Westlake, Donald E - Novel 41 (29 page)

 
          
 
Andrews and Campbell brought Mosca in a litde
after eleven. They'd found him hiding in a girl friend's apartment, and when
they brought him in he was bruised and semiconscious.
Campbell
explained he'd tried to resist arrest, and
no one argued with him.

 
          
 
Levine joined the early part of the
questioning, and got Mosca's alibi for the night Morry Gold was killed. He made
four phone calls, and the alibi checked out. Jake Mosca had not murdered Morry
Gold.

 
          
 
The fourth day, Levine again arrived at the
precinct at
four o'clock
.
He was scheduled to catch this tour, so he spent another eight hours at the
telephone, and got nothing done on the Morry Gold killing. The fifth day,
working alone now, he went on with the investigation.

 
          
 
May Torasch, the woman whose name Andy Stettin
had learned, worked in the credit department of a
Brooklyn
department store. Levine went to her apartment,
on the fringe of Sunset, at
seven o'clock
, and found her home. She was another blowsy
woman, reminding him strongly of Sal Casetta's wife. But she was affable, and
seemed to want to help, though she assured Levine that she and Morry Gold had
never been close friends.

 
          
 
"Face it," she said, "he was a
bum. He wasn't going
nowhere
, so I never wasted much
time on him."

 
          
 
She had seen Morry two days before his death;
they'd gone to a bar off
Flatbush Avenue
and had a few drinks. But she hadn't gone
back to his apartment with him. She hadn't been in the mood.

 
          
 
"I was kind of low that night," she
said.

 
          
 
"Was Morry low?" Levine asked.

 
          
 
"No, not him.
He
was the same as ever. He'd talk about the weather all the time, and his lousy
landlady. I wouldn't have gone out with him, but I was feeling so low I didn't
want to go home."

 
          
 
She didn't have any idea who might have
murdered him. "He was just a bum, just a small-timer. Nobody paid any
attention to him." Nor could she add to the names of Gold's acquaintances.

 
          
 
From her apartment, Levine went to the bar
where she and Morry had last been together. It was called The Green Lantern,
and was nearly empty when Levine walked in shortly before nine. He showed his
identification to the bartender and asked about Morry Gold. But the bartender
knew very few of his customers by name.

 
          
 
"I might know this guy by sight," he
explained, "But the
name don't
mean a
thing." And the same was true of May Torasch.

 
          
 
There were still two more names on the list,
Joe Whistler and Arnie Hendricks, the latter being the Arnie Sal Casetta had
mentioned. Joe Whistler was another bartender, so Levine went looking for him
first, and found him at work, tending bar in a place called Robert's, in
Canarsie, not more than a dozen blocks from Levine's home.

 
          
 
Whistler knew Gold only casually, and could
add nothing. Levine spent half an hour with him, and then went in search of
Arnie Hendricks.

 
          
 
Arnie Hendricks was a small-time fight
manager, originally from
Detroit
. He wasn't at home, and the gym where he usually hung out was closed
this time of night. Levine went back to the precinct, sat down at his desk, and
looked at his notes.

 
          
 
He had eight names relating to Morry Gold.
There were one brother, one woman, and six casual friends. None of them had
offered any reasons for Morry's murder, none of them had suggested any suspects
who might have hated Morry enough to kill him, and none of them had given any
real cause to be considered a suspect himself, with the possible exception of
Abner Gold.

 
          
 
But the more Levine thought about Abner Gold,
the more he was willing to go along with Andy Stettin's idea. The man was
afraid of an investigation not because he had murdered his brother, but because
he was afraid the police would be able to link him to his brother's traffic in
stolen goods.

 
          
 
Eight names.
One of
them, Arnie Hendricks, was still an unknown, but the other seven had been dead
ends.

 
          
 
Someone had murdered Morry Gold. Somewhere in
the world, the murderer still lived. He had a name and a face; and he had a
connection somehow with Morry Gold. And he was practically unsought. Of the
hundreds of millions of human beings on the face of the earth, only one Abraham
Levine, who had never known Morry Gold in life, was striving to find the man who
had brought about Morry Gold's death.

 
          
 
After a while, wearily, he put his notes away
and pecked out his daily report on one of the office Remingtons. Then it was
midnight
, and he went home. And that was when he got
some good news from the hospitsd — Andy Stettin was going to live.

