by Ed McBain
“He’s in and out, on and off. I don’t ask nobody nothing long as they pay their rent.”
“Does he pay his rent?”
“The owner of the building never said nothing about him, so I guess he pays his rent. I’m just the super here.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
“I don’t recall.”
“Was it recently?”
“I don’t recall.”
“Would it have been in September sometime?”
“I told you I don’t recall.”
“Mr. Yancy, we’d hate to have to bother all the people on this floor, just to find out when Damascus was here last.”
“That’s your job, ain’t it?” Yancy said, and paused. “Bothering people?”
“Our job right now,” Kling said flatly, “is trying to locate the suspect in a murder case. That’s our job.”
“Who got killed?” Yancy asked.
“Why should that matter to you?” Carella said.
“It don’t,” Yancy answered, and shrugged.
“Try to remember when you saw Damascus last, will you?”
“After the summer sometime.”
“Before Labor Day?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“At the beginning of September, then?”
“I guess so.”
“Have you seen him since?”
“I ain’t even sure I seen him then.”
“Did you see him at all this month?”
“No.”
“Not at any time during the month of October, is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“But you did see him in September, and you think it was sometime before Labor Day.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Was he alone?”
“There was a woman with him.”
“Do you know who she was?”
“No. He always has a different woman with him.”
“Had you ever seen this one before?”
“Once or twice.”
“But you don’t know her name.”
“No.”
“What’d she look like?”
“I don’t recall.”
“Was she white or black?”
“White,” Yancy said.
“What color hair?”
“Red.”
“Eyes?”
“I don’t recall.”
“Was she pretty?”
“For a white woman,” Yancy said.
“How old would you say she was?”
“Thirty, something like that.”
“Is she from the neighborhood?”
“I don’t think so. Only time I ever seen her was when Damascus brought her around.”
“Which was often, you said.”
“Well, a few times, anyway.”
“How old is Damascus?”
“In his forties,” Yancy said.
“What does he look like?”
“Oh, he’s about your height, six feet or so, dark hair and blue eyes, nice-looking fellow.”
“You getting this, Bert?” Carella asked.
“Mm-huh,” Kling said, without looking up from his pad.
“Is he white?” Carella asked.
“He’s white,” Yancy said.
“What kind of complexion?”
“I told you. White.”
“Pale, dark, fair, sallow?”
“Fair, I guess.”
“How is he built?”
“About like your partner here.”
“Does he have a mustache or a beard?”
“No.”
“Any scars?”
“No scars.”
“Tattoos?”
“No tattoos.”
“Any sort of distinctive mark?”
“No sort of marks,” Yancy said.
“Is he deformed in any way?”
“You mean does he have a clubfoot?” Yancy asked.
“That’s not what I meant, sir,” Carella said, refusing to flinch.
“No, he isn’t deformed,” Yancy said.
“What about his voice? What kind of voice does he have?”
“I don’t know.”
“Gruff, soft, refined, effeminate?”
“He’s not a fairy.”
“Does he lisp or stutter?”
“No, he talks straight out. Soft, I guess you would say. And fast. He talks very fast.”
“Bert?” Carella said. “Anything else?”
“Jewelry.”
“Does he habitually wear rings or other jewelry?” Carella asked.
“He’s got a ring with his initial on it,” Yancy said.
“Which initial? W or D?”
“W.”
“Does he wear it on his right hand or his left?”
“His right, I think.”
“Any other jewelry?”
“An ID bracelet, I think.”
“Gold or silver?”
“Silver.”
“With his name on it?”
“I never saw it close up,” Yancy said.
“Would you know whether or not Damascus is employed?”
“I don’t know. I’m just the super here.”
“You’re doing very well, Mr. Yancy,” Carella said.
“You’ve given us an excellent description so far,” Kling said.
Yancy looked at them suspiciously. He was used to all sorts of bullshit from Whitey, and he nodded skeptically now, letting the detectives know he wasn’t about to be that easily flattered.
“I still got to get my garbage cans off the sidewalk,” he said flatly.
“We’ll straighten out any problems with the cop on the beat,” Carella promised.
“Sure. You’ll pay the fine, too, I suppose.”
“There won’t be any fine, Mr. Yancy. Try to remember whether or not Damascus leaves the house and returns at any regularly set times, would you?”
“When he’s here, do you mean?”
“Yes.”
“If he’s got a job, it must be nights,” Yancy said. “Only time I ever seen him around was during the day.”
“He leaves the apartment at night?”
“I guess so.”
“What time?”
“Eight, nine o’clock, something like that.”
“But you wouldn’t know where he goes?”
“No.”
“Thank you, Mr. Yancy.”
“That it?”
“That’s it, thank you.”
