His other mentions in the newspaper were minor ones. He was listed as a major contributor to the campaign fund of a Republican member of the New York State Assembly. He was among those attending a Tammany Hall fund-raising dinner. He was a pallbearer at another politician’s funeral.
The over-all picture that emerged was one of a man fifty-five or sixty years old, one who had started in the lower echelons of the rackets and who had done well, moving up the ladder to a position bordering upon unholy respectability. Washburn had a great many business interests and a great many political connections. He was important and he was successful. He would be harder to reach than Maurice Lublin.
They spent a little more than a hour in the library’s microfilm room. When they got back to the hotel, the night clerk was gone and another man was behind the desk. They went upstairs. They showered, and Jill rinsed the remaining coloring out of her hair and combed and set it. Dave put on a summer suit. Jill wore a skirt and blouse. They were in the room for about an hour, then went downstairs and left the hotel.
Washburn lived at 47 Gramercy Park East. They didn’t know where that was, and Dave ducked into a drugstore and looked up the address in a street guide. It was on the East Side, around Twentieth Street between Third and Fourth Avenues.
They took a cab and got off three blocks away at the corner of East Seventeenth Street and Irving Place. They were only a few blocks from the diner where they had had breakfast. The neighborhood was shabby-genteel middle class, unimpressively respectable. The buildings were mostly brownstones. There were trees, but not many of them. The neighborhood picked up as they walked north on Irving Place.
He wondered if Lublin had Washburn’s place staked out. It was possible, he thought. He reached under his jacket and felt the weight of the gun tucked beneath his belt. They kept walking.
Chapter 11
The building at 47 Gramercy Park East was a large four-story brownstone that had been thoroughly renovated around the end of the war. There were four apartments, one to a floor. There was a doorman in front, a tall Negro wearing a maroon uniform with gold piping. No, the doorman told Jill, there was no Mr. Watson in the building, but there was a Mr. Washburn up on the fourth floor, if that was who she wanted. She said it wasn’t and he smiled a servile smile.
So Washburn was on the fourth floor. They crossed the street and moved halfway down the block, out of range of the doorman. The green square of park was bordered on all sides by a high iron fence. There was a gate, locked. A neat metal sign indicated that if you lived in one of the buildings surrounding the park you were given a key to that gate, and then you were allowed to go into the park when you wanted. Otherwise the park was out of bounds. They stood near the gate and Dave smoked a cigarette.
Jill said, “We can’t stand here forever. Lublin will send somebody around sooner or later.”
“Or the police will pick us up for loitering.”
“Uh-huh. What do we do? Can we go up there after him?”
“No. He wouldn’t be alone. One of the newspaper stories mentioned a wife, so she would be there with him, I suppose. And he probably has plenty of help. Bodyguards, a maid, all or that.”
“Then what do we do?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
They walked to the corner. A uniformed policeman passed them heading downtown. He didn’t smile. They stood on the corner while the light changed twice.
“If we could get into the park—” he said.
“We don’t have a key.”
“I know,” he said. “From the park, we could keep an eye on the doorway without being seen. It would be natural enough. We could sit on a bench and wait for something to happen. We don’t even know if Washburn’s home, or who’s with him. Or what he looks like, for that matter. The one picture in the paper wasn’t much good. Blurred, the way news photos always are—”
“All those little dots.”
“And not a close-up anyway. We might be able to see him, he might come out alone, we could have a crack at following him. He’s the key to it. Unless Lublin was doing an awfully good job of last-minute lying, Washburn is our only connection with the killers.”
“Do you think we could get him to talk?”
“I don’t know. For a while I didn’t think Lublin would talk.” He looked over at Washburn’s building. “The damn thing would have to face a park,” he said. “In the movies, they always rent an apartment right across the street from the suspect and set themselves up with binoculars and gun-shot microphones and tape recorders and everything else in the world, and they’ve got him cold. But what the hell do you do when the son of a bitch lives across from a park that you can’t even get into?”
“Maybe next door?”
The buildings on either side of Washburn’s were more of the same, renovated brownstones with an air of monied respectability about them. There would be no rooms for rent there, he thought. Not at all. But maybe around in back... “Come on,” he said.
A Fourth Avenue office building was around the block from Washburn’s brownstone. They looked at the building directory in the lobby. There were three lawyers, two CPA’s, one insurance agency, one employment agency, a commercial-art studio, and a handful of small businesses identified in such a way that they might have done anything from advertising layout to import-export. The elevator seemed to be out of order. They walked up steep stairs to the fourth floor. The whole rear wall of the floor was taken up by one business, an outfit called Beadle & Graber. The office door was shut and the window glass frosted. A typewriter made frantic sounds behind the closed door.
He went to the door and knocked on it. The typewriter stopped quickly and a gray-haired woman opened the door cautiously. Dave asked if a Mr. Floyd Harper worked there, and the gray-haired woman said no, there was no Mr. Harper there. He looked over her shoulder at the window. It faced out upon a courtyard, and across the courtyard he could see the rear windows of Washburn’s apartment. The drapes were open, but he didn’t have time to see much of anything. But if he were closer to the windows, and if he had a pair of binoculars—
“You can see Washburn’s apartment from their window,” he told Jill.
“Then it’s a shame they have the office. If it were vacant, we could rent it.”
“There’s still a way.”
“How?”
“Wait for me in the lobby,” he said.
They walked as far as the third floor together. Then she went on downstairs while he knocked on the door of one of the CPA’s. A voice told him to come in. He went inside. A balding man in his forties asked what he could do for him.
Dave said, “Just wanted to ask a question, if I could. I was thinking of taking an office in this building. There’s space available, isn’t there?”
“I think so. On the top floor, I believe.”
“Just one thing I wanted to know. Is this a twenty-four-hour building? Can you get in and out any time?”
You could, the accountant told him. They kept a night man on duty to run the elevator, and from six at night until eight in the morning you had to sign a register if you entered or left the building. “It’s not a bad location,” the accountant said. “The address has a little more prestige than it used to. It’s Park Avenue South now, not Fourth Avenue. Everybody in the city still calls it Fourth Avenue, of course, but it gives you a more impressive letterhead, at least for the out-of-town people. You want the rental agent’s phone number?”