           
 
The sixth day, he went to the precinct,
reported in, got the Chevy, and went out looking for Arnie Hendricks. He spent
seven hours on it, stopping off only to eat, but he couldn't find Hendricks
anywhere. People he talked to had seen Hendricks during the day, so the man
wasn't in hiding, but Levine couldn't seem to catch up with him. It was
suggested that Hendricks might be off at a poker game somewhere in
Manhattan
, but Levine couldn't find out exactly where
the poker game was being held.

 
          
 
He got back to the precinct at eleven-thirty,
and started typing out his daily report. There wasn't much to report. He'd
looked for Hendricks, and had failed to find him. He would look again tomorrow.

 
          
 
Lieutenant Barker came in at a
quarter to
twelve
. That was
unusual; the Lieutenant was rarely around later than eight or nine at night,
unless something really important had happened in the precinct. He came into
the squadroom and said, "Abe, can I talk to you? Bring that report
along."

 
          
 
Levine pulled the incomplete report from the
typewriter and followed the Lieutenant into his ofice. The Lieutenant sat down,
and motioned for Levine to do the same, then held out his hand.

 
          
 
"Could I see that report?" he asked.

 
          
 
"It isn't finished."

 
          
 
"That's all right."

 
          
 
The Lieutenant glanced at the report, and then
dropped it on his desk. "Abe," he said, "do you know what our
full complement is supposed to be?"

 
          
 
"Twenty men, isn't it?"

 
          
 
"Right.
And we
have fifteen.
With
Crawley
out, fourteen.
Abe, here's your reports for the last six
days. What have you been doing, man? We're
understaffed,
we're having trouble keeping up with the necessary stuff, and look what you've
been doing. For six days you've been running around in circles.
And for what?
For a small-time punk who
got a small-time punk's end."

 
          
 
"He was murdered, Lieutenant."

 
          
 
"Lots of people are murdered, Abe. When
we can, we find out who did the job, and we turn him over to the DA. But we
don't make an obsession out of it.
Abe, for almost a week now
you haven't been pulling your weight around here.
There've been three
complaints about how long it took us to respond to urgent calls. We're
understaffed, but we're not that understaffed."

 
          
 
Barker tapped the little pile of reports.
"This man Gold was a fence, and a cheap crook. He isn't worth it, Abe. We
can't waste any more time on him. When you finish up this report, I want you to
recommend we switch the case to Pending. And tomorrow I want you to get back
with the team."

 
          
 
"Lieutenant, I've got one more man to
— "

 
          
 
"And tomorrow there'll be one more, and
the day after that one more. Abe, you've been working on nothing else at all.
Forget it, will you? This is a cheap penny-ante bum. Even his brother doesn't
care who killed him. Let it go, Abe."

 
          
 
He leaned forward over the desk. "Abe,
some cases don't get solved right away. That's what the Pending file is for. So
six weeks from now, or six months from now, or six years from now, while we're
working on something else, when the break finally does come, we can pull that
case out and hit it hot and heavy again. But
it's
cold
now, Abe, so let it lie."

 
          
 
Speeches roiled around inside Levine's head,
but they were only words so he didn't say them. He nodded, reluctantly.
"Yes, sir," he said.

 
          
 
"The man was a bum," said the
Lieutenant, "pure and simple. Forget
him,
he
isn't worth your time."

 
          
 
"Yes, sir," said Levine.

 
          
 
He went back to the squadroom and finished
typing the report, recommending that the Morry Gold case be switched to the
Pending file. Then it was
twelve o'clock
, and he left the precinct and walked to the
subway station. The underground platform was cold and deserted. He stood
shivering on the concrete, his hands jammed deep into his pockets. He waited
twenty minutes before a train came. Then it did come, crashed into the station
and squealed to a stop. The doors in front of Levine slid back with no hands
touching them, and he stepped aboard.

 
          
 
The car was empty, with a few newspapers
abandoned on the seats. The doors slid shut behind him and the train started
forward. He was the only one in the car. He was the only one in the car and all
the seats were empty, but he didn't sit down.

 
          
 
The train rocked and jolted as it hurtled
through the cold hole under
Brooklyn
,
and Abraham Levine stood swaying in the middle of the empty car, a short man,
bulky in his overcoat, hulk-shouldered, crying.

 
          
 
Afternoon visiting hours at the hospital were
from two till five, so when Detective Abraham Levine of
Brooklyn
's Forty-Third Precinct got off his tour at
four p.m.
he took a
Rockaway Parkway
bus to the hospital and spent thirty-five
minutes with Detective Andy Stettin. Levine and Andy had been together when
Andy was hit, a bullet high on the left side of the chest, fired through a
closed door. Andy, a promising youngster, a hotshot, one of the new breed of
college cops, had been close to death for a while, but was now on the mend, and
very bored and impatient with hospital routine.

