When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (10 page)

"It seems a haphazard way to do business," Kaplan said.

"It's not a business. I do favors for friends."

"And take money for them."

"Is there anything wrong with taking money for a favor?"

"I don't suppose there is." He looked thoughtful. "How much would you expect for this favor?"

"I don't know what's involved," I said. "Suppose you let me have fifteen hundred dollars today. If things drag on and I feel entitled to more, I'll let you know."

"Fifteen hundred.And of course Tommy doesn't know exactly what he's getting for that."

"No," I said. "Neither doI."

Kaplan narrowed his eyes. "That seems high for a retainer," he said. "I'd have thought a third of that would be ample for starters."

I thought of my antique dealer friend. Did I know what it was tohondle? Kaplan evidently did.

"It's not that much," I said. "It's one percent of the insurance money, and that's part of the reason for hiring an investigator, isn't it? The company won't pay off until Tommy's in the clear."

Kaplan looked slightly startled. "That's true," he admitted, "but I don't know that it's the reason for hiring you. The company will pay up sooner or later. I don't think your fee is necessarily high, it just seemed a disproportionately large sum to lay out in advance, and-"

"Don't argue price," Tommy cut in. "The fee sounds fine to me, Matt. The only thing is, being a little short right now, and coming up with fifteen C in cash-"

"Maybe your lawyer will front it to you," I suggested.

Kaplan thought that was irregular. I went into the outer office while they talked it over. The receptionist was reading a copy of Fate magazine. A pair of hand-tinted etchings in antiqued frames showed scenes of nineteenth-century downtownBrooklyn. I was looking at them when Kaplan's door opened and he beckoned me back inside.

"Tommy's going to be able to borrow on the basis of his expectations from the insurance monies and his wife's estate," he said. "Meanwhile I can let you have the fifteen hundred. I hope you have no objection to signing a receipt?"

"None at all," I said. I counted the bills, twelve hundreds and six fifties, all circulated bills out of sequence. Everybody seems to have some cash around, even lawyers.

He wrote out a receipt and I signed it. He apologized for what he called a little awkwardness around the subject of my fee. "Lawyers are schooled to be very conventional human beings," he said. "I sometimes have a slow reaction time when it comes to adjusting to irregular procedure. I hope I wasn't offensive."

"Not at all."

"I'm glad of that. Now I won't be expecting written reports or a precise account of your movements, but you'll report to me as you go along and let me know what turns up? And please tell me too much rather than too little. It's hard to know what will prove useful."

"I know that myself."

"I'm sure you do." He walked me to the door. "And incidentally," he said, "your fee is only one-half of one percent of the insurance money. I think I mentioned that the policy had a double-indemnity clause, and murder is considered accidental."

"I know," I said. "I've always wondered why."

The Sixty-eighth Precinct is stationed onSixty-fifthStreet between Third and Fourth Avenues, straddling the approximate boundary of Bay Ridge andSunsetPark. On the south side of the street a housing project loomed; across from it, the station house looked like something from Picasso's cubist period, all blocky with cantilevered cubes and recessed areas. The structure reminded me of the building that houses the Two-three inEast Harlem, and I learned later that the same architect designed them both.

The building was six years old then, according to the plaque in the entranceway that mentioned the architect, the police commissioner, the mayor, and a couple of other worthies making a bid for municipal immortality. I stood there and read the whole plaque as if it had a special message for me. Then I went up to the desk and said I was there to see Detective Calvin Neumann. The officer on duty made a phone call,then pointed me to the squad room.

The building's interior was clean and spacious and well lit. It had been open enough years, though, to begin to feel like what it was.

The squad room contained a bank of gray metal file cabinets, a row of green metal lockers, and twin rows of five-foot steel desks set back to back. A television set was on in one corner with nobody watching it. Half of the eight or ten desks were occupied. At the water cooler, a man in a suit talked with a man in his shirtsleeves. In the holding pen, a drunk sang something tuneless in Spanish.

I recognized one of the seated detectives but couldn't recall his name. He didn't look up. Across the room, another man looked familiar. I went up to a man I didn't know and he pointed out Neumann, two desks down on the opposite side.

