Blood Relatives (6 page)

The kids knew somebody had been killed in that building on Saturday night, but this was Tuesday afternoon and the barricades the City Housing Authority had put up on either end of the block made the street perfect for stickball. It was still early
September, and there’d be plenty of daylight before dinnertime. So they congregated at about 4:00, chose up their sides and chalked their bases onto the asphalt, and got down to the serious business at hand.

The boy playing center field was standing almost directly opposite the hallway in which Muriel Stark had been found. He wasn’t thinking about Muriel Stark, he didn’t even
know
Muriel Stark. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t thinking about murder or sex maniacs or anything but how hard and how far the batter on the other team would hit the rubber ball. They had two guys on base now, and a hit would put them ahead. This was a tense moment, much more important than who had got killed in the building on Saturday night, or who had done it. The boy saw the pitcher on his team wind up and fling the ball toward the other team’s batter. The ball bounced on the asphalt paving, came up toward the batter waist-high. The broomstick handle came around in a powerful swing, the narrow round of wood colliding with the rubber ball and sending it soaring over the pitcher’s head, and then the second baseman’s head, to bounce somewhere between second base and center field. The boy came running in, glove low. The ball was still bouncing, and he was running to meet it, the way he’d been taught—run to meet the ball, don’t wait for it to come to you. It took a bad hop some four feet from his glove, veered off to the right and rolled into the sewer at the curb.

“That’s only a double!” he shouted immediately. “That’s only a double, it went down the sewer.”

There was no argument, they all knew the rules. The batter grumbled a little about losing a sure homer, but rules were rules and the ball had rolled down the sewer and that made it an automatic double. They gathered around the sewer grating now, half a dozen of them. Two of them seized opposite sides of the grating, their hands reaching down to clasp the cast-iron crossbars,
and they lifted the grating and moved it onto the pavement, and then the smallest boy in the group lowered himself into the sewer.

“You see it?” somebody asked.

“Yeah, it’s over there,” the boy answered.

“So get it already.”

“Just a second, I can’t
reach
the damn thing.”

“What’s that over there?” somebody else asked.

“Let me get the ball first, okay?”

“Over there. That shiny thing.”

They had found the murder weapon.

Or, to be more exact, they had found a knife near the scene of a murder, and they immediately turned it over to the police.

The blade of the knife was three and three-quarter inches long. It was a paring knife, with a pointed tip and a razor-sharp stainless-steel blade. Two stainless-steel rivets held the blade fastened to the curved wooden handle, which was itself four and a half inches long. The overall length of the knife, from the end of the wooden handle to the pointed tip of the blade, was eight and a quarter inches. The rain had washed the blade clean of any blood, but blood had soaked into the wooden handle and stained it, and it was this that the laboratory reported on. There were two types of blood on the handle of the knife. O and A. Presumably Muriel’s and Patricia’s. And presumably the killer had first slain Muriel, and then slashed Patricia, and then—instead of pursuing her when she’d run away from the building—had come down the steps to the curb and thrown the murder weapon into the sewer.

There were no usable fingerprints on the handle of the knife.

The funeral took place on Wednesday afternoon.

From the funeral home on Twelfth and Ascot, the black limousines drove out to the cemetery on Sands Spit. There were six
limousines, and behind them a row of family cars with their head-lights on, and behind those one of the 87th Precinct’s unmarked sedans. Carella was at the wheel, Kling was riding shotgun beside him. The day was one of those September miracles that made living in this part of the country almost worthwhile. The black cars moved slowly against a sky blown clear of clouds, utterly blue and dazzling with light. There was not the slightest trace of summer lingering on the air; the bite promised imminent autumn, threatened winter on the distant horizon.

At the cemetery, they walked from the cars to the open hole in the ground where the coffin was poised on canvas straps, waiting to be lowered hydraulically into the earth. A pair of gravediggers stood by silently, leaning on their shovels, hats in their hands. The Lowerys were Catholic, and the priest and clergy stood by the coffin now, waiting for the mourners to make their way along the gravel path to the burial site. Overhead, a pair of jays, blue against the bluer sky, cawed as though resenting intrusion. When the family and friends had gathered around the open grave, the priest sprinkled the coffin and the grave with holy water, and then incensed both, and said, in prayer, “Dearest brothers, let us faithfully and lovingly remember our sister, whom God has taken to himself from the trials of this world. Lord, have mercy.”

