Brooklyn Noir [2] The Classics

by Tim McLoughlin

  Crawley turned to the stenographer. “Type it up formal,” he said. “And have somebody come take the pigeon to his nest.”

  After the stenographer had left, Levine said, “Anything you want to say off the record, Perkins?”

  Perkins grinned. His face was half-turned away from Crawley, and he was looking at the floor, as though he was amused by something he saw there. “Off the record?” he murmured. “As long as there are two of you in here, it’s on the record.”

  “Do you want one of us to leave?”

  Perkins looked up at Levine again, and stopped smiling. He seemed to think it over for a minute, and then he shook his head. “No,” he said. “Thanks, anyway. But I don’t think I have anything more to say. Not right now anyway.”

  Levine frowned and sat back in his chair, studying Perkins. The boy didn’t ring true; he was constructed of too many contradictions. Levine reached out for a mental image of Perkins, but all he touched was air.

  After Perkins was led out of the room by two uniformed cops, Crawley got to his feet, stretched, sighed, scratched, pulled his earlobe, and said, “What do you make of it, Abe?”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I know that. I saw it in your face. But he confessed, so what else is there?”

  “The phony confession is not exactly unheard of, you know.”

  “Not this time,” said Crawley. “A guy confesses to a crime he didn’t commit for one of two reasons. Either he’s a crackpot who wants the publicity or to be punished or something like that, or he’s protecting somebody else. Perkins doesn’t read like a crackpot to me, and there’s nobody else involved for him to be protecting.”

  “In a capital punishment state,” suggested Levine, “a guy might confess to a murder he didn’t commit so the state would do his suicide for him.”

  Crawley shook his head. “That still doesn’t look like Perkins,” he said.

  “Nothing looks like Perkins. He’s given us a blank wall to stare at. A couple of times it started to slip, and there was something else inside.”

  “Don’t build a big thing, Abe. The kid confessed. He’s the killer; let it go at that.”

  “The job’s finished, I know that. But it still bothers me.”

  “Okay,” said Crawley. He sat down behind the desk again and put his feet up on the scarred desk top. “Let’s straighten it out. Where does it bother you?”

  “All over. Number one, motivation. You don’t kill a man for being a pompous ass. Not when you turn around a minute later and say he was your best friend.”

  “People do funny things when they’re pushed far enough. Even to friends.”

  “Sure. Okay, number two. The murder method. It doesn’t sound right. When a man kills impulsively, he grabs something and starts swinging. When he calms down, he goes and turns himself in. But when you poison somebody, you’re using a pretty sneaky method. It doesn’t make sense for you to run out and call a cop right after using poison. It isn’t the same kind of mentality.”

  “He used the poison,” said Crawley, “because it was handy. Gruber bought it, probably had it sitting on his dresser or something, and Perkins just picked it up on impulse and poured it into the beer.”

  “That’s another thing,” said Levine. “Do you drink much beer out of cans?”

  Crawley grinned. “You know I do.”

  “I saw some empty beer cans sitting around the apartment, so that’s where Gruber got his last beer from.”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “When you drink a can of beer, do you pour the beer out of the can into a glass, or do you just drink it straight from the can?”

  “I drink it out of the can. But not everybody does.”

  “I know, I know. Okay, what about the library books? If you’re going to kill somebody, are you going to bring library books along?”

  “It was an impulse killing. He didn’t know he was going to do it until he got there.”

  Levine got his feet. “That’s the hell of it,” he said. “You can explain away every single question in this business. But it’s such a simple case. Why should there be so many questions that need explaining away?”

  Crawley shrugged. “Beats me,” he said. “All I know is, we’ve got a confession, and that’s enough to satisfy me.”

  “Not me,” said Levine. “I think I’ll go poke around and see what happens. Want to come along?”

  “Somebody’s going to have to hand the pen to Perkins when he signs his confession,” said Crawley.

  “Mind if I take off for a while?”

  “Go ahead. Have a big time,” said Crawley, grinning at him. “Play detective.”

  Levine’s first stop was back at Gruber’s address. Gruber’s apartment was empty now, having been sifted completely through normal routine procedure. Levine went down to the basement door under the stoop, but he didn’t go back to Gruber’s door. He stopped at the front apartment instead, where a ragged-edged strip of paper attached with peeling scotch tape to the door read, in awkward and childish lettering, superintendent. Levine rapped and waited. After a minute, the door opened a couple of inches, held by a chain. A round face peered out at him from a height of a little over five feet. The face said, “Who you looking for?”

  “Police,” Levine told him. He opened his wallet and held it up for the face to look at.

  “Oh,” said the face. “Sure thing.” The door shut, and Levine waited while the chain was clinked free, and then the door opened wide.

  The super was a short and round man, dressed in corduroy trousers and a grease-spotted undershirt. He wheezed, “Come in, come in,” and stood back for Levine to come into his crowded and musty-smelling living room.

  Levine said, “I want to talk to you about Al Gruber.”

  The super shut the door and waddled into the middle of the room, shaking his head. “Wasn’t that a shame?” he asked. “Al was a nice boy. No money, but a nice boy. Sit down somewhere, anywhere.”

