Investigation (11 page)

Mrs. Hogan stopped speaking abruptly as the realization hit her. Her mouth fell open; she blinked rapidly, but no tears spilled from under her glasses. Her hands shook and she buried them under her wrinkled apron.

“Mrs. Hogan.” I wasn’t sure how to ask her. Her face had gone totally pale. She seemed suddenly fragile, her strength drained away by reality. There really was only one way to ask the question: ask it.

“Mrs. Hogan, yesterday when you first arrived at your daughter’s apartment, when you first saw her, you said to her,
‘Kitty, what have you done?’
Why did you ask her that, Mrs. Hogan? Why did you think
Kitty
had done something to her boys?”

Her mouth fell open; her face froze. She stared at me with magnified eyes behind her smudged glasses. Slowly she began to move her head from side to side. Her hand clutched at empty folds of skin along her neck. “No, I never.
I never, never
said such a thing. Sweet Mother of God,
I never.”

She hadn’t realized that she had actually spoken the words; really believed she had only thought them. Beyond her, the graduation portrait of Kitty caught my attention: the uneven combination of innocence and challenge; a certain gleam coming from the eyes that wasn’t merely a reflection of the photographer’s lights; the slightly parted, moist lips, about to speak. To say something. But I couldn’t think what.

This woman didn’t know anything about her daughter’s life; they had been separated from each other by more than years. I stood up, apologized that I had been mistaken. She took my extended hand awkwardly for a limp shake and led me down the hallway to the door.

After I stepped into the outside hall, I turned to see her once more; there was something vaguely familiar as she turned her face upward. Something I had seen before: a fleeting reminder of a long-gone beauty eroded by a hard and bitter life. Mary Hogan still had a hint of her daughter’s beauty.

Mrs. Sophie Silverberg was a patient at Long Island Jewish Hospital and was considered seriously ill. The young bearded doctor who confronted me had exhausted, bloodshot eyes. He told me that Mrs. Silverberg could not be questioned; she had had surgery four days ago and had gone into shock when she heard about the Keeler boys on the radio.

“I’ll be brief; I’ll do my best not to upset her.”

The doctor shook his shaggy curly head. He brought his hand up to his wide sweaty forehead, trying to think of a simple way to get his message across. “Look, there is
no way
you can see her. She practically raised those kids. Aside from the emotional shock, she’s had a real physical setback.”

“Okay, Doctor, I understand. Don’t worry about it. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

He let out a long, annoyed groan. “No, you
don’t
understand. It won’t be any different tomorrow. I will not let you see her tomorrow either.”

“Sure you will. I’ll have a court order, Dr. Wood.” His name was on a white nameplate with black letters hung sideways on his white jacket. “If you refuse to honor it, you’ll have to get all tied up in a court proceeding which will be a pain in the ass for you and me both.”

He believed me. He listed a few warnings. “She’s an elderly lady, would you keep that in mind? I mean, you won’t come on strong with her or anything?”

“I
was
planning to kick her around a little. You know, just to keep in practice. I haven’t worked an old lady over since last Thursday.”

He narrowed his bloody eyes at me and said, “You know, I
believe
you.”

Mrs. Silverberg was propped up on pillows and her knotted hands trembled as she moved her fingers along the edges of her blue quilted bed jacket. She kept a wad of crumpled tissues in each of her hands and dabbled at her eyes from time to time, pushing her rimless glasses up and then back into place.

The odor of illness, medications and sadness surrounded her. At the center of everything else, undisguised by her freshly bathed and powdered body, clean nightgown, hint of cologne, fragrance of fresh flowers, there was the unmistakable, undeniable odor of impending death. Mrs. Silverberg did not have long.

She sucked loudly on a peppermint Life Saver which she had first offered to me. We spoke quietly; she was a lot tougher than the young doctor gave her credit for.

She had loved those boys. She had taken care of them almost from the first, even when Terry was brand new and there was that little Scotch girl, Margie. Almost from the day they were born. The boys went as naturally to her apartment as they did to their own. They had two homes; they called her Nana.

“They were more family to me than my own grandchildren. My own, they live in California and once a year, maybe once every two years, they come here or they ask me to fly out there. Why would I want to fly out there? Five, six hours on the plane, and then they don’t know me, I don’t know them. Strangers; they’re all growing up, my grandchildren, teenagers already. They drive their own cars. We don’t know each other; they’re uncomfortable around me. What do I need that for?

