The Hour of the Cat (5 page)

Once in the war, at the start of the battle of the Ourcq, in 1918, soon before their position was almost overrun and Major Donovan was wounded, a German shell came out of nowhere and hit the rim of his foxhole, one of those 77 millimeter shells the Americans call a “whiz bang” because it exploded almost at the same time you heard it finish its descent. It would have been an instantaneously fatal explosion if Dunne hadn't been leaning down to pick up his canteen. He didn't so much remember the deafening concussion as the stunned quiet that followed, the paralyzed surprise.

A moment like this. “Who?”

“She was certain you'd take the case. She
insisted
I come.”

“Roberta Dee is a friend of yours?” Dunne's chair moaned as he leaned back; and again as he rocked forward.

“A friend and a customer. Although she could afford to go elsewhere, Miss Dee buys most of her clothes at my dress shop. She's been through the whole ordeal of the trial with me. She convinced me to stay away from the courtroom. She said the press would only use my presence to make an even greater sensation.”

“Roberta Dee who lives on Grand Army Plaza?” Dunne half expected her to smile or laugh.

“Of course,” she said. She seemed to be choking back tears. “I'll show myself out.” She didn't bother to close the door.

Jerroff poked his head into the office. “If there's a divorce involved, and Miss Corado should seek advice on financial matters, I'll give her my special rate.”

“Keep your special rate, Emile. I don't think she'll be back.” Dunne put on his hat and stepped into the hallway. When he reached the lobby, he stood beside the revolving door and studied the street. The voice from behind the glass partition called out, “Better call that cop 'cause I won't lie for any of the momsers inhabit this dump. I don't get paid enough.”

“Ask for a raise.”

In the luncheonette across the street, back to the counter, an elbow to support him, Dunne sucked a chocolate egg cream through a straw. The racks next to the window were filled with magazines, an entire shelf devoted to detective and mystery pulp. He picked up
Real Detective: Secrets of the World's Most Thrilling Profession
. The cover had a nighttime scene, the moon barely visible, a blonde in a low-cut red dress clinging to a man in a gray trench coat holding a flashlight. They were on a beach. Just beyond the reach of the torch's beam, two menacing figures approached from a boat they'd dragged ashore.
Thrills galore.
Like trying to pay the rent after a client blows several holes in her husband and puts you in a hole of your own.

A coupe pulled up outside. The two men in it eyed the door of the Hackett Building. They might as well mount an on-duty sign on the car roof. Dunne left the luncheonette and passed them on the passenger side. He didn't recognize either one, but Brannigan discarded detectives like Kleenex. Don't do it his way, you're gone before he's finished blowing his nose.

The afternoon had become a rehearsal for high summer, hot and still, a taste of worse to come. BEAT THE HEAT read the top line of the marquee on the second-run movie house next to the corner. ALL NEW AIR CONDITIONING! Beneath, in smaller letters were the features, a double bill,
Charlie Chan's Secret
and
Charlie Chan at the Opera
. Dunne glanced back at the detectives as he bought a ticket. Still studying the front of the Hackett Building, they practiced one of the less well kept secrets of the world's most thrilling profession: spending all afternoon cooped up in a stuffy automobile waiting for a mark who'd already flown.

 

 

It was as hot in the theater as out. The few patrons, most asleep, didn't seem to notice. Dunne stayed awake through the newsreels:
A grinning Mr. Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, comes out of 10 Downing Street. He bears a strong resemblance to the Professor, same ostrich neck and drooping mustache. Legions of German troops march past Adolf Hitler who returns their straight-armed salute.
By the time the young heir had been murdered in the first movie, Dunne was asleep. No need to worry about Charlie, no long, empty days for him, clients who take matters into their own hands, a chief of homicide looking for an excuse to rub his nose in the dirt. Chan always gets his man.

