Down Among the Dead Men

XV

Claire Purdo was thin and nervous; there was a little ring of cigarette stubs on the ash-tray beside her chair in the matron’s room by the time Koski got there. She dabbed at the pit of her palms with a fragment of handkerchief; her forehead, under the brim of the cocky little red hat, was damp with apprehension as the Lieutenant came in and sat on the edge of the matron’s cot.

“If you’re going to send me to the Island,” she burst out, “why don’t you do it, instead of keeping me in here as if I’d committed some crime!”

Koski said: “We’re after something more important than a soliciting conviction, sister.” He sized up the cheap suit, a little too large for her slender figure; the imitation fox scarf around her scrawny neck. According to the detention record, she was twenty-eight, but her features were those of the frightened adolescent. “Where’d you spend the night, if it isn’t too personal?”

“With a friend.”

“I asked where. Not how.”

“In Bay Ridge.”

“Skip the stall.” He held out his hand, palm up. “I’m no vice sniffer. I want the low. I want it quick. Unless you don’t mind getting mixed up in a homicide tangle, you’ll give out, fast.”

“Homicide!”

“Over at Big Dommy’s. Sunday night.” She lit a cigarette; her hands were shaky. “I don’t know anything—”

“Maybe you think you don’t. Just answer my questions. I’ll find out whether you do or not. Now, about last night?”

“I was at my cousin Amy’s. Rannet Street. Number Eighty-seven Rannet.”

“Keep pedaling...” He made a note of the address.

“Amy’s husband’s in the Army. She’s working over at the Flexileather plant, on a cutter. They make these Sam Browne belts for the officers and she can’t afford to stay away from the shop. But her baby’s got bronchitis or something the matter with his chest, so—”

“You sat up with the kid?”

“Yes.” Tears came into her eyes. “Now you’ll go and ask her and tell her what... how I make my living...”

“Cut the sobs.” Koski was gruff. “You don’t see any tattle-tale gray on me, do you? Now about Sunday. You picked up a sailor somewhere along in the afternoon?”

She waited, wide-eyed.

“Don’t go into the silences, sister. Was that the first time you’d seen this guy?”

“No. The second.”

“What’d he look like?”

She’d only taken a couple of puffs on her cigarette, but she stubbed it out. “He’s a squarehead, I guess. A Swede or something like that. He has black eyes.”

“Know his name?”

“Ansel something. He works on a yacht, he told me.”

“He used to.”

“Oh!” Claire seemed to be sick. “Was he the one...?”

“There was another man up there in Room Five.”

“No.” She squeezed her palms together, wretchedly. “No one else.”

“Yair. Another guy. Big guy. Bandage around his face. You must have seen him.”

“I didn’t. Honest, I didn’t.”

“Friend of Ansel’s, maybe.”

“There wasn’t anyone. Not that I saw.”

“Get it right, babe. This is serious. There’s a hot rocking chair at the end of the road for somebody. You could file yourself in the cooler for a good, long spell if you’re dumbing up on me.”

“I’m not. I didn’t see anyone.” She sniffled, miserably.

“What time’d you leave Ansel?”

“I guess I was there maybe half an hour.” She licked a finger, moistened a thread on her nylon. “He told me he’d be there later, but he wasn’t.”

“Wanted to play a return engagement?”

“No.” She pulled the scarf around her shoulders, shivered. “He gave me something... to pawn. I told him I knew a place that was open Sunday nights sometimes. But I... I thought it over and decided maybe he didn’t have any right to give it to me and maybe I’d get in trouble if the clock happened to be stolen. So I took it back to Dommy’s. But Ansel wasn’t there.”

“He might have been there. What kind of a clock was this?”

“Oh, it’s beautiful. It must have cost a lot of money. It’s gold and there are little enameled animals on it. A lion, a bull, a fish of some kind... that’s why I was afraid to hock it, — because it didn’t seem like the sort of thing Ansel would have... have had in his family. He told me his grandfather left it to him and he’d never wanted to sell it but now he needed money.” She smiled, sadly. “I kind of thought maybe he was lying about it.”

“You were kind of right. So you took the ticker back to Dommy’s. But Ansel didn’t show? That it?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you go up to Room Five to see if he was still there?”

“I did. But there was someone else in the room.”

“Now you’re clicking. What did this other gent look like?”

She seemed distressed. “I didn’t hardly see him at all. He only opened the door an inch or so, — and the room was dark inside.”

Koski stood up, cursing silently. Another false alarm. This girl wouldn’t be able to identify Bandage Face, unless...

“Think you’d be able to recognize his voice, if you heard it again?”

“I... I don’t know. Maybe.” Claire shrank back. “Did he... kill Ansel?”

“Chances are he’s the murderer, yair. What’d you do with this trinket your sailor-friend left you?”

“It’s in my room. Wrapped in the towel. Just the way he gave it to me. I’m so sorry for Ansel...”

He caught her arm. “Let’s hit the grit. I’d like a gander at this timepiece.”

Out at the main desk he told the sergeant to cross her off the detention list; if the prosecution needed her as a material witness, he’d know where to find her.

Treanor Place was noisy with push-cart peddlers, children playing in the gutters; the tenements were decorated with blankets and sheets hung out of the windows for airing.

She went up the stairs ahead of him. “You’re not going to take me in for receiving stolen property, are you? Because I didn’t know it was stolen, for sure...”

“Unlax, babe. We got other things to keep us humping.”

She put the key in the lock. “I haven’t had a chance to red’ up the room,” she opened the door, “on account of Amy called me—”

The bark of a gun punctuated her sentence. She screamed, toppled forward into the room. The door slammed in Koski’s face as he lunged for the knob. The pistol roared again, inside the room. A splinter of wood hinged out from the paneling next the jamb. The Harbor Squad man flung himself to one side, tugging out his service-special.

He stepped out, kicked at the knob. The door crashed back on its hinges. Claire Purdo lay on her face with one hand clawing feebly at the dingy matting on the floor. He bent down. There was a hole in her throat he could have put his thumb in. She couldn’t live.

There was no one else in the room. At the left, a window was open. Outside, the rusty railing of a fire escape.

Koski got to it, looked down. Two floors below a gray-haired woman looked up, shouted: “There he is!”

The Lieutenant piled through the window, onto the grating, sprinted up. There wasn’t anyone on the roof. He ran to the coping, blew on his whistle. He watched the front door of the tenement, — but no one came out except a woman wheeling a baby carriage. Koski wouldn’t have dared to shoot down into that crowded alley, anyway. He gave the three blasts on his whistle again, heard an answering shrill. A bluecoat pounded along from the avenue. Koski waved, pointed down to the tenement entrance. Then he went back down the fire escape.

The prostitute had managed to squirm over on her side. The matting beside her head was a blotch of scarlet. The bullet had torn through her throat and out at the back, of her neck. The fur scarf was sodden.

There wasn’t a prayer of saving her. If she lived long enough to make an in extremis statement, it would be more than Koski expected.

He knelt down. “Who was it, kid? Who shot you?”

Her fingers tried to press against the wound under her jaw. She made a desperate effort to speak.

All Koski heard was the death rattle.