“I don’t know.” Wiley closed his eyes. “They just get into trouble.” He sank into a weary silence while the driver talked about the previous day’s baseball.
“We’re here,” the driver said.
Wiley looked up. The green lights of the station house were shining in the darkness. Wiley dismissed the driver and turned into the building. As he passed the desk, the officer, a sergeant, nodded. Wiley went upstairs into the Homicide Squad offices.
A detective named Vincent Ricca came forward holding a meat sandwich and a mug of coffee in either hand. “You won’t like me for this, Dave,” he said. “There ain’t much to this case, what I mean.”
Wiley looked about with an expert eye and remarked, “I can see that.” The few witnesses were lolling without spirit on the benches in the large chamber. In an inner room, a barracks, two men were sleeping on cots wrapped in woolen blankets. The naked light bulbs were garish. Wiley returned to the detective and said crisply, “Let’s get through this fast, Vince. Suppose you sum it up for me.”
Ricca took a large bite of his sandwich. “These four merchant seamen got into a brawl with a customer in this bar, they’re all English. After it was over, the customer came up and stabbed one of them outside in the street, a kid named Eddie Porter. They’re operating on him now at St. Vincent’s. We don’t know about his chances to pull through.”
“What was the reason for the stabbing?” Wiley shook his head as he declined a share of the sandwich.
The detective licked away a trace of mustard. “This customer can’t tell us that. Doesn’t talk English, what I mean. We know what he did, we just don’t know why or what he had in mind. The way we got the story right now, this thing came out of a clear sky. He was drunk or vicious or both.”
“I’ll settle for ‘what’,” Wiley said grimly. “Let’s get on with this.”
“Come on.” The detective took Wiley’s arm and described the crime. Ricca was a lean man with a dark face, dressed in good taste, with amusement in his eyes. He carried himself with a jaunty air. He was friendly and willing to help Wiley do a good job. He drew Wiley over to a prisoner seated on a bench and said, “Here’s Juan Figueroa. He did the cutting. When we get a translator, he’ll give us his story.”
Wiley stared down at a picture of misery.
The prisoner was a stout man of forty, dressed in a foreign cut business suit. He looked up and pointed with an imploring gesture to abrasions on his temples. He portrayed the picture of innocence. His reddish eyes were inflamed and tears were rolling down his cheeks.
The detective said forcefully, “Figueroa, this is the district attorney! You want to tell him your side of the story? The district attorney — see?”
The prisoner broke into a torrent of choppy dialect, showing his wounds and protesting until Wiley cut him short. “I don’t talk Spanish, Figueroa! Now stop trying to kid me. You talk English and I’ll listen!”
The prisoner stared a hopeless moment, then threw his head back and applied a bloody handkerchief to his nose.
Wiley turned back to the detective and thrust his hands into his pockets. “What’s he crying about? Did he get a beating somewhere along the line?”
“Not from any of us,” Ricca grinned. “He got those marks in the brawl. He’s bawling because he knows he’s in trouble. That girl there told him the kid might die.”
“What girl?” Wiley looked across the room to a thin girl hunched forward on a bench near an inner office and smoking a cigarette with a thoughtful manner. Her long dark hair was tumbled down her neck in disorder. As he watched, she pulled a man’s raincoat close about her, concealing a loose glittering black evening dress.
“That’s the one.” Ricca finished his coffee and put the mug- away. “She could make sense out of all this, but she won’t.”
Wiley frowned. “Who was fool enough to let her know that the kid might be dying?”
Ricca shrugged. “She was here when the news came in.”
“Well, let’s see.” Wiley crossed the room and said in a severe tone, “What’s your name, Miss?”
The girl looked up with calm. “I’m Jenny Ortega,” she said, in a husky voice. “Now this time, who are you?”
Wiley returned her stare. “I’m an assistant district attorney for this county. I want to know about this stabbing. Did you see it?”
The girl made a gesture toward the weeping prisoner. “It wasn’t Figueroa’s fault. I saw the whole thing.”
“Tell me what happened.” The girl shrugged and Wiley repeated sharply, “Why did Figueroa stab this young seaman?”
The girl considered him thoughtfully and a sneer gathered. “Why don’t you ask those men there? They’ll give you a pack of lies. Isn’t that what you’re after?”
“I want your side of the story,” Wiley said sharply. “I’m looking for the truth.”
She shook her head with contempt. “No, mister, you’re not after the truth. Whatever I tell you, you wouldn’t believe me. You just want a story against poor Figueroa. Well, get that from the others.”
“The others?” Across the room three men were anxiously conferring in low tones with a second detective named Tom Corbin, Ricca’s partner. “All right, let’s do that.”
Ricca and Wiley went over. Corbin got up with a pleasant smile. He was a freckled blue-eyed man, taller than his partner and dressed with equal neatness. He shook hands and introduced his three witnesses to Wiley. They were short muscular men whose hands showed large callouses. They nodded politely. Their faces were all sunburnt but the tans were old and faded. Under their stoic manner, Wiley saw that they were deeply upset. Their names meant nothing to him.
One of the men asked in a cockney accent, “How’s the kid, mister? These here ’tecs don’t seem to know.”
Ricca said to Wiley in a low voice, “Start off with this witness. He can give you the picture.”
“Let’s go inside.” Wiley nodded the witness into the inner office. He took out a yellow form and placed it on the desk and put questions. The witness was Alexander Goudy, aged 28, unmarried, a British subject, a resident of Cowper’s Lane, London, England. Ricca and Corbin entered these facts in their notebooks.
“All right, Goudy.” Wiley sat back and shaded his eyes. “Tell me what happened.”
“Eddie did nothing. It was really the rest of us who had this trouble with the man.” Goudy spoke with a stammer. “This man had no reason to knife the kid at all.”
“When you say ‘this man’ do you mean Figueroa?”
“Yes, sir, the man outside, the prisoner.” Goudy fumbled to light a cigarette with a shaking hand. “Eddie, that’s Edward Porter, sir, he’s just eighteen. His mother manages a little sweets shop back home. We’re neighbors and I promised to look after him. The fact is I expect to marry his sister, Kitty, when I get home. Here, you can see what they look like.”
He showed a photograph of a group seated around a picnic basket under a tree. Goudy was in the picture with his arm around a girl with yellow hair. A tired older woman gazed pleasantly at the couple while a youth in shirtsleeves stood behind them grinning in a boyish pose. Wiley studied the group as Goudy pointed each one out. “That’s Kitty, Mrs. Porter, Eddie and me last summer.”
Wiley put down the print.
“Eddie’s a nice boy,” Goudy said solemnly. “He’s wanted to go to sea since he’s been a kid. That’s because of me. Not having an older brother, that made me one, in a way of speaking. I’ve been to sea all these years. I’m an oiler and Eddie liked the idea—”
“Get to the point, Alex,” Ricca said impatiently.
Wiley said, “Let him take his time.”
Goudy went on in a slow serious way. “Mrs. Porter let Eddie go to sea when I promised to take care of him. This was his first time. We shipped to Boston and then started the run back to Oslo. One day out we hit an old mine square in the shipping run. There was a big blowup. The whole bloody sky crashed down on us. There was just four alive when this Norskie freighter picked us up New York-bound. Eddie couldn’t swim and he’s just alive because we kept him afloat — me and Hughie Cartright and Johnny Barrow, taking turns—”