Эд Макбейн - Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here

“Police officers,” Willis said, and showed her his shield.

The woman scrutinized it, and then said, “Yeah?”

“We’d like to ask you a few questions,” Genero said.

“What about?”

“About the young man across the hall. Lewis Scott.”

“What about him?”

“Do you know him?”

“Slightly.”

“Only slightly?” Genero said. “You live directly across the hall from him...”

“So what? This is the city.”

“Even so...”

“I’m forty-six years old. He’s a kid of what? Eighteen? Nineteen? How do you expect me to know him? Intimately?”

“Well, no, ma’am, but—”

“So that’s how I know him. Slightly. Anyway, what about him?”

“Did you see him at any time last night?” Willis asked.

“No. Why? Something happen to him?”

“Did you hear anything unusual in his apartment anytime last night?”

“Unusual like what?”

“Like glass breaking?”

“I wasn’t home last night. I went out to supper with a friend.”

“What time was that?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“And what time did you get back?”

“I didn’t. I slept over.”

“With your friend?”

“Yes.”

“What’s her name?” Genero asked.

“Her name is Morris Strauss, that’s her name.”

“Oh,” Genero said. He glanced at Willis sheepishly.

“When did you get home, ma’am?” Willis asked.

“About five o’clock this morning. Morris is a milkman. He gets up very early. We had breakfast together, and then I came back here. Why? What’s the matter? Did Lew do something?”

“Did you happen to see him at any time yesterday?”

“Yeah. When I was going to the store. He was just coming in the building.”

“What time was that, would you remember?”

“About four-thirty. I was going out for some coffee. I ran out of coffee. I drink maybe six hundred cups of coffee a day. I’m always running out. So I was going up the street to the A&P to get some more. That’s when I saw him.”

“Was he alone?”

“No.”

“Who was with him?”

“Another kid.”

“Boy or girl?”

“A boy.”

“Would you know who?” Genero asked.

“I don’t hang around with teenagers, how would I—”

“Well, you might have seen him around the neighborhood...”

“No.”

“How old would you say he was?” Willis asked.

“About Lew’s age. Eighteen, nineteen, I don’t know. A big kid.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Long blond hair, a sort of handlebar mustache. He was wearing a crazy jacket.”

“What do you mean, crazy?”

“It was like an animal skin, with the fur inside and the, you know, what do you call it, the pelt? Is that what you call it?”

“Go ahead.”

“The raw side, you know what I mean? The skin part. That was the outside of the jacket, and the fur was the inside. White fur. And there was a big orange sun painted on the back of the jacket.”

“Anything else?”

“Ain’t that enough?”

“Maybe it is,” Willis said. “Thank you very much, ma’am.”

“You’re welcome,” she answered. “You want some coffee? I got some on the stove.”

“No, thanks, we want to take a look at the apartment here,” Genero said. “Thanks a lot, though. You’ve been very kind.”

The woman smiled so suddenly and so radiantly that it almost knocked Genero clear across the hallway to the opposite wall.

“Not at all,” she said in a tiny little voice, and gently eased the door shut. Genero raised his eyebrows. He was trying to remember exactly what he had said, and in what tone of voice. He was still new at this business of questioning people, and any trick he could learn might prove helpful. The trouble was, he couldn’t remember his exact words.

“What did I say?” he asked Willis.

“I don’t remember,” Willis answered.

“No, come on, Hal, what did I say? What made her smile that way, and all of a sudden get so nice?”

“I think you asked her if she’d like to go to bed with you,” Willis said.

“No,” Genero said seriously, and shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”

With the passkey the superintendent had provided, Willis opened the door to 4C, and stepped into the apartment. Behind him, Genero was still pondering the subtleties of police interrogation.

There were two windows facing the entrance door. The lower pane of the window on the left was almost completely shattered, with here and there an isolated shard jutting from the window frame. Sunlight streamed through both windows, dust motes rising silently. The apartment was sparsely furnished, a mattress on the floor against one wall, a bookcase on the opposite wall, a stereo record player and a stack of LP albums beside it, a bridge table and two chairs in the kitchen alcove, where another window opened onto the fire escape. A black camp trunk studded with brass rivets served as a coffee table in the center of the room, near the record player. Brightly colored cushions lined the wall on either side of the bookcase. Two black-and-white antiwar posters decorated the walls. The windows were curtainless. In the kitchen alcove, the shelves over the stove carried only two boxes of breakfast cereal and a bowl of sugar. A bottle of milk and three containers of yogurt were in the refrigerator. In the vegetable tray, Willis found a plastic bag of what looked like oregano. He showed it to Genero.

“Grass?” Genero said.

Willis shrugged. He opened the bag and sniffed the greenish-brown, crushed leaves. “Maybe,” he said. He pulled an evidence tag from his pad, filled it out, and tied it to the plastic bag.

They went through the apartment methodically. There were three coffee mugs on the camp trunk. Each of them smelled of wine, and there was a red lipstick stain on the rim of one cup. They opened the camp trunk and found it stuffed with dungarees, flannel shirts, undershorts, several sweaters, a harmonica, an army blanket, and a small metal cash box. The cash box was unlocked. It contained three dollars in change and a high school G.O. card encased in plastic. In the kitchen, they found two empty wine bottles in the garbage pail. A sprung mousetrap, the bait gone, was under the kitchen sink. On top of the closed toilet seat in the bathroom, they found a pair of dungarees with a black belt through the trouser loops, an orange Charlie Brown sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off raggedly at the elbows, a pair of white sweat socks, a pair of loafers, and a woman’s black silk blouse.

The blouse had a label in it.

They came into the grocery store at twenty minutes past seven, each of them wearing a Halloween mask, even though this was only the middle of the month and Halloween was yet two weeks away. They were both holding drawn guns, both dressed in black trench coats and black trousers. They walked rapidly from the front door to the counter, with the familiarity of visitors who had been there before. One of them was wearing a Wolf Man mask and the other was wearing a Snow White mask. The masks completely covered their faces and lent a terrifying nightmare aspect to their headlong rush for the counter.

Silvio’s back was turned when they entered the store. He heard the bell over the door and whirled quickly, but they were almost to the counter by then, and he had time to shout only the single word “Ancora!” before he punched the NO SALE key on the register and reached into the drawer for his gun. The man wearing the Snow White mask was the first to realize that Silvio was going for a gun. He did not say a word to his partner. Instead, he fired directly into Silvio’s face at close range. The slug almost tore off Silvio’s head and sent him spinning backward against the shelves. Canned goods clattered to the floor. The curtain leading to the back room was suddenly thrown open and Parker stood in the doorway with a .38 Police Special in his fist. The man with the Wolf Man mask had his hand in the cash drawer and was scooping up a pile of bills.