Now, in the midnight stillness of the squadroom, in the presence of two detectives, a police stenographer, and an appointed lawyer, Roger Broome told them everything, told them without any sense of relief, told them simply and directly and in a flat monotone about the girl he had met one winter, this must have been five years ago, no, it was only four, the month was February, a day or two before Valentine’s Day, he could remember buying a card for his mother and also one for the landlady of the rooming house where he was staying, a woman named Mrs. Dougherty. But that was after he had met the girl, after he had killed the girl.
The girl’s name was Molly Nolan, she had come here to the city from Sacramento, California, to look for a job. She was staying at a place called The Orquidea on Ainsley Avenue, he had met her in a bar, had a few drinks with her, and then had taken her back to his room at Mrs. Dougherty’s. She was a redheaded girl, not pretty, not at all pretty, but he had taken her to bed with him, and had told her she was beautiful, and then — he did not know why — he had suddenly begun hitting her, first in the eye, and then in the nose, making her bleed, and seeing that she was about to start screaming he had reached out quickly and grabbed her throat in his hands and squeezed her until she was dead.
He had carried her out of his room in the dead of night, down to the basement, where he had stuffed her into the old refrigerator after removing all the shelves. He had had to break both her legs to get her inside, he told them, and then he’d carried the refrigerator out to his truck and drove to a bridge someplace, he didn’t remember the name of it but he could show them where it was, he had driven over that same bridge many times since and wondered each time if the refrigerator with the dead girl in it was still in the mud on the bottom of the river where he had dropped it that night so long ago.
He suddenly asked if the detective with the deaf and dumb wife still worked here, surprising them all, and then he began weeping and at last said, “My mother’ll kill me,” and signed three copies of the typed confession.
It was nice to solve old cases.
The lady who had been stabbed, however, the lady named Margie Ryder was still with them.
8
At 10:00 A.M. on November 1, Detective-Lieutenant Sam Grossman of the Police Laboratory called the 87th and asked to talk to Steve Carella. When Carella got on the line, Grossman told him a joke about a man who opened a pizza parlor across the street from the Vatican, and then got down to business.
“This electric razor,” he said.
“What electric razor?”
“The one we found in the bathroom of the Leyden apartment.”
“Right.”
“We dusted it for prints and discovered something very interesting.”
“What was that?”
“The prints belonged to the killer.”
“To Damascus?”
“Is that his name?”
“Well, let’s say he’s our prime suspect at the moment.”
“Why don’t you pull him in?”
“Can’t find him,” Carella said.
“Well, anyway, the fingerprints on the razor match the ones we found on the shotgun, so how about that?”
“I don’t get it,” Carella said.
“Neither do I. Would you go shoot two people and then shave yourself with the dead man’s razor?”
“No. Would you?”
“No. So why did this guy do it?”
“Maybe he needed a shave,” Carella suggested.
“Well, I guess I’ve heard stranger things,” Grossman said.
“So have I.”
“But why would he have taken such a risk? A shotgun makes a hell of a lot of noise, Steve. Can you imagine a guy firing a shotgun four times, and then leisurely sauntering into the john to shave himself? With an electric razor, no less? It takes an hour to get a shave with one of those things.”
“Well, not that long.”
“However long,” Grossman said. “You shoot two people, your first instinct is to get the hell out. You don’t go take a shave with an electric razor.”
“Unless you know that the old lady across the hall is deaf and the only other apartment on the floor is empty.”
“You mean to tell me nobody else in the building heard those shots?”
“They heard them.”
“And?”
“The usual. Nobody called the police.”
“In any case, the killer must have known he’d made a lot of noise. He should have run.”
“But you’re saying he didn’t.”
“I’m saying he took a shave.”
“So what do you think?”
“I think you’re dealing with a psycho,” Grossman said.
Gloria Leyden lived in a midtown apartment house on the edge of the River Dix. There was a doorman downstairs, and he stopped Carella and Kling in the lobby and then phoned upstairs to let Mrs. Leyden know who was there. She promptly advised him to send them up, and they were whisked to the seventeenth floor by an elevator operator who kept whistling “I Don’t Care Much” over and over again, off key.
The apartment overlooked the river, with wide sliding glass doors that opened onto a small terrace. The place was done in Danish modern, the walls white, the rugs beige. There was a clean, well-ordered look to everything. The four cats with whom Mrs. Leyden shared the apartment seemed to have been chosen because they harmonized with the color scheme. They moved suspiciously in and out of the living room as the detectives questioned Mrs. Leyden, stopping to sniff at Kling’s cuff, and then at Carella’s shoe, one after the other, as if they themselves were detectives checking and rechecking a doubtful piece of evidence. They made Kling nervous. He kept thinking they could smell Anne Gilroy on him.
“Mrs. Leyden, we just wanted to ask you a few questions,” Carella said.
“Yes,” Mrs. Leyden said, and nodded. It was 11:00 in the morning. She was wearing a belted housecoat, but she was clearly corseted beneath it. Her hair did not seem as violently lavender as it had that day in the mortuary. She sat perched on the edge of a chair covered in a nubby brown fabric, her back to the glass doors.
“To begin with, did you ever hear either your son or your daughter-in-law speaking of a man named Walter Damascus?”
“Walter what?”
“Damascus.”
“No. Never.”
“Walter anybody?”
“No. None of their friends were named Walter.”
“Did you know many of their friends?”
“Some of them.”
“And your son never mentioned—?”
“No.”
“Nor your daughter-in-law?”
“I rarely spoke to my daughter-in-law,” Mrs. Leyden said.
“Does that mean—”
“Never confidentially, anyway.”
“But you were on speaking terms?”
“Yes, we were on speaking terms.”
“Didn’t you get along, Mrs. Leyden?”
“We got along, I suppose. Are you asking me if I liked her?”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“I see.”
“I assure you, young man, that I do not know how to use a shotgun.”
“No one suggested—”
“My son was killed along with her, are you forgetting that?”
“Did you get along with him, Mrs. Leyden?”
“Splendidly.”
“But not your daughter-in-law?”