by Howard Fast
Well, all things in their time. I had two pistols in my raincoat pocket. One of them had just killed a man—although at that moment I had no way of knowing whether or not Porfetto was dead; the other gun had just smashed a man’s hand and wrist beyond repair. A pocketful of trouble. I was full of elusive and scrambled thoughts as I walked toward the river. Could I have killed Porfetto, or were my two days of mental preparation an empty and fraudulent exercise? He was hatless as he bent to step out of the Mercedes, and from my position, I had a clear view of his head. I could have put two bullets into his head and still shot the gun out of the professional’s hand, but there was no unraveling those few seconds. Memory doesn’t work that way, and instead of being able to think back and recall what had happened in that almost instantaneous blur of action, I had to piece it together and feed it into my mind. And I kept thinking that this remarkable woman had saved, if not my life, certainly my peace of mind for however long I might live. I still could not deal with a death at my hands, as strange as that might sound coming from a policeman.
Standing at the rail of the walk, with the oily surface of the East River in front of me, a rippling black blanket touched with the dancing lights of the city, I threw the two guns into the river. I was now unarmed for the first time in seventeen years—and I felt a strange sensation of light-headedness and relief. It was over. Let happen what would happen; it was over.
I walked all the distance uptown to my apartment, slowly, just ambling along with that feeling of fatigue that a man might have after a good day’s work. It gave me a chance to think. If Porfetto was dead, they could not proceed against Deborah Alan. She was certain to have managed some sort of diplomatic status, which would give her immunity. As for the gun, Fran must have gone to Oscar’s apartment without telling me. Well, the answers could wait. I was very tired.
Why my antennas had folded, why I had no more fear of execution, I don’t know. But that was the way it was, and I turned the key in the door of my apartment and walked in with no apprehension. The apartment was empty. It was filthy, with slops of uneaten sandwiches and cold containers of coffee all over the living room. The bathrooms were used and dirty and the beds had been slept on. I called down to Fred Jones and asked him to come up, and while waiting for him, I went over the place, tearing out the bugs, the fancy and expensive listening and radio devices planted there. Somehow, with Porfetto dead or at least shot to pieces, the whole thing took on the aspect of some lunatic comic opera.
When Jones appeared, I gave him ten dollars, and together we cleaned up the place and changed the linen on the bed and scrubbed out the bathrooms.
“Some mighty funny things happening around here, Lieutenant,” he said.
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“Going to be quiet now a while?”
“I hope so.”
He left, and I drew a hot bath and sat in the water until my skin began to crinkle. Then I put on pajamas and a robe and stretched out on the couch and turned on the TV. It was almost time for the eleven o’clock news.
And there it was, the network gloating over what it termed “the most bizarre and inexplicable murder case of the year.” They showed the motor entrance to the Waldorf, swarming with plain-clothes and uniform cops, Mayor Koch and Chief of Detectives Crown in attendance; but, curiously enough, neither of them willing to make any comment or statement whatsoever. Inspector Max Roberts fended questions without answering any of them. He was a tall, skinny man, with a habit of raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. They wanted to know whether the cops had a motive for Mrs. Alan’s action, and was she being charged with the crime, and what was all this about a disappearing gun? And who was responsible for shooting Percy Lax? Some enterprising reporter had called crime analysis, downtown at Police Plaza and had come up with information on Percy Lax before the cops could put a lid on it, and what crime analysis pulled out of their computers was a want on Lax that stretched halfway around the world, eighteen assassinations attributed to him, a connection with the PLO—and what, the media wondered, was he doing in Alfred Gomez Porfetto’s pale gray Mercedes? Inspector Roberts had no comment on this or any other questions, or where Deborah Alan was being held, or where Lax was being held.
“There will be a statement forthcoming,” Roberts pleaded.
But what fascinated and puzzled me most about television’s coverage of this strange incident was the absence of platitudes. Here was this benefactor and philanthropist cruelly shot to death by an apparently crazed Israeli woman, and no one was telling the people what a loss this was, what a noble man had been done in. Quite to the contrary, every voice was exceedingly tentative. I know that word gets out, that no real lid can be put on anything, but still and all, it was odd.
I fell asleep in front of the television. It spewed out its mindless chatter through the night, but I slept the sleep of the dead, and it was not until nine o’clock the following morning that I was awakened by the telephone. It was Lieutenant Frawley, who was one of Chief of Detectives Crown’s assistants down at Police Plaza, and he said to me, with no attempt to be even moderately polite about it, “Golding, this is Frawley at the chief’s office, and he wants to see you at eleven o’clock, and you’d better get your ass down here or else.”
We had evidently reached a point where nobody liked or respected Harry Golding. I shaved, put on a clean shirt, put on my striped blue and white Columbia tie, which Fran had given me as a birthday gift, and then walked over to the station house. Sergeant Laurenti was at the desk, and he looked at me thoughtfully but said nothing.
“The keys to my car,” I said.
“In the ignition, outside.”
“I thought I gave orders that the next time someone left the keys in the ignition, he’d get his ass reamed.”
“Yes, Lieutenant. You’d better talk to Sergeant Toomey. He’s upstairs.”
