Ladyfingers

by Shepard Rifkin

  "Jesus, yes."

  "Two, three more days. And it don't look to me like you got all that time, Pablo boy. Especially with Hanrahan sprinkling salt on your tail. Don't let it gripe you."

  "Yes, sir. I won't let it gripe me."

  He lifted a red eyebrow at my sarcasm. "You hear the story of the optimist and the pessimist? Sit down and let me finish."

  I sat down.

  "This guy, for a practical joke, see, he spreads horse manure all over the living room floors of two friends of his. One friend is a pessimist and one's an optimist. The pessimist opens the door, takes one look, hits the ceiling, and yells 'Who's the son of a bitch who put this crap here? I'll kill 'im!' And the optimist comes home, unlocks the door, and this big grin spreads over his face"-here McCartney assumed a big, beatific grin that made me smile in spite of my mood-"an' this guy says, real delighted, 'Where's the pony?' "

  "That's a great story," I said, dryly.

  "Put that hot Spanish temper on ice. Hanrahan would really like to see you lose control, you know?"

  "I know."

  "Work any other angle you got. Forget the ring."

  He bit into the bagel. The two hardened halves functioned like a vise. The cream cheese spurted out on all sides.

  "Disgustin', ain't it?" he asked. "I got no ethnic food loyalties. Besides, where would I grab corned beef and cabbage in this block?"

  I put out my hand. McCartney dropped the ring into it. I phoned Kelsey from a phone booth while McCartney was paying his check.

  "Hanrahan keeps calling," Kelsey said. "As soon as you show up here or call me I'm supposed to tell you to go over to headquarters."

  I grunted.

  "And when you're done with him come here. I've found something." I turned and waved good-bye to McCartney. "Waitamimm," he said. I waited. "I love the onions with this stuff. Some guys don't like onions. They don't know what they're missin'." He looked at my face. "Relax, Pablo. You hear the latest from downtown?"

  "No."

  "The PC is resigning the end of June." I stared at him. McCartney looked hurt. He thought I didn't believe him. He went on. "I bet he couldn't take all those riots and gettin' up at three a.m. to go out to Bedford-Stuyvesant to hold the mayor's hand. He had his belly full last summer and the idea of another one is probably just too much."

  "How do you know he's resigning?"

  McCartney put down his bagel. He looked reproachful. "It ain't gossip, Pablo, that it ain't. I got it straight from someone in the chief of detectives' office."

  "So long, Mac."

  "Likewise."

  I paid my check and thought. Cops who depend on informers, like McCartney and myself, soon develop the ability to pick out pay dirt from garbage. Something in the expression of the face, the way they look at you, the tone of the voice. McCartney never passed on garbage.

  Now it made sense. Why shouldn't Hanrahan recommend me? The PC was only going to be the PC six weeks more. If Hanrahan's recommendation blew up in everyone's face it would only add up to one dead woman who would just be listed as missing and unknown. That's not enough to demote a pretty good chief of detectives.

  And if the PC thought that Hanrahan had made a stupid suggestion he wouldn't worry too much. Why should he? The PC would soon be sleeping all night long without an emergency phone call. My respect for Hanrahan went up a notch.

  McCartney caught up with me halfway down the block. He walked me to my car, saying nothing, prying at his back molars with a toothpick.

  Sure enough, I had a parking ticket.

  "Who's the flatfoot on this beat?" I yelled.

  McCartney's grin split his wide face almost in two. "Remember," he said, backing away. "Remember, 'Where's the pony?' "

  6

  WHEN I CAME INTO THE WAITING ROOM I SAW Tully. He was sitting on the old red leather couch where many a lieutenant or captain had sat before being told either to resign or face departmental charges. He was tapping his knee nervously. His tie was off-center.

  "What's up?" I asked.

  "How the hell do I know?" he said, standing up and throwing a magazine on the end table. "I got a message from the PC's office telling me to get up here forthwith and wait till you come. I been here two and a half hours and I've gone snow-blind from reading the Reader's Digest. Where you been, out shacking up?"

