Time Off for Murder

by Zelda Popkin

  "You were alone with Rockey, then?"

  "Yes." Eugene Vigo's tone was growing irritable.

  "What time did Nardello arrive?"

  "It'll be hard to say exactly. He arrived after dinner. We always finish our dinner at eight. That would make it shortly after eight."

  "How long did he stay?"

  "Midnight. Or later."

  "You two didn't leave the apartment at all?"

  "We didn't."

  The Inspector tapped his desk with his pencil. He took a long breath, said sternly: "Suppose I were to tell you that Nardello was identified going up the steps of a house on Seventy-first Street that evening."

  The lawyer smiled into the Inspector's face. "I'd say it must be an error," he answered suavely.

  "You would, would you? Did you know that Nardello had an apartment on Seventy-first Street? Did you ever hear about a man named McCabe? Or a police officer named MacKinoy?" The Inspector shot the questions, one after the other.

  Eugene Vigo answered them all with a calm mono-syllable. "No."

  "You didn't, hey? You were Rockey's lawyer, but you didn't know he had a hang-out on Seventy-first Street?"

  "Inspector." The attorney raised his hand. "I defended Mister Nardello against a charge of which I believed him innocent. I was his counsel. Not his business partner. I knew what he told me of his affairs. Nothing more. And may I remind you that I am not in the witness chair at present. You sent for me, for information. You wished to know where Mister Nardello was on a certain evening. I have told you all I know about his whereabouts." He picked up his hat…. "If there is nothing more - questions - not innuendoes, I shall have to get back to my guests."

  Mary Carner scribbled a few words on a slip of paper. She passed it to the Inspector. He read it quickly, nodded.

  Eugene Vigo's eyes caught the gesture. "You have an attractive assistant," he said.

  "Yeah." The Inspector glared. "Sit down, Counselor. Hold your horses. Something else I want to know. Where were you between one and two o'clock this afternoon?"

  The attorney's eyes became pin-points of anger. His face flamed scarlet. "That's my affair," he snapped.

  "Not any more," the Inspector snapped right back. "It's ours."

  "Am I under arrest? Am I charged with any crime?"

  "Nope," said the Inspector. "Not yet."

  "Not yet? May I ask of what crime you suspect me?" The man's mustache bristled.

  "Nope," the Inspector answered smoothly. "Unless we find somebody that saw you coming out of a certain house on Seventy-first Street."

  "Seventy-first Street?" Puzzlement replaced wrath in the lawyer's eyes. He leaned back in his chair. Then he laughed. "You missed it by twenty blocks, Inspector." He winked. "The lady's name is Marjorie. You don't need telephone numbers, do you? I'm sure you've enough good ones of your own." He reached for his hat again…. "And lunch with a charming lady was never a crime. But don't tell my wife, I beseech you She might not understand. If it becomes necessary, if it becomes absolutely necessary, you may have the lady's name. But not before that. Not before. Good-night. And good luck."

  Before Vigo had reached the door, Johnny Reese had dived to the floor, had picked up a cellophane wrapper and the blue and white band of the attorney's cigar.

  As the door shut, he placed the cigar band on the Inspector's desk, and said: Ramon Allones. A small thin man, who smokes Ramon Allones. You'll be talking to Vigo again."

  The Inspector picked up the phone. He spoke into it: "Get me Captain Walters. Inspector Heinsheimer speaking. I want a good man, detailed to Eugene Vigo. The lawyer…. He's not to let him out of his sight." He turned back to the detectives.

  "Nice piece of business," he said. "Who could know more about Rockey's affairs than his lawyer? Who would MacKinoy be in touch with? The big shot's lawyer. Who would be slick and smart and nervy? A racketeer's mouthpiece. Who could afford Ramon Allones cigars? A guy like Vigo. He's the answer to a detective's prayer. O.K. We're going places…. Tomorrow morning, I'm traveling up to see Rockey. Me myself. Vigo's got to write a letter before he can see his client. Me, I just send my name in to the warden…. I'll beat him to it this time. And you, Reese. You hop out to Staten Island. See if you can find anybody that can give us a line on where to find this Peterson. A witness'll come in handy. Even a near-sighted one. Sure, take Miss Carner. Fresh air'll do her good…. And let's see. We got Vigo - but we ain't forgetting the rest."

