KILLER'S WEDGE, page 5
part #7 of 87th Precinct Series
He looked across the room to where Virginia Dodge was watching the interrogation of the Puerto Rican girl.
I've also got to hurry, he thought. She may just take it in her mind to amble over here and see what I'm doing.
"You know whose throat you slit?" Willis asked.
"I don' know nothin'."
"Then J'm gonna let you in on a little secret. You ever hear of a street gang called the Arabian Knights?"
"No."
"It's one of the biggest gangs in the precinct," Willis said.
"Teen-age kids mostly. Except the guy who's leader of the gang is twenty-five years old. In fact, he's married and has got a baby daughter. They call him Kassim. You ever hear of anybody called Kassim?"
"In fiction, he's AH Baba's brother. In real life, He's leader of this gang called the Arabian Knights. His real name is Jose Dorena. Does that ring a bell?"
"14o.
"He's a very big man in the streets, Kassim is. He's really a punk-but not in the streets. There's a gang called the Latin Paraders and the shit has been on between them and the Knights for years. And do you know what price the Paraders have set for a truce?"
"No. What?"
"An Arabian Knights jacket as a trophy and Kassim dead."
'~So who cares?"
"You ought to care, baby. The guy whose throat you slit is Kassim. Jose6 Dorena."
Angelica blinked.
"Yeah," Willis said.
"Is this legit?" Byrnes asked.
"You said it, Pete. So you see, Angelica, if Kassim dies, the Latin Paraders'll erect a statue of you in the park. But the Arabian Knights won't like you one damn bit.
They're a bunch of mean bastards, sweetie, and they re not even gonna like the fact that you cut him-. whether it leads to his untimely demise or not."
"What?" Angelica said.
"Whether he croaks or not, you're on their list, baby."
"I din know who he wass," AngeliCa said.
"Then you did do the cutting?"
"Si. But I din know who he wass."
"Then why'd you cut him?"
"He wass bodderin' ~ "How?"
"He wass try to feel me up," Angelica said.
"Oh , come on!" Willis moaned.
"He wass!"
"Dig the virgin, Pete," Willis said.
"Why'd you cut him, baby? And let's not have the hearts and flowers this trip."
"He wass grab my bosom," Angelica said.
"On the steps. In from' the stoop. So I cut him."
Willie sighed.
Virginia Dodge seemed to be tiring of the inquisition. Nervously, she sat at the desk commanding a view of both squad room and corridor beyond, the .38 in her hand, the clear bottle of nitroglycerin resting on the desk before her.
I have to hurry, Meyer thought. Get it all down once and for all with no mistakes, and then start moving. Because if she comes over here and sees this, she is just liable to pull the trigger and blow off the back of my head, and Sarah will be sitting shivah for a week. They'll have to cover every mirror in the house and turn all the pictures to the wall. God, it'll be ghastly.
So get it done. October ain't a time for dying.
"He grabbed your bosom, huh?" Willis said.
"Which one? The right one or the left one?"
"Iss not funny," Angelica said.
"For a man he feels you up in public, iss not funny."
"So you slashed him?"
""Cause he grabbed for your tit, right?"
"What do you think, Pete?
"Dignity doesn't choose its professions," Byrnes said.
"I believe her."
"I think she's lying in her teeth," Willis said.
"We check around, we'll probably find out she's been making it with
Kassun for the past year. She probably saw him looking at another girl, and so she put the blade to him. That's more like it, isn't it, baby?"
"No. I don' know thees Kassim. He jus' come over an' get fresh. My body iss my body. An' I give it where I want. An' not to peegs with dirty hans."
"Hooray," Willis said.
"They're really gonna put a statue of you in the park." He turned to Byrnes.
"What do we make it, Pete? Felonious assault?"
"What condition is this Kassim in?"
