“You know Lenore Pickart?”
“The old woman who lives in that house on Stanhope Street? Sure.”
At least, he knew the house—everyone knew the house. Spolino couldn’t be sure if he’d actually seen Lenore Pickart in thirty years.
“Charlie rented a couple of rooms from Lenore. If anybody on earth knows what happened to Charlie, it’d be Lenore. Go talk to her, Tom. She wouldn’t bite a policeman, and she’ll be glad for the company.”
The little bell over the door tinkled again and a relentlessly stylish woman of about thirty came in, dragging an unhappy-looking little boy who was dressed like a five-year-old fashion model. Gus put on his New Customer smile.
“Thanks, Mr. Phelan—I’ll do that.”
He was about halfway to the door when he heard his name. He turned around and just caught a small object that came flying through the air at him.
“You forgot your licorice,” Gus Phelan called after him, grinning like a man who has the whole world under his protection.
. . . . .
“Was he a local boy?”
“No. He was a slicker.”
And when somebody of Gus Phelan’s generation called anybody a ‘slicker,’ it only meant one thing. Detective Lieutenant Spolino decided it was time to call in one or two favors still due from his time at Manhattan South.
“There’s a message from Stamford on your desk,” the department secretary said as he used his card key to get past her little sentry cage and into the working part of the station.
“Fine. I’ll get to it.”
He knew what that was about—he had seen the morning paper before leaving the house—but he wasn’t ready to deal with it yet.
Instead, he called the home number of Captain Harry Gideon, N.Y.P.D. The phone rang twice before the captain’s wife answered.
“He’s asleep, Tom. You know he’s been posted to night duty.”
“Then wake him up, Juanita. I need a favor, and it won’t keep.”
He heard a click as the receiver was set down on some hard surface, and he settled back to wait. He wasn’t at all embarrassed to be dragging Harry Gideon out of bed, because Harry Gideon owed him.
“Yeah, what is it, you bastard?” He really had been asleep, and probably for a couple of hours. You could hear it in the disused quality of his voice.
That made Tom very happy.
“I want you to track down a very old file for me, Harry. I want everything the city has got on a prehistoric hood by the name of Charlie Brush.”
“Char-lie Brush.” Gideon repeated the name as, apparently, he wrote it down. “How vintage?”
“Late Twenties to early Thirties.”
“Jesus, Tom! You drag me from my bed for a fucking anthropology lesson? What is this?”
“I want the book on this guy, Harry. And I want it on my desk by lunch. Just remember I’m the joker who risked his badge to get you out from under.”
“Yeah. I remember.”
The line went dead, but Harry Gideon would come through. When they had both been younger men, even before Juanita had come along, Harry Gideon had fallen in love with a very expensive hooker and had run up such a tab trying to persuade her to abandon a life of sin and become the wife of an honest cop that he was up to his eyebrows to a loan shark named Mario Tovis. He couldn’t pay and was having to do some highly inappropriate favors to keep Tovis from foreclosing on his kneecaps.
When Tom Spolino found out he wasn’t very happy. He listened to the excuses but not with a lot of sympathy, because he didn’t think there really were any excuses. Gideon was well on his way to ending up a bad cop, and Spolino hated a bad cop.
But when your partner was in trouble you were supposed to do something. You didn’t have to love the guy—if he was your partner you didn’t just stand back and let him go down the drain. So one night Tom Spolino broke into the loan shark’s office and found a second set of books hidden behind the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. He photographed the books, which proved beyond any doubt that Tovis was skimming maybe two or three thousand a week from his operation, and the next day he went back to the office during business hours to let Tovis know what he had done. He told him that if his partner wasn’t squared off, and out of Tovis’ own pocket, then the photographs of that second set of books would find their way into the hands of the Gallo Family. Tovis worked for Vito Gallo, who was notoriously hard on chiselers, and so he knew what he could expect. That afternoon, by special messenger, Harry Gideon received his IOUs back.
