The prowl car was double-parked in front of the house, and Levine braked the Chevy to a stop behind it. He and Stettin climbed out, crossed the sidewalk, and went up the stoop.
Mrs. Temple was on the verge of panic. Her hands kept washing each other, she kept shifting her weight back and forth from one foot to the other, and she stared bug-eyed as the detectives came up the stoop toward her.
“Are you police?” she demanded, her voice shrill.
Levine dragged out his wallet, showed her the badge. “Are the patrolmen up there?” he asked.
She nodded, stepping aside to let him move past her. “I went in to change the linen, and there he was, lying in the bed, all covered with blood. It was terrible, terrible.”
Levine went on in, Stettin after him, and Mrs. Temple brought up the rear, still talking. Levine interrupted her to ask, “Which room?”
“The third floor front,” she said, and went back to repeating how terrible it had been when she’d gone in there and seen him on the bed, covered with blood.
Stettin was too eager for conscious politeness. He bounded on up the maroon-carpeted stairs, while Levine plodded up after him, the woman one step behind all the way, the shawl still over her head.
One of the patrolmen was standing in the open doorway at the other end of the third-floor hall. As was usual in this type of brownstone, the upper floors consisted of two large rooms rented separately, each with a small kitchenette but both sharing the same bath. The dead man was in the front room.
Levine said to the woman, “Wait out here, please,” nodded to the patrolman, and went on through into the room.
Stettin and the second patrolman were over to the right, by the studio couch, talking together. Their forms obscured Levine’s view of the couch as he came through the doorway, and he got the feeling, as he had had more than once with the energetic Stettin, that he was Stettin’s assistant rather than the other way around.
Which was ridiculous, of course. Stettin turned, clearing Levine’s view, saying, “How’s it look to you, Abe?”
The studio couch had been opened up and was now in its other guise, that of a linen-covered bed. Between the sheets the corpse lay peaceably on its back with the covers tucked up around the sheets and rested stiffly on its chest.
Levine came over and stood by the bed, looking down at it. The bullet had struck the bridge of the nose, smashing bone and cartilage, and discoloring the flesh around it. There was hardly any nose left. The mouth hung open, and the top front teeth had been jarred partially out of their sockets by the force of the bullet.
The slain man had bled profusely, and the pillow and the turned-down sheet around his throat were drenched with blood.
The top blanket was blue, and was now scattered with smallish chunks of white stuff. Levine reached down and picked up one of the white chunks, feeling it between his fingers.
“Potato,” he said, more to himself than to the cop at his side.
Stettin said, “What’s that?”
“Potato. That stuff on the bed. He used a potato for a silencer.”
Stettin smiled blankly. “I don’t follow you. Abe.”
Levine moved his hands in demonstration as he described what he meant. “The killer took a raw potato, and jammed the barrel of the gun into it. Then, when he fired, the bullet smashed through the potato, muffling the sound. It’s a kind of home-made silencer.”
Stettin nodded, and glanced again at the body. “Think it was a gang killing, then?”
“I don’t know,” Levine replied, frowning. He turned to the patrolman. “What have you got?”
The patrolman dragged a flat black notebook out of his hip pocket, and flipped it open. “He’s the guy that rented the place. The landlady identified him. He gave his name as Maurice Gold.”
Excited, Stettin said, “Morry Gold?” He came closer to the bed, squinting down at the face remnant as though he could see it better that way. “Yeah, by God, it is,” he said, his expression grim. “It was a gang killing, Abe!”
“You know him?”
“I saw him once. On the lineup downtown, maybe — two months ago.”
Levine smiled thinly. Leave it to Stettin, he thought. Most detectives considered the lineup a chore and a waste of time, and grumbled every time their turn came around to go downtown and attend. The line-up was supposed to familiarize the precinct detectives with the faces of known felons, but it took a go-getter like Stettin to make the theory work. Levine had been attending the lineup twice a month for fifteen years and hadn’t once recognized one of the felons later on.
Stettin was turning his head this way and that, squinting at the body again. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “Morry Gold. He had a funny way of talking — a Cockney accent, maybe. That’s him, all right.”
“What was he brought in for?”
“Possession of stolen goods. He was a fence. I remember the Chief talking to him. I guess he’d been brought in lots of times before.” He shook his head. “Apparently he managed to wriggle out of it.”
The patrolman said, “He’d have been much better off if he hadn’t.”
“A falling out among thieves,” said Stettin. “Think so, Abe?”
“It could be.” To the patrolman, he said, “Anything else?”
“He lived here not quite two years. That’s what the landlady told me. She found him at quarter after four, and the last time she saw him alive was yesterday, around seven o’clock in the evening. He went out then. He must have come back some time after eleven o’clock, when the landlady went to bed. Otherwise, she’d have seen him come in.” He grinned without humor. “She’s one of those,” he said.
“I’ll go talk to her.” Levine looked over at the body again, and averted his eyes. An old English epitaph flickered through his mind: As you are, so was I; as I am, so you will be. Twenty-four years as a cop hadn’t hardened him to the tragic and depressing finality of death, and in the last few years, as he had moved steadily into the heart-attack range and as the inevitability of his own end had become more and more real to him, he had grown steadily more vulnerable to the dread implicit in the sight of death.
He turned away, saying, “Andy, give the place a going-over. Address book, phone numbers, somebody’s name in the flyleaf of a book. You know the kind of thing.”
“Sure.” Stettin glanced around, eager to get at it. “Do you think he’d have any of the swag here?”
The word sounded strange on Stettin’s tongue, odd and archaic. Levine smiled, as the death-dread wore off, and said, “I doubt it. Stick around here for the M.E. and the technical crew. Get the time of death and whatever else they can give you.”
“Sure thing.”
Mrs. Francis Temple was still outside in the hall, jabbering now at the second patrolman, who was making no attempt to hide his boredom. Levine took her away, much to the patrolman’s relief, and they went downstairs to her cellar apartment, the living room of which was Gay Nineties from end to end, from the fringed beaded lampshades to the marble porcelain vases on the mantle.
In these surroundings, Mrs. Temple’s wordiness switched from the terrible details of her discovery of the body to the nostalgic details of her life with her late husband, who had been a newspaperman.
Levine, by main force, wrestled the conversation back to the present, in order to ask his questions about Maurice Gold. “What did he do for a living,” he asked. “Do you know?”
“He said he was a salesman. Sometimes he was gone nearly a week at a time.”
“Do you know what he sold?”