The Hour of the Cat (6 page)

Along with the pictures of Babcock were three that Sniff had taken from a distance of the lovebird herself: Miss Roberta Dee. The thing to keep in mind about cameras, Dunne reminded himself, was how often they lied, how they can make an average face seem exquisite or turn extraordinary beauty into the humdrum.

In Sniffles' photos, Roberta Dee appeared fashionably attractive, the way half-a-hundred women on the street did; in the flesh, she was striking. Her face was older than Miss Corado's, and there was nothing virginal or innocent about it. But her slate-blue eyes were bright, clear, wide. She had soft waves running through her auburn hair which, though perhaps tinted or dyed, was thick and lustrous. Hers was a hard beauty, polished, like marble or jade.

She handed him the glass with Scotch in it. He took a sip and stepped over to the window. A perfect view of Grand Army Plaza. The arch. The new library. The park. A perfect view also of the bench from which he'd watched Babcock's comings and goings.

“Have a seat.” She gestured to a large plush chair. The cushion was so soft and yielding Dunne felt for a moment as if his bottom might hit the floor. He planted his elbows on the armrests and jacked himself up. She sat on the couch across from him.

“You're lucky you're alive, Miss Dee.”

“Aren't we all?” She folded her shapely legs and stretched her arms across the back of the couch, glass in her right hand, bodice of her knit dress tight against the firm curve of her breasts.

“Suppose you heard?”

“Who hasn't?”

“Didn't think you'd be this broken up.”

She sipped the soda. “If you want to watch a woman have a good cry, try Garbo in
Camille
. It's still playing at the Kings Theater in Flatbush.”

“Don't suppose the police have been here.”

“I don't suppose you'll send them.”

“I wasn't the only one saw Babcock come in and out.”

“You, Morello the doorman, and Jimmy the elevator boy were the only ones who noticed. They're taken care of. Besides, last thing they want is to lose a couple of days work sitting around waiting to testify about a dead man's doings.”

“Mrs. Babcock followed him
here
, you might be singing a different song.”

“I always sang the same song with Clem. I made him take the train to Court Street and take a cab from there.”

“Doesn't mean he couldn't be followed.”

“By you? Yes. By his wife? She's not the type to travel all the way to Brooklyn. Look, in case you haven't figured it out, Clem and I had a business deal, pure and simple. I took care of certain of his needs. He did the same for me.”

“Tell you he was off to The Commodore Hotel?”

“What he did when he wasn't with me was his own affair, and vice versa. I'm sorry about what happened to him and wish he'd been more sensible, which is probably the way you feel about Mrs. Babcock. Always hate to lose a customer.”

Above her head, an elaborately framed painting of a beach at night, silver moon penetrating the clouds, shining across sand and angry sea, a pathway of light, looked like a candidate for the wall of some museum or movie lobby, except there was something foreboding about it, threatening, as though a body were about to bob to the surface. He'd seen it before. But where?

“Another?” Without waiting for an answer, she got up, took his glass and went over to the bar. She put more Scotch in the glass; quick spray of soda. She handed him the drink. “What say we get to what really brings you here?”

“Which is?”

“Elba Corado. I told her to look you up. Said you were an ex-cop who wasn't also a crook or an Irish son-of-a-bitch. Best of all, you know the homicide routine. She told me she'd used my name. I figured you'd be here before long.”

“You seem to know a lot about me.”

She went to the window, leaned back against the radiator cover and motioned with her head toward the street. “First time I looked out and saw you sitting there, I knew you were a tail. I watched you scribbling away in your notebook as Clem arrived and left. It wasn't hard to figure. Jimmy confirmed it for me.”

“Jimmy?”

“The elevator boy.”

“Likes to play both sides.”

“He's got six kids. Plays any side that pays. Do you blame him?”

“You didn't let Babcock know?”

“Clem didn't hire me to be a private eye.”

“Don't tell me Jimmy recommended me for the Corado case.”

“No, Lenny Moss did.”

He had to give it to her: She knew how to keep a conversation going. “I don't know any Lenny Moss.”

“You did.”