  He made rapid notes on his pad…"We got to find that secretary, Struthers. He ain't in the phone book, you say, Reese? We'll try the gas company Monday morning. Has he got kids? School records might help. Or maybe he'll go to the girl's funeral. And I got to get the fellow from Troy and see papa Knight…. Plenty of angles. But we got Vigo spotted for chair number three. That's something."

  Mary said: "How about Flo Gordon? Aren't you going to look for her?"

  The Inspector waved his arm, airily. "What for? Wasn't she in the cooler in November, too? Like Rockey. MacKinoy was loose. Vigo was loose. That Vigo. He's the lad to keep your eye on. Slick bird. Marjorie! He's got to think 'em up better'n that for Gus Heinsheimer!"

  Chapter XI

  From the upper deck of the ferry to Staten Island, the city of New York seemed cut out of cardboard and phantasy. The sparkling olive waters of the Bay lapped at the feet of the incredible towers of lower Manhattan. Wind lashed the Bay to white caps, hurled them behind the soapy wake of the ferry, lifted salt spume, sent it stinging against cheeks and noses. Geometric gulls cut triangles in the sky.

  "Nice looking, ain't it?" Detective Reese observed to the girl beside him at the deck rail.

  Her "yes" had a remote, reluctant sound.

  "What're you looking so glum about?" he demanded.

  "Nothing." Mary Carner tried to smile.

  "Brace up. You look as if you were going to a funeral. That's tomorrow. Today's a nice junket to Staten Island with little Johnny. Don't you like the company?"

  "Of course. It was a little hard in the beginning. Once I got used to it -"

  "You'd rather it was that store dick you walked out on yesterday?"

  Deep pink warmed the firm line of Mary Carner's jaw, but she did not answer.

  "That's it, eh? That's what's eatin' you. You're sorry you walked out on him. Don't let it worry you. Heinsheimer likes you. He'll find you a job. If he can't get you on the force, he'll find you something else. Girls like you don't never need to worry."

  "Change the record. I don't like the tune."

  "O.K., O.K. Say look at the old girl." His arm swung around to the Statue of Liberty, that plump, gauche Victorian matron who guards Manhattan's portal. "She ain't got umph," Johnny said, "but a lot of guys are crazy about her."

  "She's beautiful. It's all beautiful," Mary said. "I'm glad I came."

  "Even with me."

  "Even with you."

  "It'd be nicer up here some night in the summer. Is it a date?"

  "My mother and father did their courting on this ferry - more years ago than I like to remember."

  "Ah gwan, you're just a kid."

  "Thanks for the sleigh ride. Since we're getting personal, might I ask a question?"

  "How old am I?"

  "No. About that." Mary's fingertip touched the scar on his cheek. "Where'd you pick it up?"

  The color of the jagged line deepened. "Oh that," Johnny said carelessly. "On my travels. I'm not bragging, but I got much better ones."

  "Knife?"

  "Yep. Nothing at all, lady, nothing at all. Souvenirs of my Vice Squad days."

  "They had you on that too. " Contempt curdled her words.

  Johnny's whole face turned scarlet, and his answer stumbled out, heavy with apology: "Don't get me wrong, sister. I ain't the kind you think. I know what they say about the Vice Squad - and sometimes it's true but more often it ain't. I never framed a girl. No, sir, not me. Some fellers like the vice detail because it's good pay and you use your personality. Not me. I don't like it, and I
don't care who knows it. But when they put you on it, you got no choice."

  "The majesty of the law - that sends fine young policemen out to trap girls for a crime they couldn't and wouldn't commit if men hadn't made the kind of rotten world this is." Mary's voice was bitter.