 
          
 
It wasn't really necessary for Levine to go
through this ritual every day, nor did he have that much to say to the
youngster, and in fact he knew full well he was only doing it because he so
much didn't want to. There was a certain amount of guilt involved, since Levine
was secretly happy that the bullet had ended his brief partnership with Andy
Stettin, but in truth Andy wasn't the main point here at all. The main point
was the hospital.

 
          
 
To Andy Stettin, a young fellow, healthy and
self-assured, the hospital was merely a nuisance and a bore. To Abraham Levine,
fifty-three years of age, short and stocky, overweight and short of wind, with
a tired heart that skipped the occasional beat, the hospital was a horrible
presentiment, an all-too-possible future. Those sad withered men, shrunken
within their maroon or brown robes, shuffling down the wide featureless
corridors in their Christmas-present slippers, were a potential tomorrow that
could be very close indeed. Going to the hospital every afternoon was for
Levine a painful repeated confrontation with his own worst fears.

 
          
 
Today, a Thursday, Levine told Andy that there
continued to be no break in the case of Maurice Gold, during the investigation
of whose murder Andy had been shot, by a drug dealer who unfortunately was not
Gold's killer. Andy shrugged, not really interested: "Gold is gonna stay
Open," he said.

 
          
 
Levine had to agree. With some sort of reverse
logic, when a case became inactive the Police Department phrase was that it was
Opened
. "Open that," meant in reality to
close it, to cease to work on it. The reason behind the Newspeak phraseology
was that only an arrest could Close a case; an inactive case could always be
reactivated by fresh evidence, and therefore it would remain —unto eternity,
most likely — Open.

 
          
 
Levine and Andy also talked awhile about
Levine's regular partner. Jack Crawley, a big shambling mean-looking harness
bull with whom Levine had a very easy and reassuring relationship. Crawley had
just come back on duty this week after his convalescent leave —he had been, several
nnonths ago, shot in the leg—and the long spell of inactivity had made him more
bristly and bad-tempered than ever. "I think he'll arrest me pretty
soon," Levine said.

           
 
Andy laughed at that, but what he mostly
wanted to talk about was a nurse he had his eye on, a pretty young thing, very
short and compact, squeezed into a too-tight uniform. Both times the girl
passed by while Levine was there, Andy did some elephantine flirting, very
heavy-handed arch remarks that Levine found embarrassing but which the girl
appeared to enjoy. The second time, after both men had watched the provocative
departure of the nurse, Andy grinned and said, "The sap still
rises
, eh, Abe?"

 
          
 
"The sap also sets," Levine told
him, getting to his feet. "See you tomorrow, Andy."

 
          
 
"Thanks for coming by."

 
          
 
Levine was walking down the wide corridor, not
meeting the eyes of the ambulatory patients, when a hand touched his elbow and
a gravelly voice said, quietly, "Let's just walk around here a
while."

 
          
 
Surprised, Levine looked to his right and saw
a short, blocky, pugnacious-looking man of about his own age, wearing an
expensive topcoat open over a rather wrinkled suit, and an old-fashioned
snap-brim hat pulled low enough to make it difficult to see his eyes. Levine
noticed the awkward bunchiness of the man's tie-knot, as though he had got
himself up in costume like a trick-or-treater, as though his real persona
existed in some other mode.

 
          
 
The man gave Levine a quick sidelong glance
from under his hatbrim. His hand held firmly to Levine's elbow. "You're a
cop, right?
Abraham Levine, detective.
Visiting the cop in there."

 
          
 
"Yes?"

 
          
 
"So let's talk a little bit."

 
          
 
They had reached an intersection of corridors.
The elevators were straight ahead, but the man was pulling Levine to the right.
"Talk about what?" Levine asked, trying to shake loose.

 
          
 
"Cops and robbers," the man said.
"I got a proposition."

 
          
 
Levine planted his feet, refusing to move.
Peeling the man's fingers from his elbow, he said, "What sort of
proposition?"

 
          
 
With darting movements of his head, the man
shot wary glances along the corridors. "I don't like it here," he
said.
"Exposed here."

 
          
 
"Exposed to what?"

 
          
 
"Listen," the man said, moving
closer, his breath warm on Levine's chin, his hatbrim nearly touching Levine's
face. "You know Giacomo Polito," he said.

 
          
 
"I know who he is.
Mafia
chieftan.
He controls one of the five families."

 
          
 
"I'm a soldier for him," the man
said, his voice low but harsh, pushing with intensity. "I know Giacomo's
whole life story."