I left the house without replying, thinking that I should be grateful that he still addressed me with some measure of respect. It’s more than I can say about the chief of detectives. I was ushered into his office down at Police Plaza by Frawley, who closed the door behind me and left me standing and facing Crown, the chief of detectives, Thomas Kelley, the commissioner of police, Inspector Roberts, the zone commander, and the district attorney to complete the jury of humorless faces. No one asked me to sit down, so I simply stood and waited, calling myself all sorts of a damn fool for not asking Toomey what he had said. I had faith in Toomey, but at this moment faith did not appear to be enough.
“Lieutenant,” Chief Crown said, “for the past two weeks, you have been an extraordinary pain in the ass. Your goddamn egotistical assumption that only you in this city knew the facts about Porfetto and his Wabash Protection agency almost fouled up a complex operation that we have been preparing for months. This morning, we took forty-three employees of Wabash into custody and closed up their operation. An hour ago, Captain Hallihan over at the West Side put his pistol in his mouth and blew out his brains, and right now the Massachusetts and Connecticut State Police are closing every branch of Listerman-Reed. This operation was scheduled to begin a week from now. We had to advance it and put it into play last night, right after Porfetto’s death—”
Porfetto was dead, and the whole fabric had begun to crumble.
“—as a result of your goddamn penchant for doing alone what a police force was set up to do. Now what we want to know is this. Why did Deborah Alan kill him? And why did you set it up?”
Still, no one invited me to sit down. They simply sat in grim silence and waited.
“I didn’t set it up,” I said. “As for Mrs. Alan, I presume she killed Porfetto because Porfetto killed her husband, and since I was able to discover that fact, I presume that Israeli Intelligence was also able to dig it out, and that she learned about it and decided to rectify the matter.”
“Porfetto killed her husband?” Crown said. “Would you like to tell us about that? Suppose you make a statement and we’ll tape it.”
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“No. I’m not making any statement for tape. I’m not under arrest, and I’m goddamn egotistical enough, as you put it, Chief, to take pleasure in telling you. So if you want me to tell you, I will.”
Crown looked at Kelley, who made no motion, and then at the district attorney, who nodded. The commissioner said, “Let him tell it.”
I told it—the whole story, leaving nothing out of any importance until I came to the details of last night.
“That’s your story?” Crown said.
“Yes, sir. I gave it to you over the phone. You know that. Now you have it again.”
“We’ll come back to it. Perhaps not today, but we’ll come back to it. Meanwhile, you have two pistols registered in your name. One is a high-powered twenty-two special, firing special long bullets. The same bullets smashed Lax’s hand and wrist. The other gun registered to you is a purse gun, also twenty-two caliber. Porfetto was killed by a small twenty-two caliber pistol. I trust you brought both guns with you.”
“No, sir.”
“An oversight?”
“No, sir. As I told you, my apartment was taken over by Wabash. I have ample evidence of that. In the course of that takeover, my two pistols were stolen.”
“Stolen?”
Roberts grinned. The district attorney shook his head.
“And of course you reported the theft to your captain or to Inspector Roberts here?”
“No, sir. As I said before, my apartment was occupied and the first occasion I had to search for the guns was late last night, when, after hearing about Porfetto, I felt it was safe to return to my apartment. I am reporting the theft now to Inspector Roberts, my zone commander.”
Kelley laughed sourly, and Crown said, “Oh, you are a lulu, Golding. You are a beauty indeed.”
The district attorney said softly, “Golding, I’ve been studying your record, particularly your marksmanship scores. You rate highest in your zone and probably highest in the department. You are what we call an instinct shot, a man who doesn’t have to aim. Very few of those. And according to the statements of Sergeants Toomey and Keene, that was the kind of shooting that happened last night. As nearly as we could piece it together, if you had shot to kill Lax, his gun would have gone off and at that close range, he couldn’t miss. So you did save Sergeant Toomey’s life. On the other hand, you and Mrs. Alan participated in a conspiracy to kill Porfetto.”
“No, sir. I have not been in communication with Mrs. Alan, either directly or indirectly, since her first visit here before her husband died.”
“You took the purse gun after she had used it. Do you also deny that?”
“I was not anywhere near the Waldorf last night, so I must deny that too.”
“Golding,” the chief of detectives said, “suppose Toomey or Keene or Hennesy or Bolansky put you there at the motor entrance last night?”
He smiled thinly and I smiled back.
“That would make it difficult for me, wouldn’t it, sir? They’re good, honorable men. We’ve worked together for years. They trust me. I trust them. A working cop puts his life in the hands of the men who back him up. I suppose that’s the way it has to be.”
There was a long moment of silence, and then Crown said, “That’s it, Golding. You’ll hear from us.”
My hand was on the door when the district attorney said, “Golding!”
“Yes, sir?” I turned around.
“Golding, did you fake that Vermeer theft?”
“No, sir. I did not.”
“No, I kind of thought you didn’t.”
