Crawley said, “You got any details yet?”
“On what happened,” said Wills, “yes.”
Levine closed and locked the door again, and turned to listen.
“There weren’t any customers,” Wills was saying. “The store stays open till three in the morning, weekends. Midnight during the week. It was just the old couple — Kosofsky, Nathan and Emma — they take turns, and they both work when it’s busy. The husband — Nathan — he was out here, and his wife was in back, making a pot of tea. She heard the bell over the door—”
“Bell?” Levine turned and looked up at the top of the door. There hadn’t been any bell sound when they’d come in just now.
“The guy ripped it off the wall on his way out.”
Levine nodded. He could see the exposed wood where screws had been dragged out. Somebody tall, then, over six foot. Somebody strong, and nervous, too.
“She heard the bell,” said Wills, “and then, a couple minutes later, she heard the shots. So she came running out, and saw this guy at the cash register—”
“She saw him,” said Crawley.
“Yeah, sure. But I’ll get to that in a minute. Anyway, he took a shot at her, too, but he missed. And she fell flat on her face, expecting the next bullet to get her, but he didn’t fire again.”
“He thought the first one did it,” said Crawley.
“I don’t know,” said Wills. “He wasted four on the old guy.”
“He hadn’t expected both of them,” said Levine. “She rattled him. Did he clean the register?”
“All the bills and a handful of quarters. She figures about sixty-two bucks.”
“What about identification?” asked Crawley. “She saw him, right?”
“Right. But you know this kind of neighborhood. At first, she said she recognized him. Then she thought it over, and now she says she was mistaken.”
Crawley made a sour sound and said, “Does she know the old man is dead?”
Wills looked surprised. “I didn’t know it myself. He was alive when the ambulance got him.”
“Died on the way to the hospital. Okay, let’s go talk to her.”
Oh, God, thought Levine. We’ve got to be the ones to tell her.
Don’t think morbid thoughts. Think about life. Think about your work.
Wills stayed in front, by the door. Crawley led the way back. It was a typical slum neighborhood grocery. The store area was too narrow to begin with, both sides lined with shelves. A glass-faced enamel-sided cooler, full of cold cuts and potato salad and quarter-pound bricks of butter, ran parallel to the side shelves down the middle of the store. At one end there was a small ragged-wood counter holding the cash register and candy jars and a tilted stack of English Muffin packages. Beyond this counter were the bread and pastry shelves and, at the far end, a small frozen food chest. This row gave enough room on the customer’s side for a man to turn around, if he did so carefully, and just enough room on the owner’s side for a man to sidle along sideways.
Crawley led the way down the length of the store and through the dim doorway at the rear. They went through a tiny dark stock area and another doorway to the smallest and most overcrowded living room Levine had ever seen.
Mohair and tassels and gilt and lion’s legs, that was the living room. Chubby hassocks and overstuffed chairs and amber lampshades and tiny intricate doilies on every flat surface. The carpet-design was twists and corkscrews, in muted dark faded colors. The wallpaper was somber, with a curling ensnarled vine pattern writhing on it. The ceiling was low. This wasn’t a room, it was a warm crowded den, a little hole in the ground for frightened gray mice.
The woman sat deep within one of the overstuffed chairs. She was short and very stout, dressed in dark clothing nearly the same dull hue as the chair, so that only her pale frightened face was at first noticeable, and then the heavy pale hands twisting in her lap.
Stanton, the other uniformed patrolman, rose from the sofa, saying to the woman, “These men are detectives. They’ll want to talk to you a little. Try to remember about the boy, will you? You know we won’t let anything happen to you.”
Crawley asked him, “The lab been here yet?”
“No, sir, not yet.”
“You and Wills stick around up front till they show.”
“Right.” He excused himself as he edged around Levine and left.
Crawley took Stanton’s former place on the sofa, and Levine worked his way among the hassocks and drum tables to the chair most distant from the light, off to the woman’s left.
Crawley said, “Mrs. Kosofsky, we want to get the man who did this. We don’t want to let him do it again, to somebody else.”
The woman didn’t move, didn’t speak. Her gaze remained fixed on Crawley’s lips.
Crawley said, “You told the patrolman you could identify the man who did it.”
After a long second of silence, the woman trembled, shivered as through suddenly cold. She shook her head heavily from side to side, saying, “No. No, I was wrong. It was very fast, too fast. I couldn’t see him good.”
Levine sighed and shifted position. He knew it was useless. She wouldn’t tell them anything, she would only withdraw deeper and deeper into the burrow, wanting no revenge, no return, nothing but to be left alone.
“You saw him,” said Crawley, his voice loud and harsh. “You’re afraid he’ll get you if you talk to us, is that it?”
The woman’s head was shaking again, and she repeated, “No. No. No.”
“He shot a gun at you,” Crawley reminded her. “Don’t you want us to get him for that?”
“No. No.”
“Don’t you want us to get your money back?”
“No. No.” She wasn’t listening to Crawley, she was merely shaking her head and repeating the one word over and over again.
“Don’t you want us to get the man who killed your husband?”
Levine started. He’d known that was what Crawley was leading up to, but it still shocked him. The viciousness of it cut into him, but he knew it was the only way they’d get any information from her, to hit her with the death of her husband just as hard as they could.
The woman continued to shake her head a few seconds longer, and then stopped abruptly, staring full at Crawley for the first time. “What you say?”
“The man who murdered your husband,” said Crawley. “Don’t you want us to get him for murdering your husband?”
“Nathan?”
“He’s dead.”
“No,” she said, more forcefully than before, and half-rose from the chair.
“He died in the ambulance,” said Crawley doggedly, “died before he got to the hospital.”
Then they waited. Levine bit down hard on his lower lip, hard enough to bring blood. He knew Crawley was right, it was the only possible way. But Levine couldn’t have done it. To think of death was terrible enough. To use death — to use the fact of it as a weapon — no, that he could never do.
The woman fell back into the seat, and her face was suddenly stark and clear in every detail. Rounded brow and narrow nose and prominent cheekbones and small chin, all covered by skin as white as candle wax, stretched taut across the skull.
Crawley took a deep breath. “He murdered your husband,” he said. “Do you want him to go free?”
In the silence now they could hear vague distant sounds, people walking, talking to one another, listening to the radio or watching television, far away in another world.
At last, she spoke. “Brodek,” she said. Her voice was flat. She stared at the opposite wall. “Danny Brodek. From the next block down.”