Ten Plus One

7

So far, the police had done only one concrete thing toward solving the multiple murders: nothing.

That morning, after Wallach left, they tried to remedy the situation somewhat by putting in a call to Samuel Gottlieb of Gottlieb, Graham and Norden. They asked the senior partner of the firm how many criminal cases Norden had handled since he’d been with them, and he told them there had been a total of four. He promptly furnished them with the names of all four clients, and then broke the list down into those who had been acquitted, and those who had been convicted. They then took the list Mrs. Norden had given them, the one containing the names of the various other firms Norden had worked for over the years, and by 11:00 they had called each firm and had a further list of twelve convicted criminals who had once been clients of Norden. They sent the list to the city’s BCI with a request for the whereabouts of each man, and then checked out a car and drove downtown to Ramsey University, where they hoped to learn something, anything, about Blanche Lettiger, the dead prostitute.

The university was in the heart of the city, beginning where Hall Avenue ended, sprawling on the fringes of the Quarter, rubbing elbows with Chinatown. An outdoor art exhibition was in full swing on the bordering side streets. Carella parked the car in a no-parking zone, pulled down the sun visor with its hand-lettered sign advising policeman on duty call, and then walked with Meyer past the canvases lined up on the sidewalk. There seemed to be a predominance of seascapes this year. The smiling perpetrators of all this watery art peered hopefully at each passerby, trying to look aloof and not too eager, but placed nonetheless in the uncomfortable position of being merchants as well as creators.

Meyer glanced only cursorily at the seascapes, and then stopped before an “action” painting, the action consisting of several bold black slashes across a field of white, with two red dots in one corner. He nodded mysteriously, and then caught up with Carella.

“What happened to people?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” Carella answered.

“There used to be a time when you looked at a painting, there were people in it. No more. Artists aren’t interested in people. They’re only interested in ‘expression.’ I read about a guy who covers a nude lady with paint, and then she rolls on a canvas, and what comes out is a painting.”

“You’re kidding,” Carella said.

“I swear to God,” Meyer said. “You can see where she rubbed with her leg or her thigh, or whatever. She’s like the guy’s paintbrush.”

“Does he clean his brushes at the end of the day?”

“I don’t know. The article didn’t say. It just told about how he worked, and it showed some examples.”

“That’s pretty far-out, isn’t it?”

“No, I think it’s a return to tradition.”

“How so?”

“The guy is obviously putting people back into painting.”

“There’s the school,” Carella said.

Ramsey University sat on the other side of a small park struck with May sunshine. There were several students sitting on the scattered benches discussing the conjugation of the verb aimer, discussing too the theory of ratio-mobility. They glanced up momentarily as Meyer and Carella crossed the park and climbed the steps of the administration building. The inside of the building was cool and dim. They stopped a student wearing a white shirt and a loose green sweater and asked him where the records office was.

“What records office?” the student asked.

“Where they keep the records.”

“Records of what? You mean the registrar?”

“We mean records of past students.”

“Alumni, you mean?”

“Well, we’re not sure this student ever graduated.”

“Matriculated students, do you mean? Or nonmatriculated?”

“We’re not sure,” Carella said.

“Day session or night?” the student asked.

“Well, we’re not sure.”

“Which college, would you know that?”

“No,” Carella said.

The student looked at him curiously. “I’m late for class,” he said at last, and wandered off.

“We get an F,” Meyer said. “We came to school unprepared.”

“Let’s talk to the dean,” Carella said.

“Which dean?” Meyer asked, peering at Carella as the student had done. “Dean of admissions? Dean of men? Dean of women? Dean Martin?”

“Dean I see you someplace before?” Carella said, and Meyer said, “Ouch!”

The dean of admissions was a nice lady in her early sixties who wore a starched ruffled blouse and a pencil in her hair. Her name was Dean Agnes Moriarty, and when the detectives said they were from the police, she immediately quipped, “Moriarty, meet Holmes and Watson.”

“Carella and Meyer,” Carella said, smiling.

“What can I do for you, gentlemen?”

“We’re interested in whatever information we can get about a woman who was once a student here.”

“When?” Miss Moriarty asked.

“We don’t know. Sometime before the war, we believe.”

“When before the war? This university was founded in 1842, gentlemen.”

“The girl was forty-one years old when she died,” Meyer said. “We can assume…”

“Died?” Miss Moriarty asked, and she raised her eyebrows slightly.

“Yes, ma’am,” Meyer said. “She was killed last night.”

“Oh,” Miss Moriarty nodded. “Then this is serious, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Oh. Well, now, let’s see. If she was forty-one years old—most of our students begin at eighteen, which would make this twenty-three years ago. Do you have any idea which college she was enrolled in?”

