“Come in, come in,” Concetta said, and stepped back into the small kitchen, allowing Willis and then Brown to pass her.
“So what you want two o’clock in the morning?” Concetta said, and closed the door against the wind. The kitchen was narrow, the stove, sink, and refrigerator lined up against one wall, an enamel-topped table on the opposite wall. A metal cabinet, its door open to reveal an array of breakfast cereals and canned foods, was on the right-angled wall, alongside a radiator. There was a mirror over the sink and a porcelain dog on top of the refrigerator. Hanging on the wall over the radiator was a picture of Jesus Christ. A light bulb with a pull chain and a large glass globe hung in the center of the kitchen. The faucet was dripping. An electric clock over the range hummed a steady counterpoint.
“It’s only midnight,” Brown said. “Not two o’clock.”
There was an edge to his voice that had not been there on the long ride up to Riverhead, and Willis could only attribute it to the presence of Mrs. La Bresca, if indeed that was who the lady was. He wondered for perhaps the hundredth time what radar Brown possessed that enabled him to pinpoint unerringly any bigot within a radius of a thousand yards. The woman was staring at both men with equal animosity, it seemed to Willis, her long black hair pinned into a bun at the back of her head, her brown eyes slitted and defiant. She was wearing a man’s bathrobe over her nightgown, and he saw now that she was barefoot.
“Are you Mrs. La Bresca?” Willis asked.
“I am Concetta La Bresca, who wants to know?” she said.
“Detectives Willis and Brown of the 87th Squad,” Willis said. “Where’s your son?”
“He’s asleep,” Concetta said, and because she was born in Naples and raised in Paradiso, immediately assumed it was necessary to provide him with an alibi. “He was here with me all night,” she said, “you got the wrong man.”
“You want to wake him up, Mrs. La Bresca?” Brown said.
“What for?”
“We’d like to talk to him.”
“What for?”
“Ma’am, we can take him into custody, if that’s what you’d like,” Brown said, “but it might be easier all around if we just asked him a few simple questions right here and now. You want to go fetch him, ma’am?”
“I’m up,” La Bresca’s voice said from the other room.
“You want to come out here, please, Mr. La Bresca?” Willis said.
“Just a second,” La Bresca said.
“He was here all night,” Concetta said, but Brown’s hand drifted nonetheless toward the revolver hosltered at his waist, just in case La Bresca had been out pumping two bullets into the commissioner’s head instead. He was a while coming. When he finally opened the door and walked into the kitchen, he was carrying nothing more lethal in his hand than the sash of his bathrobe, which he knotted about his waist. His hair was tousled, and his eyes were bleary.
“What now?” he asked.
Since this was a field investigation, and since La Bresca couldn’t conceivably be considered “in custody,” neither Willis nor Brown felt it necessary to advise him of his rights. Instead, Willis immediately said, “Where were you tonight at eleven-thirty?”
“Right here,” La Bresca said.
“Doing what?”
“Sleeping.”
“What time’d you go to bed?”
“About ten.”
“You always hit the sack so early?”
“I do when I gotta get up early.”
“You getting up early tomorrow?”
“Six A.M.,” La Bresca said.
“Why?”
“To get to work.”
“We thought you were unemployed.”
“I got a job this afternoon, right after you guys left me.”
“What kind of a job?”
“Construction work. I’m a laborer.”
“Meridian get you the job?”
“That’s right.”
“Who with?”
“Erhard Engineering.”
“In Riverhead?”
“No, Isola.”
“What time’d you get home tonight?” Brown asked.
“I left Meridian, it musta been about one o’clock, I guess. I went up the pool hall on South Leary and shot a few games with the boys. Then I came home here, it musta been about five or six o’clock.”
“What’d you do then?”
“He ate,” Concetta said.
“Then what?”
“I watched a little TV, and got into bed,” La Bresca said.
“Can anybody besides your mother verify that story?”
“Nobody was here, if that’s what you mean.”
“You get any phone calls during the night?”
“No.”
“Just your word then, right?”
“And mine,“ Concetta said.
“Listen, I don’t know what you guys want from me,” La Bresca said, “But I’m telling you the truth, I mean it. What’s going on, anyway?”
“Did you happen to catch the news on television?”
“No, I musta fell asleep before the news went on. Why? What happened?”
“I go in his room and turn off the light at ten-thirty,” Concetta said.
“I wish you guys would believe me,” La Bresca said.
“Whatever it is you’ve got in mind, I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”
“I believe you,” Willis said. “How about you, Artie?”
“I believe him, too,” Brown said.
“But we have to ask questions,” Willis said, “you understand?”
“Sure, I understand,” La Bresca said, “but I mean, it’s the middle of the night, you know? I gotta get up tomorrow morning.”
“Why don’t you tell us about the man with the hearing aid again,” Willis suggested gently.
They spent at least another fifteen minutes questioning La Bresca and at the end of that time decided they’d either have to pull him in and charge him with something, or else forget him for the time being. The man who’d called the squadroom had said, “There are more than one of us,” and this information had been passed from Kling to the other detectives on the squad, and it was only this nagging knowledge that kept them there questioning La Bresca long after they should have stopped. A cop can usually tell whether he’s onto real meat or not, and La Bresca did not seem like a thief. Willis had told the lieutenant just that only this afternoon, and his opinion hadn’t changed in the intervening hours. But if there was a gang involved in the commissioner’s murder, wasn’t it possible that La Bresca was one of them? A lowly cog in the organization, perhaps, the gopher, the slob who was sent to pick up things, the expendable man who ran the risk of being caught by the police if anything went wrong? In which case, La Bresca was lying.
Well, if he was lying, he did it like an expert, staring out of his baby blues and melting both those hardhearted cops with tales of the new job he was anxious to start tomorrow morning, which is why he’d gone to bed so early and all, got to get a full eight hours’ sleep, growing mind in a growing body, red-blooded second-generation American, and all that crap. Which raised yet another possibility. If he was lying — and so far they hadn’t been able to trip him up, hadn’t been able to budge him from his description of the mystery man he’d met outside Meridian, hadn’t been able to find a single discrepancy between the story he’d told that afternoon and the one he was telling now — but if he was lying, then wasn’t it possible the caller and La Bresca were one and the same person? Not a gang at all, that being a figment of his own imagination, a tiny falsehood designed to lead the police into believing this was a well-organized group instead of a single ambitious hood trying to make a killing. And if La Bresca and the caller were one and the same, then La Bresca and the man who’d murdered the commissioner were also one and the same. In which case, it would be proper to take the little liar home and book him for murder. Sure, and then try to find something that would stick, anything that would stick, they’d be laughed out of court right at the preliminary hearing.