  "Take it easy," I said. "You didn't waste your time; you know all about dolphin communication and the history of the YMCA and you picked up a lot of sayings you can spring on the boys tonight when you go bowling. Straighten your tie and thank God you've got the mortgage paid on that cute bungalow out in Queens."

  "I don't bowl and I live in a walk-up in the West Village," he said.

  That shut me up. I read the Digest for a while until Hanrahan came out. He walked right up to me.

  "Did you tell any reporter about this?"

  "No, sir," I said.

  "They've been bugging the commissioner. We talked it over and he's sure it's you."

  "Well, it isn't."

  "How you coming along?"

  "Just great."

  "I thought you would be. I have full confidence in your ability to fathom this bottomless mystery."

  "And don't I know it."

  " 'Sir.' "

  "Sir."

  He went back into his office.

  "What's eating him?" Tully asked.

  "Ambition, hatred, and not enough nookey," I said. "So long."

  I left him staring at me. I guessed I looked like I was getting out of control. That explained why Hanrahan seemed pleased when he went back into his office. I liked Tully and if I had felt kindlier I would have gone into the whole thing for his benefit. But I was not feeling kind.

  He almost let me get out of sight. Then he came trotting after me. "Wait," he said. He dug three Missing Persons reports out of his cheap plastic portfolio. "Here," he said. "I found three females that fit your descriptions. Rich, between thirty and forty, and may you find and marry the richest. It might make you friendlier."

  I growled a thank you at him and looked at the reports. A line at the top says "DO NOT FOLD THIS REPORT." I folded them. I could look at them after I saw Kelsey.

  I phoned the lab. Kelsey said he was stuck with the graphs from the analytical gas chronometer chromatograph and from the infrared spectrophotometer. It would take a few hours more while he checked out the reference tables. Try him again in a couple hours, he said.

  O.K. I unfolded the M.P. reports. I could amuse myself with those.

  7

  MRS. LIANA O'CONNELL. 17 EAST 79th STREET. Thirty-eight. One hundred thirty-four pounds. Five feet six, blue eyes. Hair blond but graying.

  Her pad was a nice little town house on the north side of the street. It had an expensive yew hedge, very neatly trimmed behind an iron fence full of expensive scrollwork. She hadn't been home for a week. It seemed a shame. My old neighborhood, I could understand anyone running away from there.

  A Japanese cook-gardener-houseboy-valet answered my ring. He probably earned twice as much as I did, and was worth every cent of it.

  "Nice hedge," I said.

  "I trim," he said proudly.

  When I said "police business" he demanded proof and studied it carefully before he phoned upstairs. The decision must have come down that I was house-trained. He permitted me past him.

  Mr. O'Connell came to the sunroom where I had been taken. The room was full of plants soaking in the sun; nested in the dense greenery was a little wicker table with an ash tray and the fifth volume of the Britannica. Two wicker chairs were beside it. There were hanging baskets overhead, trailing ivy and begonias. The roof was made of old, curved glass panels arranged in the shape of a wisteria tree, with big purple bulges of glass for the flower clusters. It was a beautiful room to sit in or to read in or just to brood in.

  There are times when it is better than usual being rich.

  I looked carefully at the man who should have been delighted with all this. He looked amiable and relax
ed. Hardly a grieving or worried husband.

  Behind him stretched the drawing room. Family portraits, a concert grand, lots of rugs, and bowls of fresh roses on every table.

  "No, no, please remain seated," he said. He sat down on the other chair and caressed an ivy leaf as he went on. "I suppose you've come about my wife," he said. I nodded.

  "She went out about four in the afternoon. She said she'd be in at seven or so. About midnight I phoned all the bars in the neighborhood. I know their phone numbers by heart. The Green Dragon, the Century, the Bistro. You name it, she's been there. My wife is an alcoholic. She had been in all of the ones I've mentioned, but none of them recalled her being in after seven.

  "Then I phoned all our mutual friends. She frequently would end up in one of their houses and talk about me at some length. She had not shown up there. Then all the hospitals. I didn't worry too much."

  "Why not?"

