The Little Brothers

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “The Stranger,” Marks said, thinking of the dog-master relationship in a favorite novel of his own youth. He would not have readily admitted that he said it to impress the girl. Tomasino, who had his notebook out, omitted this exchange.

  “Possibly,” she said.

  “Possibly what?” Regan said.

  “A love-hate relationship,” the girl said.

  Regan puffed out his cheeks in a way that effectively conveyed what he thought of love-hate relationships.

  Tomasino took down the correct spelling of her name and her address.

  “Do you live alone, Miss Borghese?” Marks asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  Detective Herring had dusted an appropriately sized space in the window dais.

  “Sit down, if you like,” Marks said, offering the clean spot. “Are you Italian?” He asked it lightly, knowing it to be none of his business. He did not want to come right out and say she didn’t go with her Mulberry Street address.

  “My father is of Italian extraction.”

  “His address?”

  “I am twenty-one years old,” she said, and sat down with confident ease.

  “Occupation?”

  “Mine or my father’s?”

  “Which do you live on?” Marks said.

  “I am an actress.”

  “Will you tell us in your own words how you happened to be here at eleven-thirty last night, and what it was you saw?”

  First she amended: “I’m not the greatest actress. I study acting. Sometimes I get a day’s work or so. Yesterday and last night I worked on the picture Grand Street, which they’re shooting on location. At eleven o’clock we broke. I had to get out of costume. I wore a wig, you see, because everybody knows there are no blond Italians …”

  Tomasino wrote it down, grinning.

  “On my way home I stopped at the deli which I almost always do,” she went on, “and then I looked in on Mr. Grossman which I sometimes do—did.”

  “What do you mean by ‘looked in’”?

  “I opened the door and said ‘Hi.’ He turned around and the cat was in his way. He kicked it aside. I said to him, ‘You’re a mean bastard and they’ll get back at you,’ meaning the cats. I have a very strong feeling about cats. They’re the next civilization. Something got mixed up in evolution so that we came before they were ready. Think about the sphinxes.”

  Tomasino frowned and scratched out the last few sentences.

  Marks said, “Miss Borghese, have you looked in the shop from outside the window itself lately?”

  She knew what he was getting at. “Yes. I looked in through that patch of daylight the other day.” She glanced over her shoulder at the clean place. “It caught my attention and I looked in. That’s all.”

  That, Marks thought, was normal procedure, even as people look in on excavations where provision has been made for the curious. He questioned her on the date. Then, “How did he respond to your calling him a bastard?”

  “He said, ‘You wouldn’t believe how many people agree with you.’”

  “Do you remember the first time you came into the shop?”

  “Yes. It’s almost a year ago. I was furnishing my apartment and I came in to buy a picture.”

  “A religious picture?”

  “Yes, lieutenant, a religious picture.”

  Marks knew the silent Regan was pleased. Until now Julie would not have entirely satisfied his notion of a nice girl. Her defense of something sacred gave her a whole new dimension.

  Then Julie opened up. “Look, officers, we sometimes talked. Once he told me about the Yiddish Theatre in Berlin before Hitler. Another time—he admired discipline, and we got into a crazy hassle about it. To me it’s crap, you know? I leaned over and touched the tattoo mark on his arm. ‘That’s discipline,’ I said. ‘I am here today. That, too, is discipline,’ he said. So what? Do two disciplines make one freedom? Do two deaths make one life, you know?”

  Marks smiled. He wasn’t sure whether she was making him feel older or younger than he was. “Why was Grossman here, in this particular shop, in this location, do you know?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think he was here because he wanted to be … I shouldn’t say that because I just don’t know. It’s a feeling. He didn’t like it here much, but I don’t know where he would have liked. Maybe Berlin in 1929. He especially did not like the teen-aged boys. He called them baby fascists.”

  “Did he say why he didn’t like them?”

  “They tormented him. They tried to extort money from him.”

  “That’s a pretty big word, miss,” Regan said.