“My Georgie, my Terry. My beauties,” she said, “from the time they were infants, I would go next door with a little gift, a little sweater, a pair of booties, a hat. I used to do very nice work before the arthritis. I knitted, I crocheted. But now the fingers are too stiff. Too stiff.”

“They were lucky to have you, Mrs. Silverberg.”

She moved her head from side to side. “No. Me. Me. I was the lucky one. Oh my God, those poor babies, those poor babies.”

“Mrs. Silverberg, tell me something about Mrs. Keeler.”

Her breath caught, her eyes blinked, she dabbed at the tears which ran down her face. “Kitty? My darling, darling Kitty. Oh, that is a good, lovely, lovely girl. The face, so beautiful, like a movie star. And good as good. The last time, last year, when I was in the hospital for the gallstones, every day my Kitty came or she sent George. And flowers, and bed jackets she brought me. And when I came home, there was a nurse to take care of me. A nurse she got for me and paid for, herself. My children, my college-graduate daughters, you think they thought of such a thing? A
nursing home,
they said.” She lifted her chin and with a flash of spirit and pride told me, “My Kitty said
no!
No nursing home. My children, they told me, it’s all arranged, a very nice place in Long Beach by the ocean. What do they know, three thousand miles away? They see a booklet and the pictures all look pretty, so send Mama there and that’s that. But Kitty, she sent her friend out to see for himself and he sees what’s what, behind the pictures. And I stayed in my
own home,
with a nurse to take care of me.”

“Do you remember the name of Kitty’s friend, the man who checked out the nursing home for you?”

“Who remembers? Kitty is a wonderful girl. People, you know, they see her, all the time going, running, going out, dressed so nice. So they say things.” She studied me shrewdly. “You know what kind of things I mean. Because she knows a lot of men. They’re jealous because she’s young and beautiful and so ... so alive. They don’t know her, my Kitty. But
I
know her. She is beautiful not just on the outside.” She tapped her chest. “In here, where it counts, my Kitty is beautiful.”

She seemed to have gotten stronger with the need to tell me about Kitty Keeler.

“She works hard, that girl, so hard. Like little movie stars she dresses her children. The best clothes, not just for herself, but for them too. And for George. Beautiful suede jackets she got for him, and suits. At discount, from friends she has. When she was a girl, ah ...” Mrs. Silverberg moved her hands, turned them palms up. “She was so poor. All her childhood, only wearing school uniforms and hand-me-downs. Now she works so hard for good things. Nothing cheap, no junk. She has such good taste, my Kitty.”

I remembered the closet filled with all kinds of clothing: the obsessively arranged colors.

“Mrs. Silverberg, what about George? George Keeler?”

She sighed, then carefully studied me. “You’re thinking in your head, why did she marry George? He is so much older, like a father he is to her. And that’s part of it, yes. Kitty never really had a father. So young she lost her father. And for most of her life, she has known George. No man in the whole world could be as good to Kitty like George is. And she, she is good for him, too. Don’t listen to the little gossips around the neighborhood. What they don’t know, they make up. Kitty is a loving, loving girl.” She pressed her trembling hand over her pale thin lips for a moment, then said in a thick voice, “She is my daughter. To me,
Kitty is my daughter!”

The shaggy, bloody-eyed young doctor looked in and blinked at me a few times. I had been planning to leave anyway, but I let him think it was his idea. I reached out and held the bony, gnarled hand lightly on the flat surface of the bed; applied a gentle, light pressure.

“Mrs. Silverberg, do you think you could try to remember the name of the man that Kitty had check out the nursing home for you?”

She shrugged. “One of the men from her place where she works, I think. I don’t know. A lot of men Kitty knows. A rough-looking man with dark hair.” She frowned, straining to recall. “With a face, it was so mean it would scare you on the television. But he was so nice, so kind, so good. He said, ‘No mother of mine would go to a place like that.’ That’s what he said. A good man, you can’t judge a book by its cover. He can’t help he has a mean-looking face. My daughters’ husbands, smart, handsome professional men, they dress like the magazine pictures, with the fancy haircuts—they go to ‘stylists,’ if you please, for a haircut and they go to Europe and Mexico and Hawaii for vacations, but when it comes to
caring,”
she moved her shoulders, “forget it. Forget it.” She blew her nose and pressed the tissue into a wet ball in her hand. “For
caring,
thank God, thank God,
I have my Kitty.”

