“If I don’t let it run, it won’t be cold,” Elizabeth said. “Anyway, it’s quiet water, we can hear each other fine.”
“Who else can hear us, Elizabeth?”
The question startled her. He had suspected the apartment was bugged from the moment she refused to turn off the tap or go into the other room. She had not moved from her position near the sink, which could mean that the bug was somewhere in the wall cabinet, probably under the wooden trim, and the sound of running water would overwhelm the sensitive mike and obliterate any other sound in the room. But if the apartment was bugged, who was bugging it? And if she knew the location of the bug, why hadn’t she simply ripped it out?
“Ain’t nobody here but the two of us,” she said, regaining her composure. “Who else could hear us?”
“Walls have ears these days,” Hawes said, and walked to the sink, and turned off the tap.
Elizabeth immediately moved to the other side of the room, away from the sink and facing the open window. When she spoke, her voice was directed toward the fire escape. “I’ve got things to do,” she said. “If you’re finished here, I’d like to get dressed.”
“Mind if I look around a little?”
“For that, you do need a warrant, mister.”
“I can get one, you know.”
“For what? Charlie do something against the law?”
“Maybe.”
“Then go get your warrant, man. I sure wouldn’t want no criminal to be escaping justice.”
“Know a man named Frank Reardon?” Hawes asked, and again the question startled Elizabeth. Facing the open window, her back to him, her arms folded, he saw the slight involuntary hunching of her shoulders, as though someone had suddenly put an ice cube to the base of her neck.
“Frank who?” she said to the fire escape.
“Reardon.”
“Don’t know him,” Elizabeth said.
“Ever wear earrings?” he asked her.
“Sure.”
“Perfume?”
“Sure.”
“Ever go downtown, Elizabeth? Like in the neighborhood of Avenue J and Allen?”
“Never.”
“Across the street from the big garage?”
“Never.”
“Happen to be there last Monday and Tuesday night?”
“Never been there.”
“What do you do for a living?” Hawes asked.
“I’m unemployed.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Ever work?”
“I used to be a waitress.”
“When was that?”
“Few years ago.”
“Haven’t worked since?”
“Nope.”
“How do you support yourself?”
“I got friends,” Elizabeth said.
“Like Charlie Harrod?”
“Charlie’s a friend, yes.”
“Frank Reardon’s dead,” Hawes said, and watched the back of her neck.
This time she was ready. Without missing a beat, she said, “I don’t know any Frank Reardon, but of course I’m sorry to hear he’s dead.”
“Tell Charlie when you see him, will you? He might be interested.”
“I’ll tell him, but I doubt he’ll be interested.”
Hawes turned toward the cabinet hanging over the sink. “This is Detective Cotton Hawes, 87th Squad,” he said, “investigating arson and homicide, concluding the questioning of Elizabeth Benjamin at exactly” — he looked at his watch — “eleven twenty-three A.M. on Friday, August sixteen.” He turned to Elizabeth. “Make it easier for them,” he said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Elizabeth said.
“Tell Charlie I’m looking for him,” Hawes said.
He unlocked the door, went out into the hallway, and closed the door behind him. Immediately he put his ear to the wood and listened. He heard nothing at first, and then he heard the water tap running, and then nothing again. He did not hear Elizabeth dialing the telephone, but that’s exactly what she must have done, because the next thing he heard was her voice saying, “Charlie, this is Liz. We just had a visit from the fuzz.” Silence. In that moment of silence, Hawes tried to understand what was happening. If they knew about the bug over the sink, they undoubtedly knew the phone would be tapped as well. Yet Elizabeth felt free enough on the instrument to tell Charlie they had just had a visit from the police. Had they unscrewed the mouthpiece and removed the mike? “When will you be leaving there?” Elizabeth asked, and then said, “Wait for me downstairs. I’ll be over in ten minutes.” Hawes heard her replacing the receiver on its cradle. He moved away from the door and went swiftly down the steps to the street.
She had changed into her street clothes, a short blue skirt, a red-ribbed jersey top without a bra, high-heeled navy-blue patent-leather pumps, dangling earrings, and a red-leather sling bag. She stepped high and fast, and he had trouble keeping up with her. If she wasn’t a hooker, he would eat his shield and his service revolver.
The streets of Diamondback were teeming with a populace driven outdoors by the heat; however hot it was on the sidewalk, it was hotter inside the tenements. There is no relief in the slums. In the summer you are hot, and in the winter you are cold. Summer or winter, spring or fall, you are infested with roaches and plagued with rats, and you are reminded constantly that you are an animal because you are forced to live like one. If Clearview across the river had been euphemistically named, Diamondback was a true and apt label for an area as deadly as a coiled rattlesnake.
Hawes walked on the opposite side of the street, following Elizabeth at a discreet distance, never losing sight of her. He walked past pimps in fancy dude threads, and he walked past men who were cabdrivers and letter carriers and sanitation employees; he walked past junkies sitting on the front stoops of boarded tenements and staring vacantly into space, nodding with their dreams of an America realized only in dope fantasies; he walked past candy stores taking numbers bets, and past women rushing home with grocery bags before heading downtown to work cleaning white apartments; he walked past young girls peddling their asses; he walked past young men in gang jackets and old men sitting on wooden crates, watching their shoes, and young men shooting dice on a hallway blanket, and men who were bootblacks and lavatory attendants and some who worked for ad agencies downtown (but who had trouble getting a taxi uptown after work, unless a brother was a hackie); he walked past short-order cooks and pushers, waiters and train conductors and muggers. He walked past honest men and thieves, victims and victimizers alike, who in their desperation called each other “brothers” though the only thing that linked them together was the color of their skins.
Hawes did not share the opinion of those who believed that slums were exciting because at least they were alive. The way Hawes looked at it, slums were at least dying, if not already dead. The idea depressed and angered him as much as any assault or homicide would. He wondered why it did not depress or anger those men in high government positions who, instead, seemed to prefer looking away from what was an open, bleeding, possibly fatal wound.
Go make your speeches on your high podiums, Hawes thought, in your blue serge suit and your polished brown shoes. Promise us equality and justice and tell us how the poorest son of a bitch on our welfare rolls would be considered a wealthy man in a nation someplace that’s just coming out of the Stone Age. Grin, and shake all the hands, and exhibit your smiling wife, and tell us what a tireless campaigner she was, and explain how we are a nation on the edge of greatness. Tell us everything’s all right, pal. Assure us, and reassure us. And then take a walk here in Diamondback. And keep your eyes on that girl ahead, because she is most likely a hooker, and she is living with a man who may be involved in a homicide, and that is America, too, and it isn’t going to change simply because you tell us everything’s all right, pal, when we know everything may just possibly be all wrong.