Shotgun

8

At 10:00 A.M. on November 1, Detective-Lieutenant Sam Grossman of the Police Laboratory called the 87th and asked to talk to Steve Carella. When Carella got on the line, Grossman told him a joke about a man who opened a pizza parlor across the street from the Vatican, and then got down to business.

“This electric razor,” he said.

“What electric razor?”

“The one we found in the bathroom of the Leyden apartment.”

“Right.”

“We dusted it for prints and discovered something very interesting.”

“What was that?”

“The prints belonged to the killer.”

“To Damascus?”

“Is that his name?”

“Well, let’s say he’s our prime suspect at the moment.”

“Why don’t you pull him in?”

“Can’t find him,” Carella said.

“Well, anyway, the fingerprints on the razor match the ones we found on the shotgun, so how about that?”

“I don’t get it,” Carella said.

“Neither do I. Would you go shoot two people and then shave yourself with the dead man’s razor?”

“No. Would you?”

“No. So why did this guy do it?”

“Maybe he needed a shave,” Carella suggested.

“Well, I guess I’ve heard stranger things,” Grossman said.

“So have I.”

“But why would he have taken such a risk? A shotgun makes a hell of a lot of noise, Steve. Can you imagine a guy firing a shotgun four times, and then leisurely sauntering into the john to shave himself? With an electric razor, no less? It takes an hour to get a shave with one of those things.”

“Well, not that long.”

“However long,” Grossman said. “You shoot two people, your first instinct is to get the hell out. You don’t go take a shave with an electric razor.”

“Unless you know that the old lady across the hall is deaf and the only other apartment on the floor is empty.”

“You mean to tell me nobody else in the building heard those shots?”

“They heard them.”

“And?”

“The usual. Nobody called the police.”

“In any case, the killer must have known he’d made a lot of noise. He should have run.”

“But you’re saying he didn’t.”

“I’m saying he took a shave.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think you’re dealing with a psycho,” Grossman said.

Gloria Leyden lived in a midtown apartment house on the edge of the River Dix. There was a doorman downstairs, and he stopped Carella and Kling in the lobby and then phoned upstairs to let Mrs. Leyden know who was there. She promptly advised him to send them up, and they were whisked to the seventeenth floor by an elevator operator who kept whistling “I Don’t Care Much” over and over again, off key.

The apartment overlooked the river, with wide sliding glass doors that opened onto a small terrace. The place was done in Danish modern, the walls white, the rugs beige. There was a clean, well-ordered look to everything. The four cats with whom Mrs. Leyden shared the apartment seemed to have been chosen because they harmonized with the color scheme. They moved suspiciously in and out of the living room as the detectives questioned Mrs. Leyden, stopping to sniff at Kling’s cuff, and then at Carella’s shoe, one after the other, as if they themselves were detectives checking and rechecking a doubtful piece of evidence. They made Kling nervous. He kept thinking they could smell Anne Gilroy on him.

“Mrs. Leyden, we just wanted to ask you a few questions,” Carella said.

“Yes,” Mrs. Leyden said, and nodded. It was 11:00 in the morning. She was wearing a belted housecoat, but she was clearly corseted beneath it. Her hair did not seem as violently lavender as it had that day in the mortuary. She sat perched on the edge of a chair covered in a nubby brown fabric, her back to the glass doors.

“To begin with, did you ever hear either your son or your daughter-in-law speaking of a man named Walter Damascus?”

“Walter what?”

“Damascus.”

“No. Never.”

“Walter anybody?”

“No. None of their friends were named Walter.”

“Did you know many of their friends?”

“Some of them.”

“And your son never mentioned—?”

“No.”

“Nor your daughter-in-law?”

“I rarely spoke to my daughter-in-law,” Mrs. Leyden said.

“Does that mean—”

“Never confidentially, anyway.”

“But you were on speaking terms?”

“Yes, we were on speaking terms.”

“Didn’t you get along, Mrs. Leyden?”

“We got along, I suppose. Are you asking me if I liked her?”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“I see.”

“I assure you, young man, that I do not know how to use a shotgun.”

“No one suggested—”

“My son was killed along with her, are you forgetting that?”

“Did you get along with him, Mrs. Leyden?”

“Splendidly.”

“But not your daughter-in-law?”

“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.

“Were you living with him or weren’t you?” Carella asked.

“We had separate apartments,” Mandy said.

“Where’s your apartment, Miss Pope?”

“Oh, please call me Mandy.”

Kling cleared his throat. “Where’s your apartment?” he repeated.

“Mandy,” she said, as though teaching a difficult word to a small child.

“Mandy,” Kling said, and then cleared his throat again.

