“Where’s this Nathanson?”
“I sent him back to his precinct,” Kaproski said. “There wasn’t nothing more he could do.”
“Is the lab checking the hit-run part of it?”
“Yeah. They got guys looking for skid marks and stuff like that, and they’re going over her clothes.…” Kaproski suddenly sounded bitter. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. The whole thing is my fault.…”
“It is? In what way?”
“Well, hell,” Kaproski said, self-disgust etching his deep voice. “I should have used my head. This Lenny Cervera is going to call again when the dame don’t show for the appointment, ain’t he? Wanting to know where she is? I should have gone back and bust into her apartment and waited for the call, but I was so screwed up I came along down here with Nathanson and the ambulance.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Clancy said quietly. “I guarantee he didn’t call again. She showed up for the appointment, all right, because he was driving that black car of yours. That wasn’t any accident.…”
Kaproski was amazed. “You mean he done it? He knocked off his own girl friend? But why?”
“Because she spilled to me about that car he stole, three years ago,” Clancy said bitterly. “I thought he didn’t know, but apparently he did. If anybody is at fault, it’s me. I should have had her covered closer, but I thought he was just a punk.…”
A punk … well, so much for Cervera being a punk. The inspector had been right, and John Wells, and just about everybody except him. Or except Judge Kiele as well, if being put in the same category as Judge Kiele was any consolation. Kaproski’s voice broke into his thoughts.
“I was right behind her, Lieutenant. I should have covered her.”
“You should have been home in bed at that hour,” Clancy said. He thought a moment. “Did you go through her purse?”
“Yeah,” Kaproski said, happy to change the subject, to speak of something else. But then his voice fell. “But there wasn’t nothing in it. Oh, money, and keys, and lipsticks and stuff like that, but nothing else. Just personal stuff.”
Clancy sighed. “I see.”
Kaproski cleared his throat again. “Lieutenant, I’m all done down here. You got anything you want done? To tell you the truth, after what I seen I don’t feel much like sleeping.”
Clancy thought. “Well, I’d like to hear that tape again. Just on the offhand chance that you might have missed something this character said that could be useful.”
“We can listen to it again, Lieutenant, but the way I told you is just the way he said it. Everything is still hooked up down in that crummy locker room.”
“All right,” Clancy said wearily, making up his mind. “I’ll get up and get dressed. Meet me over at the girl’s apartment, in front. Say in half an hour or so.”
“Right, Lieutenant. I’ll be there.”
“And bring her keys. As a matter of fact, bring her whole purse.”
“Right.”
Clancy hung up the telephone and stared at it a moment. His cigarette curled smoke into the dim ceiling shadows; the hands of the clock seemed poised, as if awaiting some move from the silent man, before advancing. Clancy shrugged and climbed to his feet. He padded to the bathroom.
He stripped away his pajama top preparatory to washing, and then paused, staring at himself in the mirror. A ragged scar ran waveringly across his chest, memento of the time he had been careless in making an arrest of a hopped-up killer who had murdered his wife and two innocent bystanders. A punk, eh? Clancy thought sourly. Like that son of a bitch in that dark hallway, waiting with his bloody knife, was a punk.… He sighed and ran the faucet.
Wednesday—2:10 A.M.
Kaproski was waiting patiently before the silent building when Clancy drove up in his old sedan. Clancy cut the lights and set the handbrake, switched off the ignition and climbed stiffly out, looking in both directions. The clouds had moved on, carrying their burden of storm to the east, to harass the distant ocean; a full moon rode lower in the sky now but still lit the deserted canyon of apartments with sharp, gray angular shadows cast obliquely across the empty sidewalk. The street was bare of cars or pedestrians; the bar across the street had closed for the night. In the distance the faint rumble of a subway trembled on the still air. Kaproski moved forward, his coat pocket bulging with the dead woman’s purse.
“Hi, Lieutenant.”
Clancy nodded, looking around. “Where’s the other man; the one who was on watch in the back?”
