Give the Boys a Great Big Hand

7

Saturday.

Rain.

Once, when he was a boy, he and some friends had crawled under the iceman’s cart on Colby Avenue. It had been pouring bullets, and the three of them sat under the wooden cart and watched the spikes of rain pounding the cobblestones, feeling secure and impervious. Steve Carella caught pneumonia, and shortly afterward the family moved from Isola to Riverhead. He’d always felt the move had been prompted by the fact that he’d caught pneumonia under the iceman’s cart on Colby Avenue.

It rained in Riverhead, too. Once he necked with a girl named Grace McCarthy in the basement of her house while the record player oozed “Perfidia,” and “Santa Fe Trail,” and “Green Eyes,” and the rain stained the small crescent-shaped basement window. They were both fifteen, and they had started by dancing, and he had kissed her suddenly and recklessly in the middle of a dip, and then they had curled up on the sofa and listened to Glenn Miller and necked like crazy fools, expecting Grace’s mother to come down to the basement at any moment.

Rain wasn’t so bad, he supposed.

Sloshing through the puddles with Meyer Meyer on the way to question the second possibility Kling had pulled from the MPB files, Carella cupped his hand around a match, lighted a cigarette, and flipped the match into the water streaming alongside the curb.

“You know that cigarette commercial?” Meyer asked.

“Which one?”

“Where the guy is a Thinking Man. You know, a nuclear physicist really, but when we first see him he’s developing snapshots in a darkroom? You know the one?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“I got a good one for their series.”

“Yeah, let’s hear it,” Carella said.

“We see this guy working on a safe, you know? He’s drilling a hole in the face of the safe, and he’s got his safe-cracking tools on the floor, and a couple of sticks of dynamite, like that.”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“And the announcer’s voice comes in and says, ‘Hello there, sir.’ The guy looks up from his work and lights a cigarette. The announcer says, ‘It must take years of training to become an expert safe-cracker.’ The guy smiles politely. ‘Oh, I’m not a safe-cracker,’ he says. ‘Safe-cracking is just a hobby with me. I feel a man should have diversified interests.’ The announcer is very surprised. ‘Not a safe-cracker?’ he asks. ‘Just a hobby? May I ask then, sir, what you actually do for a living?’ ”

“And what does the man at the safe answer?” Carella said.

“The man at the safe blows out a stream of smoke,” Meyer said, “and again he smiles politely. ‘Certainly, you may ask,’ he says. ‘I’m a pimp,’ “ Meyer grinned broadly. “You like it, Steve?”

“Very good. Here’s the address. Don’t tell jokes to this lady or she may not let us in.”

“Who’s telling jokes? I may quit this lousy job one day and get a job with an advertising agency.”

“Don’t do it, Meyer. We couldn’t get along without you.”

Together, they entered the tenement. The woman they were looking for was named Martha Livingston, and she had reported the absence of her son, Richard, only a week ago. The boy was nineteen years old, six feet two inches tall, and weighed 194 pounds. These facts, and these alone, qualified him as a candidate for the person who had once owned the severed hand.

“Which apartment is it?” Meyer asked.

“Twenty-four. Second floor front.”

They climbed to the second floor. A cat in the hallway mewed and then eyed them suspiciously.

“She smells the law on us,” Meyer said. “She thinks we’re from the ASPCA.”

“She doesn’t know we’re really street cleaners,” Carella said.

Meyer stooped down to pet the cat as Carella knocked on the door. “Come on, kitty,” he said. “Come on, little kitty.”

“Who is it?” a woman’s voice shouted. The voice sounded startled.

“Mrs. Livingston?” Carella said to the door.

“Yes? Who is it?”

“Police,” Carella said. “Would you open the door, please?”

“Po—”

And then there was silence.

The silence was a familiar one. It was the silence of sudden discovery and hurried pantomime. Whatever was going on behind that tenement door, Mrs. Livingston was not in the apartment alone. The silence persisted. Meyer’s hand left the cat’s head and went up to the holster clipped to the right side of his belt. He looked at Carella curiously. Carella’s.38 was already in his hand.

“Mrs. Livingston?” Carella called.

There was no answer from within the apartment.

“Mrs. Livingston?” he called again, and Meyer braced himself against the opposite wall, waiting. “Okay, kick it in,” Carella said.

Meyer brought back his right leg, shoved himself off the wall with his left shoulder, and smashed his foot against the lock in a flat-footed kick that sent the door splintering inward. He rushed into the room behind the opening door, gun in hand.

“Hold it!” he yelled, and a thin man in the process of stepping out onto the fire escape, one leg over the sill, the other still in the room, hesitated for a moment, undecided.

