“Don’t know,” the super said. “Don’t keep tabs on the comings and goings of the people who live here. Their business is their business, and mine is mine.”
“Law requires you to have a key to all the apartments in the dwelling,” Carella said. “Have you got one for Nine-D?”
“Yep.”
“All right if we use it?”
“What for?”
“To enter the apartment.”
“That’s illegal, ain’t it?”
“We won’t tell anybody if you won’t,” Brown said.
“Well,” the super said, and shrugged. “Okay,” he said, and shrugged again. “I guess.”
Carella and Brown took the elevator up to the ninth floor and stepped into the corridor. Neither man said a word to the other, but both simultaneously drew their revolvers. 9D was at the far end of the hall. They listened outside the door and heard nothing. Cautiously, Carella inserted the passkey into the lock. He nodded to Brown, and twisted the key. There was only a small click as the lock turned, but it must have sounded like a warning shot inside that apartment. Carella and Brown burst into a long, narrow entrance foyer. At the far end of the foyer, they saw Herbert Gross and a blond man they assumed to be Bernard Goldenthal, both of them armed.
“Hold it right there!” Carella shouted, but neither of the two men were holding anything right there or right anywhere. They opened fire just as Carella and Brown threw themselves flat on the linoleum-covered floor. Goldenthal made a break for a doorway to the right of the long foyer. Brown shouted a warning and fired almost before the words left his lips. The slug caught Goldenthal in the leg, knocked him off his feet, and sent him flailing against the corridor wall, where he slid to the floor. Gross held his ground, firing down the long length of the foyer, pulling off shot after shot until his pistol clicked empty. He was reaching into his jacket pocket, presumably for fresh cartridges, when Carella shouted, “Move and you’re dead!”
Gross’s hand stopped in mid-motion. He squinted down the corridor, silhouetted in the light that spilled from the room Goldenthal had tried to reach.
“Drop the gun,” Carella said.
Gross did not move.
“Drop it!” Carella shouted. “Now!”
“You, too, Goldie!” Brown shouted.
Goldenthal and Gross — one crouched against the wall clutching his bleeding leg, the other with his hand still hanging motionless over his jacket pocket — exchanged quick glances. Without saying a word to each other, they dropped their guns to the floor. Gross kicked them away as if they were contaminated. The guns came spinning down the length of the corridor one after the other, sliding along the waxed linoleum.
Carella got to his feet and started toward the two men. Behind him, Brown was crouched on one knee, his gun resting on his forearm and pointing directly at the far end of the foyer. Carella threw Gross against the wall, quickly frisked him, and then bent over Goldenthal.
“Okay,” he called to Brown, and then glanced into the room on the right of the foyer. It, too, was loaded with household goods. But unlike the stuff in the apartment downtown, this had not come from a dead woman’s home, this was not the accumulation of a lifetime. This was, instead, the result of God knew how many recent burglaries and robberies, a veritable storehouse of television sets, radios, typewriters, tape recorders, broilers, mixers, luggage, you name it, right down to a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica — a criminal bargain basement, awaiting only the services of a good fence.
“Nice little place you’ve got here,” Carella said, and then handcuffed Gross to Goldenthal and Goldenthal to the radiator. From a telephone on the kitchen wall, the late Minnie’s last shopping list still tacked up beside it, he called the station house and asked for a meat wagon. It arrived at exactly 6 P.M., not seven minutes after Carella requested it. By that time, Goldenthal had spilled a goodly amount of blood all over his mother’s linoleum.
“I’m bleeding to death here,” he complained to one of the hospital orderlies who was lifting him onto the stretcher.
“That’s the least of your worries,” the orderly answered.
Delgado had not found Pepe Castañeda in the pool hall, nor had he found him in any one of a dozen bars he tried in the neighborhood. It was now quarter past six, and he was about ready to give up the search. On the dubious assumption, however, that a pool shooter might also be a bowler, he decided to hit the Ponce Bowling Lanes on Culver Avenue before heading back to the squadroom.
The place was on the second floor of an old brick building. Delgado went up the narrow flight of steps and came into a fluorescent-lighted room with a counter just opposite the entrance doorway. A bald-headed man was sitting on a stool behind the counter, reading a newspaper. He looked up as Delgado came in, went back to the newspaper, finished the story he was reading, and then put both hands flat on the countertop. “All the alleys are full,” he said. “You got maybe a half-hour wait.”
“I don’t want an alley,” Delgado said.
The man behind the counter looked at him more carefully, decided he was a cop, gave a brief knowledgeable nod, but said nothing.
“I’m looking for a man named Pepe Castañeda. Is he here?”
“What do you want him for?” the man said.
“I’m a police officer,” Delgado said, and flashed the tin. “I want to ask him some questions.”
“I don’t want no trouble here,” the man said.
“Why should there be trouble? Is Castañeda trouble?”
“He’s not the trouble,” the man said, and looked at Delgado meaningfully.
“Neither am I,” Delgado said. “Where is he?”
“Lane number five,” the man said.
“Thanks.”
Delgado went through the doorway adjacent to the counter and found himself in a larger room than the small reception area had promised. There were twelve alleys in all, each of them occupied with bowlers. A bar was at the far end of the place, with tables and chairs set up around it. A jukebox was playing a rock-and-roll song. The record ended as Delgado moved past the racks of bowling balls against the low wall that separated the lanes from the area behind them. A Spanish-language song erupted from the loudspeakers. Everywhere, there was the reverberating clamor of falling pins, multiplied and echoing in the high-ceilinged room, joined by voices raised in jubilant exclamation or disgruntled invective.
There were four men bowling in lane number five. Three of them were seated on the leatherette banquette that formed a semicircle around the score pad. The fourth man stood waiting for his ball to return. It came rolling down the tracks from the far end of the alley, hit the stop mechanism, and eased its way toward his waiting hand. He picked up the ball, stepped back some five feet from the foul line, crouched, started his forward run, right arm coming back, left arm out for balance, stopped dead, and released the ball. It curved down the alley and arced in true between the one and three pins. The bowler hung frozen in motion, his right arm still extended, left arm back, crouched and waiting for the explosion of pins. They flew into the air like gleeful cheerleaders, there was the sound of their leap as the ball sent them helter-skelter, the additional sound of their pell-mell return to the polished alley floor. The bowler shouted, “Made it!” and turned to the three men on the banquette.
“Which one of you is Pepe Castañeda?” Delgado asked.
The bowler, who was walking back toward the score pad to supervise the correct marking of the strike, stopped in his tracks and looked up at Delgado. He was a short man with straight black hair and a pockmarked face, thin, with the light step of a dancer, a step that seemed even airier in the red, rubber-soled bowling shoes.