By then the hooker had already dropped him, so he returned, wounded but walking, to the paths of virtue. Two years later he married Juanita. Tom Spolino, who in the meantime had quit the N.Y.P.D. and gone back to Greenley, came down to be best man at his wedding. And now he was a captain, for Christ’s sake.
So if Harry Gideon had to lose a few hours of sleep to find chapter and verse on an old villain named Charlie Brush, Tom wasn’t going to mind a bit.
“I’ll be at this address,” Tom said, slapping a piece of paper down on the department secretary’s desk. “Don’t bother trying to phone—the old girl doesn’t have one.”
. . . . .
The Pickart house was wedged between two apartment buildings about three blocks away from Town Hall. Although the land was worth a fortune, the house itself was a peeling Victorian monstrosity that was Lenore’s only inheritance from her alcoholic husband, who had fallen off the Greenley pier and drowned in the Autumn of 1929, just two weeks before the stock market crash would have wiped him out anyway. Lenore had survived ever since by renting rooms—and sometimes, according to local rumor, at least in the days when she still enjoyed the charms of comparative youth, by renting out herself at well. Well, the boarders and the lovers had both long since fled, but Lenore, who probably should have been in a nursing home, her arthritis was that bad, stubbornly hung on, living on Social Security and Meals on Wheels. Hardly anyone ever saw her anymore, and she hadn’t paid a dollar in property tax for twenty years, in spite of the fact that the appraisals were kept ridiculously low, but there was a tacit understanding that the town would foreclose only after she was dead. You don’t foreclose on a local legend.
The screen door was shut, but the door behind it, which was solid oak and probably weighed a hundred pounds, was standing open three or four inches. Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino knocked a couple of times and then stepped into the foyer.
“Mrs. Pickart? Is anyone home?”
“I’m in here, dearie, and you needn’t shout the house down.”
He walked across a creaking parquet floor into a sitting room full of dusty, decrepit looking furniture and was nearly run over by Lenore’s wheelchair.
“Take a pew, dearie. Who the hell are you anyway?”
He sat down on a chair that groaned under his weight like a fat man with the gout and found himself face to face with a sharp-featured old woman in a long-sleeved lavender dress that was quite becoming in an old fashioned way but displayed all the symptoms of careful preservation. Lenore Pickart’s iron gray hair looked almost polished. She must once have been an attractive woman—and probably a pretty formidable one, for the obvious attention she lavished on her appearance, when probably she saw only a few people in a week, showed considerable force of character.
Her eyes, by contrast, were blue and astonishingly vulnerable. They looked almost out of place in that withered face.
“Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino, Ma’am.” He held up his badge for her, but she only glanced at it, as if the sight of it annoyed her. “There’s no trouble. I just wondered if you’d mind if I asked you a few questions about things that happened a long time ago. I’ve been led to understand you might be able to help us in our inquiries.”
At first her only answer was a little scornful sound from deep in her throat, and then she smiled. It was a wicked, almost a seductive smile.
“That was a long speech, dearie, but you needn’t have worried. When you get to be my age n
ot even the cops scare you.”
“Then I wonder what you can tell me about Charlie Brush.”
“Hah! Is that what this is about, bad old Charlie Brush?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
The idea seemed to please her. The smile softened and the eyes, focused on nothing at all, took on a dreamy quality. For a moment, Spolino realized, he wasn’t there for her—he wasn’t in the room at all.
So apparently there was still someone on this earth who harbored good memories of Charlie Brush.
“So what do you want to know?” she asked. She looked eager, as though she couldn’t wait another minute to hear herself speak his name.
“Everything.”
“Everything?” She shook her head and frowned. “Everything is too much. Nobody knew everything about Charlie. I knew more than most people, and that was precious little. I’ll tell you this, though—he was the best man I ever had in my bed.”
Lenore Pickart, who was probably in her middle eighties, broke out in a peal of raucous, lascivious laughter.
“Have I shocked you, dearie? Oh, I am sorry!” And she laughed again, though reining it in a little. “But at my age a lady’s morals are of purely antiquarian interest.”
“You were his mistress then?”