“No, I’m afraid we haven’t.”

“Shall we try the school of liberal arts?”

“We’re entirely in your hands, Miss Moriarty,” Carella said.

“Well, then, let’s see what we can find out, shall we?”

They found out that Blanche Ruth Lettiger had indeed enrolled in the Liberal Arts College of Ramsey University as a speech and dramatics major in 1940; that she had given her age as eighteen at the time, and her home address as Jonesboro, Indiana, a town with a population of 1,973, close to Kokomo. She had listed her temporary address at 1107 Horsely Road, in the Quarter. She had remained at the school for one term only, a matter of less than five months, and had then dropped out. Her withdrawal was somewhat mysterious, since she was an honor student with a 3.8 index, close to the perfect 4.0. Miss Moriarty had no idea where Blanche Lettiger had gone after her dropout. She had never returned to the school, and had never attempted to contact them in any way.

Carella asked Miss Moriarty if there was anyone at the school now who might remember Blanche Lettiger as a student, and Miss Moriarty promptly took the detectives to Professor Richardson in the speech and dramatics department. Richardson was a thin old man with the manner and bearing of a Shakespearean actor. His voice rolled from his mouth in golden, rounded tones. He spoke forcefully, as though he were trying to give the second balcony its money’s worth. Carella was certain every word he projected was heard all the way uptown in the squadroom.

“Blanche Lettiger?” he said. “Blanche Lettiger?”

He put one slender hand to his leonine head, closing the thumb and forefinger over the bridge of his nose, lost in silent thought. Then he nodded once, looked up and said, “Yes.”

“You remember her?” Carella asked.

“Yes.” Richardson turned to Miss Moriarty. “Do you recall the Wig and Buskin Society?”

“I do,” she said.

“Then you must also remember The Long Voyage Home.”

“I’m afraid I missed that one,” Miss Moriarty said tactfully. “The school’s drama groups do so many shows.”

“Mmm, yes, well,” Richardson said. He turned back to Carella. “I was faculty adviser of the group for four successive years. Blanche worked with us in that play.”

“The Long Voyage Home?”

“Yes. A very nice girl. I remember her very well. And the play, too. It was the first production we did in the round. Blanche Lettiger, yes, that’s right. She played one of the…ah…ladies of easy virtue.”

“What do you mean?” Carella said.

“Well…” Richardson paused, glanced at Miss Moriarty, and then said, “One of the prostitutes.”

Carella glanced at Meyer, but neither of the detectives said anything.

“She was a very nice child,” Richardson said. “Rather intense, somewhat brooding, but nice nonetheless. And a very good actress. The play is set in a London waterfront dive, you know, and the girl Blanche played spoke with a cockney dialect. Blanche mastered the tones and accent almost immediately. A remarkable feat, very. She had an excellent memory, too. She had memorized all of her sides”—Richardson paused here to see whether or not anyone had caught his use of the professional term “sides,” and then, getting no reaction, continued—”in the first two nights of rehearsal. She had quite the largest female part in the play, you know. Freda. The girl who has the long talk with Olson and then is instrumental in drugging him before he’s shanghaied. We did the play in the round, the first time anything of the sort had been tried at this school. We used the school theater, of course, but we banked rows of rented bleachers on the stage, and the performers worked in the center of it. Very exciting. In one scene, if you recall the play…”

“Mr. Richardson, I wonder if…”

“…one of the sailors, Driscoll, is supposed to throw the beer in his glass into the face of Ivan, the drunken Russian sailor. Well, when…”

“Mr. Richardson, do you know if…?”

“…the actor hurled the contents of his glass, he spattered half a dozen people sitting in the first row. The immediacy of playing in the round is difficult to…”

“Mr. Richardson,” Carella said firmly, “did Blanche Lettiger…?”

“…imagine unless you’ve done it. Blanche was excellent at it. She had a very expressive face, you see. In the scene with Olson, she was required to do a lot of listening, a task even professional actresses find difficult. It was especially difficult here because we were working in the round, where every nuance of expression is clearly visible to the audience. But Blanche carried it off beautifully, a remarkable performance, very.”

“Did she want to…?”

