The Letter Writer (3 page)

“New, huh? And not from around here.”

“Scram, will you? Before I get in any deeper.”

“Okay by me. Got all I need.” Willett shut his notebook. “Good stuff on the cigarette burns. Sounds like somebody really worked him over. Decent bet he's German, which should get me a few column inches. Be seeing you.”

Cain tossed his cigarette toward the water and went off to find the morgue guy, a tall fellow as pale as a cadaver with a personality to match. He looked up from a clipboard and gave Cain a fisheye, head to toe.

“Word to the wise, Bud. Never, repeat
never,
have my people rearrange clothing or go fishing around in pockets.”

“My name's Cain,
Bud.
And I did the pockets myself.”

“Even worse.”

“Duly noted. Will you be doing the autopsy?”

“I'm not a cutter. This'll be Doc Bolton's.”

“How 'bout a favor, then? Tell Bolton that in addition to the usual items I'd like an estimate on how old the tattoo is. The one on the right shoulder that says Sabine.”

“
Duly noted.
But put it in writing, then sign these. Plus your initials on that box down at the bottom that says you disturbed the corpse. Bud.”

Cain wrote his request and signed what he had to. He sent Petrowski and the other cop home, and lit another smoke as the meat wagon pulled away. By then the reporter was gone, and things got quiet in a hurry. Nothing but the slap of the river against the bulkheads, the low roar of passing traffic up on the viaduct. Further down the waterfront you could hear hammering, a twinkle of industry, the war effort still lumbering to its feet. He stared into the murk. If his name ended up in the papers they'd probably think he was grandstanding, already playing to the crowd. Too late now.

For all his zeal in murder cases, they'd never been a big part of the job in Horton—three or four per year, six at the most. Maybe that's why they stayed with him. Back in February, during his train ride north, Cain had taken out the same notebook he was using tonight. It was three a.m., with a half-moon rising over a tidewater landscape, bare trees wild against the sky as the train clattered through the night. The other five passengers in the compartment were asleep, including, mercifully, a nosy old woman to his left who'd already asked a zillion questions.
Where's your family? Where do you go to church? How old's your daughter? Why isn't she traveling with you? Where'd you say your wife went?

The only wakeful company was his reflection on the window. He began writing in the notebook, and before long he'd filled an entire page with names, forty in all, a list of victims from every homicide he'd ever worked—in flawless chronological order, no less, complete with race, age, and cause of death.

Now, standing by the Hudson, he flipped back a few pages, and there was the list. Number eleven was his unsolved floater:
Eldridge Warren, Negro, 53, shotgun.
The other two unsolved cases were at numbers nineteen and twenty-two.
Jake Tarn, White, 37, stabbing; Janelle Ellerbe, White, 24, strangled.
Cain scanned the page. Shootings, stabbings, a drowning in a bathtub that had splashed blood and water all over the floor tiles. Three beatings—one with a crowbar, one with a shovel, one with a stone pried loose from the wall of a cemetery. A single poisoning—rat powder baked into a damson pie, the victim's favorite.

So vivid, all of them. Gaze long enough at any one name and other faces swam into view—grieving mothers and children, a father whose loud sobs had sounded like the shrieks of an elephant, right there in the middle of the police station, everyone giving him a wide berth.

Cain remembered that the nosy old woman on the train had awakened without him noticing.

“What are all the names?” she'd asked. “Friends of yours?”

“Work stuff,” he'd said irritably.
None of your damn business.

Now he wondered exactly what he'd been up to. Taking a final inventory, perhaps, like a shopkeeper listing all his merchandise before he sold the store. Did these names represent items he'd hoped to leave behind, entrusted to others? If so, did that apply even to the most memorable one?

Rob Vance, White, 34, gunshot.

Rob's name was last on the list, as if the others had been part of a process, a mechanism, that inevitably led to his death. Cain didn't even need to close his eyes to see Rob's face the way it had looked at the end, pale and drained, or the huge bloodstain soaking wet across Rob's chest, like someone had just hit him with a water balloon—a campus prank, maybe, from their days in Chapel Hill, or from their first years as cops, young detectives learning together in a job they hadn't really wanted but had taken anyway because in 1930 no one else seemed to be hiring college graduates in that part of the state. He couldn't shake that final image of his friend, dead on the floor, the shots still ringing in his ears and Rob's mouth thrown open in surprise, his eyes already too glazed to be accusing.