I had one more bit of business at the station house. Nothing I had read or heard on television mentioned the name of Captain Courtny. I drove to the station house, double-parked as usual, and then went up to the detective room. Toomey and Keene were both there. Bolansky and Hennesy were out. I shook hands with Toomey and Keene. They asked me how it was going, and I answered that it was going well enough; but neither of them said one word about the previous night.
I went into the captain’s office. He was filling in a form, his cigar in his mouth, his lined, unhappy face as lined and unhappy as ever. He looked up at me without enthusiasm.
“The night I went to my apartment with Toomey and Keene, and you were so pissed off about it,” I said without preamble. “That night, someone called the apartment and those shitheads from Wabash who were in there cleared out minutes before we got there. You were the only one who knew where we were going.”
“So?”
“You called my apartment.”
“That’s right. If you had had enough brains to tell me what you expected to find there, I might not have called. I called to tell you—” He paused and took the cigar out of his mouth. “I called,” he said uncomfortably, “to try to say something nice. I got respect for you, Harry. I saw what was coming down. I wanted to tell you that maybe we should work closer, trust each other more. I could help you. I knew you were in some god-awful piece of trouble. Who the hell made the California trip possible! I thought it would help. But no, sir. You wouldn’t have it. You had to be a goddamn Lone Ranger and I had to be stupid enough to ask were you there yet. Oh, shit. It’s over.”
He held out his hand, and I took it. His grip was bone-crushing. “Harry,” he said, “I know you’re in deep and they’re after your scalp. But if it comes out clean, I’m going to yell my damn head off for you to get the zone commander job.”
I thanked him. But I knew it would never come out clean again. The net was much too tangled.
Chapter 17
THEY DROPPED the Vermeer charges and they never got to a point where they could indict me on the killing of Porfetto. They had no evidence. The guns were gone forever and they had no valid witness to put me at the Waldorf motor entrance that night. Percy Lax made a statement that he had recognized me, but since his gun fired the bullet that killed Joe Finelli, and he had been tried for murder and convicted, his word as a witness was not enough even for a preliminary before the grand jury. Nevertheless, I was finished as a cop in the city of New York. The D.A. and the commissioner and the chief of detectives all were convinced that I had been there and planned the whole thing, and nothing would ever unconvince them. Charley Murphy took my case against the department, and finally it was settled for me to resign honorably with a fifteen-year-and-better pension, no great gift but enough for Fran and me to live decently, so long as she held her job at Columbia. I have been occupied with writing this account and Fran has been on it as well, trying to make what I write read like appropriate English—or as close to that as possible.
Fran and the kids came back from Ireland and England exactly a week after Porfetto’s demise. Two Wabash operatives had been arrested in Dublin by the local police. It was astonishing to me to see how powerless these men became. I had looked upon them as incarnations of the devil, but deprived of their protection, they quickly turned into sniveling defendants.
The full story of Porfetto never actually emerged. The rumor all over the place was that Deborah Alan was in cahoots with the CIA, and that Porfetto had been killed to close his mouth about connections with the White House and the Pentagon; but that was the kind of nonsense that always arises in a case of this kind.
My brother Oscar says that Deborah Alan had intimated that Israeli Intelligence had discovered Porfetto’s role in Asher Alan’s death, but also I recalled that Fran and Shelly let drop a good deal of what I thought and that might have helped her to put things together.
In any case, Deborah was not prosecuted but ordered to return to Israel. There a hearing took place, but she testified behind closed doors and the testimony was not released.
Gavin and Sarah returned to school with stories about their flight to Ireland and England that gave them a lot of class in the eyes of their peers. Fran went back to Columbia, and spring came, late and very wet, but here at last.
I have control. I didn’t ask Fran about the gun until weeks later, when things had settled down. We were walking in Central Park,
and I said, apropos of nothing at all, “I keep wondering how Deborah Alan managed to have your gun in her hand when she shot Porfetto.”
“Oh? It was my gun?”
“It was, yes.”
“How is it you never asked me about that before?”
“I thought some snoopy cops from downtown might come around and ask you questions. I didn’t want you to lie.”
“But the gun disappeared. That’s what I read in all the papers. That was the great mystery of the event. What happened to the gun?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“You mean you don’t want to,” Fran said.
“Perhaps.”
“I suppose you slipped it into your pocket after you shot that monster Percy Lax.”
“I never told you I shot Percy Lax.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“But it was your gun.”
“I suppose so. You know, Harry, I couldn’t sit in that wretched little room in the Primrose Hotel all day. I would have gone crazy. So I took a walk and dropped into Altman’s to buy some stockings, and there was Deborah buying stockings, and we had lunch together. She told me how frightened New York made her—”
“That woman? Frightened?”
“Harry, I wasn’t thinking that way. I could only think that this was the city where her husband had died and she had every right to be frightened. She asked me where she could buy a gun, because she was in the army at home and she knew how to use a gun—”
“And you gave her yours.”
“Of course. It was no use to me. I couldn’t shoot anything.”
We walked on in silence for a while, and then Fran wondered whether I should have another gun. “Since it’s plain enough,” she said, “that you walked over to the river and pitched both guns in.”
“Did I?”
“I think so.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not a cop. I don’t need a gun.”
