I didn’t like the way Myra Jones had died. You’d be surprised how few burglars panic — unless they are amateurs or junkies. Jo-Jo was an amateur, but he wasn’t a junkie. I never heard of a junkie with money in the bank, or who needs wheels to roll.
I didn’t much like the robbery. The thief had gotten in and out totally unseen and undetected, not a trace left behind. And yet the haul had been peanuts.
I didn’t like two violent crimes on the same block so close together — but unconnected. Somewhere there should be a connection between the robbery and the attack on Officer Stettin.
By the time I climbed out of the subway into the 90° cool of Sixth Avenue, I was working on the other side. Burglars did panic. Junkies made clever but sloppy robberies, and grabbed and ran. And unconnected crimes happened on the same block every day in New York.
To wash it all away I stopped in a tavern a block from Marty’s place. There was still a half an hour until noon and a decent breakfast hour for Marty. I planned to relax and think about her and get into the mood. Burglaries were a dime a dozen, the cop had probably written a ticket and got someone mad, and Jo-Jo Olsen had probably had a fight with his old lady. Marty was much better food for the inner man.
But they knew me in this saloon. Before I had a chance to blow the foam off my beer, I had heard all about Petey Vitanza. Marty isn’t the kind of woman you forget about for any reason, so I called her and told her I’d be late. She didn’t like it, and neither did I.
I like bars. Everything is cool and dim and simple in a man’s relation to a glass of beer. And I don’t like hospitals. But I left that bar and took a taxi down to St. Vincent’s because I liked Petey Vitanza.
They told me that Petey would see again. He wasn’t blind, it only looked that way. His face wasn’t a face, it was a bandage. They had broken both arms. But the real serious damage was the splintered ribs and the internal injuries.
“Very complete job,” the doctor said. “I had a case on the Bowery, but this is more complete.”
The cops were there, since it was pretty clear that Petey had not fallen down some stairs. One old cop agreed that it was a good beating, but not professional.
“Amateurs,” the old cop said. “They used their hands. Too much blood and damage without enough pain. Just amateurs.”
Petey could not talk, but he could hear. They gave me two minutes. They said that he would probably live and I could ask him more questions later. I asked him if he had known the ones who beat him. He shook his head, negative. I asked him if it had been anything to do with Jo-Jo Olsen, and he nodded that it had. I asked him if it had any connection to the robbery-killing, or the cop-mugging, and he seemed agitated. He passed out then.
When I came out of the hospital it was still summer and hot. It seemed that it should have been dark and cold.
At that point I didn’t really care about Jo-Jo Olsen, or about law and order. But I cared about Petey Vitanza and men who would, or could, beat a boy that badly. It’s like politics for me — I don’t care much about Anti-Poverty Crusades by politicians, but I care a lot about the poor.
I had let enough normal lack-of-interest in another man’s troubles slow me down. Now it was time to go to work. It was time to find Jo-Jo Olsen, and I had one new fact to go on. Petey knew Swede Olsen, and he had not known who beat him. Which meant that someone else had a strong interest in Jo-Jo Olsen beside his doting father.
It was past time to meet Swede Olsen and family formally. Not that I expected the Swedish Norwegian to want to tell me much. The big older Olsen had tried to dissuade my interest in Jo-Jo forcefully. The question was: was it only me he wanted to keep away from Jo-Jo, or was all outside interest a worry to him?
When I walked up to the building on Nineteenth Street, I was not surprised to find that the Olsens lived in the best big apartment in a not-too-good building near the river. And I was not surprised to find Swede at home at mid-day. Both Gazzo and Lieutenant Marx seemed to know Olsen, and from what Petey Vitanza had told me I had already guessed that the Olsens were not a hard working family.
Swede Olsen was surprised. The big man took one look at me and clenched his large fist. I dangled my not-so-large Police Special in my hand. I didn’t point the gun, you understand, I just showed it. He had the muscles. I had the equalizer. He scowled, but he stepped back and let me walk inside.
“What you want, Kelly?” Olsen growled.
I looked around. The apartment was big and ugly. Not lack-of-money ugly, but just plain rotten-taste ugly. It fitted. I mean, everything about Olsen and his apartment talked of enough money but not much experience in spending the money wisely. The place had cost a lot to furnish, but it still looked like a slum room. The rent in such a building would be high for our section, but low tor anywhere else.
Swede himself looked like a slob, and yet Packy Wilson said the big man went to the expensive bars for his beers. The whole picture was of making money too late. And the woman who came into the living room now fitted right in. She looked like one of those Okie women in Grapes of Wrath, except that her clothes had cost a bundle and her hands were clean. Too late. The woman had money for clothes and clean hands now, but the hands had been ruined long ago, and the years had left her nothing to hang the clothes on but a bag of old bones.
“Stay out of this, Magda,” Olsen snapped at the woman.
“It’s my business,” the woman said. She looked at me as if I was a cockroach she knew too well. “You the one askin’ about my boy?”
“I’m one of them,” I said. “I’m the one who doesn’t play so rough. The others are the mean type.”
“Get lost,” the woman said.
I turned to Olsen. “You don’t want your boy found?”
“Who said he’s missing?” the woman said.
“I say he’s missing,” I said. “The question I can’t answer is the one about if he’s missing from you, Mrs. Olsen.”
“He ain’t, Kelly,” Olsen said.
“Then where is he? If the other guys find him they might play rougher.”
There was a long silence. I watched them. Olsen looked unhappy, and he was sweating. The woman looked like the rock of Gibraltar. Olsen looked worried. The woman, Mrs. Olsen, looked determined. I got a funny feeling — they were worried about themselves, not about Jo-Jo.
“What did he run for?” I asked.
“He ain’t run,” Mrs. Olsen said. “Beat it.”
“Did he jump that cop?” I snapped.
“No,” Olsen said, cried, and realized he had shot his mouth off. He looked green. His wife, Magda Olsen the mother, glared at him.
“He did nothing. He took a trip,” Magda Olsen said.
I was ready to go on with the dance when the two boys came into the room. They were both big and both young. They looked enough like Swede to tell me I was looking at Jo-Jo’s brothers. A pretty girl behind them told me Jo-Jo had at least one sister. The girl was pretty, but the boys weren’t.
“Take off,” Olsen said.
I went. But all the way down the stairs and out into the mid-afternoon sun, I knew I had learned a lot. They were worried. Not worried about Jo-Jo, but about themselves. All of them, as if they were all in some kind of collective trouble, but not police-type trouble. They were angry worried, not scared worried.
And they were not surprised that others were looking for Jo-Jo. Olsen knew Jo-Jo had not beaten and robbed Officer Stettin, and I had a pretty strong hunch that he knew who had. Olsen didn’t like what he knew. The old lady, Magda Olsen, didn’t like it all either, but she was standing pat. They were all like people on eggshells. Like they didn’t want to breathe if that would rock the boat.