When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (11 page)

Across the hall, no one responded to my knock. I could hear a television set playing and went on knocking. Finally the door opened. An enormously fat man in his underwear opened the door and walked back inside without a word, evidently assuming I would follow. He led me through several rooms littered with old newspapers and empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans to the front room, where he sat in a sprung armchair watching a game show. The color on his set was curiously distorted, giving the panelists faces that were red one moment and green the next.

He was white, with lank hair that had been blond once but was mostly gray now. It was hard to estimate his age because of the weight he was carrying, but he was probably somewhere between forty and sixty. He hadn't shaved in several days and may not have bathed or changed his bed linen in months. He stank, and his apartment stank, and I stayed there anyway and asked him questions. He had three beers left from a six-pack when I went in there, and he drank them one after another and padded barefoot through the apartment to return with a fresh six-pack from the refrigerator.

His name wasIlling, he said, PaulIlling, and he had heard about Cruz, it was on television, and he thought it was terrible but he wasn't surprised, hell no. He'd lived here all his life, he told me, and this had been a nice neighborhood once, decent people, respectedtheirselves and respected their neighbors. But now you had the wrongelement, and what could you expect?

"They live like animals," he told me. "You wouldn't believe it."

ANGEL Herrera's rooming house was a four-story red brick building, its ground floor given over to a coin laundry. Two men in their late twenties lounged on the stoop, drinking their beer from cans held in brown paper bags. I asked for Herrera's room. They decided I was a cop; the assumption showed in their faces, and the set of their shoulders. One of them told me to try the fourth floor.

There was a reek of marijuana smoke floating on top of the other smells in the hallway. A tiny woman, dark and bright-eyed, stood at the third-floor landing. She was wearing an apron and holding a folded copy of ElDiario, one of the Spanish-language newspapers. I asked for Herrera's room.

"Twenny-two," she said, and pointed upstairs. "But he's not in." Her eyes fixed on mine. "You know where he is?"

"Yes."

"Then you know he is not here. His door is lock."

"Do you have the key?"

She looked at me sharply."You a cop?"

"I used to be."

Her laugh was loud, unexpected. "Wha'dyou get, laid off? They got no work for cops, all the crooks in jail? You want to go in Angel's room, come on, I let you in."

A cheap padlock secured the door of Room 22. She tried three keys before finding the right one, then opened the door and entered the room ahead of me. A cord hung from the bare-bulb ceiling fixture over the narrow iron bedstead. She pulled it,then raised a window shade to illuminate the room a little more.

I looked out the window, walked around the room,examined the contents of the closet and the small bureau. There were several photographs in drugstore frames on top of the bureau, and half a dozen unframed snapshots.Two different women, several children. In one snapshot, a man and woman in bathing suits squinted into the sun, the surf behind them. I showed the photograph to the woman and she identified the man as Herrera. I had seen his photo in the paper, along with Cruz and the two arresting officers, but he looked completely different in the snapshot.

The woman, I learned, was Herrera's girlfriend. The woman who appeared in some of the other photos with the children was Herrera's wife inPuerto Rico. He was a good boy, Herrera was,the woman assured me. He was polite, he kept his room neat,he didn't drink too much or play his radio loud late at night. And he loved hisbabies, he sent money home toPuerto Rico when he had it to send.

FOURTH Avenue had churches on the average of one to a block- Norse Methodist, German Lutheran, Spanish Seventh-Day Adventists, and one called the Salem Tabernacle. They were all closed, and by the time I got to it, so was Saint Michael's. I was ecumenical enough in my tithing, but the Catholics got most of my money simply because they kept longer hours, but by the time I left Herrera's rooming house and stopped for a quick one at the bar on the corner, Saint Michael's was locked up as tight as its Protestant fellows.

Two blocks away, between a bodega and an OTB parlor, a gaunt Christ writhed on the cross in the window of a storefrontiglesia. There were a couple of backless benches inside in front of a smallaltar, and on one of them two shapeless women in black huddled silent and motionless.

