Ed McBain_87th Precinct 48

by Nocturne

  Murder Two was killing almost anybody else.

  Like murder in the first, murder in the second was also an A-1 felony. In accordance with the new law, Lorenzo was looking at the death penalty at worst, or fifteen to life at best, none of which added up to a tea party on the lawn.

  Naturally, he asked for a lawyer.

  He was an illegal alien in the United States of America, but, hey, he knew his rights.

  Lorenzo’s lawyer was a man named Alan Moscowitz.

  He was a tall angular man wearing a brown suit and vest, looking very lawyerly in gold-rimmed spectacles and shiny brown shoes. Carella disliked most defense attorneys, but hope springs eternal so maybe one day he’d meet one who wouldn’t rub him the wrong way.

  Moscowitz didn’t understand Italian at all.

  The melting pot realized.

  They read Lorenzo his rights in Italian, and he said he understood them, and Moscowitz ascertained, through back-and-forth interpretation, that his client understood Miranda and was willing to answer whatever questions the detectives posed. The questions they posed had to do with shooting an eighty-three-year-old woman at close range in cold blood. Lorenzo didn’t much look like a man who’d committed murder, but then again not many murderers did. What he looked like was a slightly bewildered Robert Redford who spoke only basic English like Me Tarzan,You Jane.

  The back-and-forth, in English and Italian and then English again, went this way.

  “Mr. Schiavinato …”

  Very difficult name to pronounce. Skee-ah-vee-nah-toe.

  “Mr. Schiavinato, do you know, or did you ever know, a woman named Svetlana Dyalovich?”

  “No.”

  “How about Svetlana Helder?”

  “No.”

  “Her granddaughter told us … did you know she had a granddaughter?”

  “No.”

  “We’ve been talking to her. She told us several things we’d like to ask you about.”

  “Um.”

  “Mr. Schiavinato, did you deliver to Miss Priscilla Stetson at the Hotel Powell the key to a pay locker at the Rendell Road Bus Terminal?”

  “No.”

  “Delivered it on the morning of January twenty-first, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Miss Stetson says you did.”

  “I don’t know who Miss Stetson is.”

  “She’s Svetlana Dyalovich’s granddaughter.”

  “I don’t know either of them.”

  “Locker number one thirty-six. Do you remember that?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Where’d you get that key?”

  “I don’t know what key you’re talking about.”

  “Did Svetlana Dyalovich give you that key?”

  “Nobody gave me a key.”

  “Did Svetlana Dyalovich ever come to your stall at the Lincoln Street Fish Market to purchase fish for her cat?”

  “No.”

  “Early in the morning, this would have been.”

  “No.”

  “Every morning.”

  “No. I don’t know this woman.”

  “Ever go to her apartment?”

  “How would I? I don’t know her. I don’t know where she lives.”

  “Her neighbor down the hall told the granddaughter you went there to deliver fish one morning.”

  “I don’t know her or her neighbor. Or the granddaughter, either.”

  “Then you never went to 1217 Lincoln Street, apartment 3A, is that right?”

  “Never.”

  “Mr. Schiavinato, I show you this weapon tagged as evidence and ask if you’ve ever seen it before.”

  “Never.”

  “Didn’t you buy this pistol from a man named Jose Santiago …”

  “No.”

  “On the night before …”

  “No.”

  “… Svetlana Dyalovich was murdered?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t you telephone her a few minutes before you bought the gun?”

  “No.”

  “Mr. Schiavinato, we have here a telephone company record showing that a call was made from a wall phone at a club called The Juice Bar at one-fifteen a.m. this past Friday night to a telephone listed to Svetlana Helder at 1217 Lincoln Street …”

  “Cosa?”

  The precinct’s civilian stenographer read back the question. McNalley the interpreter translated it for Lorenzo and his lawyer. Moscowitz nodded that it was okay to answer it.

  “I don’t know who called this woman,” Lorenzo said, “but it wasn’t me.”

  “Weren’t you in The Juice Bar that night at one a.m.?”

  “No. I don’t know this place.”

  “Uptown in Riverhead?”

  “No.”

  “Harris Avenue? Uptown?”

  “No.”

  “Mr. Schiavinato …”

  Such a damn difficult name to pronounce.

  “Mr. Schiavinato, do you know a man named Bernard Himmel?”

  “No.”

  “Bernie Himmel?”

  “No.”

  “Benny Himmel?”

  “No.”

  “Bernie the Banker Himmel?”

  “I don’t know any of these people.”

  “Never placed a bet with him, huh?”

  “Never. Any of them.”

  A good imitation of a Robert Redford smile.

  Hawes wanted to smack him.

  “Ever place a bet with him on the Super Bowl?”

  “What is this Super Bowl?”

  Smack the fucking smile off his face.

  “Steelers against the Cowboys?”

  “I don’t know what any of this means.”

  “Twenty grand on the Steelers?”

  “What is twenty grand?”

  “You lost the bet. Because of the point spread.”

  “What is a point spread?”

  “Twenty grand gone in a wink.”

  “What is a wink?”

