The Case of the Petticoat Murder

Chapter Eleven

EVEN with Stan's expert jockeying, it still took us more than twenty minutes to reach the Village. By the time we'd parked the Plymouth half a block beyond Corchetti's and walked back, my watch said seven twenty-three.

It was, for most of the Village's residents, a favorite time of day — a time when the Village is, perhaps, more nearly characteristic of itself than at any other. The tourists don't swarm in until later, nor do the uptown New Yorkers who tour the bars and observe the natives.

“You ever been in this place before?” Stan asked as we stepped into Corchetti's.

“Not unless they've changed the name since then,” I said.

“Then you haven't,” he said. “Nobody's changed anything in this dive since the day before the world began.”

There was a long bar with a sprinkling of after-work drinkers, a larger number of round-the-clock drinkers, and two very young girls who didn't look as if they were old enough to be drinking there at all. Against the wall opposite the bar was a row of narrow booths with very high backs, and, midway between the booths and the bar, a half dozen tables about the size of a breadboard.

“Yesterday's tablecloths and last week's sawdust,” Stan said as we approached the bar. “And if you're wondering what that slush is you're wading in, it's liquor. There's more of the stuff on the floor than there is in the glasses.”

“No Johnny Farmers here,” I said, glancing about.

“And no Mary C., either,” Stan said. “No femme junkies at all, so far as I can see.”

“Take a look in the can,” I said. “I'll brace the bartender.”

While Stan walked out to the men's room, I found a space at the bar and beckoned to the bartender.

Unlike Stan, I look like a cop. I look so much like one that I'm rarely or never taken for anything else. Whether this is a curse or a blessing, I've never decided. Perhaps it averages out pretty close to fifty-fifty.

The bartender came over immediately. “Yes, Officer?”

“Seen Johnny Farmer around lately?” I asked.

He was a pink-faced, balding man with a few long strands of graying hair brushed across the middle of his skull from left to right. “I don't know a Johnny Farmer, Officer,” he said.

I gave him a fast description, and he nodded.

“There couldn't be more than one man that unlucky, could there?” he said, grinning. “He was in, Officer.”

“He been in here before?”

“Not when I've been on duty. A man with that much height and that kind of a face would be hard to forget.”

“How about Mary C.?” I said. “She been in today?”

“She practically lives here, Officer. Today she was in about the same time as this Johnny Farmer.”

“But they didn't leave together?”

“No. Mary left a little while after.”

“You know where I can find her?”

“I know where you could try. She goes for this Italian coffee. Told me she drinks eight or ten cups of espresso a day.” He picked up a couple of empty beer glasses and dropped them in the tank behind the bar. “Try around the corner. Nero's Coffee House. She practically runs a shuttle between here and there.”

Stan had come up behind me. “No Johnny Farmers in the can,” he said.

“Let's drop around the corner,” I said. “I hear Mary C. drinks a lot of coffee.”

Nero's Coffee House was like most of the other coffee shops in the Village — a place no larger than the average shoe-repair parlor, with huge, gloomy, time-blackened paintings on all the walls, banquettes along three sides of the room, and, at the rear, a short counter with an enormous espresso machine glittering with nickel plate, surmounted with eagles and cupids, and festooned with a dozen or more spigots jutting out from all sides and at almost all possible angles.

There was a tired-looking old man dozing behind the machine and a thin, hollow-eyed blonde girl sitting at the far end of the banquette to the left of the door. There was no one else.

“I'm buying,” Stan said. “What'll it be?”

“ Capuccino,” I said.

“Espresso for me,” he said. “It may not show, Pete, but mine is starting to drag.”

The old man opened one eye long enough to manipulate the machine; then we carried our coffee back to the banquette and sat down near the girl in a way that hemmed her into the corner. She was watching us sullenly, sniffing softly now and then, her thin shoulders outlined sharply through the thin material of her grimy, long-sleeved blouse.

“The kid's on it, Pete,” Stan whispered, leaning close to me as he raised his cup. “She's hooked, right through the middle.”

“So I see,” I said.

“So you see what?” the girl said. Her voice was as thin as her body. “What makes you think you've ever been able to see anything? What do you think you are, a universal genius?”

Neither Stan nor I said anything.

“People like you can only look,” she said. “They never really see. They haven't the equipment.”

“You the girl they call Mary C.?” Stan asked.

“There used to be a girl like that, But she's been dead a long, long time.”

“We're police officers, miss,” I said.

“No! You can't be serious. Why, I would never have believed it.”

“Are you Mary C., or aren't you?” I said.

“You know I am,” she said. “Just as I knew you were a cop.” She glanced at Stan. “I'm not so sure about your friend, here. Maybe he's even worse.”

“You acquainted with a man named Johnny Farmer?” I asked.

“I'm acquainted with a lot of Johnnys,” she said. “I even know a few farmers.”