"They carted him off to the hospital. Who knows? He was bleeding all over the goddamn sidewalk. You know what killed me, Pete? A bunch of young kids were standing around in a circle. You could see they didn't know whether to cry or laugh or just scream. They were kind of hopping up and down, do you know what I mean? Jesus, imagine growing up with this every day of your life? Can you imagine it?"
"Keep in touch with the hospital, Hal," Byrnes said.
"Let's hold the booking until later. We can't do much with ..." He gestured with his head to where Virginia Dodge sat.
"Yeah. All right, Angelica. Keep your legs crossed. Maybe Kassim won't die. Maybe he's got a charmed life."
"I hope the son a bitch rots in his gray," Angelica said.
"Nice girl," Willis said, and he patted her shoulder. Meyer pulled the report from the typewriter. He separated the carbon from the three blue sheets, and then he read the top sheet.
He read it carefully because he was a patient man, and he wanted it to be right the first time.
There might not be another chance after this one.
The window near the desk was open. The meshed grill outside the window-which protected the glass from the hurled brickbats of the 87this inhabitants-would present only a small problem. Quickly, with one eye on Virginia Dodge, Meyer rolled the first report sheet into a long cylinder. Hastily, he thrust the cylinder through one of the diamond-shaped openings on the mesh and then shoved it out onto the air. He looked across the room.
Virginia Dodge was not watching him.
DETECTIVE DIVISION REPORT
PlACE OF OCCURRENCE THE DETECTIVES OF THE 87th
SQUAD APE
Ri PORTING
BEING HELD PRISONER BY
A GUN AND A BOTTLE OF
NITROGLYCERIN.
GAViN NAMI
ADDRESS OP PERSON REPORTING
Xl YOU FIND THIS NOTE.
CALL HEADQUARTERS
A? ONCE! THE NUMBER IS
CENTER 6-0800.
stun UNIFORM MEMbER ASSIGNEO
DETECTIVE 2nd/GE MEYER SU~4AMI INITIAU SHIEW NUMStI
ARRESTS
He rolled the second sheet and repeated the action.
He was shoving the third and final sheet through the opening when he heard Virginia Dodge shout, "Stop or I'll shoot!"
CHAPTER 7
MEYER WHIRLED FROM THE OPEN
WINDOW.
He fully expected a bullet to come crashing into him, and then he realized Virginia Dodge was not looking at him was not even facing in his direction. Hunched over, the .38 thrust out ahead of her, she had left the desk and the bottle of nitroglycerin and was standing a foot inside the slatted-rail divider.
On the other side of the divider was AM Miscolo.
He stood undecided, his curly black hair matted to his forehead, his blue suspenders taut against his slumped shoulders, his shirt sleeves rolled up over muscular forearms. Total surprise was on his face. He had come out of the Clerical Office where he'd been sweating over his records all afternoon. He had walked to the railing and shouted, "Hey, anybody ready for chow?" and then had seen the woman leap from the desk with the gun in her hand.
He had turned to run, and she'd yelled, "Stop or I'll shoot!" and he'd stopped and turned to face her, but now he wondered whether or not he'd done the right thing. Miscolo was not a coward. He was a trained policeman who happened to be a desk jockey, but he'd learned to shoot at the academy and he wished now his gun was in his hand instead of in one of the filing cabinet drawers in the Clerical Office. The woman standing at the railing had the look of a crazy bitch on her face. Miscolo had seen that look before, and so he thought he'd been wise to stop when she yelled at him, and yet there were a lot of other men in that room and Jesus how long had she been here and was she going to shoot up the whole damn joint?
He stood in indecision for a moment longer.
He had a wife and a grown son who was in the Air Force. He did not want his wife to become a cop's widow, he did not want her making up beds in precincts, but, Jesus, that bitch had a crazy look on her face, suppose she shot everyone, suppose she went berserk?
He turned and started to run down the corridor.
Virginia Dodge took careful aim and fired.
She fired only once.
The bullet entered Miscolo's back just a little to the left of his spinal column. It spun him around in a complete circle and then slammed him up against the door to the Men's Room. He clung to the door for an instant and then slowly slid to the floor.