No problem solving that one. Cain had witnessed it from start to finish. But questions had remained, for him and for everyone else in Horton: Could Cain have done more to stop it? Had he been complicit in some way? And what about the role played by Cain's wife, Clovis? In that sense, at least, it
was
unsolved. Number four on his list. And here he was now, same notebook in hand, with a new and nameless body to go at the top of a clean page.

Cain edged closer to the water. Looming just down the Hudson were the tall, spectral silhouettes of docked ships from the cruise lines he had read about but had never sailed on—Cunard, Panama, and Munson. They'd been a part of Clovis's world, or at least the world she'd grown up in. Clovis, the Manhattan girl who traveled south for college, exiled by an overprotective father. Harris Euston's intent had been to sever her ties to the fast crowd—swank boys who plied her with drink, social-climbing girls who egged her on. Let her settle down in the provinces for a few years, he reasoned, while everyone else headed for the Ivies and the Seven Sisters. Break free from the glut of easy money, and return home with a fresh outlook.

Her father got more than he'd bargained for when she also found a husband and a whole new way of life—culturally barren, to Euston's way of thinking, since it was an existence in which she almost never set foot in New York. Since his arrival Cain had hardly been able to turn a corner without feeling her presence. He was confronted daily by all the places she used to talk about—Macy's, Fifth Avenue, Central Park, Carnegie Hall, and now the cruise lines from her long ago vacations, lush trips to Europe and the Caribbean. Everything marked by energy and glamor, her trademarks, the very things that had first caught his eye. Rob's too, probably.

He tossed his cigarette, lit a new one and turned away from the water, crossing a rail line and then pausing. The tracks down here were from all across the country—the Lackawanna, the Erie, and the B&O—all roads leading to Gotham, city of voyagers, with Cain still feeling very much like he had just landed. Then he realized something. Try as he might, all forty of those victims from Horton had somehow made it here with him. Crafty stowaways, forever his companions. Clovis, too, a spirit whispering his name from over his shoulder. The past wasn't something you left behind. It was a parasite in the bloodstream, a congenital disorder. You could only hope that others wouldn't spot the symptoms.

The only way to respond, then, was to work this case, and work it hard. Cain inspected the glowing end of his cigarette and wondered how long you'd have to press it against human skin to produce those angry black dots. Five seconds? Twenty? A full minute, perhaps? Another question for Doc Bolton at the morgue.

He was about to leave when a bright wash of headlights caught him in profile, a big car coming straight toward him as it bumped across the cobbles. No cloaking at all on the headlights. Didn't they know there was a war on?

The car stopped twenty yards out, idling, as if whoever was inside was deciding what to do next. Cain slowly reached inside his overcoat for the .32 caliber Colt revolver holstered beneath his shoulder. The cross-hatched walnut stock felt rough and chilly. Way too soon for this, no stomach for it. As he slid the gun free from the holster he felt its life-taking power, coursing up his arm like an electrical impulse.

A car door opened. A big body emerged and moved in front of the headlights. Wide-brimmed hat, bulky overcoat. No face visible, but certainly an easy target if it came to that.

“Detective Cain?”

“Who's asking?”

“Headquarters.”

“The fourteenth?”

“Downtown.”

The
headquarters, in other words, the one for the whole department down on Centre Street. A place Cain had seen, but hadn't yet visited. He'd been sworn in a week ago during an outdoor ceremony while standing in formation with more than a hundred new recruits on a windblown park square.

“Your attendance is required tomorrow at twelve thirty. Room 114-B.”

“Says who?”

“Come on your lunch break, and keep it to yourself. Not a word to Captain Mulhearn or any of your asshole buddies in the station house.”

“Says
who
?”

“Twelve thirty sharp. 114-B. You'll be expected.”

The engine revved as the guy stepped out of the beams and climbed back in. The car made a slow U-turn, leaving Cain in darkness as he watched the tail lights wink around the corner at Tenth.

What the hell could they want with him at headquarters? And why all the secrecy? Was he already in trouble? Fired, even? Then a mud-smelling breeze off the water reminded him of what they'd just fished out of the river. He shivered, and set out for the station house.

