The Chill

Chapter 22

I still had time for another try at Earl Hoffman. I drove back toward his house, through downtown streets depopulated by the Sabbath. The questions Mrs. Deloney had raised, or failed to answer, stuck in my mind like fishhooks which trailed their broken lines into the past.

I was almost certain Deloney hadn’t killed himself, by accident or intent. I was almost certain somebody else had, and that Mrs. Deloney knew it. As for the suicide note, it could have been forged, it could have been invented, it could have been misread or misremembered. Hoffman would probably know which.

As I turned into Cherry Street, I saw a man in the next block walking away from me. He had on a blue suit and he moved with the heavy forcefulness of an old cop, except that every now and then he staggered and caught himself. I saw when I got closer that it was Hoffman. The orange cuffs of his pajama legs hung below his blue trousers.

I let him stay ahead of me, through slums that became more blighted as we went south. We entered a Negro district. The adult men and women on the sidewalk gave Hoffman a wide berth. He was walking trouble.

He wasn’t walking too well. He stumbled and fell on his hands and knees by a gap-toothed picket fence. Some children came out from behind the fence and followed him, prancing and hooting, until he turned on them with upraised arms. He turned again and went on.

We left the Negro district and came to a district of very old three-storied frame houses converted into rooming houses and business buildings. A few newer apartment buildings stood among them, and Hoffman’s destination was one of these.

It was a six-story concrete structure with a slightly rundown aspect: cracked and yellowing blinds in the rows of windows, brown watermarks below them. Hoffman went in the front entrance. I could see the inscription in the concrete arch above it: Deloney Apartments, 1928. I parked my car and followed Hoffman into the building.

He had evidently taken the elevator up. The tarnished brass arrow above the elevator door slowly turned clockwise to seven and stuck there. I gave up pushing the button after a while – Hoffman had probably left the door ajar – and found the fire stairs. I was breathing hard by the time I reached the metal door that let out onto the roof.

I opened the door a crack. Except for some pigeons coohooing on a neighboring rooftop, everything outside seemed very quiet. A few potted shrubs and a green plexiglass windscreen jutting out at right angles from the wall of the penthouse had converted a corner of the roof into a terrace.

A man and a woman were sunning themselves there. She was lying face down on an air mattress with the brassiere of her Bikini unfastened. She was blonde and nicely made. He sat in a deck chair, with a half-empty cola bottle on the table beside him. He was broad and dark, with coarse black hair matting his chest and shoulders. He wore a diamond ring on the little finger of his left hand, and had a faint Greek accent.

“So you think the restaurant business is low class? When you say that you’re biting the hand that feeds you. The restaurant business put mink on your back.”

“I didn’t say it. What I said, the insurance business is a nice clean business for a man.”

“And restaurants are dirty? Not my restaurants. I even got violet rays in the toilets–”

“Don’t talk filthy,” she said.

“Toilet is not a filthy word.”

“It is in my family.”

“I’m sick of hearing about your family. I’m sick of hearing about your good-for-nothing brother Theo.”

“Good-for-nothing?” She sat up, exposing a pearly flash of breast before she fastened its moorings. “Theo made the Million Dollar Magic Circle last year.”

“Who bought the policy that put him over the top? I did. Who set him up in the insurance agency in the first place? I did.”

“Mr. God.” Her face was a beautiful blank mask. It didn’t change when she said: “Who’s that moving around in the house? I sent Rosie home after breakfast.”

“She came back maybe.”

“It doesn’t sound like Rosie. It sounds like a man.”

“Could be Theo coming to sell me this year’s Magic Circle policy.”

“That isn’t funny.”

“I think it’s very funny.”

He laughed to prove it. He stopped laughing when Earl Hoffman came out from behind the plexiglass windscreen. Every mark on his face was distinct in the sunlight. His orange pajamas were down over his shoes.

The dark man got out of his deck chair and pushed air toward Hoffman with his hands. “Beat it. This is a private roof.”

“I can’t do that,” Hoffman said reasonably. “We got a report of a dead body. Where is it?”

“Down in the basement, You’ll find it there.” The man winked at the woman.

“The basement? They said the penthouse.” Hoffman’s damaged mouth opened and shut mechanically, like a dummy’s, as if the past was ventriloquizing through him. “You moved it, eh? It’s against the law to move it.”

“You move yourself out of here.” The man turned to the woman, who had covered herself with a yellow terrycloth robe: “Go in and phone the you-know-who.”

“I am the you-know-who,” Hoffman said. “And the woman stays. I have some questions to ask her. What’s your name?”

“None of your business,” she said,

“Everything’s my business.” Hoffman flung one arm out and almost lost his balance. “I’m detective inves’gating murder,”

“Let’s see your badge, detective.”

The man held out his hand, but he didn’t move toward Hoffman. Neither of them had moved. The woman was on her knees, with her beautiful scared face slanting up at Hoffman.

He fumbled in his clothes, produced a fifty-cent piece, looked at it in a frustrated way, and flung it spinning over the parapet. Faintly, I heard it ring on the pavement six stories down.

