Ed McBain_87th Precinct 48

by Nocturne

  “I think there was one,” Hawes said.

  “Bull’s-Eyes?”

  “No, no …”

  “You’re thinking of One-Eyed Jacks.”

  “No, Two to the Heart, something like that.”

  “Two for the Road, you’re thinking of,” Blaney said.

  “No, that was a song,” Hawes said.

  “That was ‘One for the Road.’ ”

  “This was a movie. Two from the Heart, maybe.”

  “Cause Two for the Road was very definitely a movie.”

  Carella was looking at them both.

  “This had the word ‘heart’ in the title,” Hawes said.

  Carella was still looking at them. Everywhere around them were bodies or body parts on tables and countertops. Everywhere around them was the stink of death.

  “Heart, heart,” Blaney said, thinking out loud. “Heart of Darkness? Because that became a movie, but it was called Apocalypse Now.”

  “No, but I think you’re close.”

  “Is it Coppola?”

  “Carella,” Carella said, wondering why Blaney, whom he’d known for at least a quarter of a century, was getting his name wrong.

  “Something Coppola directed?” Blaney asked, ignoring him.

  “I don’t know,” Hawes said. “Who’s Coppola?”

  “He directed the Godfather movies.”

  Which reminded Carella of the two hoods in the hotel bar. Which further reminded him of Svetlana’s granddaughter. Which brought him full circle to why they were here.

  “The autopsy,” he reminded Blaney.

  “Two to the heart,” Blaney said. “Both of them in a space the size of a half-dollar. Which didn’t take much of a marksman because the killer was standing quite close.”

  “How close?”

  “I’d say no more than three, four feet. All the guy did was point and fire. Period.”

  “Was she drunk?” Carella asked.

  “No. Percentage of alcohol in the brain was point-oh-two, well within the normal range. Urine and blood percentages were similarly normal.”

  “Can you give us a PMI?”

  “Around eleven, eleven-thirty last night. Ballpark.”

  No postmortem interval was entirely accurate. They all knew that. But Blaney’s educated guess coincided with the time the man down the hall had heard shots.

  “Anything else we should know?” Hawes asked.

  “Examination of the skull revealed a schwannoma arising from the vestibular nerve, near the porus acusticus, extending into both the internal auditory meatus …”

  “In English, please,” Carella said.

  “An acoustic neuroma …”

  “Come on, Paul.”

  “In short, a tumor on the auditory nerve. Quite large and cystic, probably causing hearing loss, headache, vertigo, disturbed sense of balance, unsteadiness of gait, and tinnitus.”

  “Tinnitus?”

  “Ringing of the ears.”

  “Oh.”

  “Liquid chromotography of the coagulated blood disclosed a drug called diclofenac, in concentrations indicating therapeutic doses. But the loose correlation between dosage and concentration is a semi-quantitative process at best. All I can say for certain is that she was taking the drug, not why she was taking it.”

  “Why do you think she was taking it?”

  “Well, we don’t normally examine joints in a post, and I haven’t here. But a superficial look at her fingers suggests what I’m sure a vertebral slice would reveal.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Lipping on the anterior visible portion.”

  “What’s lipping?”

  “Knobby, bumpy, small excrescenses of bone. In short, smooth, asymmetric swellings on the body of the vertebrae.”

  “Indicating what?”

  “Arthritis?”

  “Are you asking?”

  “Do you know whether or not she was arthritic?”

  “She was.”

  “Well, there,” Blaney said.

  Hawes was still trying to remember the title of that movie. He asked Sam Grossman if he remembered seeing it.

  “I don’t go to movies,” Grossman said.

  He was wearing a white lab coat, and standing before a counter covered with test tubes, graduated cylinders, beakers, spatulas, pipettes and flasks, all of which gave his work space an air of scientific inquiry that seemed in direct contrast to Grossman himself. A tall, angular man with blue eyes behind dark-framed glasses, he looked more like a New England farmer worried about drought than he did the precise police captain who headed up the lab.