W
HEN I CHECKED WITH
my office, Neary told me that the Porsche was cleared and had been released to the Keelers. Patti MacDougal’s boyfriend and a few other people had confirmed that she had spent the evening with them, but still no corrob on her having gone to the Keeler’s apartment at 2:30
A.M.

“It would really be nice if someone remembers seeing the Scotch girl in the parking lot.”

“Scots
girl,” I told Tim.
“Scotch
is something you drink.”

“Screw you, Joe. Listen, I sent that son-of-a-bitch Catalano over to Keeler’s place in Sunnyside to check George out. Meet him over there, Joe. See if you can get a line on George. Then send the s.o.b. for statements from
everybody
who was at Keeler’s Wednesday night. That oughtta keep him busy.”

A couple of years ago, Sunnyside had been mostly Italians, Irish and Jews, in that order. It was a small, tight Queens community that had formed its identity around a couple of churches, an orthodox and a reform synagogue and a collection of Irish bars, Italian bakeries and restaurants, kosher butchers and delis. It was also the home of Sunnyside Garden, scene of less than notable boxing and wrestling matches. The neighborhood was still hanging on, but changes were taking place, slowly and surely. The corner pharmacy now had a small sign in the window announcing that Spanish was spoken here; there were a couple more bodegas than a year or so ago, to cater not so much to a sprinkling of Puerto Ricans as to a growing number of Cubans who were buying the comfortable attached one-family homes on the side streets. There were several Greek food and specialty shops, apparently run by a huge family: all the muscular dark-haired young guys looked related. Some of the nonethnic grocery and chain stores carried what was called “Caribbean specialties” to lure the illegal immigrants from the islands, an uncertain number of phantoms who creeped out at dawn to factory jobs and came back late at night to sleep in a crowded subdivided apartment for which they paid a greedy landlord an exorbitant rate.

George Keeler owned the two-story building where his bar, Keelers Korner, was located. The building also housed, at street level, a somewhat dirty-looking French-Italian bakery, a small lamp store, a Hebrew printing company. Upstairs, on the second floor, George had his apartment and two small offices which were rented out, one to a lawyer and one to a C.P.A. Both of those tenants used the offices primarily as a mail drop.

The building had been erected in 1906 in what was probably considered at the time to be a highly handsome style. The gray stone facade was heavily ornamented along the top edge with what appeared to be a bunch of fat cherubs dancing with a bunch of mythical fat animals. Here and there were masklike faces of what looked like grinning devils: probably thinking dirty things about the cherubs and the animals.

Keeler’s Korner was exactly that: a tavern with the doorway set into the corner of the building. Keeler had bought the entire building in late 1968 and had refurbished what had been a seedy neighborhood tavern into his idea of an Irish pub. He had installed heavy leaded-glass windows, surrounded by simulated old beams of wood in a crisscross pattern. Here and there were some diamond-shaped inserts of glass scenes depicting what looked like Crusaders on horses. Over the entrance was a gable, apparently supported by the same type of simulated beams to give an old, authentic, real-Irish-village-pub effect. Surrounded by bright-green metal shamrocks was a sign, directly over the doorway,
KEELER’S KORNER.
The entire facing had been stuccoed over and painted a dull beige to fit in with the wooden-beam décor.

Sam Catalano was leaning comfortably at the bar, talking with two new good friends. He introduced me to them with the warmth reserved for members of a secret society.

The barman, a big chunky guy with a round soft pinkish face that went right back to his balding skull, was Danny Fitzmartin. His grip was bone-crushing and at odds with his nice soft sweet Irish voice and easy smile.

The waitress, Lucille something, had a wet limp handshake. Even in the dim light, it was obvious that Lucille had known better days. She was so thin she was almost transparent, and the great bubble of bright-red hair overwhelmed her sharp narrow face. Her makeup was vivid and the mascara ended in little lumps at the ends of her false eyelashes. She and Sam had already established a certain understanding. When he sat down again on the bar stool next to hers, their knees touched.