"He thought the first one did it," said Crawley.
"I don't know," said Wills. "He wasted four on the old guy."
"He hadn't expected both of them," said Levine. "She ratded him. Did he clean the register?"
"All the bills and a handful of quarters. She figures about sixty-two bucks."
"What about identification?" asked Crawley. "She saw him, right?"
"Right. But you know this kind of neighborhood. At first, she said she recognized him. Then she thought it over, and now she says she was mistaken."
Crawley made a sour sound and said, "Does she know the old man is dead?"
Wills looked surprised. "I didn't know it myself. He was alive when the ambulance got him."
"Died on the way to the hospitsil. Okay, let's go talk to her."
Oh, God, thought Levine. We've got to be the ones to tell her.
Don't think morbid thoughts. Think about life. Think about your work.
Wills stayed in front, by the door. Crawley led the way back. It was a typical slum neighborhood grocery. The store area was too narrow to begin with, both sides lined with shelves. A glass-faced enamel-sided cooler, full of cold cuts and potato salad and quarter-pound bricks of butter, ran parallel to the side shelves down the middle of the store. At one end there was a small ragged-wood counter holding the cash register and candy jars and a tilted stack of English Muffin packages. Beyond this counter were the bread and pastry shelves and, at the far end, a small frozen food chest. This row gave enough room on the customer's side for a man to turn around, if he did so carefully, and just enough room on the owner's side for a man to sidle along sideways.
Crawley led the way down the length of the store and through the dim doorway at the rear. They went through a tiny dark stock area and another doorway to the smallest and most overcrowded living room Levine had ever seen.
Mohair and tassels and gilt and lion's legs, that was the living room. Chubby hassocks and overstuffed chairs and amber lampshades and tiny intricate doilies on every flat surface. The carpet-design was twists and corkscrews, in muted dark faded colors. The wallpaper was somber, with a curling ensnarled vine pattern writhing on it. The ceiling was low. This wasn't a room, it was a warm crowded den, a little hole in the ground for frightened gray mice.
The woman sat deep within one of the overstuffed chairs. She was short and very stout, dressed in dark clothing nearly the same dull hue as the chair, so that only her pale frightened face was at first noticeable, and then the heavy pale hands twisting in her lap.
Stanton, the other uniformed patrolman, rose from the sofa, saying to the woman, "These men are detectives. They'll want to talk to you a little. Try to remember about the boy, will you? You know we won't let anything happen to you."
Crawley asked him, "The lab been here yet?"
"No, sir, not yet."
"You and Wills stick around up front till they show."
"Right." He excused himself as he edged around Levine and left.
Crawley took Stanton's former place on the sofa, and Levine worked his way among the hassocks and drum tables to the chair most distant from the light, off to the woman's left.
Crawley said, "Mrs. Kosofsky, we want to get the man who did this. We don't want to let him do it again, to somebody else."
The woman didn't move, didn't speak. Her gaze remained fixed on Crawley's lips.
Crawley said, "You told the patrolman you could identify the man who did it."
After a long second of silence, the woman trembled, shivered as through suddenly cold. She shook her head heavily from side to side, saying, "No. No, I was wrong. It was very fast, too fast. I couldn't see him good."
Levine sighed and shifted position. He knew it was useless. She wouldn't tell them anything, she would only withdraw deeper and deeper into the burrow, wanting no revenge, no return, nothing but to be left alone.
"You saw him," said Crawley, his voice loud and harsh. "You're afraid he'll get you if you talk to us, is that it?"
The woman's head was shaking again, and she repeated, "No. No. No."
"He shot a gun at you," Crawley reminded her. "Don't you want us to get him for that?"
"No. No."
"Don't you want us to get your money back?"
"No. No." She wasn't Hstening to Crawley, she was merely shaking her head and repeating the one word over and over again.
"Don't you want us to get the man who killed your husband?"
Levine started. He'd known that was what Crawley was leading up to, but it still shocked him. The viciousness of it cut into him, but he knew it was the only way they'd get any information from her, to hit her with the death of her husband just as hard as they could.