 
          
 
Levine frowned, trying to see this too-close
face, read meaning into the tone of the husky tense voice. Was this an offer of
information? The setting was unusual, the manner odd, but what else could it
be? Levine said, "You want to sell that life story?"

 
          
 
"Don't rush me."
Another
darting glance.
"Giacomo
disappeared
my
son," the man said, still in the same breathy way. "He knows I
know."

 
          
 
"Ah."

 
          
 
"You take your bus, like you do,"
the man said. "Look out the back window. When you see a green Buick following,
you get off the bus. There's a —kind of a flower on the aerial."

 
          
 
"And who are you?" Levine asked him.
"What's your name?"

 
          
 
"What's the dif? Call me Bobby."

 
          
 
"Bobby?" The incongruity of that
name with this man made Levine smile despite himself.

 
          
 
The man looked up, facing Levine more directly
than before. He too smiled, but with an edge to it. "That was my son's
name," he said.

           
 
The green Buick with the red plastic
chrysanthemum taped to its antenna followed the bus for a dozen blocks before
Levine decided to follow through. Then he got off at the next stop, stood at
the curb while the bus drove off, and waited for the Buick to stop in front of
him.

 
          
 
The delay had been because Levine wasn't
entirely sure what he thought of "Bobby" and his story. A Mafia
soldier who decided to defect usually did so when under indictment himself for
some major crime, when he could trade his knowledge for softer treatment from
the courts. Simple revenge between criminals rarely included squealing to the
police. If Bobby's son had been killed by Giacomo Polito, in the normal course
of events Bobby would simply kill Polito, or be himself killed in the attempt.
The Mafia tended to run very much along the lines of a Shakespearian tragedy,
with few roles for outsiders.

 
          
 
In addition, if Bobby had decided that his
vengeance required selling Polito to the police, why not
do
it the simple normal way? Why not simply drive to
Manhattan
and go to the Organized Crime Unit in
Police Headquarters and make his deal there? Why talk to some obscure precinct
detective in the depths of
Brooklyn
,
and in particular why do it in a hospital corridor?
And why
all this counterspy hugger-mugger?

 
          
 
What finally decided Levine to take the next
step was that he couldn't think of any rational alternative explanation for
Bobby's
actions.
If someone had decided to murder
Levine, of course, this would be an excellent ploy to put him in a position
where it could be done; but Levine could think of no one at the moment
who
would have a motive. He wasn't due to be a witness in
any upcoming trials, he hadn't made any potentially dangerous arrests recently,
nor had he received notification within the last year or so of any felons,
arrested by himself, who had been released from prison. Also, if Bobby's story
were merely a charade for some sort of con game, how could it hurt Levine? He
wouldn't pay anything or sign anything or even necessarily believe anything.
And finally, there had been the real brimstone aura of truth in that last
direct stare from Bobby, when he'd said, "That was my son's name."

 
          
 
So for all those reasons Levine had ultimately
stepped off the bus and stood waiting until the Buick pulled to a stop in front
of him. But, before getting into the car, he did nevertheless check the floor
behind the front seat, just to be absolutely certain there was no one crouched
back there, with a pistol or a knife or a length of wire.

           
 
There was nothing; just some empty beer cans.
So Levine of>ened the front passenger door and bent to enter the car, but
Bobby was leaning over toward him from the steering wheel, saying, "Uh,
would you take down the —get rid of the flower?"

 
          
 
"Of course."

 
          
 
Masking tape had been wrapped around both
antenna and flower stalk; Levine tugged on the plastic stalk and the tape
ripped, releasing it. He then got into the car and shut the door, feeling
vaguely foolish to be sitting here with a red flower in his lap. He tossed it
stop the dashboard as Bobby accelerated away from the curb, checking both the
inside and outside mirrors, saying, "I did shake 'em, but you never
know."

 
          
 
"You're being followed?"

 
          
 
"Oh, sure," he said, shrugging as
though it were an everyday event. "They wfinna know I'm not going anywhere
before the big day."

 
          
 
"What big day?"

 
          
 
"Wipe out," Bobby said, and ran a
finger along his neck. "Giacomo's got a contract out on me."

 
          
 
"You're sure of that?"

 
          
 
Bobby gave him a quick glance, almost of
contempt,
then
went back to his fitful concentration
on the road ahead and both mirrors. "I'm sure of everything," he
said. "When I'm not sure, I shut up."

 
          
 
"So you want police protection, is that
it?"

 
          
 
"Why don't I tell you what I want,
okay?"