“My apartment is on Randall and Fifth,” she said. Her voice was as delicate as her beauty, she spoke clearly but softly, looking up at the detectives, the smile touching her mouth, behaving as though she were enjoying polite cocktail conversation in the presence of three charming and attentive men at an afternoon party.

“Now, Mandy,” Carella said, “when’s the last time you saw Damascus?”

“Last week,” she said.

“When last week?” Brown asked.

“Last Friday night.”

“Where’d you see him?”

“I picked him up at The Cozy Corners. That’s a nightclub. He works there. He’s a bouncer there.”

“What time’d you pick him up?”

“Closing time. Two o’clock.”

“Where’d you go from there?”

“To his apartment.”

“How long did you stay there?”

“In his apartment?”

“Yes.”

“An hour or so.”

“Doing what?”

“Well, you know,” Mandy said, and again lowered her eyes.

“And then what?” Kling asked.

“I drove him uptown.”

“Where uptown?”

“To South Engels.”

“Why?”

“It’s where he wanted to go.”

“Did he say why?”

“Yes. He said there was a poker game he’d promised to go to.”

“So you drove him there.”

“Yes.”

“First you went to his apartment to make love, and then you drove him uptown to his poker game.”

“Yes.”

“What time was this?”

“Oh, I don’t know exactly. It must have been sometime between three and four in the morning.”

“And that was the last time you saw him?”

“Yes. When he got out of the car.”

“Have you seen him since?”

“No.”

“Talked to him?”

“No.”

“He hasn’t called you?”

“No, he hasn’t.”

“Have you called him?”

“He hasn’t got a phone.” Mandy paused. “Well, I did call the club, but they said he hasn’t been to work all week. So I thought I’d stop by the apartment this afternoon to see if anything was wrong.”

“Ever hear him mention some people named Leyden?”

“Layton? No.”

“Leyden. L-E-Y-D-E-N.”

“No, never.”

“Did he have anything with him when you left the apartment?”

“Like what?”

“Well, you tell us.”

“Yes, but I don’t know what you mean.”

“Was he carrying a gun?”

“I don’t think so. But I know he has a gun. A little pistol.”

“This would have been a big gun, Miss Pope—”

“Mandy.”

“... Mandy. You couldn’t have missed it.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“Miss Pope, was he carrying a shotgun?”

“A shotgun? No. Of course not. Why would he—?”

“Do you know what a shotgun looks like?”

“Well, no, but... well, yes, it’s like a rifle, isn’t it?”

“Somewhat.”

“No, I would have noticed something like that.”

“Was he carrying any sort of a large—”

“No.”

“... anything that could have been a shotgun wrapped up, or in a case—”

“No, he wasn’t carrying anything.”

“Mmm,” Carella said.

“Why would he take a gun to a poker game?” Mandy asked, and looked up at the cops.

“Maybe he wasn’t going to a poker game, Miss Pope.”

“Mandy.”

“Maybe he was going uptown to kill some people.”

“Oh, no.”

“Some people named Rose and Andrew Leyden.”

“No,” Mandy said again.

“You’re sure you haven’t seen him since last Friday night?”

“Yes. And that’s not like Wally, believe me. He’ll usually call me three, four times a week.”

“But this week he hasn’t called you at all?”

“Not once.”

“Did he mention anything about going out of town?”

“Where would he go?”

“You tell us.”

“No place. He has a job here. Why would he leave town?”

“If he killed some people, he might have decided it was best to leave town.”

“Well, I’m sure he didn’t kill anyone.”

“Did you ever go out of town with him?”

“No.”

“Know if he has any relatives outside the city?”

“I don’t know. He never mentioned any.”

“Miss Pope, if you—”

“Mandy.”

“... hear from Damascus, I want you to call this squadroom at once. I’m warning you now that he’s suspected of having committed multiple homicide, and if you know of his whereabouts now—”

“I don’t.”

“... or learn of them at any time in the future, and withhold this information from the police, you would then be considered an accessory.”

“Oh, I’m sure Wally hasn’t killed anyone,” Mandy said.

“An accessory as described in Section 2 of the Penal Law, Miss Pope... Mandy... ‘is a person who, after the commission of a felony, harbors, conceals, or aids the offender, with intent that he may avoid or escape from arrest, trial, conviction, or punishment, having knowledge or reasonable ground to believe that such offender is liable to arrest.’ Do you understand that?”

“Yes, I do. But Wally—”

“We’ve just told you that if we find him we’re going to arrest him, so you now have knowledge of that fact,” Brown said, and paused. “Do you know where he is?”

“No, I’m sorry. I don’t.”

“Will you call us if you hear from him?”

“Yes, of course I will. But you’re really mistaken. Wally couldn’t have killed anyone.”

“All right, Miss Pope, you’re free to go now, Mandy,” Carella said.

“Show her out, somebody,” Kling said.

Brown showed her out.