The usher poked Dunne with a flashlight. “Bub, wake up, you're snoring.” The newsreel was on again, Chamberlain smiling, Hitler saluting. It was almost dark when Dunne went outside, cooler than before. The coupe was gone. No use going home. Be staked out, at least for the night. Dunne took the train to 23rd Street and walked the rest of the way to Cassidy's Bar & Grill. Cassidy kept the backroom as a flop for his buddies from the regiment. Four cots, first come, first served. A lifesaver for those laying low on account of bill collectors, wives, girlfriends, bookies, cops. Dunne had a drink with Cassidy and rehashed the Babcock murder. He didn't mention he'd been sitting on a bench in Brooklyn when Mrs. Babcock shot her husband five times in a Manhattan hotel room. A dick's got his reputation to uphold.

Cassidy laid the evening papers on the bar. Dunne had already seen the headline on the newsstand next to the subway: Society Hubby Shot Dead. Cops Have Wife In Custody. Beneath the fold was the picture of Mrs. Babcock being led out of the Commodore in cuffs, stylish, smiling. Brannigan had her by the arm. He was wearing his official police face, grim and serious, but it was easy to see how pleased he was. Cassidy put on his glasses to read the front-page account. “You've got no reason to hide, Fin. Wasn't you shot nobody.”

“Brannigan will try to make it seem I did. Bet on it.”

“You'll only make it worse if you try to avoid him.”

“Have a loose end to tie up. Once I do, I'll set things straight.”

Dunne waited for the backroom to clear out. It was being used by Red Doyle for a meeting of the maintenance crew from the Fifth Avenue Coach Company, which ran the main bus lines in Manhattan and the Bronx. Doyle was regularly dispatched from the uptown headquarters of the Transit Workers Union to encourage the men in their demand for a six-day week and an end to the shape-up system that forced them to report at the beginning of each shift to see who'd be hired, who wouldn't. He used a chair as his soapbox, pushed his fingers through his dense tangle of red hair and ranted against “the plethora of plutocrats” who ran the bus company.

A trucker in a worn leather jacket, who'd sat silent and alone drinking boilermakers, slammed his shot glass down so hard on the bar that it cracked. “Shut that sheenie communist up, will you!” he yelled at Cassidy.

Cassidy picked up the bat he kept beneath the bar. “First, pay me for the glass, then get out.”

“My pleasure.” The trucker tossed a dollar at Cassidy. “Bad enough the Jews run the White House, now they're taking over the bars.” He jammed his newspaper under his arm and left.

When the meeting was over, Doyle came to the bar. “Do you have to be such a rabble-rouser?” Cassidy said. “Can't you tone it down a bit?”

“You've only heard my sweet talk. Wait till I get fired up.”

In the days when Big Mike, Dunne's old man, had been a well-known union organizer, Doyle had been an up-and-comer in labor circles. Later on, during the Red Scare when Attorney General Palmer rounded up alien radicals, Dunne read in the papers how Doyle's reputation for fiery left-wing rhetoric led to his detention. But, despite his convincing brogue, it turned out that Doyle had been born and bred in Butte, Montana, and wasn't entitled to a one-way ticket to the land of his origin. After a brief stint in federal prison, he returned to organizing, eventually joining the vanquished IRA irreconcilables who—their dream of a socialist republic smashed to smithereens by the Irish Free State—took up the cause of New York's heavily Irish transit workers.

Cassidy served Doyle a beer. “What I can't figure out about you,” he said, “is whether you're called ‘Red' on account of your politics or your hair.”

“Neither.” Doyle downed his beer in one long gulp and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “First place I worked in New York was Coney Island. Nobody bothered to tell me about the bad blood between Irish skin and the sun. Turned the color of a lobster. Italians I worked with had a good laugh. Dubbed me Red. After that I worked in sunless places, but the label of Red stuck.”

By the time the crowd cleared out and Dunne was able to get to sleep, it was after one o'clock. When he awoke, the morning light was already leaking through the blinds on the front window, tiding across the floor. Cassidy was behind the bar washing glasses. Two stubble-face men rapped on the window. Cassidy shook his head. They grumbled for a moment before they left in search of another bar, fresh pack of smokes, some way to tell one day from the next.

