Ed McBain - Ten Plus One

The girl waited for Frankie in the park for two hours. He never showed up for the date because Brock and Masterson kept him in the locked interrogation room for six hours, alternately rousing him and then beating him senseless again, while asking why he had killed a man he hadn’t seen in five years. At the end of their session, they were convinced he was clean. They wrote out a report stating he had broken parole by assaulting a police officer during a routine interrogation.

Frankie Pierce was removed to the criminal ward of the hospital on Walker Island in the River Dix, to recuperate before he was shipped back to the penitentiary at Castleview, upstate.

A sure sign that nothing was happening on this case—oh, yeah, maybe a cheap hood was being beaten up and made to realize you can’t go home again—was the fact that time was passing. It was true that there had been no murders since Andrew Mulligan drank his last drink, but time was nonetheless flitting by, and there was no greater proof of this than the reappearance of Bert Kling at the squadroom, looking tanned and healthy and very blond from the sun after his vacation. Lieutenant Byrnes, who didn’t like to see anyone looking so well-rested, immediately assigned him to the Sniper Case.

On the afternoon of May 7, while Meyer and Carella were uptown requestioning Mrs. O’Grady, the nice little woman who had been present when Salvatore Palumbo called it quits, Bert Kling was in the office looking over the Sniper file and trying to acquaint himself with what had gone before. When the blonde young lady walked into the squadroom, he barely looked up.

Meyer and Carella were sitting in the living room of a two-story clapboard dwelling in Riverhead while Mrs. O’Grady poured them coffee and tried to recall the incidents preceding the death of Salvatore Palumbo.

“I think he was weighing out some fruit. Do you take cream and sugar?”

“Black for me,” Meyer said.

“Detective Carella?”

“A little of each.”

“Should I call you Detective Carella, or Mr. Carella, or just what?”

“Whichever is most comfortable to you.”

“Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll call you Mr. Carella. Because calling you Detective Carella sounds as if you should be calling me Housewife O’Grady. Is that all right?”

“That’s fine, Mrs. O’Grady. He was weighing out some fruit, you said.”

“Yes.”

“And then what? I know we’ve been over all this, but…”

“Then he just fell onto the stand and slid down to the sidewalk. I guess I began screaming.”

“Did you hear the shot, Mrs. O’Grady?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Just before the train pulled in.”

“What train?”

“The train. Upstairs.”

“The elevated?”

“Yes.”

“It was coming into the platform when Mr. Palumbo got shot?”

“Well, to tell you the truth,” Mrs. O’Grady said, “I’m not too clear about the sequence. I mean, I heard the shot, but at the time I didn’t think it was a shot, I figured it was a backfire or a blow-out—who expects to hear a gun go off while you’re buying fruit from a man? So, although I heard the shot, I didn’t realize Sal…Mr. Palumbo…had been shot. I thought he was suffering a heart attack or something, him falling like that, and the fruit all tumbling off the stand. But then, of course, I saw the blood at the back of his head, and I guess my mind made the connection between the explosion I had heard and the fact that Sal was…well, I didn’t know he was dead…but certainly hurt.”

“And the train?”

“Well, what I’m trying to say is that everything happened so fast. The train coming in…I think it was coming in, though it may have been leaving…and the shot, and Sal falling down hurt. It all happened so fast that I’m not sure of the time sequence, the poor man.”

“You’re not sure, then, whether the train was pulling into the station or leaving it.”

“That’s right. But it was moving, that’s for sure. It wasn’t just standing still in the station.”

“Did you see anyone on the station platform, Mrs. O’Grady?”

“No, I didn’t even look up there. I thought it was a backfire at first, you see, or something like that. It never crossed my mind that somebody was shooting a gun. So I had no reason to look around to see who or what it was. Besides, I was buying fruit, and to tell you the truth, the shot didn’t register on my mind at all, either as a backfire or anything, it just didn’t register until I began thinking about it afterward, after Sal was dead, do you know what I mean? It’s hard to explain, but there are so many noises in the city, and you just don’t listen to them anymore, you just go about your business.”

“Then, in effect, you really didn’t hear the shot at the time. Or at least, you didn’t react to it.”

“That’s right. But there was a shot.” Mrs. O’Grady paused. “Why are you asking? Do they make silencers for rifles?”

“They’re not manufactured, Mrs. O’Grady, no. There are both state and federal regulations against the use of silencers. But any fairly competent machinist could turn one out in his own garage, especially if he had something like murder on his mind.”

“I always thought silencers were very complicated things. They always look so complicated in the movies.”

“Well, they’re really very simple in principle. When you put a silencer on a gun or a rifle, you’re closing a series of doors, in effect. You’re muffling the sound.”

“Doors?” Mrs. O’Grady asked.

“Try to visualize a piece of tubing, Mrs. O’Grady, perhaps an inch and a half in diameter, and about eight inches long. Inside this tube is a series of separated eight-inch baffling plates, the closed ‘doors’ that absorb the sound. That’s a silencer. A man can fashion one on a home lathe.”

“Well, I heard a shot,” Mrs. O’Grady said.

“And yet you didn’t turn, you didn’t look up, you didn’t comment upon it to Mr. Palumbo.”

“No.”

“The rifle that fired a .308 caliber bullet would have been a high-powered rifle, Mrs. O’Grady. Powerful enough to have felled a charging lion.”

“So?”

“It would have made a pretty loud noise.”

“So?”

“I’m only suggesting, Mrs. O’Grady, that your reconstruction of what happened may only be a result of your later thoughts about the incident.”

“I heard a shot,” Mrs. O’Grady insisted.

“Did you? Or is it only now, now that you know Mr. Palumbo was shot and killed, that you think you remember hearing a shot? In other words, Mrs. O’Grady, is logic interfering with your memory?”

“Logic?”

“Yes. If a bullet was fired, and if a man was killed, there must have been a shot. And if there was shot, you must have heard it. And if you heard it, you must have dismissed it as a backfire or a blowout.”

“I’m sure that’s what happened.”

“Have you ever heard a blowout, Mrs. O’Grady?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“And what happened? Did you ignore it, or were you momentarily startled?”

“I suppose I was startled.”

“Yet when Mr. Palumbo was killed with a high-powered rifle, which would have made a very loud noise, you only later remembered hearing a shot. Does that sound valid?”

“Well, I think I heard a shot,” Mrs. O’Grady said.

Carella smiled. “Maybe you did,” he answered. “We’ll check with the man in the change booth on the platform. In any case, Mrs. O’Grady, you’ve been extremely cooperative and most helpful.”

“He was a nice man,” Mrs. O’Grady said. “Sal. He was really a very nice man.”