The bottle of nitroglycerin on the desk did not explode.
There was, of course, no such thing as a locked-door murder mystery.
Steve Carella knew that with the instincts of an inveterate murder mystery reader and a true cop.
And yet here he was investigating a suicide which had taken place in a windowless room and-4o make matters worse-the victim appeared to have hanged himself after locking the door from the inside. It had taken three strong men to snap that lock before they could enter the room. At least, that's what they had told him yesterday when he'd first investigated the case, and that's what they were telling him again today.
Maybe it is a suicide, Carella thought. The police department treats all suicides exactly like homicides, but that is only a formality.
And maybe this is truly a suicide, what the hell, why should I always go around suspecting the worst of people?
The trouble is these sons of his all look as if they are capable of tripping a blind woman and cutting out her heart. And the old man left a fortune to be divided among them. And was it not possible that one of those sons-or maybe even all of them acting in concert-had decided to put the blocks to the old man and get that loot quick? According to the old man's lawyer, whom Carella had interrogated yesterday, the old man had left $750,000 in cash to be divided among "his beloved sons upon his jj death." That was a lot of scratch. Not to mention the whole of Scott Industries, Inc." and various other holdings throughout the country. Murders had certainly been committed for less.
But, of course, this was a suicide.
Why didn't he simply wrap it up as such?
He was supposed to meet Teddy at the precinct at seven-hey, I'm going to have a baby, how about that?-and he certainly wouldn't get there in time if he hung around this creepy old mansion and tried to make a homicide out of an obvious suicide. Oh, was he going to wine and dine her tonight!
Tonight, she'd be a queen, anything she wanted he would get for her.
Jesus, I love her, he thought.
So let's wrap the damn thing up and meet her on time, what say? What time is it anyway? He glanced at his watch. 5:45.
Well, he still had a little time so he might just as well do a thorough job. Even if it didn't smell like suicide ... oh, smell, smell, what the hell determines the smell of a case? Still, this one didn't smell like suicide.
The musty old mansion was an anomaly for the 87th Precinct. Built in the 1890's, it clung to the shoreline of the River Harb like a Charles Addams creation, hung with dark shutters, shrouded with a slate roof, its gables giving the house strange and shadowy angles. Not three miles from the Hamilton Bridge, it nonetheless gave the feeling of being three centuries removed from it. Time had somehow bypassed this eerie house squatting on the river's edge, its rusted iron fence erecting a barrier against society. The Scott Mansion. He could still remember taking the call yesterday.
"This is Roger... at the Scott Mansion.
Mr. Scott has hanged himself."
Roger, of course, had been the butler, and so Carella immediately discounted him as a suspect. The butler never did it. Besides, he seemed more broken up over the old man's death than anyone else in the house. The old man, in any case, had not been a pretty sight to see. Obese in life, the coloration of death by strangulation had not enhanced his appearance at all.
They had led Carella to the storage room which the old man had converted into a private study, away from the larger study downstairs. The three sons-Alan, Mark, and David-had backed away from the door as Carella approached it, as if the horror of that room and its contents was still terrifyingly fresh in their minds. The door jamb had been splintered. Pieces of splintered wood still rested on the floor outside the door. A crowbar was lying against the corridor wall.
The door opened outwards into the corridor. It opened easily when Carella tried it, but he saw instantly that the inside lock, a simple slip bolt, had been ripped from the door jamb when the door was forced. It hung from a single screw as he entered the room.
The old man lay in a crumpled fat ball at the opposite end of the room. The rope was still around his neck even though the sons had cut him down the moment they'd entered the room.
"We had to cut him down," Alan explained.
"To get in. We used a crowbar to break the lock, but even then we had trouble getting the door open. You see, Father had tied one end of the rope to the doorknob before.." before he hanged himself. Then he threw the rope over that beam in the ceiling and... well, after we forced the lock, we still had his weight to contend with, his weight pulling the door closed. We opened it a wedge with the crowbar, and then cut the rope before we could get in."
