Len Levinson - Without Mercy

“Where’d you get that?” asked the black man, reaching for it.

Rackman pulled it back. “When’s the last time you saw Cynthia Doyle?”

“What you wanna know for?”

“You live here with her?”

“You ain’t showed me no warrant yet.”

“I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you. Cynthia Doyle is dead.”

The black man blinked. “Huh?”

“Cynthia Doyle is dead.”

“Dead?”

“As a doornail.”

The black man forced a smile. “You’re shuckin’ me, man.”

“I wouldn’t shuck you about a thing like that.”

The smile evaporated. “She’s really dead?”

“Really.”

The black man’s face became contorted as the reality sank in. He breathed hard and looked scared. “How’d she die?”

“Somebody killed her.”

“Somebody killed her?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Who killed her?”

“I don’t like to talk about things like this in doorways.”

The black man’s hands were trembling. He was bony and around thirty years old. “Come on in.”

Rackman followed him through a vestibule to a living room whose upholstered furniture was stained, torn, and sagging. The air smelled dirty. Rackman sat on the sofa and took out his pack of Luckies. “Want one?”

“No thanks,” replied the black man, sitting opposite him.

Rackman lit his cigarette. “What’s your name?”

“Lorenzo Freeman.”

“When’s the last time you saw Cynthia Doyle?”

“She went to work around seven-thirty. Where is she now?”

“In the morgue.”

“The morgue?”

“That’s where dead people go.”

Freeman closed his eyes tightly, then opened them and stared at the floor. A few minutes passed. Then he looked up and asked, “Who killed her?”

“I don’t know yet. I was hoping maybe you could give me a lead.”

“How’d she get killed?”

“You think you can handle it?”

“I can handle anything,” Freeman replied bravely, but the tremor in his voice said he was shaken badly.

“You sure?”

“Lay it on me.”

“Somebody cut her throat in an alley on Forty-Fifth Street between Ninth and Tenth.”

Freeman’s face collapsed and his eyes went white.

“And punched her out a few times.”

Freeman covered his face with his hands. Rackman sat quietly, puffing his Lucky and observing Freeman. He thought Freeman’s emotion was genuine, that Freeman had not murdered Cynthia Doyle, but he had to get the hard facts.

“Where were you at around four-thirty this morning?” Rackman asked.

“Right here.”

“Alone?”

“That’s right.”

“Can you prove that you were here alone?”

“How can I do that?”

“Did you talk to somebody in the building a little earlier, maybe? Somebody came by selling Girl Scout cookies or something?”

“I didn’t talk to nobody. I watched the tube until around two in the morning and fell asleep.” He looked squarely at Rackman. “You don’t think I did it, do you?”

“I can’t be sure that you didn’t.”

“She was my old lady, man.”

“A lot of guys kill their old ladies.”

“I wouldn’t kill her. She was okay.”

“What did she do for a living?”

Freeman looked away. “She worked in one of them massage parlor places.”

Rackman took out his notepad and pen. “Which one?”

“The Crown Club on West Forty-fifth Street.”

“She wasn’t going to leave you, was she?”

“What for?”

“I’m asking the questions.”

“Nah, she wasn’t going to leave me. We was in love, man.”

“I’m going to be investigating this case, Freeman. If I find you’ve been fighting with her and slapping her around, you’re going to the joint.”

“Nobody’s gonna tell you that unless they’s lying. I never hit her since we was in Cincinnati, and that was over two years ago.”

“Was she having problems with anybody?”

“Not that I know of.”

“If she was having problems with somebody, would she tell you?”

“Sure she’d tell me. We was very close, man.”

“Come on Freeman, she must be having trouble with somebody. Those girls are always having trouble with somebody.”

“There wasn’t nothing big.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

Freeman reflected for a few moments. “Well, she told me she’s been hassling with one of the girls she works with, name of Carmella. And there’s Luke the Duke. He tried to game her, but my baby, she don’t like to work the streets. She likes to stay indoors where it’s dry and warm.”

Luke the Duke was a well-known Times Square pimp, and it was believed that he’d had a few women killed, although there was never enough evidence to charge him. “I’ll check them both out,” Rackman said, making notes.

Freeman looked out the dirty windows at the tenement roofs. “I can’t believe my baby ain’t never coming back,” he said in a spacey way.

Rackman obtained the address of Cynthia Doyle’s family in Cincinnati, gave Freeman his card, and left.

Down on the street, he slid behind the wheel of his Plymouth and looked at his watch. It was eight o’clock in the morning and he’d been on duty since six the previous evening. He was exhausted; his head felt like it was caving in. It was time to finish up and go home.

Driving up Eleventh Avenue, which was rumbling with early morning trucks and cars, he wondered sleepily about Cynthia Doyle and who had killed her. The motive wasn’t robbery, and her boyfriend probably didn’t do it unless she was planning to leave him for somebody else. Rackman would have to check that out. He’d also have to talk to Luke the Duke and the people Cynthia Doyle worked with at the massage parlor. Somebody killed her, and somewhere in the city there was a trail of evidence that led to the murderer. Rackman had to find that trail out of the millions of other trails that crisscrossed the city.

He parked the Plymouth in front of the Midtown North building on West Fifty-fourth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. It was a grim old fortress made of gray stone blocks fifty years ago, and he walked into the main reception area, where a bunch of uniformed cops were hanging out around the sergeant’s desk. He climbed the stairs to the Detective Division, a small room jammed with desks and stinking of cigar smoke. Sitting at his desk, he lit another Lucky and typed his report of the Cynthia Doyle murder, using his forefingers and the hunt and peck method, indicating what he’d found out so far. He dropped the report on Inspector Jenkins’ desk (Jenkins wasn’t in yet), checked Cynthia Doyle’s bag and clothes into the Property Room, and went home before somebody found something else for him to do.

He lived around the corner on West Fifty-fifth Street in an old brick apartment building that had been constructed as a comfortable middle-class residence in 1917, and was still in fairly good shape, although the elevator broke down about once a month, and several times each winter there’d been no heat or hot water. Close to the Broadway theater district, Carnegie Hall, and Lincoln Center, it had become a haven for has-been actresses, would-be dancers, aging producers of forgotten flops, directors with holes in their shoes, various musicians, a few unsuccessful writers, and a number of low echelon office workers.

Rackman unlocked the front door and entered the tiny lobby. He went to the mailroom, opened his box, and took out bills from Con Edison and Master Charge. Returning to the lobby, he waited for the shaky old elevator, and then rode it to the eighth floor, the top floor of the building. His apartment was at the corner in the back. Unlocking his door, he stepped into night again, because of thick drapes over the windows. Turning on a few lights, he hung his leather jacket in the closet and peeled off his black turtleneck sweater, which he threw onto a chair that had become the receptacle for so much assorted clothing it looked like a display in a thrift shop.