I slipped inside and sat on one of the benches myself for a few moments. I had my hundred-fifty-dollar tithe ready and I'd have been as happy giving it to this hole in the wall as to some more imposing and long-established firm, but I couldn't think of an inconspicuous way to manage it. There was no poor box in evidence, no receptacle designed to accommodate donations. I didn't want to call attention to myself by finding someone in charge and handing him the money, nor did I feel comfortable just leaving it on the bench, say, where anybody could pick it up and walk off with it.

I walked out of there no poorer than I'd walked in.

I spent the evening inSunsetPark.

I don't know if it was work, or if I even thought I was doing TommyTillary any good. I walked the streets and worked the bars, but I wasn't looking for anyone and I didn't ask a lot of questions.

OnSixtieth Street east ofFourth Avenue I found a dark beery tavern called the Fjord. There were nautical decorations on the walls but they looked to have accumulated haphazardly over the years- a length of fishnet, a life preserver, and, curiously, a Minnesota Vikings football pennant. A black-and-white TV sat at one end of the bar, its volume turned down low. Old men sat with their shots and beers, not talking much, letting the night pass.

When I left there I flagged a gypsy cab and got the driver to take me toColonial Road in Bay Ridge. I wanted to see the house where TommyTillary had lived, the house where his wife had died. But I wasn't sure of the address. That stretch ofColonial Road was mostly brick apartment houses and I was pretty sure that Tommy's place was a private house. There were a few such houses tucked in between the apartment buildings but I didn't have the number written down and wasn't sure of the cross streets. I told the cabdriver I was looking for the house where the woman was stabbed to death and he didn't know what the hell I was talking about, and seemed generally wary of me, as though I might do something unpredictable at any moment.

I suppose I was a little drunk. I sobered up on the way back toManhattan. He wasn't that enthusiastic about taking me, but he set a price of ten dollars and I agreed to it and leaned back in my seat. He took the expressway, and en route I saw thetowerofSaint Michael 's and told the driver that it wasn't right, that churches should be open twenty-four hours a day. He didn't sayanything, and I closed my eyes and when I opened them the cab was pulling up in front of my hotel.

There were a couple of messages for me at the desk. TommyTillary had called twice and wanted me to call him. SkipDevoe had called once.

It was too late to call Tommy, probably too late for Skip.Late enough, anyway, to call it a night.

I rode out toBrooklyn again the next day. I stayed on the train past theSunsetPark stations and got off atBay Ridge Avenue. The subway entrance was right across the street from the funeral parlor MargaretTillary had been buried from. Burial had been inGreen-WoodCemetery, two miles to the north. I turned and looked upFourth Avenue, as if following the route of the funeral cortege with my eyes. Then I walked west onBay Ridge Avenue toward the water.

AtThird Avenue I looked to my left and saw theVerrazanoBridge off in the distance, spanning the Narrows between Brooklyn andStaten Island. I walked on, through a better neighborhood than the one I'd spent the previous day in, and atColonial Road I turned right and walked until I found theTillary house. I'd looked up the address before leaving my hotel and now found it easily. It may have been one of the houses I'd stared at the night before. The cab ride had since faded some from memory. It was indistinct, as if seen through a veil.

The house was a huge brick-and-frame affair three stories tall, just across the street from the southeast corner of Owl'sHeadPark. Four-story apartment buildings of red brick flanked the house. It had a broad porch, an aluminum awning, a steeply pitched roof. I mounted the steps to the porch and rang the doorbell. A four-note chime sounded within.

No one answered. I tried the door and it was locked. The lock didn't look terribly challenging, but I had no reason to force it.

A driveway ran past the house on its left-hand side. It led past a side door, also locked, to a padlocked garage. The burglars had broken a pane of glass in the side door, and it had been since replaced with a rectangle of cardboard cut from a corrugated carton and secured with metallic tape.

