Jigsaw

6

It is bad to get hit on the head, any doctor can tell you that. It is even worse to get kicked in the head after you have been hit on the head, even your mother can tell you that. If a person gets hit on the head and loses consciousness, the doctors examining him will usually insist that he remain in the hospital for a period of at least one week, since unconsciousness precludes concussion, and concussion can mean internal hemorrhaging.

Brown regained consciousness twenty minutes later, and went into the bathroom to vomit. The room was a mess. Whoever had creamed him had also shaken down the place as thoroughly as the late Eugene Edward Ehrbach had shaken down the apartment of the late Donald Renninger. Brown was not too terribly concerned with the wreckage, not at the moment. Brown was concerned with staggering to the telephone, which he managed, and lifting the receiver, which he also managed. He gave the desk clerk Steve Carella’s home number in Riverhead, waited while the phone rang six times, and then spoke to Fanny, the Carella housekeeper, who advised him that Mr. Carella was in Isola with his wife and was not expected home until 1:00 or thereabouts. He left a message for Carella to call him at the Selby Arms, hung up, thought he had better contact the squad immediately, and was trying to get the desk clerk again when a wave of dizziness washed over him. He stumbled over to the bed, threw himself full-length upon it, and closed his eyes. In a little while, he went into the bathroom to throw up a second time. When he got back to the bed, he closed his eyes and was either asleep or unconscious again within the next minute.

The morning hours of the night were beginning.

Steve Carella reached him a half-hour later. He knocked on the door to room 502, got no answer, and opened it immediately with a skeleton key. He picked his way through the debris on the floor, went directly to the bed where Brown lay unconscious on the slashed and mutilated mattress, saw the swollen lump over his partner’s eye, said, “Artie?”, received no reply, and went directly to the telephone. He was waiting for the desk clerk to answer the switchboard when Brown mumbled, “I’m okay.”

“Like hell you are,” Carella said, and jiggled the receiver-rest impatiently.

“Cool it, Steve. I’m okay.”

Carella replaced the receiver, went back to the bed, and sat on the edge of it. “I want to get a meat wagon over here,” he said.

“And put me out of action for a week, huh?”

“You’re growing another head the size of your first one,” Carella said.

“I hate hospitals,” Brown said.

“How do you like comas?” Carella asked.

“I’m not in coma. Do I look like I’m in coma?”

“Let me got some ice for that lump. Jesus, that’s some lump.”

“The man hit me with a truck,” Brown said.

Carella was jiggling the receiver-rest again. When the desk clerk came on, he said, “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“What?” the desk clerk said.

“Get some ice up here on the double. Room 502.”

“Room service is closed,” the desk clerk said.

“Open it. This is the police.”

“Right away,” the desk clerk said, and hung up.

“Some people sure pick ratty dumps to stay in,” Carella said.

“Some people try to lend credence to their cover,” Brown said, and attempted a smile. It didn’t work. He winced in pain, and closed his eyes again.

“Did you see who did it?” Carella asked.

“I saw him, but he had a stocking over his face.”

Carella shook his head. “Ever since the first movie where a guy had a stocking over his face, we get nothing but guys with stockings over their faces.” He looked around the room. “Did a nice job on the room, too.”

“Beautiful,” Brown said.

“We’re lucky he left you alive.”

“Why wouldn’t he? He wasn’t after me, he was after the picture.”

“Who do you think it was, Artie?”

“My partner,” Brown said. “Albert Weinberg.”

A knock sounded on the door. Carella went to answer it. The desk clerk was standing there in his shirtsleeves, a soup dish full of ice cubes in his hands. “I had to go to the restaurant up the block for these,” he complained.

“Great, thanks a lot,” Carella said.

The desk clerk kept standing there. Carella reached into his pocket and handed him a quarter.

“Thanks,” the desk clerk said sourly.

Carella closed the door, went into the bathroom, wrapped a towel around the ice cubes, and then went back to Brown. “Here,” he said, “put this on that lump.”

Brown nodded, accepted the ice pack, pressed it to his swollen eye, and winced again.

“How do you know it was Weinberg?”

“I don’t, for sure.”

“Was he a big guy?”

“They all look big when they’re about to hit you,” Brown said.

“What I mean is did you get a good look at him?”

“No, it all happened...”

“...in a split second,” Carella said, and both men smiled. Brown winced again. “So what makes you think it was Weinberg?”

“I had him on the phone tonight,” Brown said. “Told him we’d scored.”

“Who else did you talk to?”

“Irving Krutch.”

“So it could have been Krutch.”

“Sure. It also could have been my wife Caroline. I talked to her, too.”

“She pretty good with a blunt instrument?”

“As good as most,” Brown said.

“How’s that eye feel?”

“Terrible.”

“I think I’d better get a meat wagon.”

“No, you don’t,” Brown said. “We’ve got work to do.”

“You’re not the only cop in this city,” Carella said.

“I’m the only one who got clobbered in this room tonight,” Brown said.

