The Hour of the Cat (41 page)

There was a sharp rap on the door. Before anyone could react, Matt Terry lurched in; swaying unsteadily, he squinted in the dimness and gaped directly at Roberta. “Hello, gorgeous, where they been hidin' you?”

“Hello, Matt.” Dunne advanced toward the light.

As Terry groped clumsily for his sidearm, Roberta swept her hand out of the pocket of her linen jacket and pressed a compact, silver-plated, snub-nosed pistol to his temple, the trigger already cocked.

“What the hell's goin' on here, Lina?” The pink, boisterous coloration of alcohol drained from Terry's face.

“You're the cop. Figure it out for yourself.”

Dunne took Terry's gun. “Have a seat.”

Terry sank on the bed. Roberta uncocked her gun and dropped it to her side. Dunne guessed from the expert way she wielded it that this wasn't the first time she'd pointed a gun at someone's head. That detective who'd tried to seduce Elba, for example, and then “disappeared.” It could be she'd also used it.

Color returned to Terry's face. “Can't stop steppin' in shit, can you?”

“This time you're the one's stepped in it. A whole pile,” Dunne said.

“So I like gettin' laid. Sue me.”

“Was that why you were here the night of the Lynch murder?” Terry glared at Lina. “I wasn't near here. I was with Brannigan, down at headquarters. Why not call and ask? He'd love hearin' from you.”

“You help carry anybody out of Lina's room?”

“Helped carry plenty of people outta Lina's room. Dead drunks is her specialty.”

Lina landed her open palm on his cheek. “You
never
carried nobody outta' my room, 'cept that once, less it was yourself.”

Stunned, he rubbed the side of his face. “Okay, maybe I helped lug out some drunk that night. I did Sally a favor, that's all.”

“No idea who it was?” Dunne said.

“I'm not in the habit of tryin' to tell one drunk from another. Like tryin' to tell Chinamen apart. Or flies.”

“A man is sentenced to the electric chair for a crime he didn't commit. Maybe you could save him the trip.”

“When did you go off and join the Salvation Army, Fin?” Terry stood. “Use that gun on me, you and your hooker friends will beat Grillo to the electric chair.” He stepped toward the door. Dunne spun him around, impaled the loose flesh beneath his jaw with the barrel of his gun and pushed it up until the back of Terry's head slammed hard against the door.

Terry's eyes bulged wide. He emitted a small, strangled moan.

Roberta put her hand on Dunne's arm; pressed gently until he lowered the gun from beneath Terry's chin. “Stop, Fin,” she said. “Let him talk.”

Terry sagged on the bed. He sat silently, not moving, covered his face with his hands for a second or two, like someone about to go to confession. He sighed and folded over at the waist, as though he were an inflated doll that had suddenly sprung a large, irreparable leak. “Christ, I need a smoke,” he said. Lina handed him hers.

“Was Grillo you carried out that night, wasn't it?” Dunne asked.

“Yeah.”

“Whose idea was it to pin the murder on him?”

“Whose the hell do you think?” Terry inhaled until the gray-red tip almost touched the yellow stain between his fingertips. He ground the butt in the ashtray and wiped the perspiration from his face. “Not long after I hauled Grillo out of Lina's room, I got a call to report to Brannigan who was workin' a homicide a few blocks away. When I get there he tells me that he's lookin' for the super, Walter Grillo, who's missin'.

“Right away, I tell him about Grillo and where I left him, and I think the Chief will laugh. But he tells me to go get Grillo and bring him back. Don't let anybody see me and make sure Grillo don't wake up. Once I got Grillo, we poured more liquor down his throat and dumped him in the boiler room, with the knife nearby. A little while later, we go lookin' for him, with some reporters in tow. Bingo.

“The Chief had the whole thing figured out in a matter of minutes. He knew the murder would generate a lot of attention from the D.A. as well as the papers. Longer it went unsolved, the more they'd be pokin' their noses where they don't belong. He wanted the case closed quick as possible. From then on, he took personal charge. It was like Grillo was made for the part. The papers dubbed him ‘the West Side Ripper.' Best of all, he'd apparently been so soused, he'd no memory of bein' here at Sally's. He never even brought it up. All he remembered was goin' for a walk.”