"Who cut the rope?" Carella asked.
"I did," Alan said.
"How'd you know the rope was there?"
"When we got the door open a crack, we could see the ... the old man hanging. I stuck my arm into the opening and used a jackknife on the rope."
"I see," Carella had said.
Now, standing in the room where the hanging had taken place, he really tried to see. The old man, of course, had been carted away by the meat wagon yesterday-but everything else in the room was exactly as it had been then.
The room was windowless.
Nor were there any secret panels or passageways leading to it. He had made a thorough check yesterday. The walls floor, and ceiling were as solid as Boulder Dam, ~.~onstructed in a time when houses were built to last forever.
All right, the only way into this room is through that door, Carella told himself.
And the door was locked.
From the inside.
So it's suicide.
The old man had, indeed, tied one end of the rope to the doorknob, thrown the length of rope over the ceiling beam, and then climbed onto a stool fastened the rope to his neck, and jumped. His neck had not been broken. He had died of slow strangulation.
And surely his weight had helped to hold that door closed against the efforts of his three sons to open it. But his weight alone would not have resisted the combined pull of three brawny men. Carella had checked that with the laboratory yesterday. Sam Grossman, in charge of the lab, had worked it out mathematically, fulcrum and lever, weights and balances. Had the door not been locked, the brothers could have successfully pulled it open even with the old man's weight banging at the end of the rope attached to the doorknob.
No, the door had to be locked.
There was physical evidence that it had been locked, too. For, had the slip bolt not been fastened against the retaining loop of metal, the lock would not have been ripped from the doorframe when the crowbar was used on it.
"We had to use the crowbar," Alan had said.
"We tried to pull it open by force, and then Mark realized the door was locked from the inside, and he went out to the garage to get the crowbar. We wedged it into the door and snapped the lock."
"Then what?"
"Then Mark stepped up to the door and tried to open it again. He couldn't understand why it wouldn't open. We'd snapped the lock, hadn't we? We used the crowbar a second time, wedging the door open. That was ... was when we saw Father.
You know the rest."
So the door had been locked.
So it's suicide.
Or maybe it isn't.
What do we do now? Send a wire off to John Dickson Carr?
Wearily, Carella trudged downstairs, walking past the clutter of wood splinters still in the hallway outside the door.
He found Christine Scott in the small sitting room overlooking the River Harb. I don't believe any of these people's names, Carella thought. They've all popped out of some damn British comedy of manners, and they're all make-believe, and that old man up there did commit suicide and why the devil am I wasting my time questioning people and snooping around a musty garret room without any windows?
"Detective Carella?" Christine said.
She looked colorless against the flaming reds and oranges of the trees which lined the river bank. Her hair was an ash blond, almost silvery, but it gave an impression of lack of pigmentation. Her eyes, too, were a lavender-blue but so pastel as to be almost without real color. She wore no lipstick. Her frock was white.
A simple jade necklace hung at her throat.
"Mrs. Scott," he said, "how are you feeling now?"
"Much better, thank you." She looked out at the flaming trees.
"This is my favorite spot, right here. This is where I first met the old man.
When David first brought me to this house." She paused. The lavender-blue eyes turned toward Carella.
"Why do you suppose he killed himself, Detective Carella?"
"I don't know, Mrs. Scott," Carella said.
"Where's your husband?"
"David? In his room. He's taking this rather hard."
"And his brothers?"
"Around the house somewhere. This is a very big house, you know. The old man built it for his bride. It cost seventy five thousand dollars to build, and that was back in 1896 when money was worth a great deal more than it is now.
Have you seen the bridal suite upstairs?"
"It's magnificent. Huge oak panels, and marble counter tops, and gold bathroom fixtures. And these wonderful windows that open onto a balcony overlooking the river. There aren't many houses like this one left in the city."