  “Did you like Grossman?” Marks asked.

  “Except for the way he treated the cat, I kind of dug him. But like? That’s a pretty big word, lieutenant.” She mimicked Regan’s tone.

  “Did he ever speak about music?”

  Julie shook her head. “But then I’m not very musical.”

  “I wonder how the newspapers get information we can’t get,” Marks said to no one in particular.

  “Because the people trust them,” Julie said sweetly.

  Regan had had enough. He offered Marks his hand. “We’ll have room for you over there if you need it, lieutenant. It’s an old-fashioned station, strong on history, weak in plumbing. The taxpayers are a sentimental lot.”

  He saluted Julie and left.

  In the few seconds of silence that fell throughout the shop with his departure, Marks could hear the creak of the floorboards overhead where the search of Grossman’s apartment continued. He heard also a sound like the gnawing of rats.

  “What’s that?” the girl asked, hearing it too.

  “It’s our lab people,” Tomasino said. “They’re scraping the floorboards for specimens.”

  “It takes a long time to find out something that way, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, but it’s information you can rely on.”

  He watched Tomasino walk her back to the delicatessen. They both looked so young. Tomasino was engaged to be married. Marks was himself a bachelor of long standing.

  He went outdoors and around to the hallway. While he observed the delicate process of lifting a square of ancient wallpaper, he thought about the Alberto Ruggio family who lived on the third floor, father, mother, and infant child. Could they find no better housing than this? Marks had not been present at the questioning of Ruggio, who had discovered the body when he was leaving for work at seven-thirty that morning. Not that his presence would have greatly improved the quality of the interrogation, especially in this instance, where the statement had been translated from Italian. He simply felt that something was missing from his personal docket that loosened his grasp of the case. He wanted a face-to-face meeting with Ruggio soon.

  An Italian immigrant of just under a year’s residence in the United States, Ruggio worked as a truck loader for the Ambrose Corporation, an importer of Italian foods. He had learned of the Grossman apartment from a mechanic where he worked. Grossman, according to the statement, had not wanted to rent to him because of the infant. Marks wondered how he had been persuaded: it was not in the testimony. Grossman frequently complained of the child’s crying.

  The only toilet in the building was on the second floor, the only light on that floor came from there. A gas jet in the hall had never been replaced. Presumably with the commode door closed, the floor was in darkness. The window had been boarded up.

  The man had stumbled over the body that morning, panicked, started to run downstairs, then, remembering that they had had a phone installed only that week, he had reversed himself and gone back upstairs. It was then that he saw the cat, stiffer by far than the human victim.

  The immigrant’s shoes had been sent to the laboratory. It was a question of whether a discrepancy might show up in his story, that he might have been on the death site at different hours, this to be possibly determined by a variance in the coagulation of the blood stains on his shoes. Marks could plainly hear the baby crying, one
flight up. Did Grossman make no sound when attacked? Nor the cat, that the family should sleep through such violence? He sidled by the technicians and went up to try his luck with Mrs. Ruggio despite the inadequacy of his Italian.

  A sturdy girl finally opened the door to him. The baby lay squalling on the couch where she had put it down, needing both hands to manage the door. There was fear in her eyes and the wariness of body had suggested a readiness to put herself between him and the child, and yet she did not pick it up. Her hand fumbled at the top buttons of her blouse which was open. He felt something go out of his mind as the child’s crying persisted and the woman did nothing about it.

  “Take him up!” Marks said, making the gesture to reinforce the words. The infant wore only diapers.

  “Police?” the woman asked, still rooted.

  “Yes! Si!” He pulled out his identification and showed her the photograph.

  She looked at it and made sure. Then she picked the child up who immediately groped, hand and mouth, for a breast. She went to a table where a fresh supply of diapers was laid out, and arranged one to conceal the breast and much of the baby’s head.

  What interested Marks the most was that while she was afraid, it apparently was not of the police.