  "She might have been spending the night with some gentleman she had met that evening. But in that case, Mr. Sanchez, she would have shown up here about one or two the next afternoon. That's her M.O., as I believe you gentlemen call it."

  If he wanted to tell me he knew what M.O. meant, and thereby extract some pleasure from the situation, he was welcome to it.

  "It's very seldom I run across anyone who's not a cop who knows what M.O. means."

  He beamed.

  "When she didn't show up by five I began to worry," he went on. He didn't look like he had been worrying. I said nothing.

  "I looked in her medicine cabinet. Her pills were still there. She needed a prescription to get others. So I knew something had to be wrong."

  "What kind of pills?"

  "Well, not pills, really. She takes gold therapy. She knows how to inject herself with gold sodium thiomalate. The stuff is damned expensive, I can tell you. It's fifty percent metallic gold."

  I had never heard of the drug. "What's it for?"

  "For arthritis. She has a very bad case of it."

  "Where?"

  "Her hands. Very bad."

  I stood up. Arthritis in the hands causes a grotesque enlargement of the knuckle joints. Mrs. O'Connell was not my lady.

  "One couldn't take her out anywhere. Those hands, those hands!"

  I looked at him.

  "People kept staring. I could never get used to it."

  "Thank you, Mr. O'Connell."

  "But don't you want to know more?"

  "Mr. Tully is in charge of that. He's very capable."

  "Yes, but shouldn't we keep a lookout on all the drug stores and tell them to pick her up in case she manages to get a prescription from some doctor?"

  He found a dead leaf on one of the hanging ivy strands. He crumpled it up and dropped it into the ashtray.

  "Did you tell Mr. Tully about your wife's alcoholism?"

  "No, I didn't think that quite necessary."

  "You just told him that she was missing, right?"

  "Yes."

  "The chances are that she's off on a bat-"

  "I beg your pardon?" He was getting on a high horse.

  "You know what a 'bat' means, don't you?"

  "I don't care for that kind of language, Mr. Sanchez."

  "I don't either. You have a better word? It doesn't look to me as if she met with foul play. It smells more like she's shacked up with some guy for a few days. Some guy who doesn't mind her arthritic hands. She might find that situation so good she'll just stay with him a little while."

  "I don't care for your analysis, Mr. Sanchez, and further-"

  "Let me save you a lot of phone calls, Mr. O'Connell. It's not our job to find her."

  "But Mr. Tully didn't say anything about that!"

  "You didn't tell Tully about her drinking pattern. Now if you want to take this up to the mayor's office as a case of police brutality, go right ahead."

  "It's your duty to find her!"

  "It's my duty to look for people who have left home voluntarily only if they're under eighteen. They're missing persons. Anyone over eighteen who's gone, and who's gone of his own free will, and where there's no foul play-that's not our problem, Mr. O'Connell. My advice to you is to get yourself a good private detective."

  He chewed a knuckle for a while.

  "Can you recommend one?"

  "Begin with A in the classified and work your way down till you get one you like," I said. Let word get around I was making referrals and my goose would be cooked a little more. He looked subdued.

  So Mrs. O'Connell was unhappy. But it's a lot better to be rich and unhappy than poor and unhappy. Suppose she were broke. She'd have to shack up with the guy who paid to get her drunk. But she was lucky. She could pick her playmates. Telling this to her loving husband would be cold comfort.

  The butler showed me to the door. He must have liked the lecture; he was smiling. He'd probably been behind the door listening. Before World War II all Japanese butlers were supposed to be sub commanders secretly charting our coasts. I bet this one was a graduate sociologist doing a paper on primitive American homelife. He was sure in a good place for it.

  8

  MRS. ROBERT PERRY. 1218 PARK AVENUE. Thirty-four. One hundred forty-three pounds. Five feet seven, gray eyes. Black hair.

  When I came up, there were three police cars in front of the apartment house. Also a police emergency truck, an ambulance, and a fine crowd of the kind of people who like to look at the things that bring out such equipment.