The woman continued to shake her head a few seconds longer, and then stopped abrupdy, staring full at Crawley for the first time. "What you say?"
"The man who murdered your husband," said Crawley. "Don't you want us to get him for murdering your husband?"
"Nathan?"
"He's dead."
"No," she said, more forcefully than before, and half-rose from the chair.
"He died in the ambulance," said Crawley doggedly, "died before he got to the hospital."
Then they waited. Levine bit down hard on his lower lip, hard enough to bring blood. He knew Crawley was right, it was the only possible way. But Levine couldn't have done it. To think of death was terrible enough. To use death —to use the fact of it as a weapon — no, that he could never do.
The woman fell back into the seat, and her face was suddenly stark and clear in every detail. Rounded brow and narrow nose and prominent cheekbones and small chin, all covered by skin as white as candle wax, stretched taut across the skull.
Crawley took a deep breath. "He murdered your husband," he said. "Do you want him to go free?"
In the silence now they could hear vague distant sounds, people walking, talking to one another, listening to the radio or watching television, far away in another world.
At last, she spoke. "Brodek," she said. Her voice was flat. She stared at the opposite wall. "Danny Brodek. From the next block down."
"A boy?"
"Sixteen, seventeen."
Crawley would have asked more, but Levine got to his feet and said, "Thank you, Mrs. Kosofsky."
She closed her eyes.
In the phone book in the front of the store they found one Brodek—Harry R —listed with an address on Tanahee. They went out to the car and drove slowly down the next block to the building they wanted. A taxi passed them, its vacancy light lit. Nothing else moved.
This block, like the one before it and the one after it, was lined on both sides with red brick tenements, five stories high. The building they were looking for was two-thirds of the way down the block. They left the car and went inside.
In the hall, there was the smell of food. The hall was amber tile, and the doors were dark green, with metal numbers. The stairs led up abruptly to the left, midway down the hall. Opposite them were the mailboxes, warped from too much rifling.
They found the name, shakily capital-lettered on an odd scrap of paper and stuck into the mailbox marked 4-d.
Above the first floor, the walls were plaster, painted a green slightly darker than the doors. Sounds of television filtered through most of the doors. Crawley waited at the fourth floor landing for Levine to catch up. Levine climbed stairs slowly, afraid of being short of breath. When he was short of breath, the skipped heart beats became more frequent.
Crawley rapped on the door marked 4-d. Television sounds came through this one, too. After a minute, the door opened a crack, as far as it would go with the chain attached. A woman glared out at them. "What you want?"
"Police," said Crawley. "Open the door."
"What you want?" she asked again.
"Open up," said Crawley impatiently.
Levine took out his wallet, flipped it open to show the badge pinned to the ID label. "We want to talk to you for a minute," he said, trying to make his vo
ice as gentle as possible.
The woman hesitated, then shut the door and they heard the clinking of the chain being removed. She opened the door again, releasing into the hall a smell of beer and vegetable soup. She said, "All right. Come." Turning away, she waddled down an unlit corridor toward the living room.
This room was furnished much like the den behind the grocery store, but the eff"ect was different. It was a somewhat larger room, dominated by a blue plastic television set with a bulging screen. An automobile chase was careening across the screen, pre-war Fords and Mercuries, accompanied by frantic music.
A short heavy man in T-shirt and work pants and slippers sat on the sofa, holding a can of beer and watching the television set. Beyond him, a taller, younger version of himself, in khaki slacks and flannel shirt with the collar turned up, was watching, with a cold and wary eye, the entrance of the two policemen.
The man turned sourly, and his wife said, "They're police. They want to talk to us."
Crawley walked across the room and stood in front of the boy. "You Danny Brodek?"
"So what?"
"Get on your feet."
"Why should I?"
Before Crawley could answer, Mrs. Brodek stepped between him and her son, saying rapidly, "What you want Danny for? He ain't done nothing. He's been right here all night long."