“The play isn’t one of my particular favorites, you know,” Richardson said. “Of the Glencairn series, I much prefer The Moon of the Caribbees, or even In the Zone. But Moon of the Caribbees has four women, who are all West Indian Negresses, which would rather have limited our female casting; there are, after all, white students to consider, too. In the Zone, of course, has an all-male…”

“Would you know whether Miss Lettiger…”

“…cast, and this is, after all, a coeducational institution, so we eliminated that one. As a matter of fact, The Long Voyage Home, despite its shortcomings, was extremely well suited to our needs. With the exception of two rather small parts at the very end of the play, the parts are rather well…”

“Mr. Richardson,” Carella said, “would you know whether or not Miss Lettiger had any idea of becoming a professional actress? Or was this simply another extracurricular activity for her?”

“I honestly don’t know how serious she was about the theater. We discussed it peripherally once or twice, but my notion is she was undecided. Or perhaps intimidated, I’m not sure. I think the city overwhelmed her a bit. She was, after all, only eighteen years old, and from a small town in Indiana, very. The notion of attempting to conquer the professional theater must have seemed extremely far-fetched to her.”

“She was a speech and dramatics major, though?”

“Yes. But, of course, she was only here at the school for one term, not even a full semester.”

“Had she spoken to you about leaving school?”

“No.”

“Were you surprised when she left?”

“Mr. Canella, the one thing an instructor…”

“Carella.”

“Carella, yes, forgive me. The one thing an instructor learns over the years is never to be surprised by anything a student says or does.”

“Does that mean you were surprised?”

“Well, she was an excellent student and, as I told you, a talented girl, very. Yes, I suppose I was surprised.”

“Was she in any production besides the O’Neill play?”

“No.”

“Was she in any of your classes?”

“No.”

“Would you know if she had any relatives in this city?”

“I’m sorry, I have no idea.”

“Well, thank you,” Carella said.

“Not at all. My pleasure,” Richardson answered.

They left him in his small office and walked downstairs with Miss Moriarty. “He’s a crashing bore, very,” she said, “but his memory is good, and I’m sure he gave an accurate picture of Blanche Lettiger as she was then. Was it at all helpful?”

“Miss Moriarty,” Carella said, “the terrible thing about detective work is that you never know what’s helpful and what isn’t until all the pieces fit together at the end.”

“I’ll remember that,” Miss Moriarty said. “It’ll no doubt help me in my sworn and unceasing battle against Holmes.”

“May the best man win,” Carella said.

They shook hands with her and walked out into the sunshine again.

“What do you think?” Meyer asked.

“I don’t know what to think. Why’d she drop out of school so suddenly? Good student, good marks, interested in extracurricular stuff.” Carella shrugged.

“It’s pretty unusual, isn’t it? Especially when she came all the way from Kokomo.”

“No, not Kokomo, some town near it.”

“Yeah, what was the name of that town again?”

“Jonesville, something like that.”

“Jonesboro,” Meyer said.

“That’s right.”

“You think we ought to get a flier out?”

“What for?”

“Routine check on her family, relatives, I don’t know.”

“What good would it do? I’ll tell you what bugs me about this girl, Meyer. She breaks the pattern, you know? Before, there was at least some kind of slender thread. Now…” He shrugged. “This bothers me. It really does.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t see me grinning from ear to ear, do you?”

“Maybe we are up against a nut. If we are, we can just whistle. He’ll shoot whoever the hell he wants to, at random, without rhyme or reason.”

“Who’s that blonde waving at you?” Meyer said suddenly.

Carella, who thought Meyer was joking, said, “Blondes always wave at me.”

“Yeah? Even sixteen-year-old ones?”

Carella followed Meyer’s gaze to the other end of the park, where a young blonde girl wearing a navy skirt and a pale-blue sweater had begun walking quickly toward them. He recognized her immediately, and raised his own arm in greeting.

“You know her?” Meyer asked.

“Sure. Part of my fan club.”

“I keep forgetting you’re a big-shot city detective.”

“Try to remember, will you?”

Cindy Forrest was wearing her hair loose around her face. There was a trace of lipstick on her mouth, and a string of tiny pearls around her throat. She was carrying her books hugged against her breasts, carrying also a small secret smile on her face as she approached.

“Hi,” she said. “Were you looking for me?”

“No,” Carella answered, “but it’s nice to see you, anyway.”

“Why, thank you, sir,” Cindy said. “What are you doing all the way down here?”

“Looking up some records. What are you doing here?”

“I go to school here,” Cindy said. “Remember? My abnormal-psych instructor? Witness of the primal scene?”

“I remember,” Carella said. “You’re a psychology major, right?”

“Wrong. I’m an education major.”

“And you want to teach college,” he said, nodding.

“High school,” Cindy corrected.

“Some detective,” Meyer said, sighing.

“Meyer, I’d like you to meet Cynthia Forrest. Miss Forrest, this is my partner, Detective Meyer.”