  Some ranking E-flat piano player in the department had undoubtedly decided that the death of a once-famous concert pianist rated special treatment, hence the dispatch with which Svetlana’s body and personal effects had been sent respectively to the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office and the lab. The mink coat, the cotton housedress, the pink sweater, the cotton panty hose, and the bedroom slippers were all on Grossman’s countertop, dutifully tagged and bagged. At another table, one of Grossman’s assistants sat with her head bent over a microscope. Hawes looked her over. A librarian type, he decided, which he sometimes found exciting.

  “Why do you ask?” Grossman said.

  “Cause of death was two to the heart,” Carella said.

  “Plenty of blood to support that,” Grossman said, nodding. “All of it hers, by the way. Nobody else bled all over the sweater and dress. The dress is a cheap cotton schmatte you can pick up at any Woolworth’s. The house slippers are imitation leather, probably got those in a dime store, too. But the sweater has a designer label in it. And so does the mink. Old, but once worth something.”

  Which could have been said of the victim, too, Carella thought.

  “Anything else?”

  “I just got all this stuff,” Grossman said.

  “Then when?”

  “Later.”

  “When later?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Sooner.”

  “A magician I’m not,” Grossman said.

  They went back to the apartment again.

  The yellow crime scene tapes were still up. A uniformed cop stood on the stoop downstairs, his hands behind his back, peering out at the deserted street. It was bitterly cold. He was wearing earmuffs and a heavy-duty overcoat, but he still looked frozen to death. They identified themselves and went upstairs. Another of the blues was on duty outside the door to apartment 3A. A cardboard crime scene card was taped to the door behind him. The door was padlocked. He produced a key when they identified themselves.

  Hidden under a pile of neatly pressed and folded, lace-trimmed silk underwear at the back of the bottom drawer in her dresser, they found another candy tin.

  There was a savings account passbook in it.

  The book showed a withdrawal yesterday of an even one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, leaving a balance of sixteen dollars and twelve cents. The withdrawal slip was inserted in the passbook at the page that recorded the transaction. The date and time on the slip were January 20, 10:27 a.m.

  This would have been half an hour before Svetlana Dyalovich went downstairs to buy a fifth of Four Roses.

  According to Blaney and the man down the hall, she was killed some twelve hours later.

  The man in apartment 3D did not enjoy being awakened at ten minutes to three in the morning. He was wearing only pajamas when he grumblingly unlocked the door for them, but he quickly put on a woolen robe, and, still grumbling, led the detectives into the apartment’s small kitchen. A tiny window over the sink was rimed with frost. Outside, they could hear the wind howling. They kept on their coats and gloves.

  The man, whose name was Gregory Turner, went to the stove, opened the oven door, and lighted the gas jets. He left the door open. In a few moments, they could feel heat beginning to seep into the kitchen. Turner put up a pot of coffee. A short while later, while he was pouring for them, they took off the coats and glo
ves.

  He was sixty-nine years old, he told them, a creature of impeccable habit, set in his ways. Got up to pee every night at three-thirty. They’d got him out of bed forty minutes early, he didn’t like this break in his routine. Hoped he could fall back asleep again after they were done with him here and he had his nocturnal pee. For all his grumbling, though, he seemed cooperative, even hospitable. Like buddies about to go on an early morning fishing trip, the three men sat around the oilcloth-covered kitchen table sipping coffee. Their hands were warm around the steaming cups. Heat poured from the oven. Springtime didn’t seem all that far away.

  “I hated those records she played day and night,” he told them. “Sounded like somebody practicing. All classical music sounds that way to me. How can anyone make any sense of it? I like swing, do you know what swing is? Before your time, swing. I’m sixty-nine years old, did I tell you that? Get up to pee regular every night at three-thirty in the morning, go back to sleep again till eight, get up, have my breakfast, go for a long walk. Jenny used to go with me before she died last year. My wife. Jenny. We’d walk together in the park, rain or shine. Settled a lot of our problems on those walks. Talked them out. Well, I don’t have any problems now she’s gone. But I miss her like the devil.”