He moved slowly at first, his leg stiff from all the standing around. The cold wind made him crave a warm bed, which in turn made him think again of Clovis, his wife, on silken sheets in some posh uptown hotel, the Plaza or the Astor, waiting for him in some other life where he'd never been a cop and she'd never traveled south. Plenty of blame for both sides, he supposed. Then the image was gone, and with each step afterward he felt the pressure of a hidden presence to his rear. Something creeping toward him from the river, building like a wave. He stopped, pivoting to face the shadows.

Nothing.

He resumed his journey. Muscles loosening, he quickened his pace, and did not look back.

No choice now but to keep moving forward.

IN THE MORNING CAIN DECIDED
it was time to stop living like a vagabond hermit. Two months in the city and he was still taking his clothes from a suitcase and keeping to himself.

He looked around the apartment, a modest one-bedroom flat in Chelsea, where he lived among garment workers, furriers, and butchers. The building was stout and modern, wedged between tenement houses with their clotheslines and chaos, the black zigzags of the fire escapes. Best address in the neighborhood, according to his father-in-law, although Harris Euston had made it clear he was providing it on behalf of his granddaughter Olivia, who'd be arriving later.

By Manhattan standards it was about as clean and roomy as you could get for $60 a month. The building had an elevator, hot water, a doorman. But the way Cain had been using it so far was more befitting of a flophouse. The dresser drawers remained empty. His mattress lay on the floor, which was as bare as the walls. In the icebox was a bottle of milk, nothing more. The tiny eat-in kitchen, hardly used, was as spotless as the day he moved in. He ate instead in cheap diners and luncheonettes, some of them barely wide enough for a counter.

Once he'd splurged on dinner at a Horn & Hardart automat. Now there was a place perfectly designed to make you feel alone. No one to take your order or bring your food. All you needed was a few nickels to open the tiny windows—a bowl of stew from this one, a slice of pie from that one, with the empty slots refilled before you took your first bite. You came and went without speaking to a soul. If this was the future of American dining, he wanted no part of it.

The only visible sign that Cain was still part of polite society was the pile of letters on the kitchen table. He corresponded daily with Olivia, reading her letters the moment he got home and scribbling replies until well after midnight. She kept him apprised of the doings at his sister's house in Raleigh in a tone that was newsy, chirpy, although he sensed she was not all that happy. Sue, Cain's sister, wasn't known for a light touch, and Olivia's stories implied that an unaccustomed strictness prevailed. No more freewheeling mom who mixed a nightcap—or two or three—after the dinner dishes were put away. No more flashlight searches with Dad for owls hooting in the longleaf pines out front. No more reading in bed once the call for lights-out was issued promptly at nine.

But it wasn't so easy to read his daughter's moods anymore, even between the lines of a five-page letter. She was now twelve going on thirteen—the beginning of the age of concealment, as Cain knew from his own youth. Considering all the upheaval that had preceded his departure, he supposed he should be happy she was writing him at all. So, rather than press her for more details, Cain tried to prepare her for New York's wonders without hinting at its terrors and indignities, or its noises, or the exhausting way so many faces came at you on the street and in the subway. On his first few nights in the apartment he'd barely been able to sleep because he'd been so overwhelmed by the sense of so many people living above, below, and to every side of him—people who spoke other languages, dressed differently, and were neither still nor silent. He'd felt hemmed in by their calls and cries, the scrape of their chairs, the slam of their doors, the groan of their windows in the sash. For a day or two it had almost been difficult to breathe.

But, now, with a fresh case, new colleagues, a daily routine, a desk to call his own and even a shitty new boss to complain about, maybe he should work a little harder to settle in.

It also didn't hurt that spring had arrived. Until recently his outlook had remained frozen in the images of February—curbside banks of gray slush, towering aisles of dirty wet buildings, looming like megaliths. Then, almost overnight, sprigs of green had burst from every urban fissure like a long-held breath. In the parks, blossoms fluttered to the ground. Kids raced down his street at all hours in games of tag and stickball while, from open windows, radios blared the first games of the baseball season—Red Barber calling it for the Dodgers, Mel Allen for the home-standing Yankees and Giants.

So that morning Cain moved his clothes into the dresser drawers. He set up the cheap bed frame he'd gotten at a secondhand shop. He bought fruit from a street vendor's horse-drawn wagon. He picked up three newspapers, a loaf of bread, a carton of eggs, a slab of bacon, and a pound of coffee. Then, with coffee perking and bacon popping in the skillet, he unfolded his map of the city to begin plotting the day's movements: first stop, Yorkville, the neighborhood supposedly filled with krauts.