He was filling in a form, and I stood while he finished what he was typing. He looked up then and said, "Scudder?" and pointed to a chair. He swiveled around to face me and waved a hand at the typewriter.

"They don't tell you," he said, "the hours you'regonna spend typing crud. Nobody out there realizes how much of this job is clerical."

"That's the part it's hard to get nostalgic about."

"I don't think I'd miss it myself." He yawned elaborately. "Eddie Koehler gave you high marks," he said. "I gave him a call like you suggested. He said you're okay."

"You know Eddie?"

He shook his head. "But I know what a lieutenant is," he said. "I haven't got a whole lot to give you, but you're welcome to it. You may not get the same cooperation from Brooklyn Homicide."

"Why's that?"

"They drew the case to start with. It got called in originally to the One-oh-four, which was actually wrong, it should have been ours, but that happens a lot. Then Brooklyn Homicide responded along with the One-oh-four, and they took the case away from the precinct guys."

"When did you come into it?"

"When a favorite snitch of mine came up with a lot of talk coming out of the bars and bakeries on Third under the expressway.A nice mink coat at a real good price, but you got to keep this quiet because there's a lot of heat. Well, July's a funny time to sell fur coats inSunsetPark. A guy buys a coat for hissenora, he wants her to be able to wear it that night. So my guy comes to me with the impression thatMiguelito Cruz has a houseful of stuff he's looking to sell and it just might be he hasn't got sales slips for many of the items. With the mink and a couple other items he mentioned, I remembered theTillary job onColonial Road, and it was enough to get a judge to issue a search warrant."

He ran a hand through his hair. It was medium brown, lighter where the sun had bleached it, and it was on the shaggy side. Cops were starting to wear their hair a little longer around about then, and the younger ones were beginning to show up in beards and moustaches. Neumann, though, was clean-shaven, his features regular except for a nose that had been broken and imperfectly reset.

"The stuff was in Cruz's house," he said. "He lives over on Fifty-first, the other side of theGowanus Expressway. I have the address somewhere if you want it. Those are some pretty blighted blocks over by the Bush Terminal Warehouse, if you know where that is. A lot of empty lots and boarded-up buildings and others nobody bothered boarding up, or somebody opened them up again and there's junkies camped out there. Where Cruz lived wasn't so bad. You'll see it if you go over there."

"Helive alone?"

He shook his head."With hisabuela.His grandmother. Little old lady, doesn't speak English, she probably ought to be in a home. Maybe they'll take her in at theMarien -Heim,it's right in the neighborhood. Old lady comes here fromPuerto Rico, before she can learn English she winds up in a home with a German name. That'sNew York, right?"

"You foundTillary's possessions in the Cruz apartment?"

"Oh, yeah.No question. I mean the serial numbers matched on the record player. He tried to deny it. What else is new, right? 'Oh, I buydis stuff onde street, it was some guy I met in a bar. Idoan knowhees name.' We told him, sure,Miguelito, but meanwhile a woman got cut bad in the house this stuff came out of, so it sure looks like you'regonna go away for murder one. The next minute he's copping to the burglary but insisting there was no dead woman when he was there."

"He must have known a woman got killed there."

"Of course, no matter who killedher. It was in the papers, right? One minute he says he didn't see the story, the next minute he didn't happen to recognize theaddress, you know how their stories keep changing."

"Where does Herrera come in?"

"They're cousins or something. Herrera lives in a furnished room on Forty-eighth betweenFifth and Sixth just a couple of blocks from the park.Lived there, anyway. Right now they're both living at the Brooklyn House of Detention and they'll be living there until they move upstate."

"They both have sheets?"

"Be a surprise if they didn't, wouldn't it?" He grinned. "They're your typical fuckups. A few juvenile arrests for gang stuff. They both beat a burglary charge a year and a halfago, a judge ruled there wasn't probable cause to justify a frisk." He shook his head. "The fucking rules you have to play by. Anyway, they beat that one, and another time they got collared for burglary andplea-bargained it to criminal trespass and got suspended sentences for it. And another time, another burglary case, the evidence disappeared."

"It disappeared?"

