Westlake, Donald E - Novel 41 (24 page)

 
          
 
Abraham Levine of
Brooklyn
's Forty-Third Precinct sat at his desk in
the squadroom and wished Jack Crawley would get well soon.
Crawley
, his usual tour partner, was in the
hospital recovering from a bullet in the leg, and Levine was working now with a
youngster recently assigned to the squad, a college graduate named Andy
Stettin. Levine liked the boy —though he sometimes had the feeling
Stettin
was picking his brains —but there was
an awkwardness
in the work without
Crawley
.

 
          
 
He was sitting now at the desk, thinking about
Jack Crawley, when the telephone rang. He answered, saying, "Forty-Third
Precinct. Levine."

 
          
 
It was a woman's voice, middle-aged, very
excited. "There's a man been murdered! You've got to come right
away!"

 
          
 
Levine pulled pencil and paper close, then
said, "Your name, please
?*
*

           
 
"There's been a murder! Don't you
understand "

 
          
 
"Yes, ma'am.
May
I have your name, please?"

 
          
 
"Mrs. Francis Temple. He's lying right
upstairs."

 
          
 
"The address,
please?"

 
          
 
"
One ninety-eight Third Street
. I told all this to the other man, I don't
see
— "

 
          
 
"And you say there's a dead man
there?"

 
          
 
"He's been shot! I just went in to change
the linen, and he was lying there!"

 
          
 
"Someone will be there right away."
He hung up as she was starting another sentence, and looked up to see Stettin,
a tall athletic young man with dark-rimmed glasses and a blond crewcut,
standing by the door, already wearing his coat.

 
          
 
"Just a second," Levine said, and
dialed for Mulvane, on the desk downstairs. "This is Abe. Did you just
transfer a call from Mrs. Francis Temple to my office?"

 
          
 
"I did. The beat car's on the way."

 
          
 
"All right.
Andy
and I are taking it."

 
          
 
Levine cradled the phone and got to his feet.
He went over and took his coat from the rack and shrugged into it, then followed
the impatient
Stettin
downstairs to the car.

 
          
 
That was another thing.
Crawley
had always driven the Chevy. But
Stettin
drove too fast, was too quick to hit the
siren and gun through busy intersections, so now Levine had to do the driving,
a chore he didn't enjoy.

 
          
 
The address was" on a block of ornate
nineteenth-century brownstones, now all converted either into furnished
apartments or boarding houses. One ninety-eight was furnished apartments, and
Mrs. Francis Temple was its landlady. She was waiting on the top step of the
stoop, wringing her hands, a buxom fiftyish woman in a black dress and open
black sweater, a maroon knit shawl over her head to keep out the cold.

 
          
 
The prowl car was double-parked in front of
the house, and Levine
braked
the Chevy to a stop
behind it. He and

           
 
Stettin
climbed out, crossed the sidewalk, and went up the stoop.

 
          
 
Mrs. Temple was on the verge of panic. Her
hands kept washing each other, she kept shifting her weight back and forth from
one foot to the other, and she stared bug-eyed as the detectives came up the
stoop toward her.

 
          
 
"Are you police?" she demanded, her
voice shrill.

 
          
 
Levine dragged out his wallet, showed her the
badge. "Are the patrolmen up there?" he asked.

 
          
 
She nodded, stepping aside to let him move
past her. "I went in to change the linen, and there he was, lying in the
bed, all covered with blood. It was terrible, terrible."

 
          
 
Levine went on in,
Stettin
after him, and Mrs. Temple brought up the
rear, still talking. Levine interrupted her to ask, "Which room?"

 
          
 
"The third floor front," she said,
and went back to repeating how terrible it had been when she'd gone in there
and seen him on the bed, covered with blood.

 
          
 
Stettin
was
too eager for conscious politeness. He bounded on up the maroon-carpeted
stairs, while Levine plodded up after him, the woman one step behind all the
way, the shawl still over her head.

 
          
 
One of the patrolmen was standing in the open
doorway at the other end of the third-floor hall. As was usual in this type of
brownstone, the upper floors consisted of two large rooms rented separately,
each with a small kitchenette but both sharing the same bath. The dead man was
in the front room.

 
          
 
Levine said to the woman, "Wait out here,
please," nodded to the patrolman, and went on through into the room.