“You’ll get wet out there, mister,” Meyer said.

The man hesitated a moment longer, and then came back into the room. Meyer glanced at his feet. He was wearing no socks. He glanced sheepishly at the woman who stood opposite him near the bed. The woman was wearing a slip. There was nothing under it. She was a big blowzy dame of about forty-five with hennaed hair and a drunkard’s faded eyes.

“Mrs. Livingston?” Carella asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “What the hell do you mean busting in here?”

“What was your friend’s hurry?” Carella asked.

“I’m in no hurry,” the thin man answered.

“No? You always leave a room by the window?”

“I wanted to see if it was still raining.”

“It’s still raining. Get over here.”

“What did I do?” the man asked, but he moved quickly to where the two detectives were standing. Methodically, Meyer frisked him, his hands pausing when he reached the man’s belt. He pulled a revolver from the man’s waist and handed it to Carella.

“You got a permit for this?” Carella asked.

“Yeah,” the man said.

“You’d better have. What’s your name, mister?”

“Cronin,” he said. “Leonard Cronin.”

“Why were you in such a hurry to get out of here, Mr. Cronin?”

“You don’t have to answer nothing, Lennie,” Mrs. Livingston said.

“You a lawyer, Mrs. Livingston?” Meyer said.

“No, but—”

“Then stop giving advice. We asked you a question, Mr. Cronin.”

“Don’t tell him nothing, Lennie.”

“Look, Lennie,” Meyer said patiently, “we got all the time in the world, either here or up at the squad, so you just decide what you’re going to say, and then say it. In the meantime, go put on your socks, and you better put on a robe or something, Mrs. Livingston, before we get the idea a little hanky-panky was going on in this room. Okay?”

“I don’t need no robe,” Mrs. Livingston said. “What I got, you seen before.”

“Yeah, but put on the robe anyway. We wouldn’t want you to catch cold.”

“Don’t worry about me catching cold, you son-of-a-bitch,” Mrs. Livingston said.

“Nice talk,” Meyer answered, shaking his head. Cronin, sitting on the edge of the bed, was pulling on his socks. He was wearing black trousers. A black raincoat was draped over a wooden chair in the corner of the room. A black umbrella dripped water onto the floor near the night-table.

“You were forgetting your raincoat and umbrella, weren’t you, Lennie?” Carella said.

Cronin looked up from lacing his shoes. “I guess so.”

“You’d both better come along with us,” Carella said. “Put on some clothes, Mrs. Livingston.”

Mrs. Livingston seized her left breast with her left hand. She aimed it like a pistol at Carella, squeezed it briefly and angrily, and shouted, “In your eye, cop!”

“Okay, then, come along the way you are. We can add indecent exposure to the prostitution charge the minute we hit the street.”

“Prosti—! What the hell are you talking about? Boy, you got a nerve!”

“Yeah, I know,” Carella said. “Let’s go, let’s go.”

“Why’d you have to bust in here anyway?” Mrs. Livingston said. “What do you want?”

“We come to ask you some questions about your missing son, that’s all,” Carella said.

“My son? Is that what this is all about? I hope the bastard is dead. Is that why you broke down the door, for Christ’s sake?”

“If you hope he’s dead, why’d you bother to report him missing?”

“So I could get relief checks. He was my sole means of support. The minute he took off, I applied for relief. And I had to report him missing to make it legit. That’s why. You think I care whether he’s dead or alive? Some chance!”

“You’re a nice lady, Mrs. Livingston,” Meyer said.

“I am a nice lady,” she answered. “Is there something wrong about a matinee with the man you love?”

“Not if your husband doesn’t disapprove.”

“My husband is dead,” she said. “And in hell.”

“You both behave as if there was a little more than that going on, Mrs. Livingston,” Carella said. “Get dressed. Meyer, take a look through the apartment.”

“You got a search warrant?” the little man asked. “You got no right to go through this place without a warrant.”

“You’re absolutely right, Lennie,” Carella said. “We’ll come back with one.”

“I know my rights,” Cronin said.

“Sure.”

“I know my rights.”

“How about it, lady? Dressed or naked, you’re coming over to the station house. Now which will it be?”

“In your eye!” Lady Livingston said.

The patrolmen downstairs all managed to drop up to the Interrogation Room on one pretense or another to take a look at the fat redheaded slob who sat answering questions in her slip. Andy Parker said to Miscolo in the Clerical Office, “We take a mug shot of her like that, and we’ll be able to peddle the photos for five bucks apiece.”

“This precinct got glamour, that’s what it’s got,” Miscolo answered, and he went back to his typing.