“That Lenny Moss got dead a while ago. If you were one of his girls, sorry to say I got no recollection.”

“Sorry for who?”

“Whoever.”

“I wasn't Lenny's girl. We grew up together in Brownsville and hung out in the same crowd on Rockaway Avenue. My mother worked with his in the needle trade. He was Lenny Moskowitz back then. Tall, handsome, and wild. We did a lot of partying together, then Lenny went away to jail. After he got out, I didn't see him again for awhile, not until he was arrested again and put on trial.”

“Which trial?”

“The last.”

“I testified at it.”

“I know. His mother had nobody to go to the trial with her. She asked me.”

“Lenny was a second-rate
shtarke
and a first-rate
stupe
. Let himself go to the chair for a crime he didn't commit.” He could have added “third-rate pimp,” but didn't. He searched his memory for some image of Roberta Dee. Not a trace of her but the trial was still there, fresh and vivid.

“Lenny knew he was a dead man,” she said. “So he made a deal. If his mother were taken care of, he'd take the fall. He did, she was.”

“Ask me, it was a lousy reason to let himself be electrocuted.”

Brannigan had been put on the case on orders from the department's higher-ups. A deal had already been cut. In the wake of the general strike by the garment workers in '26, “Little Augie” Orgen had battled Legs Diamond for control of the industry's protection racket. Arnold Rothstein tried to broker a peace but just when it seemed ready to take, Orgen had two of Legs's men machine gunned on 14th Street. A professional tommy-gun job, combination of blunderbuss and Waring blender, ten rounds of .45 caliber bullets at a velocity capable of penetrating a quarter-inch of steel that blew Legs's men through the plate-glass window of Brookstein's Shoe Emporium and covered the display of suede and patent-leather footwear with a shower of blood.

The city's editorial writers hollered for investigations of the gangs, the police, the city administration. Mayor Jimmy Walker sat down with Rothstein. Tammany and the mob both wanted the heat off. Rothstein promised to deliver the culprit, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Orgen offered up Lenny Moss as a sacrificial lamb. Brannigan pretended to investigate.

Dunne knew it was a set-up, but refused to go along. He didn't back up Brannigan's canned testimony when he was called to the stand. They got Moss anyway. On the way out of the courtroom, Brannigan pulled him aside.

After the Moss case, Inspector William Hanlon, a taciturn, honest cop, was pushed aside. Brannigan was promoted to Borough Inspector and made head of the Homicide Squad. He saw to it that any time an old man was found hanging from a light fixture, his last act before reaching the Happy Hunting Ground to shit his pajamas, Dunne was sure to get the case. Corpse in there three days with the windows closed before the neighbors call the cops. When some mop jockey gave his wife a hundred whacks with a rusty shovel and splashed her brains across the basement floor, everybody knew who'd get the call. Hubby doesn't try to run or get away. Cradles the corpse in his arms. Not exactly a case for Charlie Chan. The nights there were no bughouse homicides were spent at the morgue waiting for the results of one of Doc Cropsey's autopsies, listening to him gripe and guzzle cheap bootlegged whiskey.

That last night, in the spring of '29, there was a call from a warehouse on 12th Avenue. A clerk opened a locker that a renter defaulted on, pulled down a trunk that crashed to the floor, and spilled out the skeletal remains of three babies. Address of the renter turned out to be an empty lot in the Bronx. Doc Cropsey said the skeletons were full-term triplets. Suffocated at birth, probably. The most unglamorous, underreported crime of all: babies in varying states of decay in trash cans, basement corners, railroad restrooms, underpasses, wherever. He estimated they'd been dead several years.

It was a beautiful spring morning when the shift was over and it was time to get back to headquarters. The sky was streaked with hues of red and blue, dawn's early light. Dunne threw the badge on the desk.
You win, Brannigan.
The Hackett Building felt like heaven those first few months. He'd hardly given the homicide business another thought, until now.

 

 

Roberta returned to the couch and stretched out in the same position as before. “That day you testified, I was in the back, in a cloche hat, next to Lenny's mother.”