“How do you do, Mr. Meyer?” Cindy said, and extended her hand.

Meyer took it, smiled, and said, “How do you do?”

She turned back to Carella almost immediately. “Did you find what you were looking for?” she asked.

“Well, we found something, but I’m not sure it helps us very much.”

“Weren’t the records complete?”

“Yes, fairly complete,” Carella said. “It’s just that…”

“Did you talk to Mr. Ferguson?”

“Who?”

“Ferguson. The football coach.”

“No, we didn’t,” Carella said, puzzled.

“He might have been able to help you. He’s been at the school for ages. The team never wins, but they keep rehiring Ferguson because he’s such a nice old man.”

“I see,” Carella said.

“You might look him up.”

“Why, Cindy?”

“Well, didn’t you come down to…?” She stared up into his face. “I’m sorry, maybe I’m confused.”

“Maybe we’re all a little confused,” Meyer said, his eyes suddenly narrowing. “Why do you think we should have looked up the football coach, Miss Forrest?”

“Well, only because he was on the team, you see.”

“Who was on the team?” Carella said.

“Why, Daddy.” She paused, her blue eyes wide. “Didn’t you know he went to school here?”

Salvatore Palumbo was fifty-seven years old, a wiry little man who had been born in Naples and who’d come to America in 1938 because he didn’t like Mussolini or what he was doing with the country. He did not speak a word of English when he arrived, and he had only $40 in American money, plus a wife and two children, and the address of a cousin. He went to see the cousin in Philadelphia, and the cousin made a great show of welcoming him and then promptly let it be known he wasn’t really welcome at all. So Palumbo, still not speaking a word of English—this was only a week after he’d arrived—spent twenty of his American dollars for train tickets and took his family to another city, and tried to make a start.

It was not easy to make a start. In Naples, he had been a fruit vendor with a small pushcart. He used to buy his produce from the farmers who drifted into the city from the outlying districts, and he used to shove his pushcart all over the city, sometimes not getting home until 9:00 or 10:00 at night, but nonetheless providing a living for himself and his family. The living was poor, even by Italian standards; in Naples, Salvatore Palumbo and his wife had lived in a slum. In America, he moved from Philadelphia, where his cousin lived in a slum, directly to another city and another slum.

He did not like the slum. In Italian, he said to his wife, “I did not come to America to live in yet another slum,” and then he set about trying to find work. He thought it might be a good idea to get himself another pushcart, but he didn’t speak English at all, and he didn’t know where to buy his produce, or how to go about getting a vendor’s license, or even that a vendor’s license was necessary. He got a job on the waterfront instead. He was always a small man, and lifting bales and crates was difficult for him. He developed a powerful chest and muscular arms, so that he looked like a bandy-legged little wrestler after two years of working the docks.

Well, America is the land of opportunity. That’s the God’s honest truth, you can take it or leave it. You don’t have to stay in a slum, and you don’t have to keep working on the docks. If you have the will, determination, and ambition of a man like Salvatore Palumbo, you can in twenty-five years own a little house in Riverhead—in an Italian neighborhood, yes, but not in a slum or a ghetto—and you can have your own fruit-and-vegetable store seven blocks away on Dover Plains Avenue, and people will call you Sal instead of Salvatore.

At 12:00 noon on May 1, Detectives Meyer and Carella were in another part of the city making a series of startling discoveries while Sal Palumbo stood on the sidewalk outside his store and polished his fruit. They discovered first of all that Anthony Forrest was a graduate of Ramsey University, a fact they had never known. And then, carried on the wave of this fresh discovery, they remembered that Mae Norden, the wife of the slain lawyer Randolph Norden, had told them her husband had studied at Ramsey Law. Like men who had found the elusive piece of a very tiring jigsaw puzzle when the piece was right there on the table all along, just under the ashtray, they exuberantly tied the first two deaths with the death of the prostitute Blanche Lettiger, who had also been a student at Ramsey, and foolishly and joyously believed the puzzle was almost finished when in actuality it had only just begun.

Sal Palumbo had no such feelings of soaring joy as he polished the fruit. He liked fruit, indeed he loved fruit, but he did not polish it because it gave him any particular pleasure. He was not the kind of person who could go wild over the color of an apple or a pear. He polished the fruit because when it was polished it looked better to his customers, and when it looked better to his customers, they bought it. One of his customers was walking toward the store now, an Irish lady named Mrs. O’Grady. He did not know the Irish lady’s first name. He knew that she lived someplace in Riverhead, but not in the immediate neighborhood. Palumbo’s stand was on Dover Plains Avenue, just below the elevated structure, near the corner of 200th Street. There was a station stop on that corner, and every Tuesday afternoon at about this time, Mrs. O’Grady would come down the steps leading from the station and stop first in the candy store on the corner, and then next in the butcher’s shop alongside it, and then she would walk to Palumbo’s store, which was two stores down from the butcher’s shop in the shadow of the station platform.