Parker and Hawes went downtown for the search warrant. Upstairs, Meyer and Carella and Lieutenant Byrnes interrogated the two suspects. Byrnes, because he was an older man and presumably less susceptible to the mammalian display, interrogated Martha Livingston in the Interrogation Room off the corridor. Meyer and Carella talked to Leonard Cronin in a corner of the squadroom, far from Lennie’s overexposed paramour.

“Now, how about it, Lennie?” Meyer said. “You really got a permit for this rod, or are you just snowing us? Come on, you can talk to us.”

“Yeah, I got a permit,” Cronin said. “Would I kid you guys?”

“I don’t think you’d try to kid us, Lennie,” Meyer said gently, “and we won’t try to kid you, either. I can’t tell you very much about this, but it can be very serious, take my word for it.”

“How do you mean serious?”

“Well, let’s say there could be a lot more involved here than just a Sullivan Act violation. Let’s put it that way.”

“You mean because I was banging Martha when you come in? Is that what you mean?”

“No, not that, either. Let’s say there is a very big juicy crime involved here maybe. And let’s say you could find yourself right in the middle of it. Okay? So level with us from the start, and things may go easier for you.”

“I don’t know what big juicy crime you’re talking about,” Cronin said.

“Well, you think about it a little,” Carella said.

“You mean the gat? Okay, I ain’t got a permit. Is that what you mean?”

“Well, that’s not too serious, Lennie,” Meyer said. “No, we’re not thinking about the pistol.”

“Then what? You mean like because Martha’s husband ain’t really croaked? You mean like because you got us on adultery?”

“Well, even that isn’t too serious, Lennie,” Carella said. “That we can talk about.”

“Then what? The junk?”

“The junk, Lennie?”

“Yeah, in the room.”

“Heroin, Lennie?”

“No, no, hey, no, nothing big like that. The mootah. Just a few sticks, though. Just for kicks. That ain’t so serious, now is it?”

“No, that could be very minor, Lennie. Depending on how much marijuana you had there in the room.”

“Oh, just a few sticks.”

“Well then, you’ve only got a possession rap to worry about. You weren’t planning on selling any of that stuff, were you, Lennie?”

“No, no, hey, no, it was just for kicks, just for me and Martha, like you know for kicks. We lit a few sticks before we hopped between the sheets.”

“Then that’s not too serious, Lennie.”

“So what’s so serious?”

“The boy.”

“What boy?”

“Martha’s son. Richard, that’s his name, isn’t it?”

“How do I know? I never even met the kid.”

“You never met him? How long have you known Martha?”

“I met her last night. In a bar. A joint called The Short-Snorter, you know it? It’s run by these two guys, they used to be in the China-Burma-India—”

“You only met her last night?”

“Sure.”

“She said you were the man she loved,” Carella said.

“Yeah, it was love at first sight.”

“And you never met her son?”

“Never.”

“You ever fly, Lennie?”

“Fly? How do you mean fly? You talking about the marijuana again?”

“No, fly. In an airplane.”

“Never. Just catch me dead in one of them things!”

“How long have you gone for black, Lennie?”

“Black? How do you mean black?”

“Your clothes. Your pants, your tie, your raincoat, your umbrella. Black.”

“I bought them for a funeral,” Cronin said.

“Whose funeral?”

“A buddy of mine. We used to run a crap game together.”

“You ran a crap game, too, Lennie? You’ve been a busy little man, haven’t you?”

“Oh, this wasn’t nothing illegal. We never played for money.”

“And your friend died recently, is that right?”

“Yeah. The other day. So I bought the black clothes. Out of respect. You can check. I can tell you the place where I bought them.”

“We’d appreciate that, Lennie. But you didn’t own these clothes on Wednesday, did you?”

“Wednesday. Now let me think a minute. What’s today?”

“Today is Saturday.”

“Yeah, that’s right, Saturday. No. I bought the clothes Thursday. You can check it. They probably got a record.”

“How about you, Lennie?”

“How about me? How do you mean how about me?”

“Have you got a record?”

“Well, a little one.”

“How little?”

“I done a little time once. A stickup. Nothing serious.”

“You may do a little more,” Carella said. “But nothing serious.”

In the Interrogation Room, Lieutenant Byrnes said, “You’re a pretty forthright woman, Mrs. Livingston, aren’t you?”

“I don’t like being dragged out of my house in the middle of the morning,” Martha said.

“Weren’t you embarrassed about going downstairs in your slip?”

“No. I keep my body good. I got a good body.”

“What were you and Mr. Cronin trying to hide, Mrs. Livingston?”

“Nothing. We’re in love. I’ll shout it from the rooftops.”

“Why did he try to get out of that room?”