“Would you rather be funny at the station house?” Stan asked mildly.

“I'd rather you dropped dead,” she said. “I know a lot of Johnnys, yes. But no Johnny Farmer.”

“Maybe you'll recognize his description,” I said, and sketched it for her,

“Oh, God,” she said, grimacing. “That one.”

“You know him?” I asked.

“Enough to stay away from.”

“Meaning?”

“The man's insane. I mean really.”

“You with him this afternoon?”

“I'm not with him any afternoon. I saw him in a place around the corner, but that wasn't being with him. I told him to stay the hell away from me.”

“Why so?”

“He makes me sick to my stomach; that's why. I wish to I'd never seen him.”

“He ever give you any presents?”

“Like what, for instance ”

“Earrings, for instance.”

“He never gave me anything.” She paused. “Except a couple of dollars one day.”

“For what?”

She looked at me knowingly. “Nobody's kidding anybody. Let's say I needed a drink.”

“How bad?” Stan asked.

“How bad can it get? That's how bad it was. Bad enough for me to go home with him.”

“Where's that?” I asked.

“I said 'home.' I should have said his pigsty. God, I thought I'd be sick before he even got down to business.”

“What's the address?” I asked.

“I don't know. It's on Barrow Street; I don't know what number.” She coughed her soft, dry addict's cough. “In the basement.”

“Could you pick out the place if we drove you down Barrow in a squad car?”

“How could I forget it?” She paused. “You going to take me in?”

“What for?”

“Since when did cops need 'what fors'?” She coughed again. “I'll tell you the God's truth. If they send me down to Lexington again, it'll kill me. It damn near did the last time.”

“I'm going to assume you mean you're allergic to bluegrass and horses,” I said. “Now—”

“God,” she said, almost fervently. “I thought for sure you were rounding us up again. One more cure would finish me.”

“We're working another street, Mary,” I said. “All we want from you is to show us where Johnny Farmer lives. You feel like a little ride?”

“Just past his house and that's all?”

“That's all.”

“Let's go,” she said, getting to her feet. “I need the air.”

Stan drove and I rode in the back seat with Mary C.

“You said Johnny Farmer was insane,” I reminded her. “How did you mean that?”

“I meant it all the way,” she said. “He's crazy every way there is to be crazy.”

“Maybe not so much crazy as feeble-minded?”

“Both. He's a feeb, for sure, but he's crazy too. I don't know just how to say it. He — he'll do everything. Especially with girls.”

“He a violent man, Mary?”

“He could be. God knows he's big enough. It's just that when he gets near a girl he goes nutso. All he has to do is touch one and he busts his top.”

I found myself wondering whether the M.O. expert at BCI had come up with any promising sex violators.

“He try to choke you, Mary?” I asked. “Anything like that?”

“No.”

“Then what did he do?”

“It isn't what he did. He just did what everybody else does. It's the way he went about it.”

“We understand he has it for you pretty bad.”

“He must have. God knows why. I'm nothing.”

“Apparently he doesn't agree with you.”

“Maybe it's because he's crazy,” she said. “Look at me. I've got no more bust than you have, and my legs are like a couple of broom handles. You see anything about me that'd set off any explosions?”

“This is Barrow,” Stan said, slowing the car. “Is this the block, Mary?”

She turned to peer out the window. “It's farther down,” she said. “There. That little one with the boards over the windows.”

The house she had pointed out was a two-story frame structure, faced with cracking once-yellow stucco. It had obviously been untenanted for some time.

At the corner, Stan turned right and pulled in at the curb about three quarters of the way down the block.

“This far enough away, Mary?” he asked. “If you're worried about somebody seeing you get out, we can drive you somewhere else.”

“What's the difference?” she said. “People see girls like me in police cars all the time.”

“We appreciate this, Mary,” I said as I got out and held the door for her. “I don't think Johnny'll ever give you any more trouble.”

“Will he find out who told him?” she asked. “Not that it makes a hell of a lot of difference, I guess.”

“It makes a difference, all right,” I said. “But he won't find out. Neither my partner nor I will ever remember.”

“Did he do something pretty bad?”

“Bad enough.”

“He'll go to prison?”

“Very probably. If not for one thing, then for another.”

She looked both ways along the darkening street, as if undecided which direction to take.

“Well,” she said, “at least he'll know.” She coughed. “That's more than most of us do.”

“You've kind of lost me, Mary,” I said.

She smiled faintly and turned away in the direction of the river. “Anyone who knows where he's going is lucky,” she said over her shoulder. “He's one in a million.”

Stan Rayder came around the back of the car and stepped up on the sidewalk.

“Well, Pete,” he said, “you ready to take him? Or do you figure we ought to go by the book and ask for some reinforcements?”

“All I ask for is that we're not too late,” I said. “Let's take him now, Stan, and get it over with.”