliest possible time, midnight, the killer couldn’t have gotten back to the city before one-thirty. And if she was killed at the latest possible time, three o’clock, he couldn’t have left New York any later than one-thirty.”
“Okay, hold on, I’ve got it all written down here.” There was silence a while, and when he came back he said, “Two more down. Five left.”
“Plus the second list. How many on that?”
“Six. I feel like an idiot, Mister Tobin, making a mistake like that. It just goes to show the way the mind works. I’ve already got them being checked out the same way.”
“Good. Now will you set up interviews for me with the five left from the first list?”
“Will do. For today?”
“If possible.”
“It’s possible, Mister Tobin. Whatever you want is possible.”
“Good. Is Roger Kerrigan one of the five left?”
“Right. He had no alibi at all. You don’t think it was him, do you?”
“No. But I won’t need to talk to him tonight.”
“Uh, well, that’s the thing, Mister Tobin. He’ll have to be along with you when you make the interviews. The, uh, the people in charge want to know what’s going on. You know, what questions you’re asking, and like that.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I don’t mind him being around.”
“Fine. I’m glad to hear it.”
I said, “There’s a Canfield on this list, too. Isn’t that the attorney I met at your place?”
“Right. Eustace Canfield. He’s out, definitely out.”
“All right. You say you have all the reports on paper?”
“You want them?”
“Yes. I want to keep all the material in one place, for easy reference.”
“Right. I’ll send it over now. And I’ll let you know about the interviews.”
“Thank you.”
I hung up. Mickey Hansel was standing beside the desk, looking at the pictures of Rita Castle. “You know,” he said, shaking his head, looking at the pictures, “it’s a real shame.”
“Her being killed like that,” I said. “Yes, I guess it is.”
“Oh, yeah, that, too,” he said.
“Why? What did you mean?”
“I meant me,” he said. “What a bum I am.” He shook his head, looking at the pictures. “The best day I lived,” he said, “I couldn’t have had a piece of that. The best day I lived.”
eleven
AT FIVE O’CLOCK I sent Mickey home with the spare office key and instructions to come in at nine in the morning, do whatever filing I might leave for him, take any phone messages that might come in, and wait for further word from me.
Now I was alone, with the day beginning to darken outside the windows behind me, and I felt myself stopping, descending to a halt, as though someone had taken their foot off the accelerator. So long as there was another person around—even Mickey—I could go through the motions with no trouble, but once I was alone the truth inescapably emerged, causing me to slump at the desk like an unused marionette. I had no real interest in what I was doing, no real interest in anything. I spent the time thinking about my wall.
Roge
r Kerrigan showed up at twenty after five, with a briefcase. From it he took the alibi reports and Rita Castle’s note and the new list, and his presence made me active again. I checked the list and saw that Mickey Hansel was there, next to the bottom. Also William Pietrojetti, the accountant. I wrote a note to Mickey to make up folders on these names—“except yourself”—clipped the note to the list, and put it on Mickey’s worktable.
Kerrigan, grinning, said, “You run this like a little business.”
“It is a business,” I said. “What about the interviews?”
“They’re all set up for this evening, forty-five minutes apart. Is that time enough?”
“More than enough.”
“They’ll be at Ernie’s place.”
“That’s no good,” I said. “I want to see each of them at home.”
He frowned. “Does it make a difference?”
“Yes.”
“Let me use your phone, then.”
I got up from the desk and he called Rembek and made the change. While he was on the phone I sat at the work-table and started going over the alibi reports, looking at the eliminations first. They all looked good.
When he hung up, Kerrigan said to me, “Done. And those other six’ll be checked out by tomorrow morning.”
“Good.”
He said, “I’m one of the possibles, right?”
“So far.”
“Then you can interview me while we have dinner. Your first appointment isn’t till seven-thirty.”
“All right. Let me check this stuff first.”
I now looked at the reports on the five who were still suspect, starting with Kerrigan himself, who claimed to have been home alone Wednesday night, watching television, first the Tonight Show and then a Boris Karloff-Bela Lugosi horror movie called The Black Cat. Since the Tonight Show ended at one, he could have left after it and still made Allen-town in time. And since The Black Cat was a movie made in 1935, Kerrigan’s knowledge of its plot did not necessarily mean he had watched it Wednesday night.
Next on the list was a man named Frank Donner, whose occupation was listed as “businessman (vending machines),” who claimed to have spent a quiet evening with his wife and to have gone to bed at eleven-thirty. He and his wife had separate bedrooms, but we wouldn’t have taken her unsupported word for it anyway.
Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death Page 6