“He wasn’t trying to get out. He told them what he was trying to do. He wanted to see if it was still raining.”

“So he was climbing out on the fire escape to do that, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you aware that your son Richard could be dead at this moment, Mrs. Livingston?”

“Who cares? Good riddance to bad rubbish. The people he was hanging around with, he’s better off dead. I raised a bum instead of a son.”

“What kind of people was he hanging around with?”

“A gang, a street gang, it’s the same story every place in this lousy city. You try to raise a kid right, and what happens? Please, don’t get me started.”

“Did your son tell you he was leaving home?”

“No. I already gave all this to another detective when I reported him missing. I don’t know where he is, and I don’t give a damn, as long as I get my relief checks. Now that’s that.”

“You told the arresting officers your husband was dead. Is that true?”

“He’s dead.”

“When did he die?”

“Three years ago.”

“Did he die, or did he leave?”

“It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

“Not exactly.”

“He left.”

The room was suddenly very silent.

“Three years ago?”

“Three years ago. When Dickie was just sixteen. He packed up and left. It ain’t so easy to raise a boy alone. It ain’t so easy. And now he’s gone, too. Men stink. They all stink. They all want one thing. Okay, I’ll give it to them. But not here.” She tapped her chest. “Not here inside, where it counts. They all stink. Every single one of them.”

“Do you think your son might have run off with some of his friends?”

“I don’t know what he done, the little bastard, and I don’t care. Gratitude. I raised him alone after his father left. And this is what I get. He runs out on me. Quits his job and runs out. He’s just like all the rest of them, they all stink. You can’t trust any man alive. I hope he drops dead, wherever he is. I hope the little bastard drops... ”

And suddenly she was weeping.

She sat quite still in the chair, a woman of forty-five with ridiculously flaming red hair, a big-breasted woman who sat attired only in a silk slip, a fat woman with the faded eyes of a drunkard, and her shoulders did not move, and her face did not move, and her hands did not move, she sat quite still in the hardbacked wooden chair while the tears ran down her face and her nose got red and her teeth clamped into her lips.

“Running out on me,” she said, and then she didn’t say anything else. She sat stiffly in the chair, fighting the tears that coursed down her cheeks and her neck and stained the front of her slip.

“I’ll get you a coat or something, Mrs. Livingston,” Byrnes said.

“I don’t need a coat. I don’t care who sees me. I don’t care. Everybody can see what I am. One look, and everybody can see what I am. I don’t need a coat. A coat ain’t going to hide nothing.”

Byrnes left her alone in the room, weeping stiffly in the hardbacked chair.

They found exactly thirty-four ounces of marijuana in Martha Livingston’s apartment. Apparently, Leonard Cronin was not a very good mathematician. Apparently, too, he was in slightly more serious trouble than he had originally presumed. If, as he’d stated, there had only been a stick or two of marijuana in the room — enough to have made at least two ounces of the stuff — he’d have been charged with possession, which particular crime was punishable by imprisonment of from two to ten years. Now thirty-four ounces ain’t two ounces. And possession of sixteen ounces or more of narcotics other than heroin, morphine, or cocaine created a rebuttable presumption of intent to sell, the “rebuttable” meaning that Cronin could claim he hadn’t intended selling it at all, at all. And the maximum term of imprisonment for possession with intent to sell was ten years, the difference between the two charges being that a simple possession rap would usually draw a lesser prison term whereas an intent to sell rap usually drew the limit.

But Cronin had a few other things to worry about. By his own admission, he and Martha Livingston had lit a few sticks before hopping into bed together and Section 2010 of the Penal Law quite bluntly stated: “Perpetration of an act of intercourse with a female not one’s wife who is under the influence of narcotics is punishable by an indeterminate sentence of one day to life or a maximum of twenty years.”

When the gun charge was added to this, and the running of an illegal crap game considered, even if one wished to forget the simple charge of simple adultery — a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in a penitentiary or county jail for not more than six months, or by a fine of not more than $250, or by both — even if one wished to forget this minor infraction, Leonard Cronin was going to be a busier little man than he had ever been.

As for Martha Livingston, she’d have been better off exploring Africa. Even allowing for her own conviction that all men stank, she had certainly chosen a prize this time. The narcotics, whomever they belonged to, had been found in her pad. The lady who’d fallen in love at first sight was going to have a hell of a tough row to hoe.

But whatever else lay ahead for the hapless lovers, homicide and butchery would not be included in the charges against them. A check with the clothing store Leonard Cronin named proved that he had indeed purchased his funeral outfit on Thursday. A further check of his rooming-house closet showed that he owned no other black garments. And neither did Mrs. Livingston.

There must be a God, after all.