“You wouldn’t have the key to these, either, I suppose,” he said.
“I don’t have the key to nothing but the front door,” Elizabeth said.
Hawes nodded and closed the door. The bedroom dresser was on the wall opposite the bed, alongside the single window in the room. He went through each drawer methodically, poking through Harrod’s shirts and shorts, socks and handkerchiefs. In Harrod’s jewelry box, tucked under three sets of long red underwear in the bottom drawer, he found eight pairs of cuff links, a wristwatch with a broken crystal, a high school graduation ring, four tie tacks, and a small key. He took the key out of the box and showed it to Elizabeth.
“Recognize it?” he asked.
“No.”
“Well, let’s try it,” Hawes said, and went back into the darkroom. The key did not fit any of the file drawers. Sighing, Hawes went out to Harrod’s dresser and replaced the key where he’d found it. With the girl following him, he went into the kitchen and carefully inspected the cabinet over the sink. The bug, as he’d suspected, was tacked up under the bottom wooden trim. He followed the wire up to the molding where wall joined ceiling, and then across the room to the kitchen window. Stepping out onto the fire escape, he studied the rear brick wall. The wire ran clear up to the roof and then out of sight. He climbed back into the room again.
“The one in the John is behind the toilet tank,” Elizabeth said. “There’s another one in the bedroom, behind the picture of Jesus, and there’s also one in the living-room floor lamp.”
“And you’ve got no idea who planted them?”
Elizabeth shrugged. Hawes went back to the cabinet and searched through the shelves. Then he went through the drawers in the cabinet flanking the sink, and the single drawer in the kitchen table.
He found the pistol in the refrigerator.
It was wrapped in aluminum foil, and it was hidden at the rear of the bottom shelf, behind a plastic container of leftover string beans.
The gun was a Smith & Wesson 9-mm Automatic. Tenting his handkerchief over the butt, Hawes pulled out the magazine. There were six cartridges in the magazine, and he knew there would be one in the firing chamber.
“I don’t suppose this belongs to you,” he said.
“Never saw it before in my life,” Elizabeth said.
“Just sprang up there among the string beans and celery, huh?” Hawes said.
“Looks that way.”
“Happen to have a license for it?”
“I just told you it’s not mine.”
“Is it Charlie’s?”
“I don’t know whose it is.”
Hawes nodded, shoved the magazine back into the butt, tagged the gun, wrapped it, and stuck it into his jacket pocket. He gave Elizabeth a receipt for it, and then wrote his name and the squadroom telephone number on a slip of paper and handed it to her. “If you remember anything about the gun,” he said, “here’s where you can reach me.”
“There’s nothing to remember.”
“Take my number, anyway. I’ll be back later,” he said. “I suggest you stick around.”
“I’ve got other plans,” Elizabeth said.
“Suit yourself,” Hawes said, and hoped it sounded like a warning. He unlocked the door and left the apartment.
On the way down to the street, he wondered if he shouldn’t have arrested her on the spot. The law sometimes puzzled him. He was now in possession of certain facts and certain pieces of evidence, but he wasn’t sure any of them added up to grounds for a legal arrest:
(1) Frank Reardon had been shot to death with two bullets from a 9-mm pistol.
(2) Hawes had found a Smith & Wesson 9-mm pistol on the premises occupied jointly by Charles Harrod and Elizabeth Benjamin.
(3) The gun had an eight plus one-shot capacity, but there were only seven bullets in it when he’d slid open the magazine for a look.
(4) Harrod’s name had been listed in Reardon’s skimpy address book.
(5) Barbara Loomis, the super’s wife, had described as Reardon’s visitors in the week or so before the fire, a black man and a black girl who sounded a lot like Harrod and Elizabeth.
In other words, take this fellow Reardon. He’s been seen socializing with two other people. He is found shot to death with a 9-mm pistol, and a 9-mm pistol is later found in the refrigerator of those very two people with whom he’d earlier been socializing. Pretty strong circumstantial stuff, huh?
But socializing is not a crime, and keeping a gun in your refrigerator doesn’t necessarily mean you used it to kill someone, no matter how many bullets are in it. In fact, if you have a license for a gun, you can keep the gun in your refrigerator, your breadbox, or even your hat. It is not difficult to get a gun in the United States of America. People in America keep guns the way Englishmen keep pussycats. The reason people in America keep guns is because America is a pioneer nation, and one never knows when the Indians will attack. (Hawes knew, as a matter of absolute fact, that a band of fanatic Apaches in war paint had only the week before attacked an apartment building on Lakeshore Drive in Chicago.) That was why the National Rifle Association did all that lobbying in Congress — to make sure that pioneer Americans retained the right to bear arms against hostile Indians.
Elizabeth Benjamin and Charlie Harrod kept a gun in their refrigerator, so Hawes assumed they were at least as American as any Cherokee. But if an American had a license for a gun, carry or premises, you could not arrest him unless he committed a crime with the weapon. Until Ballistics told Hawes whether or not the suspect pistol was indeed the one that had chopped down old Frank Reardon, he did not have much he could pin on Elizabeth. He might be able to arrest her for keeping a gun without a premises permit, but she had claimed the gun was not hers, and the apartment she lived in was Charlie Harrod’s, and he couldn’t arrest Charlie for anything because Charlie was dead.
But even if the gun did turn out to be the murder weapon, Hawes had further doubts about arresting Elizabeth. If there was no way to link her to the pistol — no license, for example, no record of purchase, no fingerprints on it, nothing but the fact that she’d kept it in Charlie’s icebox — what could they charge her with? The crime was murder, the biggest felony of them all. A party to a crime, according to the Penal Law, is either a principal or an accessory. If Elizabeth had directly committed the act of murder, or aided or abetted in its commission, whether present or absent, or directly or indirectly counseled, commanded, induced, or procured another to commit the murder, she was a principal. If, on the other hand, she had harbored, concealed, or aided the murderer after the commission of the crime, with intent that he might avoid or escape from arrest, trial, conviction, or punishment, having reasonable ground to believe that he had committed the crime — why then, she was an accessory. So what the hell was she? Hawes would have to ask the lieutenant. And assuming she was anything at all, principal or accessory, how could they prove it on the basis of a gun found in Charlie’s refrigerator, even assuming it was the gun that had killed Reardon?
It sometimes got extremely difficult.
The joke about the patrolman chasing a fleeing bank robber, while simultaneously reading his regulations booklet in an attempt to discern whether or not he was permitted to fire his revolver, was too close to the truth for comfort. Hawes sighed and stepped out into the blazing heat of the afternoon, squinting his eyes against the onslaught of the sun.