“No. Not from the very beginning.”
“Which was when?”
“He brought her home from one of his trips. This must’ve been seven or eight years ago.”
“Where did she come from originally?”
“Alabama. He brings me home a Southern girl. You should have seen her. It was the summertime, she came into this very room wearing a tight yellow dress, straight out of Scarlett O’Hara. Some first impression.”
“What was her maiden name?”
“Rose Hilary Borden. They use all three names in the South, you know. She kept telling me about all her cousins, all of them with three names, Alice Mary Borden, and David Graham Borden, and Horace Frank Borden, straight out of Scarlett O’Hara, you should have heard her. She was an only child herself, you know, but she had these thousands of cousins scattered all over the countryside, eating corn fritters and chitlings, I suppose. I told my son immediately that I didn’t like her. Well, what can you do? He loved her, he said. Gave him a little poontang, I suppose, down South there on one of his lonely trips, men are all alike.”
Carella glanced at Kling. Neither of them said a word. Mrs. Leyden nodded her head in agreement with her own philosophy, and then said, “He was a very handsome boy, my son, he could have had any girl he wanted. Whenever he was on the road, the phone would ring every ten minutes, always another girl calling to ask when Andrew would be back. So he brings home Rose Hilary Borden in her tight yellow dress.”
“He was living here with you before they got married, is that it?” Kling asked.
“Yes, certainly. My husband passed away, poor soul, when Andrew was still a boy. You wouldn’t expect a person to leave his widowed mother all alone, would you?”
“How old was he when he got married?” Carella asked.
“This was eight years ago, he was thirty-two.”
“And you said he met Rose down South, in Alabama?”
“Yes, Montgomery.”
“We understood his territory was in the West.”
“Not at that time. He was transferred three or four years ago, after they were married.”
“Tell me, Mrs. Leyden, did you know your son would be coming home last weekend?”
“No.”
“He didn’t call you?”
“No.”
“Did you speak to your daughter-in-law anytime last weekend?”
“My daughter-in-law never called me when Andrew was away,” Mrs. Leyden said. “And I never called her, either.”
“We were just wondering if he’d told her he was coming. Apparently there’d been a change of plans—”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Mrs. Leyden said. “She didn’t even tell me the time she was pregnant. I only found out after she lost the baby, and that was because Andrew mentioned it.”
“When was this?”
“In May.”
“She was pregnant and lost the baby?”
“Yes, in her second month.”
“Mrs. Leyden, forgetting the name Walter Damascus for the moment, do you know of any of their friends who—?”
“No.”
“... might have harbored a grudge or—”
“No.”
“... for any reason whatever might have done something like this?”
“No,” Mrs. Leyden said.
“And you’ve never heard of Walter Damascus?”
“No.”
So that was that. The cats sniffed around a bit longer, Mrs. Leyden told the detectives again what a bitch her daughter-in-law was, and it was suddenly time for lunch.
It had been reasoned, perhaps incorrectly, that Walter Damascus might possibly return to his apartment to pick up the check he had left in his dresser drawer on the night of the Leyden murders. The theory behind such reasoning was simple: A man on the run needs money. So Detective Arthur Brown was assigned to a plant in Damascus’s slovenly pad, and he sat alone there that Friday afternoon, a tall burly Negro who was darker than the darkness around him, wearing a blue cardigan sweater over a blue sports shirt, gray flannel slacks, his overcoat thrown over the back of a kitchen chair, his gun in his hand.
Brown did not like solitary plants, and he particularly disliked this one because the apartment stank and because there was nothing to see but the mess Damascus had left behind him. In an automobile stakeout, people kept coming and going, you watched the passing show, it was interesting. Even when you were planted in the back of a store, you could hear customers out front, you had a sense of life steadily moving, it was reassuring. Here, there was nothing but semidarkness and silence. Damascus, whatever else he was, was most certainly a slob, and the smell in the apartment, combined with the darkness and the solitude, made Brown wish he had joined the Department of Sanitation instead. If he had, he would at this moment be riding a garbage truck that could not possibly stink as badly as this apartment did, and besides he would be outdoors in the crisp November sunshine. He debated raising the shades on the windows, decided against it, made himself comfortable in the wooden chair at the kitchen table, and was beginning to doze when he heard the key being inserted in the lock.
He was instantly awake and alert.
He rose and flattened himself against the kitchen wall as the door to the apartment opened. There was silence. The door closed again, cutting off the light from the corridor outside. There were footsteps into the room. They moved closer toward the kitchen doorway.
Brown hesitated only an instant longer, and then came around the door frame, gun extended, and curtly said, “Hold it right there!”
He was looking into the startled face of a beautiful redhead.
Her name was Amanda Pope, and she asked the detectives to please call her Mandy. She had come willingly to the station house, driving her own yellow Buick, Brown sitting beside her with his gun in his lap. She had chatted pleasantly with him on the short drive over, and now she sat pleasantly in the squadroom surrounded by three cops who meant business, and she asked them to call her Mandy, and when advised of her rights said she had no need of a lawyer, she had done nothing wrong.
“What were you doing in that apartment?” Carella asked.
“I came to see Wally,” she said.
“Wally who?”
“Damascus.”
“Who gave you the key?”
“Wally did.”
“When?”
“Oh, months ago.”
She was a beautiful young lady, and she was well aware of her good looks, and she used them to expert advantage, charming the cops right out of their shoes. Her hair was a deep auburn, striking in combination with her fair complexion and large green eyes. Her nose was perfectly turned, tip-tilted and saucy. Her mouth was generous, she wore no lipstick, she sat in a straight-backed chair in a green woolen dress that swelled over her breasts and her hips. Her legs were crossed, splendid legs, her feet were encased in high-heeled green leather pumps that accented her slender ankles. She looked up at the policemen and smiled dazzlingly, and each of them separately thought he would like to be questioning her alone in the Interrogation Room, instead of sharing her here in the squadroom with his horny colleagues.
“What’s your relationship with Damascus?” Kling asked.
“Oh, you know,” she said, and lowered her eyes demurely.
“Suppose you tell us,” Brown said.
“Well, we see a lot of each other,” Mandy said.
“How much?”
“A lot.”
“You living with him?”
“Not really.”
“What do you mean by that?”
They were finding it difficult to be stern with Amanda Pope because she was really so breathtakingly lovely and because feminine beauty is somehow associated with fragility and they did not want to run the risk of breaking or cracking or even chipping something as delicate as this. They felt enormously ashamed of the grubby surroundings to which they had introduced her, the grimy apple-green paint on the squadroom walls, the scarred desks, the dusty water cooler, the rusting metal grilles on all of the windows, the somber filing cabinets, the detention cage fortunately empty at the moment. It was not often that beauty walked softly into these premises, and so they stood about her asking stern questions in their sternest manner, but they were beguiled, they were in fact almost hypnotized.