“He remembered,” Roberta said. “But there were people he thought would be embarrassed or hurt by the truth, and he didn't want to let them down.”

Terry shrugged. “Each his own. Me, I'd rather hurt somebody's feelings than go to the chair.”

“It never bothered you that he was innocent?”

“I'm a cop, lady, not a judge or jury. Grillo had a lawyer and the chance to defend himself. Besides, I never got called to the stand.”

“Brannigan did,” Dunne said.

“That's Brannigan's problem.”

“Now it's yours too.” Dunne made Terry stretch out on the floor. He tore the cord from the blinds and knotted it around his hands and feet. “Where can I find Brannigan?”

“You're not serious, are you?”

“Humor me.”

“The Chief always said your problem's mental. ‘Dunne lost his mind in the war,' he says to me more than once.”

Dunne pulled the cord tight. “Where can I find him?”

“All right, go ahead, be my guest. He's at Joe O'Brien's card game. You was smart, you'd drop this while you still can. Skip town for a while. I won't say a word 'bout this to no one, not even the Chief. Promise.”

“I'll tell Brannigan you said hello.”

“Stop bein' such a jerk, Fin. Stick with us, we'll stick with you. That's how it works, how it'll always work. Look after your own, they'll look after you.”

“I look after myself. It's less complicated.” Dunne shoved his handkerchief in Terry's mouth and tied the sash from the curtain around it. He dragged him into the closet and closed the door.

He sent Roberta and Lina to wait in the drugstore on the corner and sat on the bed until Terry began to kick hard against the wall. He opened the closet door and put the gun to the tip of Terry's nose. There was no more kicking. Dunne stayed a few moments longer, before tiptoeing out and closing the door gently behind him. Roberta and Lina were waiting for him. He handed Roberta the vial he'd removed from the Hermes Sanatorium. “Take it to Dr. Cropsey,” he said. He gave her the address as well as Agent Lundgren's phone number. “Call him soon as I leave.”

“Think he'll take a call from me?” Roberta said.

“Tell him I'm stealing a case right from underneath his nose. Tell him I'm in the George Washington Hotel, on Lexington, beating the FBI at its own game and grabbing the credit.”

“Will he believe me?”

“He'll believe that.”

 

 

Except for Joe O'Brien at the front desk, the lobby of the George Washington Hotel was empty. Wavy-haired and pencilstached, with a close resemblance to the actor William Powell, O'Brien was the hotel night clerk as well as host and proprietor of the East Side's longest running poker game. Initially, a pickup among O'Brien's fellow veterans from the 69th Regiment, whose headquarters was just up the avenue at 27th Street, the game became a regular stop for seasoned night prowlers and the lobster-shift crowd. For some, there was the added advantage of knowing that the presence of high-ranking police officers was a safeguard against the mob-run holdup artists who knocked over poker parlors with the regularity and precision of a Swiss clock.

Dunne dropped two dollars on the counter. “Been a while,” O'Brien said.

“Turned over a new leaf.”

“I liked the old leaf better.” O'Brien pocketed the money. “Just so you know, Brannigan's in there.” He pushed a buzzer beneath the counter and Dunne went through the door behind him. Nothing had changed in the year or so since his last visit: same four round tables situated close to one another and a well stocked bar in the corner. The smoky, stale air smelled as though it had been around since the armistice.

Brannigan was at the nearest table, the only one that was occupied, facing the door. John Mayhew Taylor and Tommy Hines were on either side. Dunne didn't know the names of the other two players, but he'd seen them here before. Long-time residents of the hotel, they were financial hucksters who ran hand-to-mouth boiler-room operations that peddled worthless stocks to the gullible and desperate, an endless line of dupes looking to strike it rich. Once upon a time, they'd been highfliers, nesting in the upstairs bar at the old Waldorf-Astoria. The Crash and the birth of the SEC had brought those days to an end. The old Waldorf was knocked down to make way for the Empire State Building. Like swallows to San Capistrano, they winged it back to the second-rate hotels in which they'd been hatched.

“Well, look what the wind blew in,” Tommy Hines said.