A car would've made the trip even more of an expedition. But between his junior status and the department's wartime rationing, cars were now exclusively for big bosses and radio patrol officers. Even Mulhearn had lost his eight-cylinder Hudson, and Cain was only authorized to hail a cab on the city's dime in an emergency. That meant he was truly a flatfoot, a gumshoe. He traced his finger along a map, following the colorful spaghetti threads for the subways and omnibus lines. A crosstown walk would take him from the station house to the IRT stop for the Lexington line at 33rd. From there, six stops north to 86th, the so-called German Broadway, where he'd poke around until it was time for his appointment at headquarters.

He threw open a window. Cold and gray this morning, but he could live with that now. He stuffed his notebook in his overcoat pocket and headed for the streets.

After what the reporter had said, Cain half expected Yorkville to feel more like Berlin than Manhattan. The reality was more complicated. Initially it didn't look all that different from the rest of the city. There was even an Automat and a Woolworth's, plus a Thom McAn shoe store just like the one he'd taken Olivia to in downtown Raleigh.

It was the sounds that first told Cain the place was different. After he climbed the stairs from the subway the first conversation he heard was in German—two older men arguing, gesturing theatrically, cigarettes bobbing on their lips. The only other times he'd heard German spoken recently were in newsreels of Hitler and Goebbels. Back home a cop's first instinct would have been to lock these fellows up, or at least ask what they were up to. If there had been even a single German family in Horton, everyone would have watched their every move. Here there seemed to be thousands, stretched out for blocks in tenements beneath the Third Avenue El.

Cain headed east on 86th. He passed a travel agency that called itself a Reiseburo, with gold lettering on the storefront touting the availability of “Schiffskarten und Reisechecks.” There were so many beer halls, or
brauhausen,
that Cain soon lost count—Platzl, Rudi & Maxl's, Geiger's, Willy's Weindiele, Café Hindenberg, Kaiser's, Martin's Rathskeller, Kreutzer Hall, and more. Yet, in the middle of everything there was also an Irish pub called the Shamrock Bar, and other places, like the Eatmore Delicatessen Deutsche, that seemed to straddle several cultures at once. A joint called the Lorelei was already doing a rollicking trade at eleven a.m., and Cain's stomach grumbled as he smelled the smoky sizzle of wurst, the yeasty tang of beer. But even there he saw signs of change to accommodate anti-German sentiment. A sign in one window with a drawing of sauerkraut billed it instead as “Liberty Cabbage.”

A colleague at the station house had told him that before Pearl Harbor quite a few businesses here had displayed swastikas in their windows, or portraits of Hitler. Yorkville had been a hotbed for the Nazi organization known as the American Bund, and as recently as a few months ago beefy fellows had brazenly gone door to door collecting money for the Reich. One bunch claimed to be taking donations for the Fatherland's wounded soldiers. Another supposedly peddled Reichsmarks for dollars, a shady currency scheme designed to pump cash into Hitler's war machine. Both groups pressured potential donors by tracking down names and addresses of their relatives back in Germany:
Please give unless you want things to go badly for Uncle Hans in Dusseldorf!
Nice fellows. No swastikas or roaming bands of thugs now, of course, but Cain doubted everyone's political views had changed overnight.

Then again, some of the Germans here—maybe even a lot of them—had come to Yorkville to escape Hitler. So had other newcomers from Hungary and Czechoslovakia. As if that dynamic wasn't volatile enough, Cain noticed several storefronts with Hebrew lettering. If any had been previously defaced by Bundist thugs, the damage had long since been repaired. Maybe for now they'd earned some peace.

Cain breezed by Herrlich's Funeral Home and the Vaterland Café and Restaurant as he finally reached the upper end of Yorkville. He made his way over to Third Avenue and 96th, where he found the movie theater, a two-story building that had seen better days. It was closed, just as the reporter had said, with a big padlock on the front door. Posters in the display cases were already fading. A set of double windows on the second floor had been covered from the inside with bed sheets. It looked like the place was empty. He nonetheless rattled the big lock, then pounded on the whitewashed glass door. No response.