“Ah, signora,” Palumbo said, as she approached, and she promptly answered, “Don’t give me the Eye-talian malarkey, Sal.”

Mrs. O’Grady was perhaps fifty-two years old, with a trim, spare figure, and a devilish twinkle in her green eyes. She had been doing business with the merchants along Doyer Plains Avenue for five years now because she liked their prices and their goods better than those available in her own neighborhood. If you had asked either Mrs. O’Grady or Sal Palumbo about the casual flirtation that had been going on between them for the past five years, both would have said you were out of your mind. Palumbo was married, with two grown married sons and with three grandchildren. Mrs. O’Grady was married, with a married daughter who was pregnant. But Palumbo was a man who liked women in general, not only southern Italian types like his wife, Rose, with her dark hair and her darker eyes, but even trim little types with small compact breasts and tight small backsides and green eyes like Mrs. O’Grady. And Mrs. O’Grady was a passionate sort who liked nothing better than a good strong man in her arms, and this little fellow Sal Palumbo had good strong arms and a great massive chest with curling black hair showing at the open throat of his shirt. And so the two of them bandied small talk over the fruit, carrying on a flirtation that would never be openly recognized, that would never come to so much as a touch of the hand, but that nonetheless flared once a week every Tuesday over the pears and the apples and the plums and the peaches.

“Well, it don’t look so good to me today, Sal,” Mrs. O’Grady said. “Is this all you’ve got?”

“What’s the matter with you?” Palumbo demanded, his voice carrying only the faintest trace of an accent. “Those are beautiful fruit. What do you want? You want some nice pears today? I got some apricots, too, the first of the season.”

“And bitter as poison, I’ll bet.”

“From me? Bitter fruit from Sal Palumbo? Ah, bella signora, you know me better than that.”

“What are those melons?”

“What are they but melons? You see them with your eyes, no? You just named them. They’re honeydew melons.”

“Good?”

“Beautiful.”

“How do I know?”

“Mrs. O’Grady, for you I would slice one open, but only for you, and only because when I slice it open you’ll find a melon so sweet, and so ripe, and so green as your own eyes.”

“Never mind my own eyes,” Mrs. O’Grady said. “And you don’t have to slice it for me, I’ll take your word. No plums yet?”

“We can’t rush the summer,” Palumbo answered.

“Well, let me have two pounds of the apples. How much are the apricots?”

“Thirty-nine a pound.”

“That’s too high.”

“I’m losing money.”

“I’ll just bet you are,” she answered, smiling.

“These have to be shipped in, you know. Refrigerator cars. The grower makes money, the shipper makes money, the railroad makes money, but by the time the apricots get to me, what do I make?”

“Well, give me a couple of pounds, so you can lose some more money.”

“Two?”

“I said a couple, didn’t I?”

“Signora, in Italy, a couple is always two. In America, a couple can be three, four, a half a dozen. Ma che?” He spread his hands and shrugged his shoulders, and Mrs. O’Grady laughed.

“Two pounds,” she said.

“You need some lettuce? I got nice iceberg and nice Romaine, whichever your heart desires.”

“The iceberg,” she said. “You know who has really good fruit?”

“Sal Palumbo has really good fruit,” he answered.

“No, the fruit man in my own neighborhood. And his apricots are cheaper.”

Palumbo, who was reaching over the crates stacked in front of his stand, reaching onto the slanting stand itself to the rear, where his apricots were piled in neat rows, said, “How much are his apricots?”

“Thirty-five cents a pound.”

“So then go buy his apricots,” Palumbo said.

“I would,” Mrs. O’Grady replied, “but he was all out of them when I got there.”

“Signora,” Palumbo said, “if I was all out of apricots, they’d be thirty-five cents a pound, too. You want them, si or no?”

“I’ll take them,” Mrs. O’Grady said, her green eyes twinkling, “but it’s highway robbery.”

Palumbo opened a brown paper bag and dropped a handful of apricots into it. He put the bag on his hanging scale and was piling more apricots into it when the bullet came from the station platform above him, entering his head at a sharp angle from the top of his skull. He fell forward onto the stand. The fruit and vegetables came tumbling down around him as he collapsed to the sidewalk, the polished pears and apples, the green peppers, the oranges and lemons and potatoes, while Mrs. O’Grady looked at him in horror and then began screaming.