Levine, who had waited by the corridor doorway, shook his head grimly. This was going to be just as bad as the scene with Mrs. Kosofsky. Maybe worse.
Crawley said, "He told you to say that? Did he tell you why? Did he tell you what he did tonight?"
It was the father who answered. "He didn't do nothing. You make a Federal case out of everything, you cops. Kids maybe steal a hubcap, knock out a streetlight, what the hell? They're kids."
Over Mrs. Brodek's shoulder, Crawley said to the boy, "Didn't you tell them, Danny?"
"Tell them what?"
"Do you want me to tell them?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
On the television screen, the automobile chase was finished. A snarling character said, "I don't know what you're talking about." Another character said back, "You know what I'm talking about, Kid."
Crawley turned to Mr. Brodek. "Your boy didn't steal any hubcap tonight," he said. "He held up the grocery store in the next block. Kosofsky's."
The boy said, "You're nuts."
Mrs. Brodek said, "Not Danny. Danny wouldn't do nothing like that."
"He shot the old man," said Crawley heavily. "Shot him four times."
"Shot him!" cried Brodek. "How? Where's he going to get a gun? Answer me that, where's a young kid like that going to get a gun?"
Levine spoke up for the first time. "We don't know where they get them, Mr. Brodek," he said. "All we know is they get them. And then they use them."
"I’ll tell you where when he tells us," said Crawley.
Mrs. Brodek said again, "Danny wouldn't do nothing like that. You've got it wrong."
Levine said, "Wait, Jack," to his partner. To Mrs. Brodek, he said, "Danny did it. There isn't any question. If there was a question, we wouldn't arrest him."
"The hell with that!" cried Brodek. "I know about you cops, you got these arrest quotas. You got to look good, you got to make a lot of arrests."
"If we make a lot of wrong arrests," Levine told him, trying to be patient for the sake of what this would do to Brodek when he finally had to admit the truth, "we embarrass the Police Department. If we make a lot of wrong arrests, we don't stay on the force."
Crawley said, angrily, "Danny, you aren't doing yourself any favors. And you aren't doing your parents any favors either. You want them charged with accessory? The old man died!"
In the silence, Levine said softly, "have a witness, Mrs. Brodek, Mr. Brodek. The wife, the old man's wife. She was in the apartment behind the store and heard the shots. She ran out to the front and saw Danny at the cash register. Shell make a f>ositive identification."
"Sure she will," said the boy.
Levine looked at him. You killed her husband, boy. She'll identify you."
"So why didn't I bump her while I was at it?"
"You tried," said Crawley. "You fired one shot, saw her fall, and then you ran."
The boy grinned. "Yeah, that's a dandy. Think it'll hold up in court? An excitable old woman, she only saw this guy while he's shooting at her, and then he ran out. Some positive identification."
"They teach bad law on television, boy," said Levine. "It'll hold up."
"Not if I was here all night, and I was. Wasn't I, Mom?"
Defiantly, Mrs. Brodek said, ''Danny didn't leave this room for a minute tonight. Not a minute."
Levine said, "Mrs. Brodek, he killed. Your son took a man's life. He was seen."
"She could have been mistaken. It all happened so fast, I bet she could have been mistaken. She only thought it was Danny."
"If it happened to your husband, Mrs. Brodek, viOmake a mistake?"
Mr. Brodek said, "You don't make me believe that. I know my son. You got this wrong somewhere."
Crawley said, "Hidden in his bedroom, or hidden somewhere nearby, there's sixty-two dollars, most of it in bills, three or four dollars in quarters. And the gun's probably with it."
"That's what he committed murder for, Mr. Brodek," said Levine. "Sixty-two dollars."
"I'm going to go get it," said Crawley, turning toward the door on the other side of the living room.
Brodek jumped up, shouting, "The hell you are! Let's see your warrant! I got that much law from television, mister, you don't just come busting in here and make a search. You got to have a warrant."
