“We’re punching,” I said. “Bayard Isherwood says your husband was concerned with a business matter, so much so that he made a compulsive mention of it during an elevator ride, without saying what it was. Do you know what it might have been?”
“No. ” She moved from the door and rested her hips against the edge of a desk, studying me.
“It probably isn’t important,” I said. “The case looks cut and dried. Robbery and murder. It may break if we pick up a punk spending beyond his means.”
“Really?”
“Or liquor loosens him up and he starts bragging. Or he tells his girl and they have a fight and she makes an anonymous phone call out of spite. ”
Suddenly, a shiver crossed her shoulders. “You’re a very good cop, aren’t you?”
“I like promotions,” I said, “and the bigger paychecks.”
“But you don’t like being a policeman?”
“Not particularly.”
“You’re a rather strange man.”
Her words seemed to hang in the room, forming a quick, strange bond between us.
She looked away from me, found a cigarette on the desk, and lighted it.
“Thank you for coming,” she said.
“Why don’t you call me Nick?”
She ventured a look at me. “Okay, Nick. I hope you catch your punk and get a nice promotion. ”
* * * *
The break came twenty-eight hours later. I was again on duty early. Fresh routine reports, masses of detail, were on my desk. Included was the fact that three phone calls had emanated from the Ainsley apartment the night of the murder. One had been to Bayard Isherwood, who’d been out at the time, ten o’clock. The others, between ten and eleven, had been to friends. In both instances, Ramoth Ainsley had asked if the friend had seen her husband that evening.
I pushed the reports back, wondering where we went from there. It was then that York came into my office, his breath short, his face very red.
“We got the gun, Nick!”
“Yeah?”
“Punk kid named Jim Norton hocked it this afternoon. Thirty-two revolver. The pawnbroker reported it. Ballistics checked the gun. It’s the one that killed Willard Ainsley, all right.”
I stood up. “Where’s the kid?”
“That’s the catch. When Simmons and Pickens went over to pick him up, he bolted. He’s teetering on the roof of a six story tenement on Kilgo Street, threatening to jump.”
I’d been through this kind of thing twice before in my years on the force. The youth looked like a skinny doll pinned against the night sky by spotlights. The fire department had roped off the block and unfolded the big net. Uniform-grade police had cleared out the rubberneckers.
I skidded the black car to a stop at the barricade. York hung back, needing all of a sudden to tie his shoe laces.
I knew most of the men on duty. I learned quickly that half a dozen men were inside the building, including a priest. They’d opened the skylight trap and reached the roof. Now they were stymied. Every time they moved a muscle, the kid got ready to jump.
A weeping girl was huddled in the shadows at the base of a building.
“Who’s that?” I asked an assistant fire chief.
“Kilgo Street girl. Her name’s Nancy Creaseman.”
“Norton’s girl?”
“Something like that.”
“Why didn’t you get her out of here?”
“Chief told Norton on the loud speaker she was down here. It may have kept him from going off. She’s made no trouble. ”
I walked over to the girl. There are thousands like her in any large city. Thin, malnourished body. Mousy brown hair. Eyes shaded with long-continued anxiety. Wrong colored lipstick, attempting to hide the thinness of the pinched face.
“Nancy,” I said.
“Yes, sir.”
“My name is Nick Berkmin. I’m the homicide man in charge of the Ainsley case. ”
“Jimmy didn’t kill him, Mr. Berkmin.”
“How do you know?”
“He couldn’t.”
“Has he ever been in trouble before?”
“Not with the police. He’s not the kind. I tell you.”
“Willard Ainsley,” I said, “was carrying a lot of money on him.”
“Jimmy wouldn’t, he wouldn’t he wouldn’t!”
“Take it easy,” I said. “I’m not saying he did it. But we don’t want him doing anything foolish now, do we?”
Her anxious eyes lifted toward the spot of light in the night sky. A sob burst out of her.
“Where did he get the gun, Nancy?”
“He found it.”
“Where?”
“In a gutter, around a corner off Kilgo Street. He didn’t do anything with it at first. Then he went and pawned it.”
“Why didn’t he tell us that? Why did he break and run when the police came?”
“He’s scared of the police, of everyone. He overheard them asking his mother where he was, if she’d seen him with a gun. Then he got scared, lost his head, and ran. Please help him, Mr. Berkmin!”
She grabbed my hand and clung to it with her sweaty, thin, sticky fingers. “I know it looks bad, but Jimmy didn’t do it. You’ve got to help him. You see, he got hurt—”
“Hurt?”
“Weeks ago. He had a job, delivering for a drugstore. Some guys caught him one night, took his money, and beat him up. He’s had these blind spells ever since. It’s why he’s so scared. ”
I got my hand loose from hers. “I’ll tell you what, Nancy. You go up there, on the roof, and talk him down. I’ll see that he gets a break.” Now it was her eyes clinging to me. Her weeping stopped. She squared her shoulders and started across the street.
* * * *
I called Ramoth Ainsley from my office. She agreed to see me. I drove over, brought her down to my car, and we got in.
When she saw the direction I was taking, she said, “I was under the impression we were going to your office.”
“Isn’t this nicer?”
“I’m not at all sure,” she said.
“I wanted a chance to talk to you in private.”
She sat in cautious silence as I drove through the clean luxury of her neighborhood. I drove far down the lake shore to an undeveloped area. There, I picked a side road, turned off and parked. “We might put the case on
