Friday night. Early Saturday he took his boat out alone. He was out all day. Says he was cruising eastward on the sound. No one saw him he can be sure of. Stayed overnight on the boat somewhere near Port Jefferson and got home about noon on Sunday.’
‘He could have cruised west into the river,’ I said. ‘There’s a marina at about Seventy-ninth Street.’
‘That there is. He didn’t dock there, not officially.’
‘Nothing to stop him dropping anchor near shore.’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘How come it took so long to discover the body?’
‘Miss Driscoll was an oddball. A lot of men, but no real friends. There’s one girl friend, a Peggy Brandt, who lives a few blocks away. The Brandt girl tells us that Driscoll had a yen for men, so no one was surprised if she did not answer her phone on a week-end. On top of that, the Brandt girl says she called Driscoll on Saturday afternoon and got the impression that a man was already there, so didn’t call back.’
‘Saturday afternoon?’ I said. Jo-Jo had gone on Friday. Or had he? He had left Chelsea, but had he left the city?
‘How does Olsen fit in this one?’ Gazzo said.
I explained the various leads to Driscoll. ‘Petey seemed to think she could know something. He wasn’t sure. The picture I get is that the girl was trying to marry Jo-Jo.’ I thought about it all. Pete had pretty much said that he thought Driscoll might know something. ‘Maybe someone else followed the same trail I did, Captain. Maybe they asked questions too hard.’
‘It has the look,’ Gazzo conceded. ‘Only someone was with her on Saturday who she knew. Guys have played hard to get before and then turned around and killed when the dame looked elsewhere.’
I had thought of that one minute after I ran into Sergeant Doucette. ‘How come you didn’t make Jo-Jo in this before me?’
Gazzo rubbed his stubble. ‘No names. We couldn’t find any address book or notes in her place. The Brandt girl says she never did hear the last names of most of Driscoll’s men, except Walsh. It seems that Driscoll was chasing a couple of guys with a ring in mind, but that they were ducking, so she took up with Walsh. Walsh had been after her for a while.’
‘No address book?’
‘Maybe she didn’t keep one,’ Gazzo said.
Gazzo did not believe that either. Who would steal her address book? Some guy who wanted his name out of it. Or maybe two hoods looking for clues to where a boy was?
‘I like Walsh for a killer,’ I said.
‘So do I, but the book says I need some proof.’
‘How about the two who beat up Vitanza? It’s the pattern, and she knew Olsen.’
‘I’ve got an open mind,’ Gazzo said.
‘But you like Jo-Jo best?’
The captain sighed. ‘I’ve got to like him. Motive, opportunity, and he’s on the run. You know that’s how it works most of the time. They hit, scare, and run. Maybe there’s even more to it, but it looks like he stopped on his way and belted the Driscoll girl out.’
‘Just because he’s on the run?’
‘That’s a good start, but I’ve got this too.’
The captain held up a tiny miniature red racing car. Even from where I sat I could see that it was almost perfect in detail. There was a loop at the rear end. The loop was broken. The car was battered and scratched as if carried in a pocket a long time. It looked like a Ferrari.
‘You said Olsen was a bug on racing,’ Gazzo said.
‘Especially on Ferraris,’ I said.
I looked at that miniature racing car. It was obviously some kind of good-luck piece. A charm, a talisman. Some luck.
‘It was under her body,’ Gazzo said. ‘There was also a handkerchief with bloodstains on it — and grease. Looks like he wiped her face before he knew she was dead. The handkerchief is too common to trace. A lot of cigarette butts. An empty bourbon bottle, wiped clean. Beer cans, also wiped.’
Jo-Jo had run. Jo-Jo was a fanatic on racing cars. Jo-Jo worked around a grease pit. Bottles and beer cans did not sound like two hoods asking questions. The address book, if there had been one, was missing. That sounded like someone who knew Driscoll.
Gazzo sighed. ‘It fits, Dan. I had no lead to Olsen, it happened way out of his neighbourhood.’
‘But I brought him to you,’ I said.
‘You’re helping him a lot,’ Gazzo said.
I was really helping Jo-Jo. So far I had helped tie him potentially to a murder close to home and definitely tied him to a murder victim a long way from home. I was doing fine.
‘I’ve changed the pickup on Olsen to suspected of murder,’ the captain said.
Chapter 11
You go on the probable in this world, I’ve said that before. Captain Gazzo was going on the probable of what he had. From where the captain sat, it was logically Jo-Jo. But I had another seat and another factor. I had the character of Jo-Jo Olsen as it had been emerging as I went along, and in my book Jo-Jo Olsen was not probable.
It can be misleading to talk only to a man’s friends or a man’s enemies, but no matter how I sliced the pie it still came out that Jo-Jo Olsen was not a violent type. Nothing made it probable that Jo-Jo Olsen would lose his temper over a woman. Possible of course — anything is possible — but not probable. The way it came out in my mind was that Jo-Jo might lose his temper over a racing car, but not much else. Even if he did, his reaction would not be violent.
And violence was the key.
I stood in the afternoon heat and sun of the city outside police headquarters and looked at the whole picture, and it was all violence. The quick and efficient violence against Patrolman Stettin. The unplanned violence of the burglar that had killed Tani Jones. The calculated violence for a purpose that had put Pete Vitanza into the hospital. The peripheral violence of Swede Olsen. The menace of violence that were my two shadows. The infinite potential of violence that was Andy Pappas. The animal violence of a Jake Roth or Max Bagnio under Pappas’ orders. Naked violence from end to end. I could not place Jo-Jo Olsen into that picture.
But the only one connected to Nancy Driscoll was Jo-Jo.
If my logic was to be more than wishful thinking, I needed a connection between the Driscoll girl and some other factor in the affair; or I had to rule her out of the case by labelling an outsider as her killer, someone who had no other connection to Jo-Jo Olsen or anyone else in this affair. Someone like Walsh. If someone outside all the other problems had killed Nancy Driscoll, then there would still be no concrete connection of Jo-Jo to any specific crime. I would be no worse off. If I could bring someone I already knew into a connection with Driscoll, I could be better off.
There was only one place to go for an answer — the people who had known Nancy Driscoll. Maybe the police had missed something. They do miss something sometimes, although not really very often. But this time they had been asking without knowledge of Jo-Jo. I went back into headquarters and up to Gazzo’s office. I got the addresses of the Brandt woman from the captain’s pretty sergeant, on Gazzo’s okay. I went back into the heat and hailed a cab. I had two addresses for the Brandt girl. I gave the office address, since it was only afternoon, and sat back with the window open and let the wind blow against my face and tried to think of nothing.
It did not work. It never does. My mind whispered around and around the same point — I was missing the key. I tried to think of Marty. That wasn’t hard. She was easy to think about. But my mind saw her as if in a silent movie, her body and her face moving, but the offstage voice whispering that there was a key to all this, and that I should have seen the key by now. One small, out-of-normal incident gnawed like a worm in my brain. I could not place it. And there were a host of larger hints. They talked to me, but they did not say anything. My mind was not