Carella sighed. “One consolation, anyway,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“He didn’t get what he came after. That’s in my desk drawer, back at the ranch.”

It was decided over Brown’s protests (actually, Brown only did the protesting; Carella did all the deciding) that he would be taken to Saint Catherine’s Hospital, a dozen blocks away, for examination and treatment in the Emergency Room. Carella left him there at 2:00 A.M., still grumbling, and caught a taxi over to Weinberg’s apartment on North Colman. At that hour of the morning, the neighborhood resembled a lunar landscape. Weinberg’s rooming house was the only building on the street that had not already been abandoned by its owners, those entrepreneurs having decided the buildings were too expensive to maintain in accordance with the city’s laws; those respectable businessmen also having discovered that no one was willing to buy such white elephants; those wheeler-dealers having merely pulled out, leaving a row of run-down tenements as a gift to the city, lucky city.

There was a time, and this not too long ago, when hippies and runaways had moved into these buildings en masse, painting their colorful flower designs on the brick fronts, sleeping on mattresses spread wall-to-wall, puffing pot, dropping acid, living the happy carefree life of the commune-dweller. The regular residents of this run-down slum area, forced to live here because of certain language and racial barriers the city raised against some of its citizens, could not understand why anyone would come to live here of his own free will and choice — but they certainly knew pigeons when they saw them. The hippies, the runaways, the carefree happy commune-dwellers had no need for telephones, being in touch as they were with nature. The only time they might have needed Mr. Bell’s invention was when the restless natives of the ghetto came piling into the apartment to beat up the boys and rape the girls and take whatever meager possessions were worth hocking. The hippies and the runaways decided that perhaps this wasteland was not for them, it becoming more and more difficult to repeat the word “Love” when a fist was being crashed into the mouth or a girl was screaming on the mattress in the other room. The ghetto regulars had struck back at a society that forced them to live in such surroundings, little realizing that the people they were harassing had themselves broken with the same society, a society that allowed such ghettos to exist. It was a case of poor slob beating up on poor slob, while five blocks away, a fashionable discotheque called Rembrandt’s bleated its rock-and-roll music, and ladies in sequined slacks and men in dancing slippers laughed away the night. The hippies were gone now, the flower designs on the building fronts faded by the sun or washed away by the rain. The slum dwellers had reclaimed their disputed turf, and now their only enemies were the rats that roamed in the deserted tenement shells. Weinberg lived in a rooming house on a street that looked as if it had suffered a nuclear attack. It stood with shabby pride in the middle of the block, a single light burning on the second floor of the building. Aside from that, its somber face was dark. Carella climbed to the top floor, trying to ignore the rustle of rats on the staircase, the hackles rising at the back of his neck. When he reached the fourth floor, he struck a match, found 4C at the far end of the hall, and put his ear to the door, listening. To any casual passerby unfamiliar with the working ways of the police — and there were likely to be, oh, just scores of such passersby on a pitch-black landing at 2:00 in the morning — Carella might have looked like an eavesdropper, which is just what he was. He had been with the police department for a good many years, though, and he could not recall ever knocking on a door behind which there might be a criminal without first listening. He listened now for about five minutes, heard nothing, and only then knocked.

There was no answer.

He had decided together with Brown that his visit to Weinberg should not come as a visit from a cop. Instead, he was to pose as one of the “friends” Brown had hinted at, here to seek retribution for the beating Weinberg had possibly administered. The only problem seemed to be that no one was answering the door. Carella knocked again. Weinberg had earlier told Brown that he was about to curl up with a bottle of bourbon. Was it possible he had gone over to the Selby Arms, kicked Brown and the room around a little, and then returned here to his own little palace to knock off the bottle of cheer? Carella banged on the door a third time.

A door at the other end of the hall opened.

“Who is it there?” a woman’s voice said.

“Friend of Al’s,” Carella answered.

“What you doing knocking down the door in the middle of the night?”

“Have to see him about something,” Carella said. The landing was dark, and no light came from the woman’s apartment. He strained to see her in the gloom, but could make out only a vague shape in the doorway, clothed in what was either a white nightgown or a white robe.

“He’s probably asleep,” the woman said, “same as everybody else around here.”

“Yeah, why don’t you just go do that yourself, lady?” Carella said.

“Punk,” the woman replied, but she closed the door. Carella heard a lock being snapped, and then the heavy bar of a Fox lock being wedged against the door, solidly hooked into the steel plate that was screwed to the floor inside. He fished into his pocket, took out a penlight, flashed it onto Weinberg’s lock, and then pulled out his ring of keys. He tried five keys before he found the one that opened the door. He slipped the key out of the lock, put the ring back into his pocket, gently eased the door open, went into the apartment, closed the door softly behind him, and stood breathing quietly in the darkness.

The room was as black as the landing had been.