  Marks said “Please” when she returned, and motioned toward the rocker near the window. He stood by the window himself and looked out most of the time. The baby made more noise sucking than Marks would have thought possible. Inadvertently he glanced toward the mother.

  “Pig,” she said. Then hastily: “Him, him. Not you.”

  That much of the modern American idiom she had picked up. “Him and me,” Marks said, with a sigh. Across the way was a leathergoods factory, but there was no one at the benches. He recalled that it was closed for vacation. He turned back to the room. It was bare and clean. Shallow roots. And no wonder, if this was the best America had to offer. He could see through to the kitchen and the old-fashioned tub. On the living room table was one of Grossman’s statuettes—of a sorrowing male saint. All Grossman’s statues and icons were made in Italy. There was a candle burning before this one, the wax scented. The sweet smell was pervasive.

  “How long are you in America?”

  “One year.”

  “In this apartment?”

  “Nice,” she said, so that he let it go without knowing whether or not she had understood him. There was a pillow at his feet. Like most of the ghetto women, she was a street watcher. He leaned out the window: much of the street was obscured from that vantage by the green, white, and red streamers. Beneath him he saw the laboratory truck pull away. A block away was the Bowery, and on the other side, what most people had in mind when they spoke of the Lower East Side, one of the most famous Jewish ghettos in the world. Why did Grossman settle on Hester Street, west of the Bowery?

  Mrs. Ruggio was buttoning her blouse when Marks pulled back into the room. The child was finishing off on his own thumb.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Francesco.” She turned and pointed to the statue.

  “St. Francis?”

  “Si.” She smiled.

  Marks strode across the room, picked up the statuette—not roughly, but there was no gentle way to make this move—tumbled it back and forth, and sounded it with a tap of his fingernail. His main purpose was to get a reaction out of the woman, to perhaps touch that nerve end of fear again. She watched him without a change in expression: not surprise, not anger, not fear. Which was in itself unnatural. He put the saint back in his place and returned to her side. He harkened back to her original response on seeing him in the doorway. “What are you afraid of, Mrs. Ruggio?”

  “Afraid?” she repeated.

  She knew damn well what he meant. Marks drew his hand back as though he were going to strike her. She pulled away, turning her face from him. He waited. When she looked at him again, he said. “That’s afraid,” he said and pointed to her. He repeated his question, with one alteration: “Who are you afraid of?”

  “America,” she said, and looked him in the eye.

  He had no choice but to take it for an answer.

  On his way downstairs he stopped in on the team working over Grossman’s apartment. Nothing in the way of personal papers had shown up on the premises, not a bankbook, lease or mortgage to the building, no lading bills on the merchandise, nothing. “There’s got to be a bank deposit box somewhere, boss,” one of the men said.

  “Find it and get us a court order,” Marks said.

  Tomasino was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. “Dave, here’s something interesting: Allioto, the delicatessen owner? He says that when Miss Borghese came in there last night she had a man with her. Now why wouldn’t she’ve mentioned him to us?”

  “Let’s find out. What else have we got to do?”

  Tomasino understood the shortness, the impatience of Marks, of indeed any officer in charge of a homicide investigation that seemed likely to depend more on technical than human evidence, and most cases did.

  “I thought it might be you,” Julie said through an inch or so of doorway. She removed the latch chain and allowed the two detectives to enter.

  A man stood at the window, his back to them. Marks was aware of him, but the first thing he actually saw on entering the room—his eyes could not escape it—was the religious picture. It hung on the wall directly opposite the door. Marks wished Regan was with them. A blue-robed madonna was pictured floating, he presumed heavenwards, on a cushion of cloud. The print had been mounted on cardboard, with the words WOMEN’S LIB lettered in red underneath.

  Julie called out quite unnecessarily, “Sorry, Mike, but they’re here in person.”

  The man remained at the window.

  Marks said, “Any particular reason you didn’t mention your companion to us, Miss Borghese?”

  “He did not go into Mr. Grossman’s with me.”