Cassidy looked over the papers, offering a running commentary on the growing tensions between the Germans in the Sudetenland and the Czechoslovakian Republic, to which they'd been annexed by the peace the Allies imposed in 1919. He read aloud the accusations of Konrad Henlen, the leader of the Sudeten Germans—the Czechs labeled him a “a Nazi mouthpiece”—who denounced “the perfidy of the Czechs and the arrogance of the British, the world's premier practitioners of imperial oppression.”

“Well, he's got that right,” Cassidy said. “Look at the way the Brits treated the Irish and what they did to America in the wars we fought, hangin' our patriots, burnin' the capitol and encouragin' the Indians in their savagery. ‘Arrogant,' for sure, that's the way the Brits will always be. But if they think they're gonna get us to pull their chestnuts outta the fire a second time, like we did in 1917, they're in for a nasty surprise.”

After a few more minutes of Cassidy's commentary and a cup of his watery coffee, Dunne went next door to Rostoff's Cafeteria for some bacon and eggs. Old Jules Rostoff was on the stool by the cash register, where he always was, scowling across the room. According to Cassidy, Rostoff had been a member of the original Bolshevik government in Russia but had gone sour on the Revolution and fled to New York, a conversion seemingly affirmed by the yellowed hand-made sign above the cash register:

“Rostoff's Commandments” is how Cassidy described them. “They should be added to the original ten.” Dunne finished his eggs and smoked a cigarette. A patrol car pulled up outside. One of the patrolmen entered and looked around offhandedly, his casual saunter immediately giving away his mission. The counterman handed him a bag of coffee and doughnuts, and he left without paying.

At the Turkish bath on 14th Street, the fez-wearing proprietor was slumped in an armchair, sucking a narghile. His wife handed out towels as the sons cleaned up the lockers. Dunne paid extra for a shave, which the proprietor administered in a slow, careful manner while his wife ironed Dunne's shirt and pants for free.

 

 

The morning had already gone from warm to hot when Dunne exited the IRT at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. Yet after the rank, sweltering subway, the air was gentle and refreshing. Around the great arch in the center of the Plaza, a contingent of slow-moving WPA men in green-gray coveralls tended the flowerbeds. Above, on the monument, the patinated copper soldiers brandished sabers, swords, bayonets.

The doorman let Dunne into the building without a question. If he'd connected the picture of Babcock in the papers with the lady in apartment 4C, he showed no sign of it. Expecting the elevator man might be more inquisitive, Dunne ducked into the staircase and walked the four flights. Miss Dee's apartment was at the end of the hall. He waited to catch his breath before ringing her bell. Nothing. He rang again. The peephole stayed shut, but a voice came from behind the door: “Who is it?”

“Friend of a friend, Miss Dee. Like a word with you.” Dunne turned his ear to the door and bent close. Suddenly, it swung open.

“My friends know better than to bother me unannounced.” She had the words out before Dunne could unbend from his eavesdropping.

He straightened up and removed his hat. “Miss Dee?”

“Only two types would come here unannounced. Either a detective or a dimwit.”

“I believe you know who I am, Miss Dee.”

“Let me guess.” Her lips, full and pouty, were a deep carmine, the same color as her fingernails. “Too good looking to be a detective. You must be a dimwit.”

“Unless you want your neighbors to hear, I'd suggest you invite me in.”

“You already invited yourself.” She led the way down a short hallway into a spacious living room that had the feel of a show-room in a suave department store, elegant but not really lived in. In the corner, next to a table with a lavish arrangement of rose and lavender centaurea, was a small bar. “Drink?”

“Little early, don't you think?”

“It's evening in Rome.”

“When in Rome, I guess. Scotch, a jerk of soda.”

She filled two glasses with ice, poured Scotch in one, and squirted soda from a blue syphon in both.

The image he'd had of her was from the photos Sniffles Ott had taken. A part-time snap shooter for the
Brooklyn Eagle
, Sniffles sat alone in his car waiting for Babcock. The way Sniffles liked it: A three-hundred-pound man nursing his eternal cold, nobody to complain about the incessant wheezing and snorting, rasp of phlegm being dragged up his throat. Charged twenty bucks for the job. Additional offer of snaps featuring women in black silk stockings and nothing else.

Sorry, Sniff, no sale
. A peek. Not bad.
Only what I asked for.