Shotgun (87th Precinct)

by Ed McBain

  “Were you living with him or weren’t you?” Carella asked.

  “We had separate apartments,” Mandy said.

  “Where’s your apartment, Miss Pope?”

  “Oh, please call me Mandy.”

  Kling cleared his throat. “Where’s your apartment?” he repeated.

  “Mandy,” she said, as though teaching a difficult word to a small child.

  “Mandy,” Kling said, and then cleared his throat again.

  “My apartment is on Randall and Fifth,” she said. Her voice was as delicate as her beauty, she spoke clearly but softly, looking up at the detectives, the smile touching her mouth, behaving as though she were enjoying polite cocktail conversation in the presence of three charming and attentive men at an afternoon party.

  “Now, Mandy,” Carella said, “when’s the last time you saw Damascus?”

  “Last week,” she said.

  “When last week?” Brown asked.

  “Last Friday night.”

  “Where’d you see him?”

  “I picked him up at The Cozy Corners. That’s a nightclub. He works there. He’s a bouncer there.”

  “What time’d you pick him up?”

  “Closing time. Two o’clock.”

  “Where’d you go from there?”

  “To his apartment.”

  “How long did you stay there?”

  “In his apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “An hour or so.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Well, you know,” Mandy said, and again lowered her eyes.

  “And then what?” Kling asked.

  “I drove him uptown.”

  “Where uptown?”

  “To South Engels.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s where he wanted to go.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “Yes. He said there was a poker game he’d promised to go to.”

  “So you drove him there.”

  “Yes.”

  “First you went to his apartment to make love, and then you drove him uptown to his poker game.”

  “Yes.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Oh, I don’t know exactly. It must have been sometime between three and four in the morning.”

  “And that was the last time you saw him?”

  “Yes. When he got out of the car.”

  “Have you seen him since?”

  “No.”

  “Talked to him?”

  “No.”

  “He hasn’t called you?”

  “No, he hasn’t.”

  “Have you called him?”

  “He hasn’t got a phone.” Mandy paused. “Well, I did call the club, but they said he hasn’t been to work all week. So I thought I’d stop by the apartment this afternoon to see if anything was wrong.”

  “Ever hear him mention some people named Leyden?”

  “Layton? No.”

  “Leyden. L-E-Y-D-E-N.”

  “No, never.”

  “Did he have anything with him when you left the apartment?”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, you tell us.”

  “Yes, but I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Was he carrying a gun?”

  “I don’t think so. But I know he has a gun. A little pistol.”

  “This would have been a big gun, Miss Pope—”

  “Mandy.”

  “…Mandy. You couldn’t have missed it.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “Miss Pope, was he carrying a shotgun?”

  “A shotgun? No. Of course not. Why would he—?”

  “Do you know what a shotgun looks like?”

  “Well, no, but…well, yes, it’s like a rifle, isn’t it?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “No, I would have noticed something like that.”

  “Was he carrying any sort of a large—”

  “No.”

  “…anything that could have been a shotgun wrapped up, or in a case—”

  “No, he wasn’t carrying anything.”

  “Mmm,” Carella said.

  “Why would he take a gun to a poker game?” Mandy asked, and looked up at the cops.

  “Maybe he wasn’t going to a poker game, Miss Pope.”

  “Mandy.”

  “Maybe he was going uptown to kill some people.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Some people named Rose and Andrew Leyden.”

  “No,” Mandy said again.

  “You’re sure you haven’t seen him since last Friday night?”

  “Yes. And that’s not like Wally, believe me. He’ll usually call me three, four times a week.”

  “But this week he hasn’t called you at all?”

  “Not once.”

  “Did he mention anything about going out of town?”

  “Where would he go?”

  “You tell us.”

  “No place. He has a job here. Why would he leave town?”

  “If he killed some people, he might have decided it was best to leave town.”

  “Well, I’m sure he didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Did you ever go out of town with him?”

  “No.”

  “Know if he has any relatives outside the city?”

  “I don’t know. He never mentioned any.”

  “Miss Pope, if you—”

  “Mandy.”

  “…hear from Damascus, I want you to call this squadroom at once. I’m warning you now that he’s suspected of having committed multiple homicide, and if you know of his whereabouts now—”

  “I don’t.”

  “…or learn of them at any time in the future, and withhold this information from the police, you would then be considered an accessory.”

  “Oh, I’m sure Wally hasn’t killed anyone,” Mandy said.

  “An accessory as described in Section 2 of the Penal Law, Miss Pope…Mandy…‘is a person who, after the commission of a felony, harbors, conceals, or aids the offender, with intent that he may avoid or escape from arrest, trial, conviction, or punishment, having knowledge or reasonable ground to believe that such offender is liable to arrest.’ Do you understand that?”

  “Yes, I do. But Wally—”

  “We’ve just told you that if we find him we’re going to arrest him, so you now have knowledge of that fact,” Brown said, and paused. “Do you know where he is?”