“I sent him back to the precinct also,” Kaproski said. “No sense in covering a dead woman.”
“Yeah,” Clancy said. He studied the street. “Which direction did the car come from?”
Kaproski lifted an arm, pointing. “From somewhere down that way. He could have been parked up near the next corner, or even around the block, I guess.”
Clancy thought a moment. “Let’s walk down there a minute. Do you know if there’s a bar, or a drugstore, or a delicatessen, or anything around here that’s open this late?”
“Jeez, I don’t know in this neighborhood. I don’t think so, at this hour. I didn’t notice any coming up from the subway. Why? You need something, Lieutenant?” Kaproski shook his head. “If it’s cigarettes, I ain’t got none, Lieutenant.”
“He had to telephone from someplace,” Clancy said patiently. “And it had to be within a block or two at the most. He called and then ducked right into his car. Let’s go see.”
Their footsteps were muffled on the still-damp sidewalk; the dying wind nipped at their flapping raincoats. At the corner Clancy looked in one direction; street lights glimmered on a darkened avenue. He turned, looked, and then shrugged in disappointment. Looming a bit down the block was one of the booths the telephone company had erected as an additional blockade to the already overcrowded sidewalk traffic, its glass windows shining blackly. Clancy stared at it a moment and then started back toward the apartment.
“Wait, Lieutenant,” Kaproski said. The phone booth had given him an idea. “How about fingerprints?”
“Yeah,” Clancy said sourly. “How about them? Let’s go back and listen to that tape.”
Kaproski shrugged and followed his boss down the street. They pulled open the heavy glass doors and Kaproski led the way to the rear. A set of stairs led steeply downward; they descended carefully to find themselves in a labyrinth of cubbyholes, each boarded up with slats, and roofed with a maze of twisting, insulated pipes. The entire basement smelled of damp concrete and rats.
The recorder was silently winding tape from one spool to another. Clancy drew up a box before the apparatus and sat down, putting on the earphones. A few minutes of fiddling with buttons and switches and he had backtracked the tape to the portion he wanted. He switched to playback and pressed another button, bending forward, listening carefully. Kaproski waited, his attitude a clear compromise between insult that his word should be doubted, and fear that he might actually have missed something. His eyes were fixed on the lieutenant’s unrevealing face. Clancy played the brief conversation through, reversed the tape, and then played it through once again. When he removed the earphones and switched the machine back to automatic, he nodded to himself.
“Handkerchief,” he said quietly. “Over the mouthpiece.…”
“It was like I said, wasn’t it, Lieutenant?”
Clancy stood up. “It was like you said. We’ll strike off a medal for you tomorrow.” He thought a moment. “Well, let’s see if we can learn anything upstairs in her apartment.”
They climbed back to the narrow hallway and walked to the front to take a creaking elevator to the sixth floor. They walked down the musty uncarpeted corridor, their feet making little clicking sounds on the dirty chipped mosaic. Clancy waited while Kaproski fumbled through the purse and produced keys, applying them to the door. The second one worked; the door swung back. Clancy walked past the other and fumbled on the wall until he encountered the light switch.
A small but neat room confronte
d them. Slipcovers of some cheap cotton material protected the sagging sofa and the two lumpy chairs from the few moments of sunlight the apartment managed each day. Several throw rugs tried their best to hide the bare expanse of worn but polished wood parquet, and failed sadly. The walls held several dark pictures, all religious in nature; a few floor lamps with plastic-covered shades stood on either side of a tall, ornate china-closet-cum-escritoire, completing the pitiful symmetry. The escritoire, an obvious heirloom handed down from some more fortunate period in the Hernandez family’s fortunes, exhibited in the rear a series of small slotted cubbyholes, from which papers poked unevenly. Clancy walked over, staring down at them.
Kaproski closed the door and looked about, clearing his throat. “What do you want me to do, Lieutenant?”
“Take the rest of the apartment,” Clancy said shortly.
“Principally the bedroom.…”
“Sure, Lieutenant.” Kaproski started out of the room and then paused, puzzled. “What am I looking for?”