“Didn't notice. I had other things on my mind.”

“Lenny said you were the only cop who didn't lie.”

“Got juiced all the same.”

“I saw him in Sing Sing. He said he never met a cop but you who didn't lie when it was convenient or he was told to. He couldn't seem to get over it.”

Dunne drained his drink. “So you wait ten years to look me up and let me know Lenny Moss thought I was okay? Wish I could say I was grateful, only I'd be lying.”

“It was you looked me up.”

She had a point.

“And after a view of me once ten years ago in a crowded courtroom, you look out the window and recognize me from four stories up? Quite a feat.”

“I didn't know it was you, not from here. I thought it might be. It wasn't till I tailed you back to your office I was sure.”

“No man ever followed me I didn't know it.”

“Last time I looked I wasn't a man.”

The moon in the painting above her head contained the vague suggestion of a face, craters for eyes, a nose. Mister Moon seemed to be winking.

“All this to help the brother—excuse me, half brother—of your dressmaker? Sorry, Miss Dee, but I can't figure why you got involved in this, or better yet, why I should.”

“Because Elba Corado is different.”

“From what?”

“You and me. Elba thinks this is a world where the good, the true, and the beautiful should come out on top. You and me, we know that the beautiful does okay, long as it lasts, but where'd goodness and truth ever get anyone? Wouldn't it be nice, this once, to see the good and the true at least finish in the money? That's why I sent Elba to you. She loves her brother, and love can take us to the strangest places. It's made her so passionate about his innocence that it's like a religion with her. I figured any dick in this town gives her an honest shake, it'd be you.”

“I already got a religion.” He pushed himself out of the chair, feeling woozy as he did. He knew what he should do: go home, piss out the Scotch, have a nap, visit Brannigan, and start looking for another divorce case. “Besides, I don't come cheap.”

“She has her own business. I'm sure she'll meet your terms, but she'll want her money's worth. What she doesn't want is some worm working from the cockeyed notion of turning this into a romance.”

“Do I look like some dime-store gigolo?”

“You look like a man, which means it's better to be up front at the starting gate and let you know this is a race for geldings.”

She led him to the door.

From where he stood, the picture on the far wall seemed to have darkened. Mister Moon was missing his smile. He remembered what it reminded him of: the cover of
Real Detective,
only the couple and the approaching thugs were missing.

“I'll let Elba know you've agreed. She'll be thrilled.” She pecked him lightly on the cheek. The passing touch of her lips: a kiss, almost. Her breasts pressed for an instant against his arm, a professional goodbye. “You're a
mensch
.”

The day had turned cloudy and rain seemed imminent. Grand Army Plaza was almost empty. The strollers were gone, and the WPA crew. No one around to defend or watch over, the figures on the monument seemed forlorn. Roberta Dee was up to something besides the pursuit of the good and the true. He'd had the same uneasy feeling with Mrs. Babcock. A feeling you couldn't acquire by reading
Real Detective
. It came the hard way.

Some day he might be smart enough to pay attention to it.

He lifted the notebook from his pocket and, starting to write a list of the people he'd want to talk to about Walter Grillo, realized he didn't even know the name of the nurse Grillo had been convicted of killing or the date set for his execution. A lot he didn't know. But the minute he put the notebook away and walked toward the subway, he knew he was being tailed.

Since taking power, Adolf Hitler has silenced or sent into exile most of his opponents. He has also won the loyalty of large numbers of Germans, many of whom were skeptical at best and hostile at worst. Georg D., a foreman in a shoe factory in the northeast part of Berlin that has lately been given over to producing boots for the army, is a case in point. He walks with a slight limp, the result of being shot in the hip by a British sniper during the war. “I work all the time now, but I'm not complaining,” he says. “Better to be exhausted than unemployed. Three years I was out of work. We barely had enough to eat. My boy got crooked legs from the rickets.” Each evening, after leaving the factory, Georg D. and his comrades stop in a nearby tavern to talk and drink beer. Most of the conversation is about sports, not politics. Georg D. observes that “Men talk only politics when they're frightened or unhappy. That is not the situation now.”