  He sighed heavily, freshened the coffee in his cup.

  “More?” he asked.

  “Thank you, no,” Carella said.

  “Just a drop,” Hawes said.

  “Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, that was swing. Harry James, the Dorsey Brothers, wonderful stuff back then. You had a new song come out, maybe six, seven bands covered it. Best record usually was the one made the charts. ‘Blues in the Night’ came out, there must’ve been a dozen different big-band versions of it. Well, that was some song. Johnny Mercer wrote that song. You ever hear of Johnny Mercer?”

  Both detectives shook their heads.

  “He wrote that song,” Turner said. “Woody Herman had the best record of that song. That was some song.” He began singing it. His voice, thin and frail, filled the stillness of the night with the sound of train whistles echoing down the track. He stopped abruptly. There were tears in his eyes. They both wondered if he’d been singing it to Jenny. Or for Jenny.

  “People come and go, you hardly get a chance to say hello to them, no less really know them,” he said. “Woman who got killed tonight, I don’t think I even knew her name till the super told me later on. All I knew was she irritated me playing those damn old records of hers. Then I hear three shots and first thing I wonder is did the old lady shoot herself? She seemed very sad,” he said, “glimpses I got of her on the stairs. Very sad. All bent and twisted and bleary-eyed, a very sad old lady. I ran out in the hall …”

  “When was this?”

  “Right after I heard the shots.”

  “Do you remember what time that was?”

  “Around a quarter past eleven.”

  “Did you see anyone in the hall?”

  “No.”

  “Or coming out of her apartment?”

  “No.”

  “Was the door to the apartment open or closed?”

  “Closed.”

  “What’d you do, Mr. Turner?”

  “I went right downstairs and knocked on the super’s door.”

  “You didn’t call the police?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t trust the police.”

  “What then?”

  “I stayed in the street, watched the show. Cops coming, ambulances coming. Detectives like you. A regular show. I wasn’t the only one.”

  “Watching, do you mean?”

  “Watching, yes. Is it getting too hot in here for you?”

  “A little.”

  “If I turn this off, though, we’ll be freezing again in five minutes. What do you think I should do?”

  “Well, whatever you like, sir,” Hawes said.

  “Jenny liked it warm,” Turner said. He nodded. He was silent for several moments, staring at his hands folded on the kitchen table. His hands looked big and dark and somehow useless against the glare of the white oilcloth.

  “Who else was there?” Carella asked. “Watching the show?”

  “Oh, people I recognized from the building mostly. Some of them leaning out their windows, others coming downstairs to see things firsthand.”

  “Anyone you didn’t recognize?”

  “Oh, sure, all those cops.”

  “Aside from the cops or the ambulance peop—”

  “Lots of others, sure. You know this city. Anything happens, a big crowd gathers.”

  “Did anyone you didn’t recognize come out of the building? Aside from cops or …”

  “See what you mean, yeah. Just let me think a minute.”

  The gas jets hissed into the stillness of the apartment. Somewhere in the building, a toilet flushed. Outside on the street, a siren doo-wah, doo-wahed to the night. Then all was still again.

  “A tall blond man,” Turner said.

  As he tells it, he first sees the man when he comes out of the alleyway alongside the building. Comes out and stands there with the crowd behind the police lines, hands in his pockets. He’s wearing a blue overcoat and a red muffler. Hands in the pockets of the coat. Black shoes. Blond hair blowing in the wind.

  “Beard? Mustache?”

  “Clean-shaven.”

  “Anything else you remember about him?”

  He just stands there like all the other people, behind the barricades the police have set up, watching all the activity, more cops arriving, plainclothes cops, they must be, uniformed cops, too, with brass on their hats and collars, the man just stands there watching, like interested. Then the ambulance people carry her out of the building on a stretcher, and they put her inside the ambulance and it drives off.

  “That’s when he went off, too,” Turner said.

