Then I heard the bad omen. Silence.
A garage is not a quiet place. With light in both shop and office there should have been noise. There was no sound of any kind. I looked into the office. It was empty. There was an open ledger and a paper coffee cup. I went into the shop section.
I found Schmidt in the rear behind a stripped-down truck. They had worked him over good before he died. I did not think they had intended to kill him. He had just died on their hands. His white hair lay in a pool of blood that had poured from his nose and mouth. The blood was still wet. His bloody face was a mass of bruised wounds. It looked like at least one arm had been broken. I did not look for the rest of the details of what they had done to him, but a blow-torch burned on the workbench. There was a long steel rod in his right hand. It looked like he had fought back at some point. Some old man.
Fight had not helped. He was dead.
I went into the office and called Gazzo. I smoked while I waited. I had the feeling that eyes were watching me. That was probably only nerves, but the blood was still wet out there in the garage, so I was wary. A man came in to ask if I had a cigarette machine. I told him no, but I tried to keep him there. He had a girl out in a car and he left. I smoked and listened to every sound until the sirens growled into the street and I was surrounded by blue uniforms. Gazzo sat at Schmidt’s desk. I told him my story of this killing.
‘You better take a vacation,’ the captain said. ‘I can’t handle many more bodies.’
‘Bodies are your business,’ I said. ‘You live on dead bodies, Captain.’
I suppose I felt bad. And nervous. Schmidt had been a good, tough, honest man. None of it had helped him.
‘I don’t want the next to be yours,’ Gazzo said.
He had seen my face. I did not want the next to be me either.
‘You’re getting close,’ Gazzo said. ‘Schmidt is still warm. You’re maybe too close. You’ve maybe got someone worried. You want to tell me why?’
‘I don’t know why,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything.’
‘Sure,’ Gazzo said. ‘Someone worked you over for fun.’
‘They think I know, Captain, but I don’t.’
He looked at me. ‘That’s bad.’
‘I know how bad it is,’ I said. And I did. It is bad enough to know something dangerous enough to be beaten for; it is much worse to not know what they think you know.
I went out into the dark of Water Street. Squad cars blocked the street. Their red revolving lights played across all the parked cars. I thought about Schmidt. The killers were still looking for answers. I did not think they had found any here. I took deep breaths in the hot night. I almost wished they had found their answers, ended it all. I lighted another cigarette. At a time like this the dangers of cigarettes don’t seem so bad. You have to live a while for them to kill you, and I’m not sure many of us are going to make it. The men who control the bombs wear better clothes and speak better in more languages than Pappas or Jake Roth or the ones who killed Schmidt, but they are the same men.
I smoked and watched a solitary patrolman walk along the dark street. He was not one of the squad-car boys; he was a beat cop. Stettin’s replacement. I watched him and smiled. He had come round the corner, and caught my eye, at a slow amble. He had probably been snoozing somewhere or cadging a quick free drink and had not heard the squad cars arrive. In the instant he saw the squad cars he assumed a purposeful efficient air. He came down the block batting car tyres with his billy, trying to appear tall and alert. He peered closely at the cars parked near the driveways and fire hydrants. He stopped at the cars parked in front of the loading docks. That was legal at night and on Sundays. He seemed annoyed that no one had parked illegally. I watched his slow progress down the block towards the river. I saw him pass the mouth of the alley where Stettin had been mugged. He looked into that alley.
There was a click inside my head.
That’s the closest word I can think of. A click. A sudden sensation of something being released, of clicking into place. Where there had been all jagged pieces there was a click and a sudden smooth surface.
I knew where Officer Stettin fitted into this. I knew why he had been mugged. Suddenly, like that.
Not chapter and verse, not the full implications, but the connection. I was suddenly as sure as a man can ever be sure of anything. I did not know why I had not seen it before. It was so clear. So obvious. I knew what the mugger had wanted. I knew why Stettin had been attacked. The mugger had wanted the only thing taken from Stettin that could possibly have been a danger to anyone. The only thing taken that could have involved anyone else.
The summons book.
A guess? Yes. A hunch. But it had to be. Have you ever had a thought that you suddenly just know is true? Nothing else, you just know. That is sometimes all that detective work is — a flash of hunch that must be true. Sometimes, did I say? Most of the time. Ask any cop. All else aside, most of the crimes of the kind the police get — small, violent, messy crimes — are solved by informers or a hunch. Not clues, not a neat trail, but the experienced hunch.
I had the hunch I had been looking for. Stettin did not know why he had been mugged. There had to be a reason. And the only thing stolen that could have involved someone else was the summons book. End of hunch. Next question: How did a summons book become so dangerous?
Even as I thought I had begun to walk fast in the night. Towards St Vincent’s Hospital. Because if my hunch were right, and I knew it was, then Pete Vitanza should be my confirmation even if he did not know it. If my hunch were right, then I had a whole new picture of the murder of Tani Jones. A picture I liked better. The picture I had sensed from the start. Burglars rarely kill, and Tani Jones had put up no fight. The shooting had been quick, close, sudden. The killer had not run. He was out looking for Jo-Jo. Looking hard to the point of two more murders. Why? Because there had been no burglar. There had been no robbery. That was all a cover-up.
Tani Jones had known her killer.
She had known her killer, and the killer had known her. He had known that she was Andy Pappas’ girl friend.
The killer was a man who had called on Tani Jones. A man who went to see her while Pappas was safely out of town. A man who was cheating Andy Pappas with Tani Jones, the dumb little girl who liked men too much. Then what had happened in Tani Jones’s apartment that day? I did not know that, a hunch can only go so far, but for some reason the man had killed her. When I knew who, I would probably know why, but one thing I was sure of — the man had not planned to kill Tani. The whole faked robbery had an impromptu ring about it, an aura of improvisation, a spur-of-the-moment desperate cover-up. Something had happened in Tani Jones’s apartment that day that made a secret lover into a sudden killer.
What that was my hunch could not tell me, but my hunch told me one more big fact. After the killer had killed, faked his robbery, and got clean away unseen, something more had happened down on Water Street. Something had suddenly gone very wrong for the killer, and it had involved Patrolman Stettin and his summons book.
By this time I was at St Vincent’s. The doctor did not want to let me talk to Pete Vitanza. I argued. I told the doctor that it was urgent police business. He had seen me there with Lieutenant Marx earlier. It finally worked. I went into Pete’s room.
Pete was propped up in bed, his splinted arms thrust straight out. He looked better. He was young and resilient, and the young recover quickly. But his eyes were still bandaged, and when I entered his whole head turned towards the sound I made as I came in.
‘Mr Fortune?’
He had had some visitors, there was mail on his bedtray and books on the bed he could not read yet. Apparently the nurse had been reading to him. But he was really waiting for me. Some of his visitors had been police, and he wanted to talk about Nancy Driscoll.