“What’s your name?” Carella asked. His coat was still open, and his hand was resting lightly on his hip, close to his holster.
“Herbert Gross.”
“Mind if we come in, Mr. Gross?”
“Why would you want to?” Gross asked.
“To see if Mr. Goldenthal is here.”
“I just told you he wasn’t,” Gross said.
“Mind if we check it for ourselves?” Brown said.
“I really don’t see why I should let you,” Gross said.
“Goldenthal’s a known criminal,” Carella said, “and we’re looking for him in connection with a recent crime. The last address we have for him is 911 Forrester, Apartment 3A. This is 911 Forrester, Apartment 3A, and we’d like to come in and check on whether or not our information is correct.”
“Your information is wrong,” Gross insisted. “It must be very old information.”
“No, it’s recent information.”
“How recent?”
“Less than three months old.”
“Well, I’ve been living here for two months now, so he must have moved before that.”
“Are you going to let us in, Mr. Gross?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Gross said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t think I like the idea of policemen crashing in here on a Sunday afternoon, that’s all.”
“Anybody in there with you?”
“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” Gross said.
“Look, Mr. Gross,” Brown said, “we can come back here with a warrant, if that’s what you’d like. Why not make it easy for us?”
“Why should I?”
“Why shouldn’t you?” Carella said. “Have you got anything to hide?”
“Nothing at all.”
“Then how about it?”
“Sorry,” Gross said, and closed the door and locked it.
The two detectives stood in the hallway and silently weighed their next move. There were two possibilities open to them, and both of them presented considerable risks. The first possibility was that Goldenthal was indeed in the apartment and armed, in which event he was now warned and if they kicked in the door he would open fire immediately. The second possibility was that the IS information was dated and that Goldenthal had indeed moved from the apartment more than two months ago, in which event Gross would have a dandy case against the city if they kicked in the door and conducted an illegal search. Brown gestured with his head, and both men moved toward the stairwell, away from the door.
“What do you think?” Brown whispered.
“There were two of them on the grocery store job,” Carella said. “Gross might just be the other man.”
“He fits the description I got from the old lady,” Brown said. “Shall we kick it in?”
“I’d rather wait downstairs. He expects us to come back. If he’s in this with Goldenthal, he’s going to run, sure as hell.”
“Right,” Brown said. “Let’s split.”
They had parked Brown’s sedan just outside the building. Knowing that Gross’s apartment overlooked the street, and hoping that he was now watching them from his window, they got into the car and drove north toward the river. Brown turned right under the River Highway and headed uptown. He turned right again at the next corner, and then drove back to Scovil Avenue and Forrester Street, where he pulled the car to the curb. Both men got out.
“Think he’s still watching?” Brown asked.
“I doubt it, but why take chances?” Carella said. “The street’s deserted. If we plant ourselves in one of the doorways on this end of the block, we can see anybody going in or out of his building.”
The first doorway they found had obviously been used as a nest by any number of vagrants. Empty pint bottles of whiskey in brown paper bags littered the floor, together with empty crumpled cigarette packages, and empty half-gallon wine bottles, and empty candy bar wrappers. The stench of urine was overpowering.
“No job’s worth this,” Brown said.
“Don’t care if he killed the goddamn governor,” Carella said.
They walked swiftly into the clean, brisk October air. Brown looked up the street toward Gross’s building. Together, he and Carella ducked into the next doorway. It was better, but only a trifle so.
“Let’s hope he makes his move fast,” Brown said.
“Let’s hope so,” Carella agreed.
They did not have long to wait.
In five minutes flat, Gross came down the front steps of his building and began walking south, toward the building where they waited. They moved back against the wall. He walked past swiftly, without even glancing into the hallway. They gave him a good lead and then took off after him, one on each side of the street, so that they formed an isosceles triangle with Gross at the point and Brown and Carella at either end of the base.
They lost him on Payne Avenue, when he boarded an uptown bus that left them running up behind it to choke in a cloud of carbon monoxide. They decided then to go back to the apartment and kick the door in, which is maybe what they should have done in the goddamn first place.
There is an old Spanish proverb that, when translated into city slang, goes something like this: When nobody knows nothing, everybody knows everything.
Nobody seemed to know nothing about the José Vicente Huerta assault. He had been attacked in broad daylight on a clear day by four men carrying sawed-off broom handles, and they had beaten him severely enough to have broken both his legs and opened a dozen or more wounds on his face, but nobody seemed to have had a good look at them, even though the beating had lasted a good five minutes or more.
Delgado was not a natural cynic, but he certainly had his doubts about this one. He went through Huerta’s building talking to the tenants on each floor, and then he went to the candy store across the street, from which the front stoop of the building was clearly visible, and talked to the proprietor there, but nobody knew nothing. He decided to try another tack.
There was a junkie hooker in the barrio, a nineteen-year-old girl who had only one arm. Her handicap, rather than repelling any prospective customers, seemed instead to excite them wildly. From far and wide, the panting Johns came uptown seeking the “One-Armed Bandit,” as she was notoriously known. She was more familiarly known as Blanca Diaz to those neighborhood men who were among her regular customers, she having a habit as long as the River Harb, and they knowing a good lay when they stumbled across it, one-armed or not, especially since the habit caused her to charge bargain rates most of the time. Conversely, many of the neighborhood men were familiarly known to Blanca, and it was for this reason alone that Delgado sought her out.
Blanca was not too terribly interested in passing the time of day with a cop, Puerto Rican or otherwise. But she knew that most of the precinct detectives, unlike Vice Squad cops, were inclined to look the other way where she was concerned, perhaps because of her infirmity. Moreover, she had just had her 3 P.M. fix and was feeling no pain when Delgado approached her. She was, in fact, enjoying the October sunshine, sitting on a bench on one of the grassy ovals running up the center of The Stem. She spotted Delgado from the corner of her eye, debated moving, thought, Oh, the hell with it, and sat where she was, basking.
“Hello, Blanca,” Delgado said.
“Hullo,” she answered.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine. I’m not holding, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I mean, if you’re looking for a cheap dope bust...”
“I’m not.”
“Okay,” Blanca said, and nodded. She was not an unattractive girl. Her complexion was dark, her hair was black, her eyes a light shade of brown; her lips were perhaps a trifle too full, and there was a small unsightly scar on her jawline, where she had been stabbed by a pimp when she was just sixteen and already shooting heroin three times a day.