“Me and half the other women in this town, if it makes any difference. I was his main lady, but Charlie wasn’t particular and I’m not the possessive type. I had as much of him as I wanted—almost as much.”
She smiled and shook her head. For a moment it seemed as if there might be tears in her eyes, but that passed quickly. Charlie, it seemed, was a pleasant memory but not a deep grief.
“Do you know what happened to him?”
“Do I know what happened to him?” she repeated, apparently unable to believe her ears. “Of course I know what happened to him. Somebody killed him—not that he probably didn’t deserve it.”
“Can you be sure of that?”
“I’m sure.”
The blue eyes narrowed, no longer looking at all vulnerable. Spolino had the sense that she was guarding something—perhaps not a secret, perhaps only her lost lover’s peculiar brand of honor.
“I’ll tell you what happened,” she went on. “Charlie walked out of this house on the evening of June the 27th, 1941. It was a Friday, and I’d served pot roast for dinner. Charlie liked pot roast. He got up from my table, put on his jacket, and went out that door. He got into that big red Lincoln of his, and I never saw him again.”
“That doesn’t mean he died,” Spolino put in, feeding her the line he knew she wanted.
“Yes it does, Mr. Policeman. And you know how I know? Because he owed me a week’s rent, and Charlie, mean, black-hearted son-of-a-bitch that he was, would never have stiffed me for a week’s rent. That’s how I know they killed him, because Charlie always settled up—with friends or enemies, he always evened the score.”
“Do you know who killed him?”
Lenore Pickart, who, after her fashion, had probably loved her black-hearted Charlie, moved her head in a little gesture of dismissal.
“Haven’t a clue. Does it matter?”
Yes, it did matter. But Tom Spolino imagined he might have a better idea than old Mrs. Pickart.
“Did he leave anything behind?”
“Everything—but don’t get your hopes up. He left his clothes and his shaving stuff, and not another thing. The cops could have walked into his room any hour of the day or night, the whole four years he was here, and they wouldn’t have found anything they could use. He traveled light, and nobody knew his secrets. He was that kind.”
“What did you do with it all?”
“I gave it away.” And this time there were tears in her eyes. “I waited until I was sure he was never coming back, and then I gave it all away. I kept his suits, though—I couldn’t bear . . .”
He waited until she had regained control, and then he asked.
“Can I have a look?”
He wasn’t sure why it was suddenly important, but he wanted something to bring Charlie Brush tangibly to life for him. The suits would do.
“Help yourself,” Lenore answered, as if the request was a surprise but nothing more. “They’re in a box down in the basement. You’ll have to go down there by yourself—I haven’t been able to make those stairs in fifteen years. On the chest of drawers. It’s marked.”
Spolino found it easily enough. While Lenore Pickart waited in her wheel chair at the top of the cement stairway, he dug through a collection of stiff cardboard boxes that were covered with years of dust. One of them had a white card taped to it, marked “Charlie”.
He put it down on the floor and slid the cover off. One, two, three, four suits, all brown.
“Did you find it? Is it still there?” Lenore called down anxiously.
Spolino was about to answer when he heard something crackle as he passed his hand over the lapel of the first suitcoat. There was an envelope in the inside breast pocket. Inside he found a single small sheet of paper, folded in half.
There was just one line of writing, in the peculiar block letters of a semi-literate.
“Tommy the baker’s boy, watch your ass.”
Chapter 19
Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino walked up the stairs from Mrs. Pickart’s basement and managed to bid the old lady a very polite good morning. He left the house with no appearance of haste and walked the six blocks back to police headquarters without breaking into a run. It was, perhaps, the most sustained exercise of self control he would ever achieve.
Because he was scared green. He hadn’t been this scared when, as a rookie cop in the East Village, he had gone out on a twelfth story window ledge to talk in a woman who was out of her mind on LSD and was threatening to jump into the traffic with her baby daughter in her arms. The women had gone over, but Spolino had managed to get the little girl away from her—he had carried the child back inside and then had stuck his head in a wastepaper basket and thrown up.