“Letters,” Clancy said. “Or notes. Anything that Cervera might have written to her. Or anyone else, that might give us any idea of what he had in mind.”
“Right,” Kaproski said, and disappeared.
Clancy dragged up one of the chairs, sitting on the sagging arm, and started going through the papers in the escritoire methodically. The majority of the slips in the first box were bills, some already receipted, but most of them still to be paid. He studied them carefully for any hint of something useful; the thought came to him that they were not too different from the ones that littered his own desk at home. The detritus of the bachelor, male or female, he thought, and wondered for a second if Mary Kelly’s desk would be the same. He pushed the thought aside, stuffed the papers back, and reached for another cubbyhole. A library card was extracted, well used, and some recipes scribbled hastily on odds and ends of paper and laid away for some happier day when they could be experimented with. Clancy shrugged and continued.
A few religious tracts were extracted from the third cubbyhole, glanced over, and replaced. Some cutouts of fashions from a style magazine followed; Clancy glanced at the tight smiles of the models, thought of the battered body in the morgue, and shoved them back almost viciously. The last space provided some old snapshots, and Clancy bent over them. One of them he separated from the others, turning to hold it under the light to study it. It portrayed the dark-haired pretty girl he had known looking self-consciously and seriously into the camera, while the boy at her side, his arm about her, laughed. Lenny Cervera, he thought, remembering the thin face and narrow chin. And how are you laughing now? Tight-lipped, out of the corner of your mouth, professional Sing Sing style, you punk? Or a big belly laugh that the girl proved such an easy sucker? It’s the last laugh that counts, you miserable punk, Clancy thought savagely, and jammed the picture back into place.
Kaproski came in bearing a small bundle of letters bound with frayed blue ribbon.
“How about these, Lieutenant? Found them in a dresser drawer in her bedroom, under a pile of panties.”
Clancy took them, pulling on the bow ribbon. He leafed through them, looking at the signatures, nodded in satisfaction, and then glanced at the dates. They were in chronological order; he began with the most recent, which was on top. Kaproski leaned over his shoulder and the two men read the short note together:
Hi, Marcia, honey—
Well, I suppose Ma already told you how I’m all set when I get out of here. Now that I can see the end of this thing, I got to admit it ain’t been all bad. I learned a lot, and I made myself some friends, and at least I ain’t been out of work these last three years like some of the old gang I can think of—ha! ha! If you ever see any of them you can tell them I said that.
Well, the first thing I’m going to do when I get back to town, honey, is to make up to you for everything. You can believe me on that. You’re going to be the first one I look up, that’s for sure. I owe you a lot, honey, and don’t think I don’t know it. I got a lot to make up for with you, and that’s going to come first.
Well, there ain’t nothing ever new up here, and a guy can’t say too much in these things anyways, but I know I don’t have to spell things out for you, anyways, because you could always read between the lines where I was concerned.
It won’t be long now, honey—
Lenny
Clancy laid the letter aside and read several more. And then came back to the discarded letter and read it again, slowly, with Kaproski muttering the words half aloud over his shoulder.
“Hell,” Kaproski said, puzzled. “That sure don’t sound like he meant her any harm.”
“Read it again,” Clancy said softly. “The little bastard was cagey. Cute.” He folded the letter and slipped it back on the pile, tied the ribbon, and put the small bundle in his jacket pocket. He looked up. “Anything else in there?”
“Naw. Nothing in writing. Just a bed and a dresser and a little wood chair. Place is pretty small.”
“Yeah,” Clancy said. He got to his feet. “Well, let’s go.”
He walked into the bedroom, glanced around, checked briefly in the tiny kitchen and bathroom, and then came back to the living room. He opened the door, waited until Kaproski had preceded him, and then clicked off the light and closed the door softly behind them. The elevator was still waiting for them; they rode it to the ground floor in silence and walked down the hall to the foyer. Kaproski straight-armed the heavy front doors; the two men stood on the top step of the entrance while Clancy frowned in deep thought.
