“With…well, with whatever. With…with why you dragged me up here. What’s the story?”
“You read the papers, Frankie?”
“Sometimes.”
“When’s the last time?”
“I don’t know. I go to work early, and I ain’t got time to stop for them. Anyway, I don’t read so good. That’s why I got in all that trouble when I was still in high school. Everybody else was reading…”
“Yeah, let’s never mind the underprivileged-kid bit, Frankie,” Masterson said. “When’s the last time you read a newspaper?”
“I don’t know. I just told you…”
“You listen to the radio?” Brock asked in his even, emotionless voice.
“Sure I do.”
“You heard about the guy who’s going around shooting people?”
“What guy?”
“The sniper.”
“Yeah, I think I heard something about it. Yeah, that’s right, he shot some guy up in Riverhead, didn’t he? A fruit man or something. Yeah, I heard that.” Frankie looked up at the detectives, puzzled. “I don’t get it. What…what…?”
“All right, let’s cut the crap,” Brock said, and the room went silent.
Frankie looked up at them expectantly, and they looked down at him patiently, waiting. Frankie wasn’t sure what crap he was expected to cut, but he suddenly wanted that door to be unlocked, suddenly wanted that telephone to ring. The two detectives stood over him silently, and he looked up at them silently, each waiting, he not knowing what he was expected to say or do, they seemingly possessed of infinite patience. He wiped his upper lip. He shrugged, the silence lengthened unbearably. He could hear the clock ticking on the wall.
“Look,” he said at last, “could you tell me what…?” and Brock hit him. He hit him suddenly and effortlessly, his arm coming up swiftly from its position at his side, his hand open, his palm catching Frankie noisily on the cheek. Frankie was more surprised than hurt. He brought his hands up too late, felt the stinging slap, and then looked up at Brock with a puzzled expression.
“What’d I do?” he asked plaintively.
“Randolph Norden is dead, Frankie,” Masterson said.
Frankie sat still for several moments, looking up at the detectives, sweating freely now, feeling trapped in this small room with its locked door. “What…what do you want from me?”
Brock hit him again. He hit him very hard this time, drawing back his fist and smashing it full into Frankie’s face. Frankie felt the hard knuckles colliding with his nose, and he said, “What are you doing?” and started to come out of the chair, when Masterson put both meaty hands on his shoulders and slammed him down again, so hard that the shock rumbled up his spine and into his neck. “Hey!” he said, and Brock hit him once more, and this time Frankie felt something break in his nose, heard the terrible crunching sound of his own nose breaking, and then immediately touched his upper lip and felt the blood pouring onto his hand.
“Why’d you do it, Frankie?” Brock said tightly.
“I didn’t do nothing. Listen, will you listen…?”
Brock bunched his fist and raised it over his head as if he were holding a hammer in it, and then brought it down as if the fist itself were the head of the hammer, onto the bridge of Frankie’s nose, and Frankie screamed in pain and fell out of the chair. Masterson kicked him in the ribs, once, sharply.
“Get up,” Brock said.
“Look, look, will you please…?”
“Get up!”
He struggled to his feet. There was an unbearable pain in his nose, and blood was dripping onto his lip and all over his white shirt and the new tie he had bought for his afternoon date.
“Listen,” he said, “listen to me. I’ve got a job, I’m working, I’m straight, can’t you understand…?” and Brock hit him. “Listen!” he screamed. “Listen to me! I didn’t do anything! You hear me? Can you understand me?” and Brock hit him again, because Brock did not understand him at all. Brock understood only that Frankie Pierce was a punk who had been cutting up other punks in street rumbles since the time he was twelve. He understood only that the punk named Frankie Pierce had graduated into the cheap thief who was Frankie Pierce, and then into the jailbird, and then into the ex-con, all of which still made him a punk, that was the understanding Brock had. So he kept following him around the room while Frankie backed against the walls trying to explain that he was straight now, he was honest, he was working, kept hitting the broken nose over and over again until it was only a sodden shapeless mass plastered to his face, don’t you understand, hit him as Frankie reached for the phone and tried to pick up the receiver, won’t you please understand, kicked him when he fell to the floor whimpering in pain, please, please, understand, and then stood over him with his fists bunched and ready and yelled, “Why’d you kill him, you little son of a bitch?” and hit him again when he couldn’t answer.
The girl waited for Frankie in the park for two hours. He never showed up for the date because Brock and Masterson kept him in the locked interrogation room for six hours, alternately rousing him and then beating him senseless again, while asking why he had killed a man he hadn’t seen in five years. At the end of their session, they were convinced he was clean. They wrote out a report stating he had broken parole by assaulting a police officer during a routine interrogation.
Frankie Pierce was removed to the criminal ward of the hospital on Walker Island in the River Dix, to recuperate before he was shipped back to the penitentiary at Castleview, upstate.
11
A sure sign that nothing was happening on this case—oh, yeah, maybe a cheap hood was being beaten up and made to realize you can’t go home again—was the fact that time was passing. It was true that there had been no murders since Andrew Mulligan drank his last drink, but time was nonetheless flitting by, and there was no greater proof of this than the reappearance of Bert Kling at the squadroom, looking tanned and healthy and very blond from the sun after his vacation. Lieutenant Byrnes, who didn’t like to see anyone looking so well-rested, immediately assigned him to the Sniper Case.
On the afternoon of May 7, while Meyer and Carella were uptown requestioning Mrs. O’Grady, the nice little woman who had been present when Salvatore Palumbo called it quits, Bert Kling was in the office looking over the Sniper file and trying to acquaint himself with what had gone before. When the blonde young lady walked into the squadroom, he barely looked up.
Meyer and Carella were sitting in the living room of a two-story clapboard dwelling in Riverhead while Mrs. O’Grady poured them coffee and tried to recall the incidents preceding the death of Salvatore Palumbo.
“I think he was weighing out some fruit. Do you take cream and sugar?”
“Black for me,” Meyer said.
“Detective Carella?”
“A little of each.”
“Should I call you Detective Carella, or Mr. Carella, or just what?”
“Whichever is most comfortable to you.”
“Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll call you Mr. Carella. Because calling you Detective Carella sounds as if you should be calling me Housewife O’Grady. Is that all right?”
“That’s fine, Mrs. O’Grady. He was weighing out some fruit, you said.”
“Yes.”
“And then what? I know we’ve been over all this, but…”
“Then he just fell onto the stand and slid down to the sidewalk. I guess I began screaming.”
“Did you hear the shot, Mrs. O’Grady?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Just before the train pulled in.”
“What train?”
“The train. Upstairs.”