When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

Page 16

And it would be a piece of work, too, removing the traces of the Tillary occupancy. The aunt's bedroom and bathroom took up the front third of the top floor; the rest was a large open space given over to storage, with trunks and cardboard cartons fitted in under the pitched roof along with pieces of furniture that had been removed from service. Some were covered with cloths. Others were not. Everything was lightly coated with dust, and you could smell the dust in the air.
I went back to the aunt's bedroom. Her clothes were still in the dresser and closet, her toilet articles in the bathroom medicine chest. Easy enough to leave everything, if they didn't need the room.
I wondered what Herrera had hauled away. That was how he'd first come to the house, carting off jetsam after the aunt's death.
I sat in the chair again. I smelled the dust of the storage room, and the scent of the old woman's clothes, but I still held the lily-of-the-valley perfume in my nostrils and it overscored all of the other aromas. It cloyed now, and I wished I could stop smelling it. It seemed to me that I was smelling the memory of the scent more than the scent itself.
In the park across the street, two boys were playing a game of keep-away, with a third boy running vainly back and forth between them, trying to get the striped ball they tossed back and forth. I leaned forward, propping my elbows on the radiator to watch them. I tired of the game before they did. I left the chair facing the window and walked through the open area and down both flights of stairs.
I was in the living room, wondering what Tommy had around the house to drink and where he kept it, when someone cleared his throat a couple of yards behind me.
I froze.
Chapter 11
"Yeah," a voice said. "I sort of figured it was you. Whyntcha sit down, Matt. You look white as a ghost. You look like you seen one."
I knew but couldn't place the voice. I turned, my breath still stuck in my chest, and I knew the man. He was sitting in an overstuffed armchair, deep in the room's long shadows. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt open at the throat. His suit jacket was draped over the chair's arm, and the end of his tie peeped out of a pocket.
"Jack Diebold," I said.
"The same," he said. "How you doin', Matt? I got to tell you you'd make the world's worst cat burglar. You were clompin' around up there like the horse cavalry."
"You scared the shit out of me, Jack."
He laughed softly. "Well, what was I gonna do, Matt? A neighbor called in, lights on in the house, blah blah blah, and since I was handy and it was my case I took the squeal myself and came on over. I figured it was probably you. Guy from the Six-eight called me the other day, mentioned you were doin' something for this Tillary asshole."
"Neumann called you? You're at Brooklyn Homicide now?"
"Oh, a while now. I made Detective First, shit, it's been almost two years."
"Congratulations."
"Thanks. Anyway, I came over, but I don't know it's you and I don't want to charge the stairs and I thought, shit, we'll let Mohammad come to the mountain for a change. I didn't mean to scare you."
"The hell you didn't."
"Well, you walked right past me, for God's sake, and you looked so funny goin' about it. What were you lookin' for just now?"
"Just now? I was trying to guess where he keeps his liquor."
"Well, don't let me stop you. Find a couple of glasses too, while you're at it."
A pair of cut-glass decanters stood on a sideboard in the dining room. Little silver nameplates around their necks identified them as Scotch and Rye. You needed a key to remove them from their silver caddy. The sideboard itself held linen in its center drawers, glassware on the right-hand side, bottles of whiskey and cordials on the left. I found a fifth of Wild Turkey and a couple of glasses, showed the bottle to Diebold. He nodded and I poured drinks for both of us.
He was a big man a couple of years my senior. He'd lost some hair since I'd seen him last, and he was heavy, but then he'd always been heavy. He looked at his glass for a moment, raised it to me, took a sip.
"Good stuff," he said.
"Not bad."
"What were you doin' up there, Matt? Lookin' for clues?" He stretched the last word.
I shook my head. "Just getting the feel of it."
"You're working for Tillary."
I nodded. "He gave me the key."
"Shit, I don't care if you came down the chimney like Santy Claus. What's he want you to do for him?"
"Clear him."
"Clear him? The cocksucker's already clear enough to see through. No way we're gonna tag him for it."
"But you think he did it."
He gave me a sour look. "I don't think he did it," he said, "if doin' it means stickin' a knife in her. I'd love thinkin' he did but he's alibied better than a fuckin' Mafia don. He was out in public with this broad, a million people saw him, he's got charge-card receipts from a restaurant, for Christ's sake." He drank the rest of his whiskey. "I think he set her up."
"Hired them to kill her?"
"Something like that."
"They're not hired killers by trade, are they?"
"Shit, of course they're not. Cruz and Herrera, button men for the Sunset Park syndicate. Rubouts a specialty."
"But you think he hired them."
He came over and took the bottle from me, poured his glass half full. "He set them up," he said.
"How?"
