quiet on the steel plates. She stood with her back to me, looking out across the courthouse grounds at the tower with its clock.
I sat and glared at the back of her sleek dark head. I couldn’t guess what secrets lay coiled inside of it, but I was morally certain that they weren’t criminal secrets. Ella lacked the earmarks of the type: the dull-eyed resignation, the wild flares of rebelliousness, the indescribable feral odor of sex that has grown claws.
The harsh rasp of a turning key cut into my thoughts. The matron who had let me in opened the heavy door. “Lieutenant Wills would like to see you, sir.”
The girl at the window started visibly, then got herself under control. She remained staring out through the bars as if she was mesmerized by the clock in the tower. I went out into the corridor.
Detective-Lieutenant Harvey Wills was leaning on the balustrade above the spiral stairwell. He was a man in his fifties with nearly thirty years of law enforcement extending like an uphill road behind him. He had short gray hair, a pugnacious prow of a nose. His coloring and his bearing went with the steel-gray angularities of the jail.
“I don’t like this,” I said when the matron had closed the door. “It’s hard enough questioning a client in these surroundings without the police department horning in.”
“That wasn’t my intention. Something came up, I thought you’d like to know.” Wills added in a mildly questioning tone: “Is she giving you a difficult time?”
“She’s frightened.”
“Then why doesn’t she break down and give us the facts we need? This is a big case, Bill-seventeen burglaries with a total take in money and property close to forty thousand. I got my first break in five months on it when that little client of yours walked into Broadman’s store with Mrs. Simmons’s diamond ring.”
“She doesn’t deny that she sold the ring. But it doesn’t prove that she’s involved with the burglary gang.”
“It does when you put it together with certain other facts. I’ll tell you something, because I don’t want to see you climbing way out on a limb. There’s one outstanding fact linking more than half of these burglaries together. In nine instances, nine out of seventeen, one or more members of the victimized family were in the hospital at the time the burglary occurred. The other members of the family, if any, were visiting the hospital. It’s pretty clear that someone inside the hospital tipped off the gang each time that the coast was clear.”
“Why blame Ella Barker? There must be two hundred people on the hospital staff.”
“Two hundred and forty-seven, we’ve been checking them out for months. But only one of them sold a diamond ring from the Simmons burglary. Only the one had a platinum watch from the Denton job hid in her bureau drawer.”
“What platinum watch are you talking about?”
“This one.” With a slight conjurer’s flourish, Wills produced an object wrapped in tissue paper. He undid the wrapping and showed me a wafer-thin ladies’ watch. “We found it in Ella Barker’s apartment this morning. Mrs. Denton has identified it as hers.”
I felt an emptiness at my back, as though the room where Ella was waiting had gone down like an elevator. I realized that I had invested fairly heavily in the girl. Perhaps my belief in her innocence was mistaken. Perhaps her unresponsiveness was sullen caginess, her fear a natural fear of what she had coming to her.
“All I want to do,” Wills said, “is ask her how she got hold of it. Surely you don’t have any objections to that.”
“I’ll ask her.”
But before we could summon the matron, a man called up the stairs: “Lieutenant? You up there?”
Wills leaned over the balustrade. “What is it, Granada?”
“Trouble on Pelly Street.”
“What kind of trouble?”
Sergeant Granada thrust his dark, saturnine face up through the curved shadows in the stairwell. “Somebody tried to knock off Hector Broadman.”
chapter 2
WILLS LET ME RIDE along in the back of his black Mercury. Granada drove, using the siren. In the streets behind us another siren was howling contrapuntally. Before we were out of the Mercury, an ambulance pulled in to the yellow curb behind us.
Broadman’s store stood in a poor neighborhood between a tamale shop and a run-down hotel. Its windows were obscured by hand-lettered signs: WE BUY AND SELL EVERYTHING, INCLUDING KITCHEN SINKS. OLD GOLD BOUGHT: HIGHEST PRICES. The interior resembled the nest of a giant magpie, choked with the debris of people’s lives. In the dusty gloom halfway down the store, a white hat hovered like a puff of ectoplasm. A dismal voice called out from under it: “Here he is, back here.”
Wills and Granada strode toward the white hat and the voice. They moved as policemen do, with heavy purpose carrying a hint of menace. The ambulance men, a tall one and a short one, trotted behind them light-footed as shadows, and I brought up the rear.
A bald man with a bright wig of blood was sitting up on a couch. He was supported by a brown, thin man who wore the white hat and apron of a short-order cook. The bloody man was breathing loudly, gasping his breath in and groaning it out. His eyes rolled up toward us, like veined white eggs under his bird’s-nest eyebrows. He pulled away from the man who was holding him up, got to his feet somehow, took a few tottering steps like a fat enormous infant learning to walk, and went to his knees. He crawled away from us into a forest of furniture, making small noises.
“What’s the matter with Broadman?” Wills said.
“See for yourself.” The white-hatted man was yellow with compunction, or with panic of his own. “Somebody clobbered him on the head, hard.”
“Who hit him, Manuel?” Granada said.
Manuel shrugged, carefully. His neck and face were rigid, as if the big starched hat on his head were a chunk of ice he had to keep balanced there. “How do I know? The walls are thick, I was busy serving tamales. Then I heard him yelling.” His eyes dropped. There were blood spots on his apron.
“We’ll attend to the poor chap,” said one of the lads in white, the taller one.
I gave him a second look, and saw that he was no lad. He was forty, at least, with blue bags under his eyes. Still he had that willowy look-the look of a middle-aging man who can’t give up the illusive airs of youth. His sidekick was much younger, bright-eyed and plump like a slightly shopworn cherub.
“Yeah,” Wills said dryly. “You do that, Whitey.”
Broadman was trying to crawl under a Hollywood bed. It stood too close to the floor. He rooted at it with his damaged head.
The ambulance men got hold of him with firm and gentle hands. One on each side, they raised him to his feet. He bucked like a wall-eyed bronco in their arms.
“Now, now,” the tall old youth kept saying. “You had a hard knock, old chap, but you’ll be good as new. We’ll get you to a doctor, and he’ll fix you up.”
Broadman kicked at them. They lifted him clear of the floor, making soothing sounds, with male nurses’ almost masochistic patience.
“Is he scared of something?” Granada said.
Broadman answered him, in a high and terrible voice: “I don’t want to go! You can’t make me go to the hospital.”
He renewed his floundering struggles. The ambulance men were tiring. The short one had a livid scratch on his chin. There were tears in Whitey’s pale eyes, and his mousy hair was dark with sweat.
“Can’t you give us a hand, Sergeant?”
“You said you’d handle him. I didn’t want to get in bad with the union.” Granada’s half-smile was sardonic.
“Get with it, Pike,” Wills snapped. “This isn’t doing Broadman any good.”
Granada was a powerful, bull-shouldered man. With his help Broadman was quickly subdued. They carried him out spread-eagled and head down, and still convulsive. A crowd gathered around the ambulance, buzzing like flies at the sight of blood, while the attendants strapped him to a stretcher.
