was fading, so he went over it again with his stylo, pressing hard so that it was sharp and black.
“You get outta here, you dirty whore!”
The words were screamed in a hoarse voice, rising shrilly like a scraped fingernail on glass. Andy climbed to his feet and jammed the notepad into his side pocket. “What’s going on out there?” he called.
Shirl came in, flushed and angry, followed by a thin gray-haired woman. The woman stopped when she saw Andy and pointed a trembling finger at him. “My brother dead and not even buried yet and this one is carrying on with another man…”
“I’m a police officer,” Andy said, showing her his buzzer. “Who are you?”
She drew herself up, a slight movement that did nothing to increase her height; years of bad posture and indifferent diet had rounded her shoulders and hollowed her chest. Scrawny arms dangled from the sleeves of the much worn, mud-colored housedress. Her face, filmed now with sweat, was more gray than white, the skin of a photophobic city dweller; the only coloring in it appeared to be the grime of the streets. When she spoke her lips opened in a narrow slit, delivered the words like metal stampings from a press, then closed instantly afterward lest they deliver one item more than was needed. Only the watery blue eyes held any motion or life, and they twitched with anger.
“I’m Mary Haggerty, poor Michael’s sister and only living relation by blood. I’ve come to take care of Michael’s things, he’s left them all to me in his will, the lawyer told me that, and I have to take care of them. That whore’ll have to get out, she’s taken enough from him…”
“Just a minute.” Andy broke into the shrill babble of words and her mouth snapped shut while she breathed rapidly through flared righteous nostrils. “Nothing can be touched or taken from this apartment without police permission, so you don’t have to worry about your possessions.”
“You can’t say that with her here,” she squawled and turned on Shirl. “She’ll steal and sell everything that’s not nailed down. My good brother…”
“Your good brother!” Shirt shouted. “You hated his guts and he hated yours, and you never came near this place as long as he was alive.”
“Shut up!” Andy broke in, coming between the two women. He turned to Mary Haggerty. “You can go now. The police will let you know when the things in this apartment are available.”
She was shocked. “But — you can’t do that. I have my rights. You can’t leave that whore here alone.”
Andy’s patience was cracking. “Watch your language, Mrs. Haggerty. You’ve used that word enough. Don’t forget what
Her face went white and she took a half step backward. “My brother was in business, a businessman,” she said weakly.
“Your brother was in the rackets, and that means girls among other things.” Without her anger to hold her erect she slumped, deflated, thin and bony; the only round thing in her body was her abdomen, swollen from years of bad diet and bearing too many children.
“Why don’t you go now,” he said. “We’ll get in touch with you as soon as possible.”
The woman turned and left without another word. He was sorry that he had lost his temper and said more than he should, but there was no way to take back the words now.
“Did you mean that — what you said about Mike?” Shirl asked, after the door had closed. In a plain white dress and with her hair pulled back she looked very young, even innocent, despite the label Mary Haggerty had given to her. The innocence seemed more realistic than the charges.
“How long did you know O’Brien?” Andy asked, fending the question off for the moment.
“Just about a year, but he never talked about his business. I never asked, I always thought it had something to do with politics, he always had judges and politicians visiting him.”
Andy took out his notebook. “I’d like the names of any regular visitors, people he saw in the last week.”
“Now you are asking the questions — and you haven’t answered mine.” Shirl smiled when she said it, but he knew she was serious. She sat down on a straight-backed chair, her hands folded in her lap like a schoolgirl.
“I can’t answer that in too much detail,” he said. “I don’t know that much about Big Mike. About all I can tell you for certain is that he was some sort of a contact man between the syndicate and the politicians. Executive level I guess you would call it. And it has been thirty years at least since the last time he was in court or behind bars.”
“Do you mean — he was in jail?”
“Yes, I checked on it, he’s got a criminal record and a couple of convictions. But nothing recently, it’s the punks who get caught and sent up. Once you operate in Mike’s circle the police don’t touch you. In fact they help you — like this investigation.”
“I don’t understand…”
“Look. There are five, maybe ten killings in New York every day, a couple of hundred felonious assaults, twenty, thirty cases of rape, at least fifteen hundred burglaries. The police are understaffed and overworked. We don’t have time to follow up any case that isn’t open and shut. If someone gets murdered and there are witnesses, okay, we go out and pick the killer up and the case is closed. But in a case like this, frankly, Miss Greene, we usually don’t even try. Unless we get a make on the fingerprints and have a record on the killer. But the chances are that we don’t. This city has a million punks who are on the Welfare and wish they had a square meal or a TV or a drink. So they try their hand at burglary to see what they can pick up. We catch a few and send them upstate on work gangs, breaking up the big parkways with pickaxes to reclaim the farmland. But most of them get away. Once in a while there is an accident, maybe someone comes in while they are pulling a job, surprises them while they are cleaning out the place. If the burglar is armed there may be a killing. Completely by accident, you understand, and the chances are ninety-nine out of a hundred that something like this happened to Mike O’Brien. I took the evidence, reported the case — and it should have died there. It would have if it had been anyone else. But as I said, Big Mike had plenty of political contacts and one of them put on some pressure to make a more complete investigation, and that is why I am here. Now — I’ve told you more than I should, and you’ll do me a big favor if you forget all about it.”
“No, I won’t tell anyone. What happens next?”
“I ask you a few more questions, leave here, write up a report — and that will be the end of it.
She was shocked. “Aren’t you going to catch the man who did it?”
“If the fingerprints are on file, we might. If not — we haven’t got a chance. We won’t even try. Aside from the reason that we have no time, we feel that whoever did Mike in performed a social service.”
“That’s terrible!”
“Is it? Perhaps.” He opened his notepad and was very official again. He had finished with the questions by the time Kulozik came back with latent prints from the cellar window and they left the building together. After the cool apartment the air in the street hit like the blast from an open furnace door.
7
It was after midnight, a moonless night, but the sky outside the wide window could not equal the rich darkness of the polished mahogany of the long refectory table. The table was centuries old, from a monastery long since destroyed, and very valuable, as were all the furnishings in the room: the sideboard, the paintings, and the cut-crystal chandelier that hung in the center of the room. The six men grouped around the end of the table were not valuable at all, except in a financial sense, although in that way they were indeed very well off. Two of them were smoking cigars, and the cheapest cigar you could buy cost at least ten D’s.
“Not every word of the report if you please, Judge,” the man at the head of the table said. “Our time is limited and just the results will be all we need.” If anyone there knew his real name they were careful not to mention it. He was now called Mr. Briggs and he was the man in charge.
“Surely, Mr. Briggs, that will be easy enough,” Judge Santini said, and coughed nervously behind his hand.