 
          
 
Stettin
and
the second patrolman were over to the right, by the studio couch, talking
together. Their forms obscured Levine's view of the couch as he came through
the doorway, and he got the feeling, as he had had more than once with the
energetic
Stettin
, that he was
Stettin
's assistant rather than the other way
around.

           
 
Which was ridiculous, of
course.
Stettin
turned, clearing Levine's view, saying,
"How's it look to you.
Abe?"

 
          
 
The studio couch had been opened up and was now
in its other guise, that of a linen-covered bed. Between the sheets the corpse
lay peaceably on its back with the covers tucked up around the sheets and
rested stiffly on its chest.

 
          
 
Levine came over and stood by the bed, looking
down at it. The bullet had struck the bridge of the nose, smashing bone and
cartilage, and discoloring the flesh around it. There was hardly any nose left.
The mouth hung open, and the top front teeth had been jarred partially out of
their sockets by the force of the bullet.

 
          
 
The slain man had bled profusely, and the
pillow and the turned-down sheet around his throat were drenched with blood.

 
          
 
The top blanket was blue, and was now
scattered with smallish chunks of white stuff. Levine reached down and picked
up one of the white chunks, feeling it between his fingers.

 
          
 
"Potato," he said, more to himself
than to the cop at his side.

 
          
 
Stettin
said, "What's that?"

 
          
 
"Potato.
That
stuff on the bed. He used a potato for a silencer."

 
          
 
Stettin
smiled blankly. "I don't follow you.
Abe."

 
          
 
Levine moved his hands in demonstration as he
described what he meant. "The killer took a raw potato, and jammed the
barrel of the gun into it. Then, when he fired, the bullet smashed through the
potato, muffling the sound. It's a kind of home-made silencer."

 
          
 
Stettin
nodded, and glanced again at the body. "Think it was a gang killing,
then?"

 
          
 
"I don't know," Levine replied,
frowning. He turned to the patrolman. "What have you got?"

 
          
 
The patrolman dragged a flat black notebook
out of his hip pocket, and flipped it open. "He's the guy that rented the
place. The landlady identified him. He gave his name as Maurice Gold."

 
          
 
Excited,
Stettin
said, "Morry Gold?" He came
closer to the bed, squinting down at the face remnant as though he could see it
better that way. "Yeah, by God, it is," he said, his expression grim.
"It was a gang killing, Abe!"

 
          
 
"You know him?"

 
          
 
"I saw him once.
On the
lineup downtown, maybe —two months ago."

 
          
 
Levine smiled thinly. Leave it to
Stettin
, he thought. Most detectives considered the
lineup a chore and a waste of time, and grumbled every time their turn came
around to go downtown and attend. The line-up was supposed to familiarize the
precinct detectives with the faces of known felons, but it took a go-getter
like
Stettin
to make the theory work. Levine had been
attending the lineup twice a month for fifteen years and hadn't once recognized
one of the felons later on.

 
          
 
Stettin
was
turning his head this way and that, squinting at the body again. "Yeah,
sure," he said. "Morry Gold. He had a funny way of talking —a Cockney
accent, maybe. That's him, all right."

 
          
 
"What was he brought in for?"

 
          
 
"Possession of stolen
goods.
He was a fence. I remember the
Chief
talking to him. I guess he'd been brought in lots of times before." He
shook his head. "Apparently he managed to wriggle out of it."

 
          
 
The patrolman said, "He'd have been much
better off if he hadn't."

 
          
 
"A falling out among thieves," said
Stettin
. "Think so, Abe?"

 
          
 
"It could be." To the patrolman, he said,
"Anything else?"

 
          
 
"He lived here not quite two years.
That's what the landlady told me. She found him at
quarter after four
, and the last time she saw him alive was
yesterday, around
seven o'clock
in the evening. He went out then. He must have come back some time after
eleven o'clock
, when the landlady went to bed. Otherwise,
she'd have seen him come in." He grinned without humor. "She's one of
those," he said.

 
          
 
"I'll go talk to her." Levine looked
over at the body again, and averted his eyes. An old English epitaph flickered
through his mind: As you are, so was I; as I am, so you will be. Twenty-four
years as a cop hadn't hardened him to the tragic and depressing finality of
death, and in the last few years, as he had moved steadily into the heart-attack
range and as the inevitability of his own end had become more and more real to
him, he had grown steadily more vulnerable to the dread implicit in the sight
of death.