He stepped over to a display case for a closer look at a poster for a propaganda film,
Sieg im Westen,
which touted Germany's conquest of Belgium and the Netherlands. Someone had painted anti-Nazi graffiti on the glass.

A tapping noise startled him from behind. He turned to see a young woman in the ticket booth. She had apparently just entered from the theater, yet was already enshrouded by cigarette smoke. More astonishing was the way she was dressed, or not dressed. Temperatures were in the forties on this chilly spring morning, yet she wore a gauzy black negligee, open in the front, with only a lacy black bra underneath. Her face was striking for its lack of color, all whites and blacks like in a publicity still, except for her lips, lacquered a deep red. Her dark eyes were heavily lined, lashes full. Pale pancake makeup coated her face, or maybe that was her natural complexion, practically drained of blood. Her hair, as glossy as the feathers of a raven, was bobbed in a pageboy that left her long white neck exposed.

She tapped again on the glass and spoke in a voice muffled by the compartment.

“Alles geschlossen. Acht uhr.”

“What?”

“We are all closed. Until eight. Then showtime.”

“Eight? This place is still open?” She nodded. He opened his overcoat to show his detective's shield, feeling like a flasher—probably because of how he was reacting to all that bare flesh. The oddest part was that her skin didn't show a single goose bump.

She frowned.

“So you are not come for the show?”

“I have a few questions about one of your customers.”

She considered this a moment, then nodded wearily. “Um die ecke. Around the corner, then to the back. There is a door in the alley.”

Cain made his way around to a black steel door in a rear alley where the cobbles reeked of stale beer, with broken bottles underfoot. He hammered at the door, which groaned on rusted hinges to reveal a dark hallway. She began walking away before he was even inside. High heels and black hose, with a ladder-back run down the left thigh. Still no sign that she was the least bit cold. She led him behind what looked like the back of a movie screen before turning left at the end. They emerged into a vast theater, cold and dim, at least fifty rows leading up into complete darkness. Pigeons fluttered above, cooing and resettling. The dusty air was nearly as chilly as outside. The soles of Cain's shoes stuck to the floor with every step, with a sound like he was tearing pages out of a magazine.

A skittering noise from behind made him jump.

“Rat,” she said blandly. “Not to worry. You will find many here. Even among the ownership.”

“And who does own this place now?”

She took a seat in the front row, her stockings making a zipping noise as she crossed her legs. Looking as comfortable as if she were settling in for a double feature, she poked out her lower lip and exhaled smoke toward the ceiling.

“Albie Schreiber and Joel Feinman. Two Jewish boys.”

Cain was too surprised to answer.

“Yes. No one expects that. Especially the Bundists, who become outraged to learn they have paid money to a Jew.”

“But the place is still running?”

“Not for kino, or cinema. Distributor of German films, he is kaput. So a floor show now. Live act.”

“You?”

“And other girls. A revue, I think it is called. With piano.” She pointed toward the corner. “Plinky plink. Sometimes a singer. And still with popcorn.”

So maybe the dead man had been here recently, after all, to watch a floor show instead of a movie. Just the sort of seedy place you'd expect to be frequented by someone who ended up with cigarette burns on his chest.

“What's your name?”

“Angela.” She pronounced it with a hard
g,
the German way. Her breath vapored as she spoke. “Tell me, is it warm in here to you?”

“Not especially. Not at all, in fact.”

“No. I suspected not.”

He wondered what she was on. Pills? A needle?

“Are there other girls in the revue?”

“Three. Sometimes four.”

“Any of them named Sabine?”

She stared at him a moment, then slowly shook her head. A quicker no would've been more convincing.

“Is that why you are here? Looking for this Sabine?”

“I'm here about a man with a Sabine tattoo. He had a ticket stub from this theater in his pocket.”

“His name?”

Cain shrugged.

“So he is dead man, then?”

“How'd you know?”

“How else would you take ticket from his pocket and not know his name?”

“And you don't know who he might be, this customer with a thing for a Sabine?”

“Many men come. Many have ‘a thing,' as you say, for all kinds of girls.”

Angela included, no doubt, especially if these were the only clothes she ever wore. Did she live here? His mind flashed on the image of some hidden room with a bare bulb, a cot, a table, a hypodermic syringe. Maybe a few scraps of food, a grimy towel. He felt a stab of weary pity. He got out his notebook.