"It got lost or misfiled or something, I don't know. It's a miracle anybody ever goes to jail in this city. You really need a death wish to wind up in prison."

"So they did a fair amount of burglary."

"It looks like.In-and-out stuff, nickel-and-dime crap. Kick the door in, grab a radio, run into the street and sell it on the street for five or ten dollars. Cruz was worse than Herrera. Herrera worked from time to time, pushing a hand truck in the garment center or delivering lunches, minimum-wage stuff. I don't thinkMiguelito ever held a job."

"But neither of them ever killed anybody before."

"Cruz did."

"Oh?"

He nodded."In a tavern fight, him and another asshole fighting over some woman."

"The papers didn't have that."

"It never got to court. There were no charges pressed. There were a dozen witnesses reporting that the dead guy went after Cruz first with a broken bottle."

"What weapon did Cruz use?"

"A knife.He said it wasn't his, and there were witnesses prepared to swear they'd seen somebody toss him the knife. And of course they hadn't happened to notice who it was did the tossing. We didn't have enough to make a case of weapon possession, let alone homicide."

"But Cruz normally carried a knife?"

"You'd be more likely to catch him leaving the house without underwear."

THAT was early afternoon, the day after I'd taken fifteen hundred dollars from Drew Kaplan. That morning I'd bought a money order and mailed it to Syosset. I paid my August rent in advance, settled a bar tab or two, and rode the BMT toSunsetPark.

It's in Brooklyn, of course, on the borough's western edge, above Bay Ridge and south and west ofGreen-WoodCemetery. These days there's a fair amount ofbrownstoning going on inSunsetPark, with young urban professionals fleeing theManhattan rents and renovating the old row houses, gentrifying the neighborhood. Back then the upwardly mobile young had not yet discovered the place, and the population was a mixture ofLatins and Scandinavians. Most of the former were Puerto Ricans, most of the latter Norwegians, and the balance was gradually shifting fromEurope to the islands, from light to dark, but this was a process that had been going on for ages and there was nothing hurried about it.

I'd walked around some before my visit to the Six-eight, keeping mostly within a block or so ofFourth Avenue, the main commercial thoroughfare, and orienting myself intermittently by looking around for Saint Michael's Church. Few of the buildings stood more than three stories, and the egg-shaped church dome, set atop a two-hundred-foot tower, was visible a long ways off.

I walked north onThird Avenue now, on the right-hand side of the street, in the shade of the expressway overhead. As I neared Cruz's street I stopped in a couple of bars, more to immerse myself in the neighborhood than to ask any questions. I had a short shot of bourbon in one place, stuck to beer otherwise.

The block whereMiguelito Cruz had lived with his grandmother was as Neumann described it. There were several vast vacant lots, one of them staked out in cyclone fencing, the others open and rubble-strewn. In one, small children played in the burned-out shell of a Volkswagen beetle. Four three-story buildings with scalloped brick fronts stood in a row on the north side of the block, closer toSecond Avenue than to Third. The buildings abutting the group on either side had been torn down, and the newly exposed brick side walls looked raw except for the graffiti spray-painted on their lower portions.

Cruz had lived in the building closest toSecond Avenue, closest, too, to the river. The vestibule was a lot of cracked and missing tiles and peeling paint. Six mailboxes were set into one wall, their locks broken and repaired and broken again. There were no bells to ring, nor was there a lock on the front door. I opened it and walked up two flights of stairs. The stairwell held cooking smells, rodent smells,a faint ammoniac reek of urine. All old buildings housing poor people smell like that. Rats die in the walls, kids and drunks piss. Cruz's building was no worse than thousands.

The grandmother lived on the top floor, in a perfectly neat railroad flat filled with holy pictures and little candle-illuminated shrines. If she spoke any English, she didn't let me know it.

No one answered my knock at the apartment across the hall.

I worked my way through the building. On the second floor, the apartment directly below the Cruz apartment was occupied by a very dark-skinned Hispanic woman with what looked like five children under six years old. A television set and a radio were playing in the front room, another radio in the kitchen. The children were in constant motion and at least two of them were crying or yelling at all times. The woman was cooperative enough, but she didn't have much English and it was impossible to concentrate on anything in there.