  I remember once, oh, it was six years ago, I guess, when I was walking my beat on Broadway at 96th Street. I saw an ambulance, with its siren going, stop at the subway entrance. The driver and his assistant saw me as they hopped out. They said all they knew was that the call had come in as an injury in the subway. I thought that someone had taken a dive on the tracks. I went down with them and asked the man sitting in the change booth downstairs what the trouble was. He pointed to a woman sitting on a bench.

  "Sprained ankle," he said. The woman let her ankle be bandaged but she refused to go to the hospital. After she signed a release for the ambulance driver I went upstairs. I looked at all those faces staring down like a pack of hungry dogs. I knew what they were hungry for.

  "Sorry, folks," I said. "No blood."

  They looked disappointed. I pushed through them pretty roughly.

  At 1218 the doorman was in the middle of the crowd on the sidewalk telling them the way it was. I walked into the lobby and told the elevator man I wanted the seventeenth floor.

  "You a reporter?" His eyes were bright.

  "I hear they lead exciting lives," I said.

  We rode up in silence all the way.

  The door to 17G was open. There were five cops milling around inside. Over their shoulders I saw a tall, gray-faced, middle-aged man of about forty and a woman of about sixty, with a red, tearful face and nice legs; she was alternately sobbing and screaming at him. Past them was a big, wide-open window and in front of it a cop looking down seventeen floors into the courtyard.

  "You're responsible for it!" the woman screamed. "You made her do it, you rotten son of a bitch!"

  One of the cops blocked me.

  "No visitors, buddy," he said.

  I showed him the badge.

  "What happened?"

  "The Missus took a dive. That's all I know."

  He looked at me closely. "I know every guy in the Eleventh Squad, Jack," he said. "I never seen you around."

  "Did I say I was on the Eleventh?"

  "You aren't from Homicide South, either."

  He was bucking for detective.

  "Here we are," I said, "having a jurisdictional dispute, when there's a hysterical woman ten feet from you accusing someone of homicide."

  "You got your I.D.?" I showed it to him.

  This guy really needed to be taken down a peg. I said, "You bucking for sergeant?" That's a safe question. Every cop wants to make sergeant.

  "Well?"

  "You ever read the sergeant's exam?" Every cop sneaks a
look at it and some of them get to know it by heart. My feeling was this guy didn't.

  "What about it?"

  "All right. What's the first thing you do at the scene of a homicide?" It's a fair question and the answer is so obvious that most guys flunk it.

  He promptly said, "Get fingerprints." This gave him an idea. He called out to the other cops, "Hey, don't let nobody touch nothing!"

  "You got a long way to go," I said. "You may never get there."

  So two of the other cops decided to get in on it. One said you should look for the murder weapon and the other said you should notify the detectives right away.

  They were all wrong. There is only one correct answer, and I told it to them with a lot of relish.

  "Gentlemen," I said, "the only correct answer is (and I quote): 'Arrest the perpetrator thereof.' "

  That shut them up.

  I asked them where their detectives were.

  "They oughtta be here any minute."

  "Watch him," I said, pointing to Mr. Perry. "She's accusing him of pushing his wife out the window. Maybe she's crazy, but stick around just in case she's right and he decides to follow her out the window."

  Three of the cops took up a position on either side of the window and one in front.

  I didn't want to take over anyone else's territory, but I had to ask Perry a couple of questions. He looked more approachable than the woman. She had sunk onto a couch and was pressing her fists against her forehead. She kept repeating the same phrase, "Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God."

  I walked over to him. "I'm afraid I'll have to ask you a few questions."

  He was very pale. "Yes."

  "You reported your wife missing a week ago. Right?"

  "Yes," he whispered.

  "She came back and jumped."

  His throat was so dry he couldn't talk. He nodded.

  "Did you see her hands?"

  He stared at me without comprehension.

  The woman on the couch jumped up. "I'm her aunt!" she screamed. "She told me he had left letters lying around deliberately, letters written to him by his secretary, dirty little love letters. She told me he had told her she was ugly and the secretary was young and pretty, and the reason why he never wanted any children was because she was ugly!"