  The man joined them in his own good time. Julie introduced him. “This is Michael Phillips, Lieutenant Marks, and—I’m sorry, I don’t remember …”

  “Pasquale Tomasino, Detective First Grade,” Tomasino clipped the words.

  Phillips did not offer to shake hands, nor did the detectives. He was good-looking in a weak sort of way; a beardless face with very smooth skin made it hard to guess his age. There was something … off about him, Marks felt; something institutional; the idea of prison went through his mind. Phillips gave Julie’s address as his also, and added: “Temporarily.”

  “Do you have a permanent address, Mr. Phillips?”

  “3897 Granada Vista, Los Angeles.”

  “Occupation?”

  “Sometimes I edit film.”

  “And other times you don’t,” Marks said.

  “You’re right, lieutenant.” There was a suggestion of martyrdom in the quiet way he said it, something that made Marks feel like a bully. He turned the questioning over to Tomasino who had his notebook in hand.

  While he listened, Marks appraised Julie by the house she kept. It was very neat, which was fortunate, considering the number of objects in the one room and kitchen apartment. It confirmed the background he had suspected: a loom stood in the corner like an attic ghost. Alongside it, a cased guitar; there was a microscope in a plastic hood on top of the bookcase, and the bookcase itself was stacked with expensive art and film books too large to shelve upright. The paperbacks included Paul Goodman, Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver, and on the end, where he glowered from the jacket like a child determined not to grow up, Norman Mailer. On the table were several public library books—politics of the left, women’s rights, Che Guevera … Julie would have parents of means who had indulged her shifting interests—up to the point of political activism. The detective wondered if Phillips belonged in that set-up, if possibly he was on the run.

  Phillips himself responded carefully to Tomasino’s question as to whether he would recognize any of the four or five people who passed while he waited outside Grossman’s for Julie. “I might, but I don’t
think it would be useful.”

  “Why not?”

  “A good lawyer could take apart such identification. The street isn’t well lighted.”

  “You’re jumping the gun on us, Mr. Phillips,” Marks said over his shoulder. “Before we can go to trial we need a charge, and before we can make a charge we need a suspect. It might be one of those people.”

  “It is possible I could make tentative identification of one or two persons.”

  Marks kept wandering around the room: he saw no evidence of this man’s residence with Julie. He had no warrant to search, and no reason in terms of the homicide. Yet he was curious. Why, if Phillips had any possible reason for avoiding the authorities, did he admit to seeing anyone outside the shop at all?

  Tomasino asked for descriptions.

  “One was a rather plump young man—I think he was young. In any case, he walked with a rolling gait like a sailor’s.”

  “What do you see, lieutenant?” Julie asked. She had been watching Marks with a look of amused detachment.

  “Not much I didn’t expect to see, except for one thing, Miss.”

  “Yes?”

  “Your partner’s gear.” He nodded toward Phillips.

  “Have you really looked?” she said, meeting his eyes dead on.

  Marks spun around on his heel. “As soon as you’re ready, Tommy.”

  6

  ANGIE PRAYED THAT ALICE would not come out until he could get away. He stripped two of the bills from the money folded in his pocket and stuffed them into the bottom of the shopping bag. Then he opened the door to the Ladies Room without looking inside and threw the bag through the doorway. Somebody screamed, but Angie bolted from the waiting room into the concourse and pushed into a stream of people. He let it carry him toward the street. His body oozed a cold sweat and he could smell its taint of sickness.

  “Angeeeee!” Alice’s voice filled the concourse. He did not look back. He kept his head down and stayed to the middle of the crowd. He didn’t know when Alice stopped screaming his name; the noise in his own head throbbed louder. He tried not to push and he did not look around. He hoped she would look in the bag soon. He didn’t even know why he had run away from her, except that alone, he could run faster. But what he needed was someone to tell, someone to help him figure out … What he needed was to get rid of the coat which was making him sweat so much. What he needed was to wake up and find out it was all a nightmare.