A water tap dripped into a sink somewhere off on his left. On the street outside, a fire engine siren wailed into the night. He listened. He could see nothing, could hear nothing. Cupping his penlight in his hand, he flashed it only a few feet ahead of him and began moving into the room, vaguely making out a chair, a sofa, a television set. At the far end of the room, there was a closed door, presumably leading to the bedroom. He turned off the flash, stood silent and motionless for several moments while his eyes readjusted to the darkness, and then started for the bedroom door. He had moved not four feet when he tripped and fell forward, his hands coming out immediately to break his fall. His right hand sank to the wrist into something soft and gushy. He withdrew it immediately, his left hand thumbing the flash into light. He was looking into the wide-open eyes of Albert Weinberg. The something soft and gushy was a big bloody hole in Weinberg’s chest.

Carella got to his feet, turned on the lights, and went into the small bathroom off the kitchen. When he turned on the lights there, an army of cockroaches scurried for cover. Fighting nausea, Carella washed his bloody right hand, dried it on a grimy towel hanging on a bar over the sink, and then went into the other room to call the precinct. A radio motor-patrol car arrived some five minutes later. Carella filled in the patrolmen, told them he’d be back shortly, and then headed crosstown and uptown to Irving Krutch’s apartment. He did not get there until 3:15 A.M., two and a half hours before dawn.

Krutch opened the door the moment Carella gave his name. He was wearing pajamas, his hair was tousled, even his mustache looked as if it had been suddenly awakened from a very deep sleep.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Just a few questions, Mr. Krutch,” Carella said.

“At three in the morning?”

“We’re both awake, aren’t we?”

“I wasn’t two minutes ago,” Krutch said. “Besides...”

“This won’t take long,” Carella said. “Did you speak to Arthur Brown tonight?”

“I did. Why? What...?”

“When was that?”

“Must have been about... eight o’clock? Eight-thirty? I really can’t say for sure.”

“What’d you talk about, Mr. Krutch?”

“Well, Brown told me you’d found a piece of that photograph in Ehrbach’s apartment, and he said you’d also got another piece from Weinberg. I was supposed to come up to the squadroom tomorrow morning and see them. In fact, you were supposed to show them to me.”

“But you couldn’t wait, huh?”

“What do you mean, I couldn’t...”

“Where’d you go after you spoke to Brown?”

“Out to dinner.”

“Where?”

“The Ram’s Head. The top of 777 Jefferson.”

“Anybody with you?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“A friend of mine.”

“Man or woman?”

“A girl.”

“What time’d you leave the restaurant?”

“About ten-thirty, I guess.”

“Where’d you go?”

“For a walk. We looked in the store windows along Hall Avenue. It was a beautiful night and...”

“Where were you along about midnight, Mr. Krutch?”

“Here,” Krutch said.

“Alone?”

“No.”

“The girl came back here with you?”

“Yes.”

“So she was with you between what time and what time?” Carella said.

“She was here when Brown called at eight — or whenever it was.” Krutch paused. “She’s still here.”

“Where?”

“In bed.”

“Get her up.”

“Why?”

“One man’s been assaulted and another’s been killed,” Carella said. “I want her to tell me where you were when all this was happening. That all right with you?”

“Who was killed?” Krutch asked.

“You sound as if you know who was assaulted,” Carella said quickly.

“No. No, I don’t.”

“Then why’d you only ask who was killed? Aren’t you interested in who was beaten up?”

“I’m...” Krutch paused. “Let me get her. She can clear this up in a minute.”

“I hope so,” Carella said.

Krutch went into the bedroom. Carella heard voices behind the closed door. The bedsprings creaked. There were footsteps. The door opened again. The girl was a young blonde, her long hair trailing down her back, her brown eyes wide and frightened. She was wearing a man’s bathrobe belted tightly at the waist. Her hands fluttered like butterflies on an acid trip.

“This is Detective Carella,” Krutch said. “He wants to know...”

“I’ll ask her,” Carella said. “What’s your name, Miss?”

“Su... Su... Suzie,” she said.

“Suzie what?”

“Suzie Endicott.”

“What time did you get here tonight, Miss Endicott?”

“About... seven-thirty,” she said. “Wasn’t it seven-thirty, Irving?”

“About then,” Krutch said.

“What time did you go out to dinner, Miss Endicott?”

“Eight or eight-thirty.”

“Where’d you eat?”

“The Ram’s Head.”

“And where’d you go afterwards?”

“We walked for a little while, and then came here.”

“What time was that?”

“I guess we got here at about eleven.”

“Have you been here since?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Did Mr. Krutch leave you at any time between seven-thirty and now?”

“Yes, when he went to the men’s room at the restaurant,” Suzie said.

“Happy now?” Krutch asked.

“Overjoyed,” Carella answered. “Are you familiar with timetables, Mr. Krutch?”

“What do you mean? Train timetables?”

“No, investigating timetables. You’re an insurance investigator, I thought you might...”

“I’m not sure I’m following you.”

“I want you to work up a timetable for me. I want you to list everything you did and the exact time you did it from six P.M. until right this minute,” Carella said, and paused. “I’ll wait,” he added.