  Levine looked around. The room was full of low-slung, heavy, sagging, over-stuffed furniture, armchairs and sofas. He picked the least battered armchair of the lot, and sat on the very edge. Although he was a short man, his knees seemed to be almost up to his chin, and he had the feeling that if he relaxed he’d fall over backwards.

  The super trundled across the room and dropped into one of the other armchairs, sinking into it as though he never intended to get to his feet again in his life. “A real shame,” he said again. “And to think I maybe could have stopped it.”

  “You could have stopped it? How?”

  “It was around noon,” said the super. “I was watching the TV over there, and I heard a voice from the back apartment, shouting, ‘Al! Al!’ So I went out to the hall, but by the time I got there the shouting was all done. So I didn’t know what to do. I waited a minute, and then I came back in and watched the TV again. That was probably when it was happening.”

  “There wasn’t any noise while you were in the hall? Just the two shouts before you got out there?”

  “That’s all. At first, I thought it was another one of them arguments, and I was gonna bawl out the two of them, but it stopped before I even got the door open.”

  “Arguments?”

  “Mr. Gruber and Mr. Perkins. They used to argue all the time, shout at each other, carry on like monkeys. The other tenants was always complaining about it. They’d do it late at night sometimes, two or three o’clock in the morning, and the tenants would all start phoning me to complain.”

  “What did they argue about?”

  The super shrugged his massive shoulders. “Who knows? Names. People. Writers. They both think they’re great writers or something.”

  “Did they ever get into a fist fight or anything like that? Ever threaten to kill each other?”

  “Naw, they’d just shout at each other and call each other stupid and ignorant and stuff like that. They liked each other, really, I guess. At least they always hung around together. They just loved to argue, th
at’s all. You know how it is with college kids. I’ve had college kids renting here before, and they’re all like that. They all love to argue. Course, I never had nothing like this happen before.”

  “What kind of person was Gruber, exactly?”

  The super mulled it over for a while. “Kind of a quiet guy,” he said at last. “Except when he was with Mr. Perkins, I mean. Then he’d shout just as loud and often as anybody. But most of the time he was quiet. And good-mannered. A real surprise, after most of the kids around today. He was always polite, and he’d lend a hand if you needed some help or something, like the time I was carrying a bed up to the third floor front. Mr. Gruber come along and pitched right in with me. He did more of the work than I did.”

  “And he was a writer, wasn’t he? At least, he was trying to be a writer.”

  “Oh, sure. I’d hear that typewriter of his tappin’ away in there at all hours. And he always carried a notebook around with him, writin’ things down in it. I asked him once what he wrote in there, and he said descriptions, of places like Prospect Park up at the corner, and of the people he knew. He always said he wanted to be a writer like some guy named Wolfe, used to live in Brooklyn too.”

  “I see.” Levine struggled out of the armchair. “Thanks for your time,” he said.

  “Not at all.” The super waddled after Levine to the door. “Anything I can do,” he said. “Any time at all.”

  “Thanks again,” said Levine. He went outside and stood in the hallway, thinking things over, listening to the latch click in place behind him. Then he turned and walked down the hallway to Gruber’s apartment, and knocked on the door.

  As he’d expected, a uniformed cop had been left behind to keep an eye on the place for a while, and when he opened the door, Levine showed his identification and said, “I’m on the case. I’d like to take a look around.”

  The cop let him in, and Levine looked carefully through Gruber’s personal property. He found the notebooks, finally, in the bottom drawer of the dresser. There were five of them, steno pad size loose-leaf fillers. Four of them were filled with writing, in pen, in a slow and careful hand, and the fifth was still half blank.

  Levine carried the notebooks over to the card table, pushed the typewriter out of the way, sat down and began to skim through the books.

  He found what he was looking for in the middle of the third one he tried. A description of Larry Perkins, written by the man Perkins had killed. The description, or character study, which it more closely resembled, was four pages long, beginning with a physical description and moving into a discussion of Perkins’s personality. Levine noticed particular sentences in this latter part: “Larry doesn’t want to write, he wants to be a writer, and that isn’t the same thing. He wants the glamour and the fame and the money, and he thinks he’ll get it from being a writer. That’s why he’s dabbled in acting and painting and all the other so-called glamorous professions. Larry and I are both being thwarted by the same thing: neither of us has anything to say worth saying. The difference is, I’m trying to find something to say, and Larry wants to make it on glibness alone. One of these days, he’s going to find out he won’t get anywhere that way. That’s going to be a terrible day for him.”

  Levine closed the book, then picked up the last one, the one that hadn’t yet been filled, and leafed through that. One word kept showing up throughout the last notebook. “Nihilism.” Gruber obviously hated the word, and he was also obviously afraid of it. “Nihilism is death,” he wrote on one page. “It is the belief that there are no beliefs, that no effort is worthwhile. How could any writer believe such a thing? Writing is the most positive of acts. So how can it be used for negative purposes? The only expression of nihilism is death, not the written word. If I can say nothing hopeful, I shouldn’t say anything at all.”

