Michael Collins - Silent Scream

“Nothing, Dan. Nothing!” He looked now toward where Emily Green lay so silent. “Doorways, that’s my speed. I’m good at watching from doorways. Right outside when it happened!”

“What the hell should you have done? Dashed in to do battle? A paintbrush against Bagnio’s forty-five?”

We waited in silence after that, the odor of death growing thick in the sleazy room.

Captain Gazzo straddled a chair, faced us both. The M.E. was still working over Emily Green. Gazzo’s men had been combing the bare room for an hour, not looking hopeful. Gazzo added it up.

“She got a call from Bagnio. Said nothing, and came here. Why did Max kill her? She wouldn’t talk, and he hit too hard persuading her? Then had to finish the job? Or did he let her know something dangerous to him and have to kill her?”

“A forty-five automatic is heavy enough to do it,” I said.

The M.E. looked up. “Possible, but not likely. Something thicker, a bottle or club. Nothing in this room looks right. About three hours ago now, I’d estimate. First or second blow did the job, the rest were fun or panic.”

The morgue men packed Emily Green up, took her out. Gazzo’s men had all quit, stood around. Except the fingerprint man.

“Ten different sets already,” he said. “A transient flop. Why don’t I ever get a neat, high-class murder?”

Gazzo ignored the fingerprint man, scowled. “Why did she come here at all? How did Bagnio make her come? A threat? Told her he had something important that would help Hal, or hurt him?”

I told him what Charley Albano and Mia had said uptown.

“Irving Kezar ties to Charley, if Pappas’s kid is telling it true, and Sid Meyer ties to Kezar,” Gazzo mused. “Charley Albano would lie about anything, but if he says Max Bagnio killed Andy, and not alone, he could know, too.” Gazzo looked at Hal. “Any chance your wife could change her mind, decide to come back?”

“How would I know? She’d started the divorce, moved in with Pappas.” His voice was stiff, as if it hurt even now to mention Diana and Pappas together.

“You think Emily could have hired Bagnio?” I said. “To kill Diana? Pappas was the extra murder?”

“Maybe Max had two partners,” Gazzo said. “One for each.”

“Captain!”

A call from down in the back yard. Gazzo and I went and looked down. One of Gazzo’s men held a sawed-off baseball bat. I saw the blood on it. Gazzo looked around the barren room. He opened both windows. One of them wouldn’t stay open.

“Windows never work in a dump like this,” Gazzo said. “The bat was a brace to hold the window up. Lying around handy.”

Gazzo went out to go down to the back yard. I turned to Hal. I described Charley Albano and his yellow gloves.

“When you were watching Diana’s new place, did you see a man like that? See him do anything strange? Did he see you?”

“Well,” he thought, then nodded, eager. “I think maybe I did. With that paunchy guy, what was his name-Kezar? And, Dan, I might have seen the small guy with the gloves around St. Marks Place, too. After the murders. Sort of watching.”

I said, “Tell Gazzo I had to go. And stay hidden, you hear?”

I called Irving Kezar’s office from the candy store. He was out, his efficient secretary didn’t know where he was this time. She never gave out his home address.

In the rain, seven empty taxis passed me up. Lunch hour, they were heading midtown for more lucrative short hauls. I cursed them all the way to the subway at Astor Place, rode uptown to Sixty-eighth Street, and walked north to Seventieth.

In the bare lobby of Kezar’s building, a young man in a hat and brown overcoat was studying the mailboxes as if he had just come in and was looking for the apartment number of some tenant. But his hat and coat were almost dry. That made me alert, and I recognized him-the man who could have followed Kezar from his athletic club a month ago, who looked like a young lawyer, but had a gun under his coat.

That had to mean Kezar was now upstairs. I went up, and was wrong again. Not even Jenny Kezar answered my ring. I went back down, using the stairs, but the young man was gone. Puzzled, I walked out into the rain and turned west. Maybe Kezar had used another exit to give the young man the slip. Which had to mean that Kezar was up to something he wanted quiet and hidden.

I turned south on the avenue, looked for the first tavern where I could call Gazzo-and then I forgot about Gazzo. The young man in the brown coat was behind me! He hadn’t been staked out for Kezar, but for me! Jenny Kezar. She must have reported my earlier visit. Not as beaten-down as she seemed? Having Kezar tailed-or did she have some other reason for being nervous?

Brown overcoat wasn’t a bad tail, but he wasn’t the best, and this was my city. I led him to an art gallery I knew on Madison Avenue. It had a concealed back-room exit into an areaway that served the next building, too. I came back out on Madison. Brown overcoat emerged from the gallery looking annoyed. He began to wave at taxis in the rain, and I got a break-he had no more luck than I’d had. He had to walk, and I followed him. He went south and west, bent into the rain, and started across the Park at Sixty-sixth Street.

I would be too easy to hear and spot on the sunken roadway unless I stayed so far back I could lose him on the other side of the Park. So I took to the sodden grass and bare bushes and tailed from up above the roadway. On Central Park West he went north to Sixty-ninth Street, and west to Columbus, where he went into a bar. I watched him enter the telephone booth. He came out, walked back to Central Park West, sat on a bench across from a big apartment building. In the rain, he watched the entrance.

I went in through the service entrance on Sixty-ninth. The rows of apartment bells listed a Mr. K. Irving in 17-B. The elevators had operators, and in a building like this they would ask questions of a one-armed man in a duffel coat and black beret. I used my keys on the stairs door, walked up the seventeen flights.

In a narrow service corridor, I listened at the back door of 17-B. I heard no sounds, used my keys again, slipped inside. I stood in a large kitchen that had not been used much recently. In the rest of the apartment there was a heavy, empty silence. I moved on cautiously.

It was a large apartment-six rooms-with the packaged air of a hotel suite. Rented furnished, cleaned by maids, used but not quite lived in. A big living room had a well-stocked liquor cabinet, the dining room was formal. One bedroom seemed used on some regular basis, its closet full of expensive suits and jackets, its one tall bureau containing shirts, underwear, men’s accessories. I was in the right apartment, Irving Kezar’s name was on various items.

The other two bedrooms were furnished but unused, closets and drawers empty. A final room, a kind of office-den, was the only really lived-in room. It was busy, messy, with papers on a desk and empty glasses on a coffee table in front of a comfortable couch. There were no filing cabinets. If Kezar had a second set of files or books, they were in still a fourth place. I went to work studying the papers in the desk.

After an hour I had a better picture of Irving Kezar’s work-and no picture at all. A man who was “called in” to consult, got people “together.” Expediter of collaborations, arranger of contacts-the oil in the wheels of a lot of “projects” and deals. But the details seemed to slip away, elude definition. Not one concrete fact or specific company, not one reference to exactly what he expedited or arranged. And nothing remotely related to Andy Pappas, or an Albano, or Max Bagnio, or anyone else I knew.

I sat back to think, and the sound of the key in the front door almost caught me flat-footed. Not quite. My subconscious had sensed the elevator stopping at the floor without actually being aware of it, and when the key scraped in the lock, I was alert, had a few seconds. Not time to reach the kitchen and rear door across the living room, but just time to slip through the connecting door between the den-office and one of the unused bedrooms. Not even time to close the connecting door, risk its sound, but only to flatten against the door, breathe softly.