They watched as he limped toward the doorway. At the door, he turned and said, “Ain’t nothing wrong with my eyes.”
“What?” Carella said.
“The description,” Yancy answered, and went out.
Carella went to the dresser. In the top drawer, in a box containing tie clasps and cuff links, he found an uncanceled check made out to Walter Damascus for $110.79. The check was drawn to the account of The Cozy Corners and signed by someone named Daniel Cudahy.
“Something?” Kling asked.
“I think so,” Carella answered.
The Cozy Corners was a bar-cum-nightclub on Dover Plains Avenue in Riverhead. The owner’s name was Daniel Cudahy, and when Carella and Kling got there at 5:00 in the afternoon, he was eating his dinner.
“In this crazy racket,” he said, “you got to eat when you get a chance. It starts becoming a madhouse around here in a little while.”
Cudahy was a diminutive man with a balding head and a broken nose. There was a knife scar on his right temple, and his right eye twitched spasmodically as though in memory of how close the knife had come to gouging it. He sat at a table near t
he bar, eating a minute steak and French fries, sipping a bottle of Heineken’s beer. The decor of the place was cozy-cute, with checkerboard tablecloths and wood paneling and phony electric candlesticks on each table. A small dance floor was at one end of the room, a piano, a set of drums, and three music stands behind it. The name of the band performing—according to what was lettered on the bass drum—was KEN MURPHY’S MARAUDERS. The detectives sat at Cudahy’s invitation and watched him demolish the steak. Between mouthfuls, he said, “Sure, I know Wally. Where the hell is that bum?”
“He works for you, does he?”
“He’s my bouncer,” Cudahy said.
“Does he work full-time?”
“Every night except Sunday. We’re closed Sunday.”
“When’d you see him last, Mr. Cudahy?”
“Friday night. He was supposed to come in Saturday night, and never showed. I’m expecting him tonight, but who the hell knows?”
“Did he call in?”
“Nope.”
“Did you call him?”
“He hasn’t got a phone.”
“No place you can reach him?”
“He lives in Isola someplace, some crumby neighborhood. I wouldn’t go down there personally if you gave me a million dollars.”
“He lives on South Second, isn’t that right?”
“Yeah, somewhere down there. All full of spies and niggers,” Cudahy said. “I wouldn’t go down there with the National Guard.”
“And he has no phone?”
“No phone.”
“How come?”
“What do you mean, how come?”
“Almost everybody has a phone.”
“Well, he’s hardly ever there, what the hell does he need a phone for?”
“If he’s not there, where is he?” Kling asked.
“Who knows? He works for me, that’s all. His private life is his own business. I pay him seventy-five bucks a week, and he throws out anybody causing a disturbance. That’s our agreement. He can live wherever the hell he wants, in the park if he wants, on a park bench, it don’t matter to me.”
“Is he married, would you know?”
“If he is, he’s sure got it going for him six ways.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he’s always got broads hanging on him. He’s a real handsome guy, you know. I think he wanted to be an actor onetime.”
“Has he ever mentioned a wife to you?”
“Naw, I think he’s single, actually. A guy who looks like he does, why would he want to get married?”
“He was here Friday night, you said?”
“Yeah.”
“From when to when?”
“Got here at nine, left at closing time.”
“Which was when?”
“Two o’clock. We’re open till one every weekday night except Friday. Friday it’s two, Saturday it’s three, and Sunday we’re closed. That’s it.”
“So he left here at two.”
“That’s right. I paid him and he took off.”
“Is this the check you gave him?” Carella asked, and took the check from his wallet.
“That’s it. I pay every two weeks. That’s for two weeks’ salary less social security, disability, and federal and state withholding. It comes to one hundred ten dollars and seventy-nine cents.”
“Which means he’s been to that apartment sometime between Friday night and today,” Kling said.
“Huh?” Cudahy asked.
“We’re just thinking out loud,” Carella said.
“Oh,” Cudahy said, and poured more beer from the bottle into his glass. “You guys want a drink or something?”
“No, thanks,” Kling said.
“Too early for you?”
“We’re not allowed,” Carella said.
“Yeah, sure. I wish I had a nickel for every cop who ain’t allowed to drink on duty who comes in here and knocks off three shots in a row. Especially in the wintertime.”
“Well,” Carella said, and shrugged.
“What do you want Wally for? Did he do something?”
“Maybe.”
“Will you let us know if he comes in?” Kling said.
“Sure. What’d he do?”
“He might have killed a few people.”
Cudahy whistled softly and then swallowed some beer.
“Ever see him with a gun?” Kling asked.
“Nope.”
“Didn’t wear one on the job, huh?”
“Nope.”
“We’re thinking of an Iver Johnson .22,” Carella said.