Brannigan lifted his eyes from the cards. He was squeezed in a captain's chair, the handles of his midsection pressing against the armrests. His massive shoulders bulged tightly against the seams of his shirt. “Join us?”

“Just watching.”

“Lost your nerve?” Brannigan asked.

“Somebody swiped my cash,” Dunne said.

“Report it to the police?”

“Think it'd help?”

Brannigan shifted in his chair. “Think it'd hurt?”

Somebody else his size might have looked fat and ungainly. But Dunne had come to see in Brannigan a close resemblance to the tigers in the Bronx Zoo who sprawled in roly-poly repose until feeding time, when they sprang up with savage agility, lax skin turning taut and murderous. Brannigan's smile did nothing to diminish the catlike intensity of his stare.

“If you want, take my chair.” Taylor threw down his cards and left the table. “I should have listened to the Professor. He warned me against coming here.”

Hines folded his hand. “If luck was water, I'd be dead of thirst.” The two others also folded. Brannigan swept the pot into his pile of winnings. From the size of it, if luck was water, he was having a bath. He shuffled the cards for a fresh hand.

Joe O'Brien brought in a box full of sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Right behind was Red Doyle, who took off his hat and tossed it on one of the empty tables.

“Well if it ain't Leon O'Trotsky himself,” Hines said.

Doyle slipped off his jacket and hung it over the back of the chair that Taylor had just vacated. “Deal me in.”

Brannigan dealt. Hines arranged his cards. “Surprised to see you, Red. Last I heard you was learnin' Russian for your next trip to the Workers' Motherland.”

The others laughed. Doyle picked up his cards. “Why don't you tag along. Stop in Berlin and give 'em some tips on beatin' confessions out of defenseless prisoners.”

“Shut up and play cards,” Brannigan said.

“Hey, Joe,” Doyle said, “do me a favor and pour me a Scotch.”

“Thought vodka would be the beverage of choice for Comrade Doyle.” Hines chuckled to himself.

“And bring these Christian Fronters here some beers,” Doyle said. “Good German beer if you have it, the kind the Führer has pissed in. Put it on my tab.”

After several more hands, Brannigan's winnings, if not as large as when Doyle arrived, were still substantial. It was Hines's turn to deal. He swept up the cards. “Where you rabble-rousin' nowadays?” he asked Doyle.

“Organizin', you mean. The doorman and maintenance workers are unionizin', and I'm givin' a hand.”

“Next, it'll be hookers and dope fiends,” said the player across from Brannigan.

“Give everybody an equal start and offer a basic measure of security, maybe we won't churn out hookers and dope fiends the way we do today,” Doyle said.

Brannigan was back on a winning streak. “This is the last time I'll say it. Shut up or leave the table.”

The player across from Brannigan threw down his cards and quit the game. He picked up a newspaper from the bar. “Look at this.” He whacked the tabloid with the back of his hand and held up the headline: HITLER TO JEWS: GET OUT.

“Ten to one, those sheenies will be headed here.” Another of the players tossed in his cards and went to the bar.

“Just what we need, more sheenies.” The player at the bar handed him a drink.

“You guys are a regular font of human kindness,” O'Brien said.

“More like a urinal.” Doyle folded, too.

Brannigan gathered in his winnings. He left his chair, stretched, and yawned. He joined the others at the bar and poured himself a Scotch. “Why so quiet, Fin?” he said. The glass was almost invisible in the curl of his hand.

“Sometimes you learn more by listening,” Dunne said.

“Sure, and it's a lot safer than driving hookers to New Jersey.” Brannigan threw an arm across Dunne's shoulder. “Believe it or not, despite all your shenanigans, I still got a soft spot for you. Maybe I can steer some clients your way. Save you from having to scrounge in the gutter.” He dropped his arm and clapped Dunne on the back, a friendly pat, if also a little harder than that.

“Lately, I've been listening to Matt Terry. He's been shooting his mouth off at Sally Hoffritz's place, telling everybody how Grillo got framed.”

“I meant what I said about helping you find work, Dunne. Once a cop, always a cop. You stop being a pain in the butt, I'll help make sure your business goes right.” Brannigan lit a cigar.