“Must of left it home,” he said mildly.

The woman gathered herself together and made a dash for the penthouse. Moving clumsily and swiftly, Hoffman caught her around the waist. She didn’t struggle, but stood stiff and white-faced in the circle of his arm.

“Not so fast now, baby. Got some questions to ask you. You the broad that’s been sleeping with Deloney?”

She said to the man: “Are you going to let him talk to me this way? Tell him to take his hands off me.”

“Take your hands off my wife,” the man said without force.

“Then tell her to sit down and cooperate.”

“Sit down and cooperate,” the man said.

“Are you crazy? He smells like a still. He’s crazy drunk.”

“I know that.”

“Then do something.”

“I am doing something. You got to humor them.”

Hoffman smiled at him like a public servant who was used to weathering unjust criticism. His hurt mouth and mind made the smile grotesque. The woman tried to pull away from him. He only held her closer, his belly nudging her flank.

“You look a little bit like my dau’er Helen. You know my dau’er Helen?”

The woman shook her head frantically. Her hair fluffed out.

“She says there was a witness to the killing. Were you there when it happened, baby?”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. Luke Deloney. Somebody drilled him in the eye and tried to make it look like suicide.”

“I remember Deloney,” the man said. “I waited on him in my father’s hamburg joint once or twice. He died before the war.”

“Before the war?”

“That’s what I said. Where you been the last twenty years, detective?”

Hoffman didn’t know. He looked around at the rooftops of his city as if it was a strange place. The woman cried out:

“Let me go, fatso.”

He seemed to hear her from a long way off. “You speak with some respect to your old man.”

“If you were my old man I’d kill myself.”

“Don’t give me no more of your lip. I’ve had as much of your lip as I’m going to take. You hear me?”

“Yes I hear you. You’re a crazy old man and take your filthy paws off me.”

Her hooked fingers raked at his face, leaving three bright parallel tracks. He slapped her. She sat down on the gravel roof. The man picked up the half-empty cola bottle. Its brown contents gushed down his arm as he raised it, advancing on Hoffman.

Hoffman reached under the back of his coat and took a revolver out of his belt. He fired it over the man’s head. The pigeons flew up from the neighboring rooftop, whirling in great spirals. The man dropped the bottle and stood still with his hands raised. The woman, who had been whimpering, fell silent.

Hoffman glared at the glaring sky. The pigeons diminished into it. He looked at the revolver in his hand. With my eyes focused on the same object, I stepped out into the sunlight.

“You need any help with these witnesses, Earl?”

“Naw, I can handle ’em. Everythin’s under control.” He squinted at me. “What was the name again? Arthur?”

“Archer.” I walked toward him, pushing my squat shadow ahead of me across the uneven surface of the gravel. “You’ll get some nice publicity out of this, Earl. Solving the Deloney killing singlehanded.”

“Yeah. Sure.” His eyes were deeply puzzled. He knew I was talking nonsense, as he knew he had been acting nonsense out, but he couldn’t admit it, even to himself. “They hid the body in the basement.”

“That means we’ll probably have to dig.”

“Is everybody crazy?” the man said between his upraised arms.

“Keep quiet, you,” I said. “You better call for reinforcements, Earl. I’ll hold the gun on these characters.”

He hesitated for a stretching moment. Then he handed me the revolver and went into the penthouse, bumping the doorframe heavily with his shoulder.

“Who are you?” the man said.

“I’m his keeper. Relax.”

“Did he escape from the insane asylum?”

“Not yet.”

The man’s eyes were like raisins thumbed deep into dough. He helped his wife to her feet, awkwardly brushing off the seat of her robe. Suddenly she was crying in his arms and he was patting her back with his diamonded hand and saying something emotional in Greek.

Through the open door I could hear Hoffman talking on the phone: “Six men with shovels an’ a drill for concrete. Her body’s under the basement floor. Want ’em here in ten minutes or somebody gets reamed!”

The receiver crashed down, but he went on talking. His voice rose and fell like a wind, taking up scattered fragments of the past and blowing them together in a whirl. “He never touched her. Wouldn’t do that to the daughter of a friend. She was a good girl, too, a clean little daddy’s girl. ’Member when she was a little baby, I used to give her her bath. She was soft as a rabbit. I held her in my arms, she called me Da.” His voice broke. “What happened?”

He was silent. Then he screamed. I heard him fall to the floor with a thud that shook the penthouse. I went inside. He was sitting with his back against the kitchen stove, trying to remove his trousers. He waved me back.

“Keep away from me. There’s spiders on me.”

“I don’t see any spiders.”

“They’re under my clothes. Black widows. The killer’s trying to poison me with spiders.”

“Who is the killer, Earl?”

His face worked. “Never found out who put the chill on Deloney. Word came down from the top, close off the case. What can a man–?” Another scream issued from his throat. “My God, there’s hundreds of ’em crawling on me.”

He tore at his clothes. They were in blue and orange rags when the police arrived, and his old wrestler’s body was naked and writhing on the linoleum.

The two patrolmen knew Earl Hoffman. I didn’t even have to explain.