“Lieutenant …”
“What?”
“You got any ideas on this thing?”
“Just one,” Clancy said. “That we better pick up this Cervera pretty damn soon.…”
“You got anything you want me to do?”
Clancy shook his head. “Not at this hour. We’ll get together in the morning. Right now we might as well try and get some sleep. I’ll drop you off at a subway.”
“Right, Lieutenant.”
The two men moved slowly down the steps and across the sidewalk in the direction of the old sedan. A car came easily around the corner, the sweep of its headlights as it made the turn momentarily blinding them; it straightened and then began to increase in speed. Clancy was reaching for his car keys when he heard a startled grunt from Kaproski.
“Lieutenant!”
The weight of the heavy detective drove violently against the smaller lieutenant in a frantic tackle; Clancy felt himself being carried down to the sidewalk. His hands automatically came up to save himself, scraping painfully on the cement; his head jerked back to prevent striking the sidewalk. There was the sharp stutter of a machine pistol, the crash of glass as the apartment doors behind them disintegrated under the stream of bullets. Kaproski rolled over, drawing his service revolver in the same movement; he scrambled to the edge of the sedan and snapped a shot in the direction of the taillight which was already disappearing around the corner. The squeal of tires overrode the echo of the shots. He jumped to his feet, dashing madly for the corner, revolver in hand. He ran into the middle of the intersection, looked down the street a moment, and then trotted back. Clancy was already on his feet, dusting himself off.
Kaproski cursed viciously. “He got away. The son of a bitch!” He stood there, catching his breath, his mouth twisted in anger, and then looked at his superior. “You all right, Lieutenant?”
“I’m all right.” To his own amazement Clancy found his voice a bit shaky. “And thanks, Kap.”
Kaproski dropped his arm, the gun still dangling from his fingers. “I saw the glint from that gun just as he passed under the street light, out of the corner of my eye. That dirty, miserable, son of a bitch!”
Clancy had turned and was staring at the line of bullet marks stitched across the brick face of the building on either side of the shattered glass doors.
“High,” he said inanely, and shuddered.
Windows were being thrown up; heads p
oked out in that combination of fear and curiosity that shooting always provokes. The high keening of a siren rose faintly in the distance, in answer to some frantic telephone call. It increased in volume, and then was suddenly cut, its echo still remaining. A black-and-white patrol car, top light flashing, tore around the corner and pulled up with squealing brakes beside the two men; a spotlight bathed them in white. A hand extended from the interior of the car, service revolver in hand.
“You! Drop that gun’ And get them up!”
Kaproski peered forward curiously; the extended arm stiffened. “You heard me! Drop it!”
Another voice came from the inside of the darkened patrol car. “That’s Kaproski of the 52nd Precinct, for Christ’s sake!” The tone was disgusted. “And Lieutenant Clancy …”
Kaproski calmly holstered his gun and bent down. “Why don’t you get some glasses, son?”
The door opened; a young and red-faced patrolman eased himself out. On the far side of the car a sergeant got down, closing the door dehind him. He walked over to Clancy.
“What happened, Lieutenant?”
“Somebody took a pot shot at us for luck,” Clancy said. “From a passing car.” He turned, pointing to the ragged line of chipped brick and the mess of broken glass.
The sergeant whistled. “Tommy gun …” He dragged a notebook from his pocket and moved to the front of the patrol car, taking advantage of the light from the headlamps. “Did you see who it was?”
Clancy paused, remembering his own impatience with poor witnesses in the past. “We have reason to believe it was Lenny Cervera.…”
“The con? The one that broke out of Sing Sing yesterday?”
“That’s right. But to be honest, I didn’t see anything. It happened too fast.”
“It was a black sedan with one guy in it,” Kaproski said positively. “Driving with his left hand, right hand holding a machine pistol across his chest and over the window ledge. A black, four-door sedan; shiny, like it was new. I saw that much, anyways.” He paused, remembering something else. “And it had New York plates; I seen them when I took a shot at the back of it.”
The Quarry Page 5