  “He sounds like Jeopardy!,” Carella said.

  “Please, Detective,” Moscowitz warned, raising an eyebrow.

  “Sorry, Counselor,” Carella said, and raised his own eyebrow. “Mr. Schiavinato, didn’t you lose twenty thousand dollars on the Steelers-Cowboys game?”

  “I never had twenty thousand dollars in my entire life.”

  “You had it when you paid your marker, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know what a marker is.”

  “A promise to pay money you owed.”

  “I don’t owe anybody money. I have an honest job. I do honest work.”

  “You owed Bernie Himmel the twenty thousand dollars you lost on the Super Bowl, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “You went to see him on Friday night …”

  “No.”

  “… and he told you he’d kill you if you didn’t pay the money by Sunday morning.”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Bernie Himmel. Your bookie. Bernie the Banker. You’re a gambler, aren’t you, Lorenzo?”

  “Sometimes I bet on horse races. At the OTB. But I don’t know this man you’re talking about.”

  “Then you don’t remember him telling you to get the money or you’d be swimming with your little fishies?”

  “I don’t know him. How could he tell me this?”

  “After which you went directly to the wall telephone …”

  “No.”

  “… and called Svetlana Dyalovich. Why, Lorenzo? Did you want to make sure she’d be out of the apartment when you went there to burglarize it?”

  “Cosa?” he said again.

  The stenographer repeated the question. McNalley translated it. Moscowitz cleared his throat.

  “Detective,” he said, “my client has told you repeatedly that he did not know Svetlana Dyalovich, did not know her granddaughter, and never went to her apartment on Lincoln Street. Nor does he know a bookmaker named Bernie Himmel or a gun dealer named Jos
e Santiago. Now, if …”

  “He’s not a gun dealer.”

  “Excuse me, I thought he’s supposed to have sold my client a gun.”

  “He did sell him a gun. But he’s not a dealer. He pumps gas at a Texaco station.”

  “Whatever he does, my client doesn’t know him.”

  Carella figured he kept calling him “my client” only because he couldn’t pronounce his last name.

  “So unless you have something new to …”

  “How about a clear chain on the gun, Counselor?”

  “You!” Moscowitz shouted, and pointed his finger at the stenographer. “Hold it right there.” He turned to Carella. “Is this off the record?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  The stenographer waited. Carella nodded.

  “Then let me hear it,” Moscowitz said.

  “We’ve traced the gun from its registered owner …”

  “Named?”

  “Rodney Pratt.”

  “To?”

  “Jose Santiago, who stole it from the glove compartment of Pratt’s car …”

  “He’s admitted this?”

  “He has.”

  “And from there … ?”

  “To Mr. Schiavinato here, who bought it from him for two hundred and fifty dollars.”

  “Well, this is where it begins to get speculative, Detective. But let’s assume for the moment, arguendo, that my client did buy a gun from this man. How does that make it the murder weapon?”

  “The bullets that killed Mrs. Helder and her cat were fired from it. We found them embedded in the door behind her body and the baseboard behind the cat. We recovered the gun itself in a sewer outside her building. The only thing we don’t have is Mr. Schiavinato’s fingerprints on the gun, and frankly …”

  “Well, that’s a very big negative, Detective. Anyone could have fired the gun.”

  “Perhaps your client …” Byrnes said.

  He couldn’t pronounce the name, either.

  “… can explain why he telephoned the victim minutes before he bought the gun that killed her.”

  “Why exactly did he call her, Lieutenant?”

  The weak spot.

  Byrnes knew it, Carella knew it, Hawes knew it, and now Moscowitz had zeroed in on it: Why had Lorenzo called Svetlana before buying the gun he later used to kill her?

  “We think he was planning to burglarize her apartment,” Carella said. “He called to find out when it would be safe. When she’d be home.”

  It still sounded weak.

  “Are you saying he called to ask her when she’d be home? So he could run right over to burglarize …”

  “Well, no, he didn’t ask her flat out.”

  “Then how did he ask her?”

  “I don’t know the actual conversation that took place.”

  “But you think he was trying to determine when she’d be out of the apartment …”

  “Yes.”

  “So he’d know when it would be safe to go in and burglarize it.”

  “Exactly.”

  “In Italian?”

  “What?”

  “This conversation. Was it in Italian?”

  “Yes, it was. According to a witness.”

  “Because he doesn’t speak English, you see.”

  “I suspect he speaks some English.”

  “Oh. And why is that?”

  “He sells fish to English-speaking people, I’m sure he must speak at least a little English.”

  “We’ll have to ask him, won’t we?” Moscowitz said, and smiled sweetly. “In Italian.”

  Hawes wanted to smack him, too.

  “How long was this phone conversation, do you know?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “The phone company would know, I suppose.”

  “Yes, but …”

  “Should we contact them?”

  “Why?”

  “Find out how long it took my Italian-speaking client to learn when his prospective victim would be out of the apartment so he could burglarize it.”

  He’s trying his case right here in the interrogation room, Carella thought. And winning it.

  “By the way, were there any signs of burglary at the scene?” Moscowitz asked.