  “You watched him leave?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “There was a … a sort of sad look on his face, I don’t know. As if … I don’t know.”

  “Where’d he go?” Hawes asked. “Which direction?”

  “Headed south. Toward the corner. Stopped near the sewer up the street …”

  Both detectives were suddenly all ears.

  “Bent down to tie his shoelace or something, went on his way again.”

  Which is how they found the murder weapon.

  3

  The gun they’d fished out of the sewer was registered to a man named Rodney Pratt, who—on his application for the pistol permit—had given his occupation as “security escort” and had stated that he needed to carry a gun because his business was “providing protection of privacy, property, and physical well-being to individuals requiring personalized service.” They figured this was the politically correct way of saying he was a private bodyguard.

  In the United States of America, no one is obliged to reveal his race, color, or creed on any application form. They had no way of knowing Rodney Pratt was black until he opened the door for them at five minutes past three that morning, and glowered out at them in undershirt and boxer shorts. To them, his color was merely an accident of nature. What mattered was that Ballistics had already identified the gun registered to him as the weapon that had fired three fatal bullets earlier tonight.

  “Mr. Pratt?” Hawes asked cautiously.

  “Yeah, what?” Pratt asked.

  He did not have to say This is three o’fucking clock in the morning, why the fuck are you knocking my door down? His posture said that, his angry frown said that, his blazing eyes said that.

  “May we come in, sir?” Hawes asked. “Few questions we’d like to ask you.”

  “What kind of questions?” Pratt asked.

  The “sir” had done nothing to mollify him. Here were two honkie cops shaking him out of bed in the middle of the night, and he wasn’t buying any sirs, thank you. He stood barring the door in his tank top undershirt and stripe
d boxer shorts, as muscular as any prizefighter at a weigh-in. Hawes now saw that the tattoo on his bulging right biceps read Semper Fidelis. An ex-Marine, no less. Probably a sergeant. Probably had seen combat in this or that war the United States seemed incessantly waging. Probably drank the blood of enemy soldiers. Three o’clock in the morning. Hawes bit the bullet.

  “Questions about a .38 Smith & Wesson registered to you, sir.”

  “What about it?”

  “It was used in a murder earlier tonight, sir. May we come in?”

  “Come in,” Pratt said, and stepped out of the door frame, back into the apartment.

  Pratt lived in a building on North Carlton Street, at the intersection of St. Helen’s Boulevard, across the way from Mount Davis Park. The neighborhood was mixed—black, white, Hispanic, some Asians—the rents price-fixed. These old prewar apartments boasted high ceilings, tall windows and parquet floors. In many of them, the kitchens and bathrooms were hopelessly outdated. But as they followed Pratt toward a lighted living room beyond, they saw at a glance that his kitchen was modern and sleek, and an open-door glimpse of a hall bathroom revealed marble and polished brass. The living room was furnished in teakwood and nubby fabrics, throw pillows everywhere, chrome-framed prints on the white walls. An upright piano stood against the wall at the far end of the room, flanked by windows that overlooked the park.

  “Have a seat,” Pratt said, and left the room. Hawes glanced at Carella. Carella merely shrugged. He was standing by the windows, looking down at the park four stories below. At this hour of the night, it appeared ghostly, its lampposts casting eerie illumination on empty winding paths.

  Pratt was back in a moment, wearing a blue robe over his underwear. The robe looked like cashmere. It conspired with the look of the apartment to create a distinct impression that the “security escort” business paid very well indeed these days. Hawes wondered if he should ask for a job recommendation. Instead, he said, “About the gun, Mr. Pratt.”

  “It was stolen last week,” Pratt said.

  They had seen it all and heard it all, of course, and they had probably heard this one ten thousand, four hundred and thirteen times. The first thing any criminal learns is that it is not his gun, his dope, his car, his burglar’s tools, his knife, his mask, his gloves, his bloodstains, his semen stains, his anything. And if it is his, then it was either lost or stolen.