He shook his head, impatient with the question. "I wish I was the first person to question them," he said. "The guys from the Six-eight went over with a burglary warrant, they didn't know when they went in where the stuff was from. So they already talked to the PRs before I got a crack at 'em."
"And?"
"First time out, they denied everything. 'I bought the stuff on the street.' You know how it goes."
"Of course."
"Then they didn't know anything about a woman who got killed. Now that was horseshit. They ran that story and then they changed it, or it died a natural death, because of course they knew, it was in the papers and on the television. Then the story was that there was no woman around when they did the job, and on top of that they were never upstairs of the first floor. Well, that's nice, but their fucking fingerprints were on the bedroom mirror and the dresser top and a couple of other places."
"You had prints putting them in the bedroom? I didn't know that."
"Maybe I shouldn't tell you. Except I can't see how it makes a difference. Yeah, we found prints."
"Whose? Herrera's or Cruz's?"
"Why?"
"Because I was figuring Cruz for the one who knifed her."
"Why him?"
"His record. And he carried a knife."
"A flick knife. He didn't use it on the woman."
"Oh?"
"She was killed with something had a blade six inches long and two or two-and-a-half inches wide. Whatever. A kitchen knife, it sounds like."
"You didn't recover it, though."
"No. She had a whole mess of knives in the kitchen, a couple of different sets. You keep house for twenty years, you accumulate knives. Tillary couldn't tell if one was missing. The lab took the ones we found, couldn't find blood on any of them."
"So you think-"
"That one of 'em picked up a knife in the kitchen and went upstairs with it and killed her and then threw it down a sewer somewhere, or in the river, or who knows where."
"Picked up a knife in the kitchen."
"Or brought it along. Cruz carried a flick knife as a regular thing, but maybe he didn't want to use his own knife to kill the woman."
"Figuring he came here planning to do it."
"How else can you figure it?"
"I figure it was a burglary and they didn't know she was here."
"Yeah, well, you want to figure it that way because you're trying to clear the prick. He goes upstairs and takes a knife along with him. Why the knife?"
"In case someone's up there."
"Then why go upstairs?"
"He's looking for money. A lot of people keep cash in the bedroom. He opens the door, she's there, she panics, he panics-"
"And he kills her."
"Why not?"
"Shit, it sounds as good as anything else, Matt." He put his glass on the coffee table. "One more session with 'em," he said, "and they woulda spilled."
"They talked a lot as it was."
"I know. You know what's the most important thing to teach a new recruit? How to read 'em Miranda-Escobedo in such a way that they don't attach any significance to it. 'You have the right to remain silent. Now I want you to tell me what really went down.' One more time and they woulda seen that the way to cop out on Tillary was to say he hired them to kill her."
"That means admitting they did it."
"I know, but they were admitting a little more each time. I don't know. I think I could've got more out of them. But once they got legal counsel on the spot, shit, that's the end of our cozy little conversations."
"Why do you like Tillary for it? Just because he was playing around?"
"Everybody plays around."
"That's what I mean."
"The ones who kill their wives are the ones who aren't playing around and want to be. Or the ones who're in love with something sweet and young and want to marry it and keep it around forever. He's not in love with anybody but himself. Or doctors. Doctors are always killing their wives."
"Then-"
"We got tons of motive, Matt. He owed money that he didn't have. And she was gettin' ready to dump him."
"The girlfriend?"
"The wife."
"I never heard that."
"Who would you hear it from, him? She talked to a neighbor woman, she talked to a lawyer. The aunt dyin' made the difference. She came into the property, for one thing, and she didn't have the old woman around for company. Oh, we got lots of motive, my friend. If motive was enough to hang a man we could go shoppin' for a rope."
JACK Diebold said, "He's a friend of yours, huh? That's why you're involved?"
We had left the Tillary house somewhere in the early evening. I remember the sky was still light, but it was July and it stayed light well into the evening hours. I turned off the lights and put the bottle of Wild Turkey away. There wasn't much left in it. Diebold joked that I should wipe my prints off the bottle, and off the glasses we had used.
He was driving his own car, a Ford Fairlane that was showing a lot of rust. He chose the place, a plush steak-and-seafood restaurant near the approach to the Verrazano Bridge. They knew him there, and I sensed that there wouldn't be a check. Most cops have a certain number of restaurants where they can eat a certain number of free meals. This bothers some people, and I have never really understood why.
We ate well- shrimp cocktails, strip sirloins, hot pumpernickel rolls, stuffed baked potatoes. "When we were growin' up," Diebold said, "a man who ate like this was treating himself right. You never heard a goddamned word about cholesterol. Now it's all you hear."
"I know."
"I had a partner, I don't know if you ever knew him. Gerry O'Bannon. You know him?"