Crawley looked at Levine in disgust and frustration, and Levine knew what he was thinking. The simple thing to do would be to go ahead and make the arrest and leave the Brodeks still telling their lie. That would be the simple thing to do, but it would also be the wrong thing to do. If the Brodeks were still maintaining the lie once Crawley and Levine left, they would be stuck with it. They wouldn't dare admit the truth after that, not even if they could be made to believe it.
They must be wondering already, but could not admit their doubts. If they were left alone now, they would make the search themselves that they had just kept Crawley from making, and they would find the money and the gun. The money and the gun would be somewhere in Danny Brodek's bedroom. The money stuffed into the toe of a shoe in the closet, maybe. The gun under the mattress or at the bottom of a full wastebasket.
If the Brodeks found the money and the gun, and believed that they didn't dare change their story, they would get rid of the evidence. The paper money ripped up and flushed down the toilet. The quarters spent, or thrown out the window. The gun dropped down a sewer.
Without the money, without the gun, without breaking Danny Brodek's alibi, he had a better than even chance of getting away scot-free. In all probability, the grand jury wouldn't even return an indictment. The unsupported statement of an old woman, who only had a few hectic seconds for identification, against a total lack of evidence and a rock solid alibi by the boy's parents, and the case was foredoomed.
But Danny Brodek had killed. He had taken life, and he couldn't get away with it. Nothing else in the world, so far as Levine was concerned, was as heinous, as vivious, as evil, as the untimely taking of life.
Couldn't the boy himself understand what he'd done? Nathan Kosofsky was dead. He didn't exist any more. He didn't breathe, he didn't see or hear or taste or touch or smell. The pit that yawned so widely in Levine's fears had been opened for Nathan Kosofsky and he had tumbled in. Never to live, ever again.
If the boy couldn't understand the enormfty of what he'd done, if he was too young, if life to him was still too natural and inevitable a gift, then surely his parents were old enough to understand. Did Mr. Brodek never lie awake in bed and wonder at the frail and transient sound of his own heart pumping the life through his veins? Had Mrs. Brodek not felt the cringing closeness of the fear of death when she was about to g
ive birth to her son? They knew, they had to know, what murder reallv meant.
He wanted to ask them, or to remind them, but the awful truths swirling in his brain wouldn't solidify into words and sentences. There is no real way to phrase an emotion.
Crawley, across the room, sighed heavily and said, "Okay. Youll set your own parents up for the bad one. That's okay. We've got the eye-witness. And there'll be more; a fingerprint on the cash register, somebody who saw you run out of the store — "
No one had seen Danny Brodek run from the store. Looking at the smug young face, Levine knew there would be no fingerprints on the cash register. It's just as easy to knuckle the No Sale key to open the cash drawer.
He said, to the boy's father, "On the way out of the store, Danny was mad and scared and nervous. He pulled the door open, and the bell over it rang. He took out his anger and his nervousness on it, yanking the bell down. Well find that somewhere between here and the store, and there may be prints on it. There also may be scratches on his hand, from yanking the bell mechanism off the door frame."
Quickly, Danny said, "Lots of people got scratches on their hands. I was playing with a cat this afternoon, coming home from school. He gave me a couple scratches. See?" He held out his right hand, with three pink ragged tears across the surface of the palm.
Crawley said, "I've played with cats, too, kid. I always got my scratches on the back of my hand."
The boy shrugged. The statement needed no answer.
Crawley went on, "You played with this cat a long while, huh? Long enough to get three scratches, is that it?"
"That's it. Prove different."
"Let's see the scratches on your left hand."
The boy allowed tension to show for just an instant, before he said, "I don't have any on my left hand. Just the right. So what?"
Crawley turned to the father. "Does that sound right to you?"
"Why not?" demanded Brodek defensively. "You play with a cat, maybe you only use one hand. You trying to railroad my son because of some cat scratches?"
This wasn't the way to do it, and Levine knew it. Little corroborative proofs, they weren't enough. They could add weight to an already-held conviction, that's all they could do. They couldn't change an opposite conviction.
Westlake, Donald E - Novel 41 Page 8
