“A boy?”
“Sixteen, seventeen.”
Crawley would have asked more, but Levine got to his feet and said, “Thank you, Mrs. Kosofsky.”
She closed her eyes.
In the phone book in the front of the store they found one Brodek — Harry R — listed with an address on Tanahee. They went out to the car and drove slowly down the next block to the building they wanted. A taxi passed them, its vacancy light lit. Nothing else moved.
This block, like the one before it and the one after it, was lined on both sides with red brick tenements, five stories high. The building they were looking for was two-thirds of the way down the block. They left the car and went inside.
In the hall, there was the smell of food. The hall was amber tile, and the doors were dark green, with metal numbers. The stairs led up abruptly to the left, midway down the hall. Opposite them were the mailboxes, warped from too much rifling.
They found the name, shakily capital-lettered on an odd scrap of paper and stuck into the mailbox marked 4-D.
Above the first floor, the walls were plaster, painted a green slightly darker than the doors. Sounds of television filtered through most of the doors. Crawley waited at the fourth floor landing for Levine to catch up. Levine climbed stairs slowly, afraid of being short of breath. When he was short of breath, the skipped heart beats became more frequent.
Crawley rapped on the door marked 4-d. Television sounds came through this one, too. After a minute, the door opened a crack, as far as it would go with the chain attached. A woman glared out at them. “What you want?”
“Police,” said Crawley. “Open the door.”
“What you want?” she asked again.
“Open up,” said Crawley impatiently.
Levine took out his wallet, flipped it open to show the badge pinned to the ID label. “We want to talk to you for a minute,” he said, trying to make his voice as gentle as possible.
The woman hesitated, then shut the door and they heard the clinking of the chain being removed. She opened the door again, releasing into the hall a smell of beer and vegetable soup. She said, “All right. Come.” Turning away, she waddled down an unlit corridor toward the living room.
This room was furnished much like the den behind the grocery store, but the effect was different. It was a somewhat larger room, dominated by a blue plastic television set with a bulging screen. An automobile chase was careening across the screen, pre-war Fords and Mercuries, accompanied by frantic music.
A short heavy man in T-shirt and work pants and slippers sat on the sofa, holding a can of beer and watching the television set. Beyond him, a taller, younger version of himself, in khaki slacks and flannel shirt with the collar turned up, was watching, with a cold and wary eye, the entrance of the two policemen.
The man turned sourly, and his wife said, “They’re police. They want to talk to us.”
Crawley walked across the room and stood in front of the boy. “You Danny Brodek?”
“So what?”
“Get on your feet.”
“Why should I?”
Before Crawley could answer, Mrs. Brodek stepped between him and her son, saying rapidly, “What you want Danny for? He ain’t done nothing. He’s been right here all night long.”
Levine, who had waited by the corridor doorway, shook his head grimly. This was going to be just as bad as the scene with Mrs. Kosofsky. Maybe worse.
Crawley said, “He told you to say that? Did he tell you why? Did he tell you what he did tonight?”
It was the father who answered. “He didn’t do nothing. You make a Federal case out of everything, you cops. Kids maybe steal a hubcap, knock out a streetlight, what the hell? They’re kids.”
Over Mrs. Brodek’s shoulder, Crawley said to the boy, “Didn’t you tell them, Danny?”
“Tell them what?”
“Do you want me to tell them?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
On the television screen, the automobile chase was finished. A snarling character said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Another character said back, “You know what I’m talking about, Kid.”
Crawley turned to Mr. Brodek. “Your boy didn’t steal any hubcap tonight,” he said. “He held up the grocery store in the next block. Kosofsky’s.”
The boy said, “You’re nuts.”
Mrs. Brodek said, “Not Danny. Danny wouldn’t do nothing like that.”
“He shot the old man,” said Crawley heavily. “Shot him four times.”
“Shot him!” cried Brodek. “How? Where’s he going to get a gun? Answer me that, where’s a young kid like that going to get a gun?”
Levine spoke up for the first time. “We don’t know where they get them, Mr. Brodek,” he said. “All we know is they get them. And then they use them.”
“I’ll tell you where when he tells us,” said Crawley.
Mrs. Brodek said again, “Danny wouldn’t do nothing like that. You’ve got it wrong.”
Levine said, “Wait, Jack,” to his partner. To Mrs. Brodek, he said, “Danny did it. There isn’t any question. If there was a question, we wouldn’t arrest him.”
“The hell with that!” cried Brodek. “I know about you cops, you got these arrest quotas. You got to look good, you got to make a lot of arrests.”
“If we make a lot of wrong arrests,” Levine told him, trying to be patient for the sake of what this would do to Brodek when he finally had to admit the truth, “we embarrass the Police Department. If we make a lot of wrong arrests, we don’t stay on the force.”
Crawley said, angrily, “Danny, you aren’t doing yourself any favors. And you aren’t doing your parents any favors either. You want them charged with accessory? The old man died!”
In the silence, Levine said softly, “We have a witness, Mrs. Brodek, Mr. Brodek. The wife, the old man’s wife. She was in the apartment behind the store and heard the shots. She ran out to the front and saw Danny at the cash register. She’ll make a positive identification.”
“Sure she will,” said the boy.
Levine looked at him. “You killed her husband, boy. She’ll identify you.”
“So why didn’t I bump her while I was at it?”
“You tried,” said Crawley. “You fired one shot, saw her fall, and then you ran.”
The boy grinned. “Yeah, that’s a dandy. Think it’ll hold up in court? An excitable old woman, she only saw this guy while he’s shooting at her, and then he ran out. Some positive identification.”
“They teach bad law on television, boy,” said Levine. “It’ll hold up.”
“Not if I was here all night, and I was. Wasn’t I, Mom?”
Defiantly, Mrs. Brodek said, “Danny didn’t leave this room for a minute tonight. Not a minute.”
Levine said, “Mrs. Brodek, he killed. Your son took a man’s life. He was seen.”
“She could have been mistaken. It all happened so fast, I bet she could have been mistaken. She only thought it was Danny.”
“If it happened to your husband, Mrs. Brodek, would you make a mistake?”
Mr. Brodek said, “You don’t make me believe that. I know my son. You got this wrong somewhere.”
Crawley said, “Hidden in his bedroom, or hidden somewhere nearby, there’s sixty-two dollars, most of it in bills, three or four dollars in quarters. And the gun’s probably with it.”
“That’s what he committed murder for, Mr. Brodek,” said Levine. “Sixty-two dollars.”
“I’m going to go get it,” said Crawley, turning toward the door on the other side of the living room.
Brodek jumped up, shouting, “The hell you are! Let’s see your warrant! I got that much law from television, mister, you don’t just come busting in here and make a search. You got to have a warrant.”