“Christ, have mercy,” the chanter of the first choir said.

“Lord, have mercy,” the second choir responded.

“Our Father,” the priest said, and sprinkled the coffin again, “who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and lead us not into temptation—”

“But deliver us from evil.”

“From the gate of hell.”

“Rescue her soul, O Lord.”

“May she rest in peace.”

“Amen.”

“O Lord, hear my prayer,” the priest said.

“And let my cry come to you.”

“The Lord be with you.”

“And with your spirit.”

“Let us pray,” the priest said. “O Lord, we implore you to grant this mercy to your dead servant, that she who held fast to your will by her intentions may not receive punishment in return for her deeds; so that, as the true faith united her with the throng of the faithful on earth, your mercy may unite her with the company of the choir of angels in heaven. Through Christ our Lord.”

“Amen.”

And then it was straight out of
Hamlet.

Like some grief-stricken Laertes, he threw himself upon the coffin just as it was being lowered into the grave. Carella recognized him at once as the slender, dark-haired, dark-eyed young man whose photograph had been in Patricia Lowery’s wallet. He was identified by name in the next moment when a dark-haired woman standing alongside the grave shouted, “Andy, no!” and reached over to pull him from the descending casket. Someone shouted an order, the coffin stopped and hung trembling on canvas straps, the young man spread-eagled and sobbing on its shining black lid. The woman was tugging at his arm, trying to break his embrace on the long black box. “Get away from me, Mom!” he shouted, and a terrible keening moan sprang from his lips in the next moment, his arms hugging the casket, his head thrown back, his cry of inconsolable grief rising to frighten even the jays, who responded in terrified flapping clamor. A man broke from the crowd of mourners, the cast was being identified for Carella without benefit of program—Andrew Lowery on the coffin hanging suspended over the open grave, his mother, Mrs. Lowery, still tugging at his arm, and now a man whom Mrs. Lowery
addressed as Frank, and to whom she immediately said, “Help me, your son’s gone crazy!” Mother, father, grief-stricken son, and Patricia Lowery standing by and watching her blood relatives with strangely detached eyes, as though they were somehow embarrassing her with their excessive display of emotion. For whereas Andrew Lowery may not have gone quite crazy, he was certainly putting on a fine show of what Hamlet might have called emphatic grief, his phrases of sorrow conjuring the wandering stars and making them stand like wonder-wounded hearers, so to speak. He was pounding on the coffin with his fists now, and shouting, “Muriel, wake up! Muriel, say you’re not dead! Muriel, I love you!” while his father and mother tried to pull him off the casket, fearful that he
and
it would tumble into the grave together, the priest hastily muttering a prayer for those resting in the cemetery (or at least
trying
to rest with all the noise Andrew Lowery was making), this time in Latin for the sake of any Roman spectators,
“Oremus. Deus, cuius miseratione animae fidelium,”
and so on.

For a moment Carella wondered whether he should step in and break up the near-riot at graveside. But finally Frank Lowery managed to pull his son off the coffin, and Mrs. Lowery clutched him to her in embrace and shouted, “We all loved her, oh, dear God, we
all
loved her!” and the priest concluded his Latin prayer with the words
“Per eundem Christum, Dominum nostrum.”
The gravediggers—who, like cops, had seen it all and heard it all—simply pressed the button that again sent the coffin
d
escending and the soul hopefully
a
scending. The skies above were still as blue as though a jousting tournament were to take place that very afternoon, with banners and pennoncels flying, and shields ablaze with two lions gules on an azure field, and lovely maidens in long pointed hats with silken tassels and merry eyes—rather than
eyes red with mourning, or squinched in embarrassment, or narrowed in pain.

“She came to live with us when her parents died,” Mrs. Lowery said. “She was fifteen at the time, they were both killed in an automobile accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike—my sister, Pauline, and my brother-in-law, Mike. Muriel came to live with us a month later. I never adopted her, but I was planning to. She always called me Aunt Lillian, but she was like a daughter to me. And certainly like a sister to Andy and Patricia.”