  Levine put the notebooks back in the dresser drawer finally, thanked the cop, and went out to the Chevy. He’d hoped to be able to fill in the blank spaces in Perkins’s character through Gruber’s notebooks, but Gruber had apparently had just as much trouble defining Perkins as Levine was now having. Levine had learned a lot about the dead man, that he was sincere and intense and self-demanding as only the young can be, but Perkins was still little more than a smooth and blank wall. “Glibness,” Gruber had called it. What was beneath the glibness? A murderer, by Perkins’s own admission. But what else?

  Levine crawled wearily into the Chevy and headed for Manhattan.

  Professor Harvey Stonegell was in class when Levine got to Columbia University, but the girl at the desk in the dean’s outer office told him that Stonegell would be out of that class in just a few minutes, and would then be free for the rest of the afternoon. She gave him directions to Stonegell’s office, and Levine thanked her.

  Stonegell’s office door was locked, so Levine waited in the hall, watching students hurrying by in both directions, and reading the notices of scholarships, grants, and fellowships thumbtacked to the bulletin board near the office door.

  The professor showed up about fifteen minutes later, with two students in tow. He was a tall and slender man, with a gaunt face and a full head of gray-white hair. He could have been any age between fifty and seventy. He wore a tweed suit jacket, leather patches at the elbows, and non-matching gray slacks.

  Levine said, “Professor Stonegell?”

  “Yes?”

  Levine introduced himself and showed his identification. “I’d like to talk to you for a minute or two.”

  “Of course. I’ll just be a minute.” Stonegell handed a book to one of the two students, telling him to read certain sections of it, and explained to the other student why he hadn’t received a passing grade in his latest assignment. When both of them were taken care of, Levine stepped into Stonegell’s crowded and tiny office, and sat down in the chair beside the desk.

  Stonegell said, “Is this about one of my students?”

  “Two of them. From your evening writing course. Gruber and Perkins.”

  “Those two? They aren’t in trouble, are they?”

  “I’m afraid so. Perkins has confessed to murdering Gruber.”

  Stonegell’s thin face paled. “Gruber’s dead? Murdered?”

  “By Perkins. He turned himself in right after it happened. But, to be honest with you, the whole thing bothers me. It doesn’t make sense. You knew them both. I thought you might be able to tell me something about them, so it would make sense.”

  Stonegell lit himself a cigarette and offered one to Levine. Then he fussed rather vaguely with his messy desktop, while Levine waited for him to gather his thoughts.

  “This takes some getting used to,” said Stonegell after a minute. “Gruber and Perkins. They were both good students in my class, Gruber perhaps a bit better. And they were friends.”

  “I’d heard they were friends.”

  “There was a friendly rivalry between them,” said Stonegell. “Whenever one of them started a project, the other one started a similar project, intent on beating the first one at his own game. Actually, that was more Perkins than Gruber. And they always took opposite sides of every question, screamed at each other like sworn enemies. But actually they were very close friends. I can’t understand either one of them murdering the other.”

  “Was Gruber similar to Perkins?”

  “Did I give that impression? No, they were definitely unalike. The old business about opposites attracting. Gruber was by far the more sensitive and sincere of the two. I don’t mean to imply that Perkins was insensitive or insincere at all. Perkins had his own sensitivity and his own sincerity, but they were almost exclusively directed within himself. He equated everything with himself, his own feelings and his own ambitions. But Gruber had more of the—oh, I don’t know—more of a world-view, to badly translate the German. His sensitivity was directed outward, toward the feelings of other people. It showed up in their writing. Gruber’s forte was characterization, subtle interplay between personalities. Perkins was deft, almost glib, with movemen
t and action and plot, but his characters lacked substance. He wasn’t really interested in anyone but himself.”

  “He doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who’d confess to a murder right after he committed it.”

  “I know what you mean. That isn’t like him. I don’t imagine Perkins would ever feel remorse or guilt. I should think he would be one of the people who believes the only crime is in being caught.”

  “Yet we didn’t catch him. He came to us.” Levine studied the book titles on the shelf behind Stonegell. “What about their mental attitudes recently?” he asked. “Generally speaking, I mean. Were they happy or unhappy, impatient or content or what?”

  “I think they were both rather depressed, actually,” said Sto-negell. “Though for somewhat different reasons. They had both come out of the Army less than a year ago, and had come to New York to try to make their mark as writers. Gruber was having difficulty with subject matter. We talked about it a few times. He couldn’t find anything he really wanted to write about, nothing he felt strongly enough to give him direction in his writing.”

  “And Perkins?”

  “He wasn’t particularly worried about writing in that way. He was, as I say, deft and clever in his writing, but it was all too shallow. I think they might have been bad for one another, actually. Perkins could see that Gruber had the depth and sincerity that he lacked, and Gruber thought that Perkins was free from the soul-searching and self-doubt that was hampering him so much. In the last month or so, both of them have talked about dropping out of school, going back home and forgetting about the whole thing. But neither of them could have done that, at least not yet. Gruber couldn’t have, because the desire to write was too strong in him. Perkins couldn’t, because the desire to be a famous writer was too strong.”

  “A year seems like a pretty short time to get all that depressed,” said Levine.