This time there wasn’t any open window, no beckoning promise of safety. There was just him and the angry spirit of Charlie Brush.
Spolino did not believe in ghosts. The world was bad enough as it was, and that kind of nonsense was for kids on Halloween. But he did not know what human agency could have put that note into the inside pocket of Charlie Brush’s suitcoat. Those boxes, he was quite sure, had not been touched in years.
He considered briefly the possibility that it all might be some elaborate practical joke, but that just didn’t wash. Had Gus Phelan set him up? No. Until that morning he hadn’t even known himself that he was going to ask about Charlie Brush, and it was easier to believe in ghosts than in some huge conspiracy involving both his own department and the local grocer—one was impossible, but the other was patently ridiculous.
But someone had left him that message. Tommy the baker’s son—who was that if not him?
When he got back to his desk he discovered that the faxes from New York were just beginning to come in, so Harry Gideon had come through for him after all. There was also a note to call Amy in research.
“We found your hood, Tom,” she said, with a little thrill of professional pride in her voice that even the telephone lines couldn’t disguise. “The problem was, when we went over to the computer we started entering the old cases in reverse order—more recent stuff first—and the project sort of bogged down around 1952. We’re not just made of time down here, you know.”
“I know. So what have you got?”
“I’ll send it up. It makes gaudy reading.”
So did the New York file. Reform school, two years at Rikers Island for aggravated assault—it went on and on. Your typical small time hood, but with a proclivity for violence. There was also a set of fingerprints and mugshots from the Rikers Island stint. The mugshots showed a twenty-year-old white male who probably did all right with the ladies and thought of himself as one very hard case. The eyes seemed to
stare at you from the photograph, wondering if you’d seen the joke.
So now it was time to give Stamford a call.
“Morning, Tom. I suppose you’ve heard about the Grazzi shooting.” It was Jerry Reilly from homicide, who was a good man.
“Just what was in the papers, Jerry, and you don’t seem to have told them much. What’s going on?”
“Well, Sal Grazzi just about got his head taken off with a twelve gauge shotgun, but not before our perpetrator turned his private parts into dog food. It wasn’t nice.”
“Any suspects?”
“No definite i.d. yet, but we’ll catch him. He offed Sal in a high-class whorehouse up on Summer Street, right in front of the madam and a couple of the girls. He even left the shotgun behind for us, and we lifted a beautiful set of prints from it. We have witnesses, he even have his voice on tape. We’ll catch the stupid prick.”
“Did he use a name on the tape?”
“Yeah, but who gives his right name in a whore house?”
“What was it, Jerry?”
“Charlie.”
Tom Spolino took a deep breath. What was it Gus Phelan had said? “Whenever you read in the newspapers that somebody ’d been found with his face blown away, you always knew it was Charlie.”
“Jerry, I wonder if you’d let me have a word with your witnesses. Today.”
“Sure. You can have the whole show. What is it, Tom? You got somebody in mind?”
“I’ll be by this afternoon, Jerry. Thanks.”
. . . . .
Amy was right—the file on Charlie Brush and its related cases made gaudy reading. There were about twenty-eight folders, seven of them dealing with unsolved homicides. Charlie, it seemed, was a nasty piece of work.
The old photographs left nothing to the imagination: a Mr. Aaron Spieler, well-known local bookie, found December 12, 1935, on the back seat of his car with a bloody crater where his face should have been. Ricardo Mistretta, known unaccountably as Rickie the Nose, lying naked on the floor in his girlfriend’s bedroom with what was left of his head propped against the chest of drawers, having departed this life August 8, 1936. Samuel “Slappy” Beal, occupation unknown, discovered seated in the next to the last row at the Greenley Theater, September 14, 1937, his throat elegantly cut and the razor with which the operation was performed tucked into his shirt pocket. Alphonso Gela, liquor distributor and reputed cocaine dealer, crushed against the back wall of his own warehouse in the small hours of the morning, November 23, 1939, by someone driving a stolen car.
The Moonlight Page 17