  “The window was open.”

  “Oh? This means a burglary was committed?”

  “No, but Mr. Schiavinato must have know there was money in the apartment …”

  “Oh? How would he have known that?”

  “He knew the woman. Talked to her every morning at the market. Even made a delivery to the apartment when she was sick one morning. She was a lonely old lady. She confided in him. And he took advantage of her trust.”

  “I see. By shooting her and killing her, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “He was surprised during the commission of …”

  “But I thought he called her to find out when she’d be out.”

  “Yes, but …”

  “If he knew when she’d be out, how come he was surprised?”

  “People come home unexpectedly all the time.”

  “So he shot her. Was this after he found this money he supposedly knew was in the apartment?”

  “It had to’ve been. He paid off his bookie the very next day.”

  “Gave him twenty thousand dollars the next day, is that right?”

  “Yes. Himmel told us …”

  “A bookie,” Moscowitz said, dismissing him with an airy wave of his hand.

  “He had no reason to lie.”

  “Oh? When did bookmaking become legal?”

  “We offered no deals.”

  “How about offering me one?”

  “Like what?”

  “We all go home. My client included.”

  “Your client is a murderer.”

  “Who stole twenty thousand dollars from an old lady, right?”

  “Maybe more.”

  “Oh? How much more?”

  “She withdrew a hundred and twenty-five from her bank the morning before she was killed.”

  Moscowitz looked at him.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “Are you now saying he stole a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars from her?”

  “I’m saying the money is gone. I’m saying twenty thousand of it was turned over to a bookie the following morning. I’m saying it’s highly likely, yes.”

  “Stole all that money and then shot her, is that it?”

  “Yes, that’s it. That’s what it looks like to us.”

  “Detective, I’ll tell you what. This is so preposterous that I’m going to ask that you stop the questioning of my client right this …”

  “It’s Schiavinato,” Carella said. “Skee-ah-vee-nah-toe.”

  “Thank you. All we’re doing here is going over the same tired ground over and over again. You’re wasting everyone’s time here, and I think you know a grand jury will kick this right out the window in ten seconds flat.”

  “I think not.”

  “We think not,” Byrnes amended.

  “Either way, let’s quit. Right now.”

  “Sure,” Carella said. “In fact, I have a suggestion.”

  “And what’s that, Detective?”

  “Let’s hold a little lineup.”

  Moscowitz looked at him.

  “Let’s drag Himmel and Santiago out of bed, and let’s go wake up the man who saw your client kneeling over the sewer where we recovered the gun.”

  Moscowitz was silent for what seemed a very long time. Then he said, “What man? You don’t have such a witness.”

  “Wanna bet, Counselor?”

  “What I don’t understand,” Priscilla said, “is what happened to the other hundred and twenty.”

  “Me, too,” Georgie said.

  They were sitting in Lieutenant Byrnes’s office, Priscilla in the comfortable black leather wingback chair behind the lieutenant’s desk, the men on straight-backed wooden chairs across
the room, near the bookcases. Outside the lieutenant’s office was the squadroom proper. They could hear telephones ringing out there. Outside the grilled corner windows, there was the steady sound of traffic on Grover Avenue and the intersecting side street. Beyond the slatted wooden railing that divided the squadroom from the corridor outside, in a little room with the words interrogation lettered on its frosted-glass upper panel, Lorenzo Schiavinato was still being questioned. The little digital clock on the lieutenant’s desk, alongside a picture of a woman Priscilla presumed to be his wife, read 10:32 a.m. The day was beginning to cloud over. It looked as if it might snow again.

  “He said she’d withdrawn a hundred and twenty-five from the bank, didn’t he?”

  “The cop, yeah,” Tony said.

  “Told us a hundred and twenty-five, didn’t he?”

  “Carella, yeah.”

  “So how come there was only five in the envelope?” Priscilla asked.

  “Which isn’t exactly horseradish,” Georgie reminded her yet another time.

  He desperately wanted her to believe that the five was what the old lady had in mind when she said her granddaughter would be taken care of. He wanted her to get off that missing hundred and twenty. He knew where ninety-five of that was. It was in an envelope inside a shoebox on the top shelf of his bedroom closet, tucked into one of a pair of black patent-leather slippers he wore with his tuxedo on special occasions like New Year’s Eve.

  “What happened to the other hundred and twenty?” Priscilla asked again.

  Georgie was still doing arithmetic.

  Old lady took a hundred and twenty-five from the bank. But there was only a hundred in the locker. So where’d the other twenty-five go?

  Lorenzo was weeping into his hands.

  This was because he was Italian. It was also because his lawyer had advised him to tell him everything he knew about this old lady’s death before the cops called in a lot of people who’d begin pointing fingers at him. Moscowitz listened without benefit of an interpreter as Lorenzo broke his tale in broken English.

  It was a sad story.

  After he heard it, Moscowitz told the detectives he had no doubt the crime had been committed, but there were unique and sympathetic circumstances surrounding it. In view of these unusual conditions, he had advised his client to tell his story in the presence of a district attorney, and was therefore requesting one now.