  "Take it easy, sister. It's the law. And, if we like the law or if we don't like it, the law's got to be enforced. Now don't get me wrong. I ain't no blue-nose reformer. I ain't never felt I was responsible for nobody's morals but my own. And those poor little tomatoes - say, if you'd ever see the dumps they come from - most of them you couldn't blame 'em. Nobody could. You'd say they was bettering themselves when they get into this. Oh, I know some of them's too dumb to work - and some of them's too lazy, but what kind of work could they get anyway if they wanted to be respectable? Slavin' in a factory or in some woman's kitchen for eight bucks a week? It's that kind of work that drives 'em to it. They want pretty dresses and nice shoes - like the girls in the movies - and why shouldn't they want it? It don't make a girl a bad girl to want a nice dress on her back. As long as she's got somethin' to sell, that somebody wants to buy -"

  "You're a sociologist, Johnny."

  The young detective wagged his head indignantly. "I am not. I'm nothing of the kind. I'm a cop. Nothing else. But there's more'n one guy on the Squad feels the same as I do. What burns me up are those sons-of - excuse me, excuse me - those gorillas that make a business out of these kids. That's how I got this souvenir. One of Rockey Nardello's boys gave it to me. We pulled a raid. He pulled a switchback."

  "What'd you give him?"

  "Me? Nothing much. A thirty-eight in the elbow. Another in the wrist. That's nothing at all to what the judge gave him. Ten years. He was the reception committee up at the big house when his boss got there."

  Behind them a bell jangled; from the ferry's bowels, came the crash and sudden hush of machinery, the swish of boat gliding into slip.

  "We're there," said Johnny. "Hop back in the car."

  Of all the five Boroughs which make up the far-flung metropolis of New York, none is less urban than the Borough of Richmond which goes by the name of Staten Island. Back of the wind-swept cliffs where St. George looks serenely toward the sky-scrapers and the Bay are towns and villages, farms and woodland, unconfined sky and sea and beach, and open fields, with red soil like wounds on the green cheeks of gentle hills.

  A Sunday somnolence lay over houses and lawns. Automobiles were massed before churches. Church-going pedestrians made traffic snarls. It was small town New York.

  Johnny Reese rolled along the Boulevard, swung off into a dirt road that was a wash-board of rain-made gullies. He climbed steeply.

  At the top of a hill, a monstrous gray house stood. Its Doric porch columns had the pretentious classicism of Colonial Virginia; its gray salt box sides, the parsimonious architecture of Vermont; its white cupola belonged to some New England church. But time and decay had given it a special character of its own. It had become a ghost house - the ghost of all old houses, dead and unburied. Rust had streaked its columns; its shutters flapped, creaking, on rusted hinges; broken windows stared like sightless eyes down on the checker-board of a sprawling cemetery and the bleak loneliness of an unpainted shingle bungalow.

  Johnny Reese consulted his little black book. He pulled up his brakes. "We have arrived, Madam." He gestured toward the bungalow. "The Peterson country estate." He clicked off the ignition, held the car door open.

  Wind slashed the detectives' cheeks and ankles.

  "Small wonder," said Mary, "that Peterson was nervous. A place like this would give anyone the jitters." She looked over her shoulder at the scarecrow house on the hilltop. "That standing over you. Think anybody lives there?"

  "We'll find out."

  "Johnny . . ." Miss Carner plucked the young detective's coat lapel. "Phyllis was somewhere for at least two weeks. Could Peterson have used that big house? Or not Peterson? Anybody? Anybody else that was in this? What do you think?"

  Johnny Reese grunted. "I don't think. I go see."

  Behind its picket fence, Nils Peterson's bungalow was a narrow L of unpainted shingles and tarpaper roof, with a brick chimney on the short end of the L. Over the single front window, a dark shade had been drawn. Beyond the house stretched a grape arbor and the brown stubble of a cultivated acre.

  Johnny Reese swung open the gate and went up the walk. Decorously, he rapped on the door. "Just to make sure he ain't home," be apologized. The hollow echo of his rapping came back. "That's right." He nodded sagely. "He ain't home." He rattled the door knob. "No sale," he said. He dug down into his pants pockets. "Ever been a burglar, sister?"