  “No, I’m sorry. I don’t.”

  “Will you call us if you hear from him?”

  “Yes, of course I will. But you’re really mistaken. Wally couldn’t have killed anyone.”

  “All right, Miss Pope, you’re free to go now, Mandy,” Carella said.

  “Show her out, somebody,” Kling said.

  Brown showed her out.

  Everybody likes to spend Saturday in a different way.

  Meyer and Hawes went to a poetry reading, Carella got hit on the head, and Bert Kling got beat up.

  It was a nice Saturday.

  The poetry reading was scheduled to start at 11:00 A.M. in the YMCA on Butler Street, but it did not actually get underway until 11:15, at which time a portly young man wearing muttonchop whiskers and a brown tweed suit stepped through the curtains and told the assembled crowd—some fifty people in all—that this was to be, as they all knew, a memorial service for Marguerite Ryder, who had been buried yesterday. The portly young man then went on to say that ten of Margie’s closest friends and fellow poets had written elegies for her, and that they would be read by their authors this morning accompanied by the guitarist, Luis-Josafat Garzon. The portly young man then introduced Garzon, a sallow-faced gentleman wear
ing a dark-gray suit. Garzon solemnly sat on a black stool stage left, and the curtains opened, and the first poet stepped forward and began reading his tribute to the dead woman.

  There was a curious mixture of mourning and celebration in that auditorium, an air of grief commingled with the excitement one might expect at a Broadway opening. The first poet read his work with dramatic fervor, as though hoping David Merrick was sitting in the audience with an offer to do a one-man show. In his poem, he compared Margie Ryder to a sparrow innocently striking an unexpected obstacle that had broken her body and snuffed out her life, “to fly no more,” he intoned, “to fly no more, except in boundless dreams, eternal dreams.” He lowered his manuscript, his head, and his eyes. There was a brief silence, and Meyer fully expected everyone to begin applauding, thankful when they had the good grace not to. The second poet had titled his poem “Voice,” and in it he told of an incredibly lovely voice that had been stilled.

  “Shout,” he shouted, “scream against this indecency,

  “Raise your voice to raise the voice

  “Robbed by the obscene steel of death!

  “For oh, there was beauty here,

  “There was depth and beauty enough

  “To fill a garden,

  “A forest,

  “A world.

  “Oh, Marge, we cry,

  “We cry out!

  “Our voices rise in tumultuous grievance!

  “Hopefully you will hear and know, hear and know,

  “Oh Marge.”

  There was another silence. Hawes wanted to blow his nose, but was afraid to do so. Luis-Josafat Garzon played a brief, lugubrious guitar passage to cover the tardy entrance of the third poet, a tall gaunt young man wearing a beard and sunglasses. His poem, Hawes felt, was a trifle derivative, but the audience listened respectfully nonetheless, and there was even the sound of tears throughout the reading.

  “It was only a week or so ago,

  “As I sat sipping my cider,

  “That a woman was killed whom you may know,

  “By the name of Marguerite Ryder.

  “And this woman she lived with no other thought

  “Than to give to the humans beside her.”

  Hawes looked at Meyer, and Meyer looked at Hawes, and the gaunt, bearded, sunglassed poet began reading the second stanza.

  “She was a child, yes only a child,

  “In a tenement garden of dreams,

  “And the love that she gave, was a love more than love,

  “But it ended in futile screams.

  “Someone tore her apart, someone stepped on her heart,

  “Someone viciously opened her seams.”

  The reading continued in a similar vein for the remainder of the morning. Unlike the assorted poets who read their wares, the audience seemed composed of people who could hardly be classed as hippies. A spot check of the crowd turned up neighborhood faces familiar to Hawes and Meyer alike; merchants, housewives, professional men, even a patrolman from their own precinct, sitting attentively in his off-duty clothes. The idea, of course, was not to glom the audience, but rather to take a bead on “ten of Margie’s closest friends,” any of whom might have done the dear girl in.

  Discounting the mystery man who had met Margie in Perry’s Bar & Grille on DeBeck Avenue, and who had later returned in desperate need of her name, discounting him as a prime suspect because there were too many ifs involved (if he had finally remembered her name, and if he had gone to her apartment, and if she had let him in at that hour of the morning), there remained the likelihood that the person who had stabbed Margie was indeed one of her good friends, someone who could have been with her in her apartment at four or later in the morning. So Meyer and Hawes sat through two hours and ten minutes of bad poetry (including some lines attributed to Marguerite Ryder herself) while pretending they were at a police lineup instead, an entertainment now defunct but not missed in the slightest by either of the men.

  The parade of poets was colorful but hardly instructive. Meyer and Hawes went backstage after the reading to talk to the ten budding versifiers, as well as to the guitarist Garzon. They learned to their surprise that there had been a party at Garzon’s house on the night Margie was murdered, with “mos’ of the kids” (as Garzon put it) having been in attendance.