“I wouldn’t know an Iver Johnson .22 from a 1937 Packard,” Cudahy said, and grinned. “Is that what he killed somebody with?”
“No,” Carella said, and frowned.
“When’s he supposed to have done it?” Cudahy asked.
“Friday night sometime.”
“After he left here?”
“Looks like it.”
“You got the wrong man,” Cudahy said flatly.
“What makes you think so?”
“Unless she was in it with him.”
“Who?”
“The broad.”
“What broad?”
“He left here Friday night with some broad.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know her name. I seen her around here before, though. She comes pick him up every now and then. She drives a big yellow Buick.”
“What does she look like?”
“A good-looking tomato,” Cudahy said. “Red hair, green eyes, everything in the right places.”
“You say she left here with him Friday night?”
“Yeah.”
“At two in the morning?”
“Yep.”
“Did she have the Buick with her?”
“Yeah, she’s always got that submarine with her. I think she goes to bed with that goddamn submarine.”
“Did Damascus say where they were going?”
“Where would you go with a gorgeous redhead at two o’clock in the morning?” Cudahy asked.
The drive downtown to South Second took exactly forty-two minutes. They made the drive carefully, observing all the speed limits, and then subtracted ten minutes from the total in allowance for what would have been lighter traffic at two o’clock in the morning. This meant that it would have taken Damascus and the redheaded girl approximately a half hour to get from The Cozy Corners in Riverhead to the apartment on South Second Street. They would have arrived there if that’s where they’d been headed, at about 2:30. The possibility existed, of course, that they had gone instead to the girl’s apartment. Or perhaps they had gone directly to the Leyden apartment, where Damascus had pumped four shots into Rose and Andrew—while the girl watched? It sounded incredible, but Carella and Kling were both experienced cops who knew that nothing was incredible where murder was concerned.
Henry Yancy was nowhere in sight. They climbed the steps to the third floor and knocked on the door to apartment 33.
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice called.
“Police,” Carella said.
“Oh, shit,” the woman answered.
They waited. They heard footsteps approaching the door, heard a chain being removed from its slotted track, heard the lock being turned. The door opened. The woman was perhaps forty years old, her hair up in curlers and covered with a kerchief. She was wearing a blue apron, and holding a wooden spoon in her hand.
“What is it?” she asked. “I’m making supper.”
Carella flashed the tin and said, “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“What about? Nobody in this house done nothing.”
“Were you in your apartment on Friday night?”
“We w
ere in all night Friday, my husband and me both. If it’s something happened someplace Friday night, we had nothing to do with it.”
“Were you awake at two-thirty?”
“No.”
“Did you hear anyone coming in across the hall at that time?”
“I told you we were asleep.”
“You didn’t hear anything in the hall?” Kling asked.
“Do you hear things when you’re sleeping?” the woman asked.
“Thank you,” Kling said, and the woman slammed the door.
“I keep wondering why he went out to buy a shotgun when he had a perfectly good .22 in his closet,” Carella said.
“I keep wondering a lot of things,” Kling said. “Let’s hit this other apartment, huh?”
The woman in apartment 32 told them she had gone to an American Legion affair on Friday night. She and her husband had not come home until 3:30 in the morning. She said she’d heard nothing unusual in the apartment next door.
“Did you hear anything at all?” Carella asked.
“No,” she said. “Nothing.”
“Can you usually hear what goes on in there?”
“Well,” she said, “the walls are very thin, you know.”
“Do you think anyone was in there?”
“No. Why, what is it? Was there a burglary? There’s been a lot of burglaries in this building lately.”
“No, not a burglary,” Kling said. “We’re trying to find out whether Walter Damascus was in his apartment when you got home Friday night.”
“Well, how could he be?” the woman said.
“What do you mean?”
“He was downstairs.”
“Doing what?” Carella asked immediately.
“Getting into a yellow automobile,” the woman said.
So they drove uptown again—this was a day for driving, all right—and they discovered that it took them twenty minutes to get from South Second to the Leyden apartment on South Engels Street, which (again deducting ten minutes for lighter early-morning traffic) meant that Damascus could have left his own apartment at 3:30, after approximately an hour of dalliance with the unidentified redhead, to arrive at the Leyden apartment by 3:40. Add five minutes for taking the elevator or climbing the steps to the tenth floor, and you had an estimated time of 3:45 A.M. for the murders. Four shotgun blasts in the dead of night, and nobody reporting them to the police.
Some questions obviously had to be asked.
It was close to 7:30; both men were exhausted. They agreed between them that the questions could wait until morning, and Carella called the squadroom to say they were signing off. Detective Meyer Meyer, who was catching, said, “Short day today?”—which was what he usually said no matter what time anyone called in to check out.
