Бретт Холлидей - Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 46, No. 9, September 1982

Siderman had other doubts, but a man in a rush wasn’t going to be an attentive audience. “No, that’s all for now.”

“For now? Siderman, this case is a closed matter with me. Ended, shut, finis. John Gideon is a convicted rapist, and there’s nothing more I can do for him. Now upstairs, there is a county lock-up crammed with more prisoners than girls at the U.S.O. dance when the fleet’s in town. And it is my job to get them all to trial before the floors collapse from their collective weight and the ones that aren’t crushed in the fall are wandering the city at-large because of over-crowding and the inherent structural weakness of concrete. Don’t call us, Siderman, we’ll call you.”

Siderman finished his coffee alone and then left the basement of the Courts Building by a side exit and crossed the busy boulevard to the Public Safety Building. He took an elevator up to the police divisions on the seventh floor. One of the two detectives at work in the Assault/Rape Division was Vincent DiBiasi, a swarthy Greek of fifty with an olive complexion and unruly black eyebrows. They knew each other only slightly and so Siderman introduced himself and showed the detective his press credentials.

“Yes, Siderman,” said the detective, pushing back from his paperwork, “what can I do for you?”

“I’m looking into the John Gideon rape case,” Siderman told DiBiasi.

A faint smile appeared on the detective’s face. “Well, I don’t think you’ll find much news in that, Siderman. Gideon’s already been convicted.”

“You were the investigating officer, is that right?”

“That I was. The rape happened on Airport Authority property, but neither they nor the county people are equipped to do effective investigations in cases of rape, so we usually step in. Also, the victim in this case was a resident of the city.”

“I was just across the street talking with Ed Wintermute, who was Gideon’s attorney,” Siderman told the detective. “He brought up the mattter of this photo montage you put together to show the victim. He said you showed him that montage at one point during the investigation.”

“The montage? Yes, I seem to recall showing it to Wintermute. What about it?”

“Well, lieutenant, you’ll excuse me for saying so, but that montage wasn’t precisely cricket where John Gideon was concerned.”

“How do you mean?”

“How I mean is, Gideon’s photos were noticeably smaller than those of the other five suspects. And Gideon’s show no vertical black line separating the two pictures.”

Siderman saw the detective’s dark eyes narrow, as though he was measuring Siderman now not as merely a pesterous journalist, but as an adversary come out of the woodwork.

Evenly, he said to Siderman, “I don’t recall anything out of line with that particular montage. With a rape victim, everything has to be a little hurry-up. The memory of the events surrounding the assault tend to vanish pretty rapidly. The victim’s subconscious mind goes to work almost immediately to lock the events away as being too horrid for the conscious mind to recall.”

“I see. Do you remember off-hand who picked the other five subjects in the montage?”

“I did”

“And who exactly did you pick?”

DiBiasi’s eyes again narrowed. “I don’t think I understand what you’re driving at, Siderman.”

“I mean, were they suspects in other rapes, or males with records of arrest for rape? Or were they just randomly picked? You know, a cat burglar here, a shoplifter there. Or were they cops?”

“Just random. No cops. Just five guys with previous arrest records, all with short, dark brown beards and about the same age and height as the suspect. As I say, we were dealing with a time element here.”

“But John Gideon wasn’t arrested as a suspect until five weeks after the crime was committed,” Siderman said.

“Five hours, five days, five weeks, what does it matter? We arrested the suspect, slapped together a photo montage and then showed it to the victim. We followed all the recognized procedures. The chief gave us high marks for that investigation.”

Siderman nodded, thinking DiBiasi may have got high marks for his investigation, but not very high marks for telling the truth. Ed Wintermute had told Siderman he’d never seen the photo montage. So why was DiBiasi all too eager to agree Wintermute had seen it when Siderman indicated that was the case? Something had the aroma of a barrel of fish here. What was being exhibited here was far too much contact between an investigating detective and a member of the public defender’s staff, more than was normal.

DiBiasi seemed fidgety to get back to work. “Look, if that’s all, Siderman, I got a mountain of reports to get out here and my private secretary had the gall to go off shopping with Princess Grace in Monaco.”

“Don’t get up,” Siderman told him, “I’ll let myself out.”

Siderman might have left the building then were it not for the fact that his hunches were coming in bunches like bananas. He walked briskly to a public phone near the bank of elevators and punched off the digits for the Assault/Rape Division. The answering voice was that of the other detective Siderman had seen in the office.

“Assault/Rape, Lt. Colquitt.”

“Is Lt. DiBiasi there?”

“Yes, but he’s on the phone, sir. Is there something I can help you with?”

“No,” Siderman told the detective, “I’ll call him back later.”

That was curious. Here was a detective, presumably up to his badge in paperwork and yet he had time to make a phone call. But then again it could have been a call he’d taken and not made.

Quickly Siderman broke the connection, slipped in another dime and nickel and dialed the Office of the Public Defender.

“Office of the Public Defender,” answered a female’s voice.

“Ed Wintermute, please.”

“Mr. Wintermute is on the telephone, sir. Would you like to hold?”

“No, I’ll catch him another time.”

Elements in a puzzle were now beginning to show themselves in a teasing, elusive way, but Siderman’s aging brain wasn’t up to putting them together. This was piecework better left to men with younger, more facile minds, not to a battle-weary police reporter whose best days could be read in the alcoholic rings in a bartop.

But one thing was clear to him. Both Vincent DiBiasi and Ed Wintermute might have been conferring on a matter that was largely moot. Then, one or the other stood to gain or lose something by John Gideon’s conviction or vindication. No. Not one or the other. Both . If only one of them was directly or indirectly involved, the other would simply turn him a cold shoulder and a deaf ear. In any event, a lot of people were suddenly showing more than casual interest in Siderman’s inquiries.

It was after ten p.m. when Siderman returned home to his sidehill duplex on Dulanney Street, where it seemed he had always lived, just two buildings down from Fraley’s Fine Foods, a dilapidated mom-and-pop’s where it seemed he had always shopped, and across the street from the King Klean Coin-Op Laundramat where it seemed he had eternally done his dirty clothes. As well, he expected to die on this street, found propped up in bed one morning with a two-day-old copy of the New York Times collapsed on his chest like a faulty tent, filled with Pulitzer-caliber stories by which he had not gotten around to be inspired.

He had a lone Spencer steak in his refrigerator, a survivor piece of meat that was on the verge of turning from light brown to blue. It didn’t look as though it would kill him and so he plopped it into a frying pan on his speed-heat burner turned up to full blast. He covered it with a lid to cut down the spatter and set a pan of water to boil for some vermicelli noodles. Protein and starch. Likely, they would do him in long before the actuary tables.