  “Was Margie Ryder there?” Hawes asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Garzon said.

  “What time did she leave?”

  “She only stay a shor’ while.”

  “How long?”

  “She arrive abou’ ten o’clock, and she leave it mus’ have been close to mi’night.”

  “Alone?”

  “Perdone?”

  “Did she leave the party alone?”

  “Ah, sí, sí. Solo. Alone.”

  “Was she with anyone in particular while she was there?”

  “No, she drift aroun’, comprende? It was like a big party, you know? So she stop here, she stop there, she drink, she laugh, she was muy sociable, Margie, you know? Everybody like her.”

  Which did not explain why anybody would want to kill her.

  Meyer and Hawes thanked everybody and went out into the street to breathe some fresh November prose.

  Steve Carella was supposed to take down the screens, but he decided to visit the Leyden apartment instead, which is how he happened to get hit on the head. Of course, he might have got hit on the head while taking down the screens too, but in police work there is a clear line between possibility and probability, and chances were a good sixty-to-one that he would not have been nursing a bump on his noggin that night if he had taken care of his household duties that afternoon, instead of running into the city to snoop around an empty apartment.

  The reason he went back to the apartment was not, as Teddy had surmised, to get out of taking down the screens. (True, he did not enjoy taking down the screens, but neither did he enjoy putting them up, and he enjoyed getting hit on the head perhaps even less than either.) He had discovered through years of police work that very often you can’t see the forest for the trees, which is a fresh and imaginative way of saying that sometimes you have to step back for a long view, or closer for a tight view, in order to regain your perspective on a case.

  In Carella’s thinking, a murder invariably served as the impetus that set in action a proscribed police routine. Often, in slogging through reports typed in triplicate, in deciphering the medical gobbledygook on an autopsy return, in tailing a suspect or interrogating a witness, in poring over questioned documents or ballistics data, it was completely possible to forget exactly why you were doing all these things, forget that it was indeed a corpse that had prompted this machinery into motion. When that happened, he found it advisable to return to the scene, and imagine for himself the details of what might have happened during the actual commission of the crime.

  Also, he hated taking down screens.

  The elevator sped him to the third floor. It was a self-service elevator, and the killer could have used it with immunity at any hour of the day or night—but had he? Would he have risked being seen by, say, a pair of tenants returning home from a late party? Or would he have more realistically used the stairway that opened directly onto the apartment’s service entrance? After all, the kitchen door had been found open by Novello, the milkman. Wasn’t it likely that the killer had entered and left by the same door? Standing in the corridor, Carella looked at the closed front door to Mrs. Leibowitz’s apartment, heard behind it the singing of her colored maid, and then walked down the hall to the Pimm apartment. He listened at the door. The apartment within was still.

  He went back up the hallway again to the Leyden apartment, decided to enter instead by the service entrance, and walked to the small cul-de-sac at the end of the corridor. The garbage cans for all three apartments were stacked on the small landing there. The back doors t
o the Leibowitz and Pimm apartments were on one side of the landing, the back door to the Leyden apartment opposite them. Without trying to figure out what was obviously a complicated architectural scheme, Carella reached into his side pocket for the key he had signed out downtown at the Office of the Clerk yesterday (premeditation, Teddy would claim, you knew you weren’t going to take down those screens today) and approached the Leydens’ kitchen door. He had a little trouble turning the key in the lock (should be using my goddamn skeleton, he thought) but finally managed to twist it and open the door. He had a bit more trouble extricating the key, yanked it loose at last, put it back into his side pocket, and closed the door behind him.

  The apartment was silent.

  This is where the killer must have stood, he thought. He must have entered through this door, and hesitated for a moment in the kitchen, trying to determine where his victims were. Rose Leyden had doubtless heard something and come into the living room to investigate, and that was when he’d fired the two shots that had taken off her face.

  Carella moved into the living room.

  The rug was still stained, the blood having dried to a muddy brown color. He looked down at the huge smear where Rose Leyden’s head had rested, and then glanced toward the bedroom. Andrew Leyden had probably been asleep, exhausted after his long trip home, shocked into wakefulness by the two shots that had killed his wife. He had most likely jumped out of bed, perhaps yelling his wife’s name (was that the shouting one of the tenants had reported hearing?) and started for the living room only to be met by the killer in the bedroom doorway.

  Carella nodded, and walked across the room.

  The killer probably stopped right here, he thought, firing into Leyden’s face, you have to hate somebody a hell of a lot to fire a shotgun at point-blank range into his face. Twice. Carella took a step into the bedroom. He saw that the top drawer of the dresser was open, and he recalled instantly that it had not been open on the morning after the murders, and he wondered whether the lab boys had left it that way, and he was starting toward the dresser to investigate when somebody came from behind the door and hit him on the head.

  He thought as he fell toward the bedroom floor that you can get stupid if people hit you on the head often enough and then, stupidly, he lost consciousness.