Lillian Lowery carried a bottle of whiskey to the kitchen table and set it down before the detectives. In the other room, her husband Frank was talking to well-wishers who had come back to the house after the funeral.

“I know you’re not allowed to drink on duty,” she said, “but I feel the need for one myself, and I’d appreciate it if you joined me.”

“Thank you,” Carella said.

She poured three shot glasses full to their brims. Carella and Kling waited for her to lift her glass, and then they lifted theirs as well. “Andy will miss her most,” Mrs. Lowery said, and tilted the glass, swallowing all the whiskey in it. Carella and Kling sipped at their drinks. When Carella put his glass down on the kitchen table, Kling put his down too. “They were really like brother and sister,” she said, pouring herself another shot from the bottle. “Except that brothers and sisters sometimes argue. Not Andy and Muriel.” She shook her head, lifted the glass, and downed the whiskey. “Never. I never heard a word of anger between them. Never even a raised voice. They got along beautifully. Well, you saw him at the cemetery, he was beside himself with grief. It’s going to take him a long time to get over this. He blames himself a little, I think.”

“Why do you say that, Mrs. Lowery?” Carella asked.

“Well, he was supposed to go with them to the party, you know. At Paul’s house. Paul Gaddis. He’s one of Andy’s friends. It was his birthday they were celebrating that night. But then at the last minute, Andy got a call from the restaurant, asking if he could come in, so he went to work instead of the party. Even so, he could maybe have saved her, if only he’d been a few minutes earlier.”

“I’m not sure I understand you,” Carella said.

“Well, he went to pick up the girls.”

“Who did? Your son?”

“Yes. Andy.”

“If he was working—”

“Well, he called here from the restaurant and asked if they were home yet. This was about ten-fifteen. I told him they weren’t here, and he said he was through at the restaurant, there’d been a very small crowd for a Saturday night, and he thought he’d head over to Paul’s and pick them up. So I said fine. But what happened, you see, Andy went over to Paul’s house, and the girls had already left.” She shook her head, and poured herself another shot glass full of whiskey.

“Mrs. Lowery,” Carella said, “what did Andy do when he got to the party and found out the girls had gone?”

“He went looking for them.”

“In the street?”

“Yes. But it began raining again, and he thought they might have gone back to the party, so he went back there. But they weren’t there, so he went out looking for them again, and he still couldn’t find them. He got here alone at about twelve-fifteen, which is when I called the police. He was soaking wet. You’d have thought he’d taken a shower with his clothes on.”

The detectives had gone to the funeral for two reasons. To begin with, they knew that killers sometimes attended the funeral
services of their victims, and they wanted to make certain there were no dark-haired, blue-eyed strangers in the crowd. Second, they wanted to show the suspect knife to Patricia Lowery and ask her to identify it as the murder weapon. They had not had a chance to talk to her at the cemetery, so Carella asked Mrs. Lowery if they might speak to Patricia now. Mrs. Lowery left the kitchen to get her. Sitting at the kitchen table, Carella and Kling could hear voices whispering in the other room. They felt curiously removed from the tragedy that had shaken this house, and yet intimately involved in it. They sat listening.

When Patricia came into the room, her face was tear-streaked. They expressed their sympathies to her, as they had to her mother, and then Carella put a manila envelope on the kitchen table and unwound the string from the cardboard button on the tie flap. He pulled the knife out by the tag attached to its handle and placed it on the kitchen table in front of Patricia.

“Have you ever seen this before?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

“Where?”

“It’s the knife that killed Muriel,” Patricia said. “It’s the knife the murderer used.”

They went to see Paul Gaddis because there were some things they wanted to know about his party guests. They did not expect to learn what they learned there, and they probably
wouldn’t
have learned it if Gaddis hadn’t suddenly become hungry. Gaddis was a good-looking young man who’d obviously begun lifting weights at an early age, and who’d just as obviously quit before he’d turned into a muscle-bound clod. He was sinewy and lean, with a firm, almost overpowering handshake, and an eager, helpful expression on his face. He led the detectives into the living room, and they sat there talking in the golden afternoon light. On Carella’s
lap was the manila envelope with the tagged murder weapon inside it.