Silent Scream

CHAPTER 26

Irving Kezar’s run-down apartment building on East Seventieth Street looked better in the late-afternoon May sun, a little the way it must have been when it was new a long time ago. I rang Kezar’s bell. I didn’t expect him to be home at this hour, but Jenny might be. If she was, I’d have to try to trick her out by calling and saying Kezar wanted to meet her. But I was in luck, there was no answer to my ring.

I rode the elevator to the sixth floor, went along the quiet corridor to 6-C. I rang again to be sure, then used my keys. Inside, I closed the door behind me, and stood studying the old apartment. It hadn’t improved since February. The seedy old furniture was still dull and dusty, the heavy drapes covered the windows, making it like some gloomy room in a museum. There was no point in searching, the police had done a thorough job back in January.

No, the evidence I expected to find now would be obvious. Overlooked, not hidden. Not recognized because both the police and I had been neatly turned in the wrong direction. At least, that was my hunch. The stain of blood on the rug had been scrubbed, but it still showed. It told me nothing new. I went through the big old apartment until I found Kezar’s bedroom.

In my mind I pictured that night in January when Sid Meyer had died. The way I had come into the lobby for a time, the way Kezar had made the janitor open the lobby door for him. A witness to his coming out before the three shots. The way he had come out in a raincoat. Kezar had changed coats. Because it had been snowing, obviously. Right? Wrong-I hoped.

The clothes in his bedroom closet weren’t as good or as numerous as in his Central Park West apartment. The velvet-collared gray Chesterfield was there-cleaned, pressed and put away in a plastic bag. But I found what I wanted anyway.

The cloth had been torn under the middle button. A small tear that might happen if someone grabbed the button. Sewn up, not expertly, but so that it hardly showed in the herringbone pattern. Herringbone looks gray, but it is really made up of contrasting threads of white and black-and Sid Meyer had had black thread under a fingernail.

Natural for a man to change into a raincoat in the snow. Because of that, and because someone had taken a minute to mend the small tear, none of us had noticed the change of coats, or studied the Chesterfield. My fault. Gazzo hadn’t even known that Kezar had changed coats.

In the living room I pulled the heavy drapes away from the windows. The broken pane had been fixed. I raised the bottom frame all the way open as it had been on the night of the murder, studied it. On both sides of the new pane there was a faint groove in the old wood. Something had dented the frame after the pane was broken, the glass out. As if some heavy weight had been hooked over the wood of the raised window.

Obvious, again, that when Sid Meyer went out the window his head had broken the glass. But Sid Meyer had been a very small man. Literally blown out the window, he should have been sprawled backwards as he fell, his head nowhere near the raised window. Maybe he hadn’t hit the glass at all, something else had. Unless it had simply been broken on purpose for a reason.

I stepped back, sighted from some five feet away through the new pane. The building across the narrow alley was a five-story brownstone, its roof parapet just below the level of the Kezars’ windows. The roof of the brownstone was cluttered with a kind of tool shed, a wooden pigeon coop, and the tall brick doorway shelter down. The pigeon coop was in direct line with the repaired windowpane.

I went down in the elevator, along to the building across the alley, and up to the roof door. I used my keys to open it, stepped out into the sun. The Kezars’ open window was just across the alley, the wooden pigeon coop was at least six feet wide. I went over every inch of the coop. It had been four months, there had been snow and rain, the wood of the coop was old and soft, and the bullet had gone in cleanly. But I saw it.

High up on the rear wall of the coop through the wire mesh and above the top roost. It was that close to having missed the coop and flying so far no one would ever have found it. Life can be a matter of an inch. A large bullet, from the look of it, buried in the gray wood and almost invisible even up close. No one could have seen it from Kezar’s window, even if anyone had been looking. No one had. Not until now.

A vital bullet. Not three shots that night, but four. I had heard only three, so when had the fourth been fired? Why hadn’t I heard it? Now I was getting excited.

I went down, back to Kezar’s building, and up to the sixth floor again. The door to the stairs was close to the door of 6-C. I went down the stairs to the landing where the one gun, the. 45 automatic, had been found. I searched the floor and the walls as high as I could reach. I looked for any crevice, anything loose, any hiding place. There was nothing.

I hung out the window on three landings. Nothing was loose outside, nothing was hanging-the police wouldn’t have missed anything hanging anyway. I lit a cigarette, studied the stairwell that stretched silent up and down. If I’d just shot a man, was in a hurry to leave a gun on the stairs as if dropped, what would I have done? Just thrown it down.

I went up to the turn of the stairs between the landings of the fifth and sixth floors. A gun thrown from here would have been found on the fifth floor where it had been. I looked around the bare half-landing. There was noth… the banister post! One of those heavy metal posts spaced along all stairway banisters, hollow, six to seven inches square, with a domed metal cap!

I pulled at the cap, cursing my one hand. It shifted, but wouldn’t come off. If I couldn’t get it off…? I looked closer at the cap. There was a recent dent where the sleeve fitted over the post, holding the cap tightly on.

Back in 6-C, I searched the kitchen until I found a hammer. On the half-landing again, on my knees, I hit up at the cap on the hollow post. Once, twice. It flew off and fell with an echoing clang and clatter down the silent stairwell. I stood up.

The small, foreign automatic was wedged down inside the hollow post. Everyone wanted a bonanza. I had mine!

I pulled the gun out by the barrel, wrapped it in my handkerchief. It could still have fingerprints. It would have been hidden in a hurry, time needed to bang the banister cap tight, probably with the heavy. 45 the police had found.

Up in 6-C again, I went to the telephone. I called Captain Gazzo. He was out. I talked to his female sergeant, “Get him on the radio, it’s urgent. Tell him I found the second gun that shot Sid Meyer. Tell him to find Irving and Jenny Kezar, pick them up, bring them to their apartment on East Seventieth.”

I hung up, sat down to wait. I was nervous. If I was right, I’d solve more than just Sid Meyer’s murder. I’d close the books on all the murders. The whole answer.

My throat was dry as a desert. I went out to the kitchen to see if the Kezars had a cold beer in the refrigerator. Two steps into the kitchen, I sensed the shape behind me. Too late.

Weak from the months in the hospital, the blow on my head knocked me flat. Out for maybe a minute, then aware of movement in the living room, the outer door closing. I struggled up. Too late, no way to catch whoever it had been now. Kezar? Jenny? Who else? Someone who had come in and hidden while I was on the stairs.

I swayed out into the living room. The small automatic was gone from the table near the telephone-handkerchief and all. In the kitchen I found some beer, drank it in gulps. They had the gun. Did I have enough without it? I wasn’t sure. I…

The telephone rang. Calling to gloat? No-Captain Gazzo.

“I picked them up, Dan. Be there in half an hour.”

“You found them? Both? Where?”

“Kezar at his office, Jenny at his club. I’m on my way.”

I hung up, sat. They couldn’t have hit me and been where Gazzo found them. Then who had hit me, taken the gun? Why? I sat and went over it all in my mind. I was sure. Yet…?

Someone had the gun, but as the day darkened outside toward evening, I realized that I had one advantage-Kezar and Jenny couldn’t know I’d lost the gun. With the rest, and a little luck and fast talking, it could be enough to corner them.

When the outer door opened and Gazzo herded them both in, I looked straight at Irving Kezar.

“I’ve got the whole thing, Kezar,” I said. “I know it all.”