Carmody stopped and nodded slowly. “Where’s Eddie?” he said.
“They’ve taken him away.”
“He’s dead then,” Carmody said. Nothing showed on his face. “I was hoping I’d got a bum tip. What happened?”
“He was shot twice in the back. Right here.”
Carmody stared at the sidewalk beyond the group of detectives and saw bloodstains shining blackly in the uncertain light. In the back, he thought.
“We’ll break this one fast, don’t worry,” Wilson said. “We’ve got a witness who saw the shooting. She was a friend of Eddie’s. Karen Stephanson. You know her?”
“She saw it, heh? Where is she now?”
“At Headquarters, looking at pictures.”
Carmody turned and walked away, his heels making a sharp, ringing sound. Wilson called after him but Carmody kept going, shouldering people aside as he headed for his car.
It took him twenty minutes to get back to center-city. He parked at Oak and Sixteenth, a few doors from the morgue, and walked into the rubber-tiled foyer. The elderly cop on duty got to his feet, a solemn, awkward expression on his face. “He’s down the hall. In B,” he said. “You know the way, I guess, Sarge.”
Carmody pushed through swinging doors and turned into the second room off the wide, brick-walled corridor. Three men were present, a pathologist from Memorial Hospital, a uniformed cop and an attendant in blue denim overalls. The square clean room was powerfully illuminated by overhead lights and water trickled in a trough around the edge of the concrete floor. The air smelled suspiciously clean, as if soap and brushes had been used with tireless efficiency to smother something else in the room.
Eddie lay on a metal table with a sheet covering the lower half of his body. The brilliant white light struck his bare chest and glinted sharply on the smears and streaks of blood. His shirt, which had been cut away from him, lay beside the table on the floor.
Carmody stared at his brother’s body for a few moments, his features cold and expressionless. A lock of hair was curled down on Eddie’s ivory-pale forehead and his face was white and empty and still. The choirboy who stole the show at St. Pat’s, Carmody thought. Who wanted to play it straight, get married and have kids. That was all over, as dead as any other dream. One of the men said something to him hesitantly and awkwardly. “Damn shame, sorry...” Carmody couldn’t speak; a pain was pressing against his throat like a knife blade. He nodded slowly, avoiding their eyes.
Someone came into the room behind him, and Carmody turned and saw old Father Ahearn standing in the doorway.
“I came as quickly as I could, Mike,” he said.
Carmody turned and looked down at his brother. “We were all too late,” he said, holding his voice even and cold. “Too late, Father.” He put out a big hand and pushed the lock of hair back from Eddie’s forehead. For another moment he stood there, staring at the pale quiet face, and then, moving deliberately and powerfully, he walked past the priest and out to the sidewalk. The night was cool and soft; a faint wind moved over the city and a diffused light was spreading thinly along the horizon.
The door behind him opened and Father Ahearn came to his side. “Why can’t you face me, Mike?” he cried softly. “Who did this thing to your brother?”
“I warned him,” Carmody said, swallowing hard against the pain in his throat. “I warned him, but he wouldn’t listen to me.”
“You warned him!” Father Ahearn took Carmody’s big hard arm and tried to pull him around; but the detective’s body was like a post set in stone. “What do you mean by that, Mike?”
“He wouldn’t listen to me,” Carmody said again. “They meant business but he wouldn’t believe it.”
“You knew this was going to happen?” the old priest said in a soft, horrified voice. “Is that what you are saying?”
“Sure, I knew it would happen...” Carmody said.
The old priest took a step backward, quickly and involuntarily, as if the face of evil had appeared before him without warning. “God have mercy on your soul,” he said, breathing the words softly.
“Save the mercy for the men who killed him, Father.” Without looking at the old priest, Carmody turned quickly and strode toward his car.
Half an hour later he pulled up before Karen’s hotel. The street was quiet now, the squad cars had gone back to their regular duty. Only a few groups of people remained on the sidewalk, smoking a last cigarette and exchanging their final words on the shooting. Everyone prefaced his recapitulation with an “I was just—” “Just getting into bed.” “Just locking up.” “Just opening the ice-box — when it happened.” For some reason, Carmody thought, listening to the eddies of talk in the silent street, they all felt these commonplace activities had assumed a shape and significance through their temporal relationship to tragedy. And maybe they did. I was just getting drunk, he remembered. Just passing out after accepting Beaumonte’s word that Eddie would be spared for two more days.
A middle-aged patrolman was posted in the small foyer of Karen’s hotel.
“Is the witness back yet?” Carmody asked him.
“Got in about fifteen minutes ago, Sarge.”
“You’ll be here all night?”
“That’s right. And there’s a man in back and one just outside her room. You going up?”
“Yes.” The cop unlocked the inner door and Carmody walked by him and took the elevator up to her floor. He nodded to the alert-looking young cop who was on guard there and then rapped on her door.
“You’d better start asking everybody for identification,” he said.
The young man flushed slightly. “I’ve seen your pictures in the paper lots of times, Sarge.”
“Okay. But be on your toes when anyone gets off that elevator. If the guy she spotted comes up here he won’t give you a chance. Remember that.”
“I’m ready for him,” the cop said, putting a hand on the butt of his revolver.
Carmody glanced at his youthful, clean-cut face, and swallowed hard against a sudden constriction in his throat. Another Eddie, confident and hard, willing to take on all the trouble in the city. How did they get guys like this for sixty bucks a week? Where did they find these brave dumb kids?
The door opened and Karen looked up at him. She had been crying but her face was now pale and composed. For a moment they stared at each other in silence. Then she said, “What do you want here?”
“The whole story, everything,” he said, moving into the room and closing the door. She sat down slowly and locked her hands together in her lap. “Eddie was killed, that’s what happened,” she said, struggling to control her voice. “Just the way you said it would.”
“You saw the killer. I want to know what he looked like. I want every detail you can remember.”
“I’ve told the police everything.”
“Tell me now.”
“Why should I? You’re a friend of the men who killed him. You stood by and let them murder him.” She rose suddenly and turned away from him, her small face beginning to break and crumble with emotion. “You said we were the same kind of dirt, didn’t you? But you let them kill your brother. I’m not in that class.”
Carmody took her frail shoulders in his hands, twisted her around and sat her in the chair. When she attempted to get up, weeping helplessly now, he caught her wrist and forced her back with a turn of his hand. “I don’t want any speeches,” he said coldly. “There’ll be plenty of speeches from everybody else. The Mayor, the newspapers, priests and ministers, they’ll all make speeches. But they won’t do any good. When they’re all through talking, Eddie will be just as dead. So don’t waste my time with a speech.” His voice went low and hard, “Start with the beginning. Eddie was here tonight, wasn’t he? When I called?”