  "No," said Mary. "I've never robbed mail boxes before, either. But you have to begin some time." She pointed at a rusted letter-box on the door lintel. "Do we start here?"

  To answer her, Johnny Reese dug out a circular, advertising penny-sale specials at the New Deal Pharmacy, another announcing the bargains at the First National Store, and a leaflet of the double features in St. George during the last two weeks of November. He tossed them on the ground. "Peterson can't buy 'em any more," he said. "Got a hairpin?"

  He twisted the hairpin in the keyhole of the postbox. The flimsy door creaked open. A stream of envelopes slithered into his hand. He ran them over quickly. "Tax bill, letter from the mortgagee, tax bill, water tax bills, tax notice, mortgagee, mortgagee, mortgagee. Bet it got them sore as hops when that baby didn't answer the letters." He sorted the letters in his hand according to the dates on their postmarks. "The first of 'em came on the twentieth of October," he announced. "Nils Peterson hasn't called for his mail since the day after he had a date with Phyllis in the New York house." Then he crooked his finger. "Come around to the back," he said. "I never did like burgling from the front."

  The lean-to's screen door swung open. Johnny Reese threw his weight against the wooden door, tried a skeleton key in the key-hole. He went back to his car for his tool kit, pried the door jamb with his screw driver. He said: "No use. Bolted," and took a wirecutter over to the screen on the back window. He cut a square in the wire netting, struck the glass above the latch with the blunt end of a chisel. The pane fell inward with a pleasant tinkle. He reached inside, turned the latch, pushed the window up, and was over the sill.

  Mary heard a splash, a thump, a burst of profanity, then Johnny's voice: "Stay out there. This is a lake."

  She heard him sloshing about, muttering, and after a few minutes: "Go around to the front. I'll open the door."

  When he threw open the door finally, he was barefoot, his coat off, his trousers rolled above his calves.

  "The job needed a plumber, not a detective," he complained. "Water pipe bust in the kitchen. Froze and bust. Sweetest mess you ever saw. Here, you stay in here where it's dry."

  Clean air and sunlight came gingerly with the lady detective into a damp interior that was dining hall, bed-chamber, living room and storage warehouse. Bureaus, chairs, boxes filled every inch of the room. Against one wall stood a huge oak sideboard piled high with crockery; in the middle of the room, a round oak dining table, against the other wall a white enamel bed-stead, covered with a patch-work quilt. Along the quilt's length, one still could see the hollow of a human form. Under the bed was an old-fashioned commode and on the table a kerosene lamp, with blackened chimney and oil bowl nearly dry. In the shadow of the sky-scrapers of Manhattan, Nils Peterson had lived as primitively as his peasant ancestors.

  Johnny Reese gestured cheerfully. "Everything's here but Nils and his clothes. That," he pointed to a cretonne walled wardrobe, "that's where the hangers are. Clothes gone. Stay in here, sister. The muck's up to your ankles in the kitchen. Don't look at my feet. They're a holy show."

  "You're sopping, Johnny. You'll catch cold."

  "I will not. Tough as nails. Don't go in the kitchen."

  From the doorway, Mary peered across a sea of slime, at Nils Peterson's coal range, his iron sink, oil-cloth covered table, shelves, heaped with canned
goods, groceries, dishes, pots and pans.

  "Didn't even bother to use up the supplies," she observed. "Washed out the coffee pot and cup and saucer. Still on the drainboard."

  "Yep. Packed up his clothes and beat it," Johnny said across her shoulder…. "Hold everything."…He was listening…. "We're getting company." He whirled around.

  A stooped, cadaverous man in ragged garments, a gray beard down to his navel and a battered hat pulled low over a leathery face, was hurrying up the path from the front gate. The man carried a huge tortoise-shell cat, and as he came, he called: "Hey, Peterson. Hey, Peterson."

  Johnny Reese rolled his wet pants down, went to the door. The stranger stepped back as he saw him. He dropped the cat.

  "Who're you?" the bearded man demanded. "Who're you in Peterson's house?"