I crossed the street and sat in the park for a while. Then I moved to where I could observe theTillary house from the other side of the street. I was trying to visualize the burglary. Cruz and Herrera had had a car, and I wondered where they'd parked it. In the driveway, out of sight and close to the door they'd entered through? Or on the street, making a getaway a simpler matter? The garage could have been open then; maybe they stowed the car in it, so no one would see it in the driveway and wonder about it.

I had a lunch of beans and rice and hot sausage. I got to Saint Michael's bymidafternoon. It was open this time, and I sat for a while in a pew off to the side,then lit a couple of candles. My $150 finally made it to the poor box.

I did what you do. Mostly, I walked around and knocked on doors and asked questions. I went back to both their residences, Herrera's and Cruz's. I talked to neighbors of Cruz's who hadn't been around the previous day, and I talked to some of the other tenants in Herrera's rooming house. I walked over to the Six-eight looking for Cal Neumann. He wasn't there, but I talked to a couple of cops in the station house and went out for coffee with one of them.

I made a couple of phone calls, but most of my activity was walking around and talking to people face-to-face, writing down bits and pieces in my notebook, going through the motions and trying not to question the point of my actions. I was amassing a certain amount of data but I had no idea whether or not it added up to anything. I didn't know what exactly I was looking for, or if there was anything there to look for. I suppose I was trying to perform enough action and produce enough information to justify, to myself and to Tommy and his lawyer, the fee I had already collected and largely dispersed.

By early evening I'd had enough. I took the train home. There was a message at the desk for me from TommyTillary, with his office number. I put it in my pocket and walked around the corner, and Billie Keegan told me Skip was looking for me.

"Everybody's looking for me," I said.

"It's nice to be wanted," Billie said. "I had an uncle was wanted in four states. You had a phone message, too. Where'd I put it?" He handed me a slip.TommyTillary again, but a different phone number this time."Something to drink, Matt? Or did you just drop by to check your mail and messages?"

I'd been taking it easy inBrooklyn, mostly sticking with cups of coffee in bakeries and bodegas, drinking a little beer in the bars. I let Billie pour mea double bourbon and it went down easy.

"Looked for you today," Billie said. "Couple of us went out to the track.Thought you might want to come along."

"I hadwork to do," I said. "Anyway, I'm not much for horses."

"It's fun," he said, "if you don't take it serious."

THE number TommyTillary left turned out to be a hotel switchboard in Murray Hill. He came on the line and asked if I could drop by the hotel. "You know where it is?Thirty-seventh andLex?"

"I ought to be able to find it."

"They got a bar downstairs, nice quiet little place. It's full of these Jap businessmen in BrooksBrothers suits. Every once in a while they put down their scotches long enough to take snapshots of each other. Then they smile and order more drinks. You'll love it."

I caught a cab and went over there, and he hadn't been exaggerating much. The cocktail lounge, plush and dimly lit, had a largely Japanese clientele that evening. Tommy was by himself at the bar, and when I walked in he pumped my hand and introduced me to the bartender.

We took our drinks to a table. "Crazy place," he said. "Look at that, will you? You thought I was kidding about the cameras, didn't you? I wonder what they do with all the pictures. You'd need a whole room in your house just to keep them, the way they click 'emoff."

"There's no film in the cameras."

"Be a kick, wouldn't it?" He laughed. "No film in the cameras. Shit, they're probably not realJaps, either. Where Imostly been going, there's the Blueprint a block away on Park, and there's another place, a pub-type place, Dirty Dick's or something like that. But I'm staying here and I wanted you to be able to reach me. Is this okay for now or should we go somewhere else?"

"This is fine."

"You sure?I never had a detective work for mebefore, I want to make sure I keep him happy." He grinned,then let his face turn serious. "I was just wondering," he said, "if you were, you know, making any progress.Getting anyplace."

I told him some of what I'd run into. He got very excited when he heard about the barroom stabbing.

"That's great," he said. "That ought to wrap it up for our little brown brothers, shouldn't it?"

"How do you figure that?"

"He's a knife artist," he said, "and he already killed somebody once and got away with it. Jesus, this is great stuff, Matt. I knew it was the right move to get you in on this. Have you talked to Kaplan yet?"