The McBain Brief Page 16

  “How often?”

  “Two, three times a week. No, less.”

  “When’d you see her last?”

  “Last night.”

  “Before that.”

  “Last . . . Wednesday, I guess it was. Yeah.”

  “Why’d you date her?”

  “I don’t know. Why do you date girls?”

  “Why’d you date this girl? Why’d you date Jean Ferroni?”

  “I don’t know. She’s . . . she was a nice kid. That’s all.”

  “You serious about her?” Johnny asked.

  “Well . . .”

  “You been sleeping with her?”

  “No. No. I mean . . . well no, I wasn’t.”

  “Yes or no?”

  “No.”

  “What time did you pick her up last night?”

  “Eight-fifteen. I told you . . .”

  “Where’d you drop her off?”

  “Gun Hill and White Plains.”

  “What time was this?”

  “About eighty-thirty.”

  “Why’d you date her so much?”

  “I heard she was . . . hell, I don’t like to say this. I mean, the girl’s dead . . .”

  “You heard what?”

  “I heard she was . . . hot stuff.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Around. You know how the word spreads.”

  “Who’d you hear it from?”

  “Just around, that’s all.”

  “And you believed it?”

  “Well, yeah. You see, I . . .” He stopped short, catching himself and his tongue.

  “You what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Johnny said. “Now.”

  “All right, all right.” He fell into a surly silence, and Johnny and I waited. Finally, he said, “I saw pictures.”

  “What kind of pictures?”

  “You know. Pictures. Her. And a guy. You know.”

  “You mean pornographic pictures?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then say what you mean. Where’d you see these pictures?”

  “A guy had them.”

  “Have you got any?”

  “No. Well . . . I got one,” the kid admitted. “Just one.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  He fished into his wallet and said, “I feel awful funny about this. You know, Jean is dead and all.”

  “Let’s see the picture.”

  He handed a worn photograph to Johnny, and Johnny studied it briefly and passed it to me. It was Jean Ferroni, all right, and I couldn’t very much blame the Tocca kid for his assumption about her.

  “Know the guy in this picture?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Never seen him around?”

  “No.”

  “All right, kid,” Johnny said. “You can go to work now.”

  Richard Tocca looked at the picture in my hand longingly, reluctant to part with it. He glanced up at me hopefully, saw my eyes, and changed his mind about the question he was ready to ask. I got out of the car to let him out, and he walked to his Ford without looking back at us. The questioning had taken exactly seven minutes.

  Johnny started the car, and threw it into gear.

  “Want me to drive?” I asked.

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “This puts a different light on it, huh?”

  Johnny nodded.

  We staked out every candy store and ice cream parlor in the Gun Hill Road to 219th Street area, figuring we might pick up someone passing the pornos there. We also set up four policewomen in apartments, thinking there was an off chance someone might contact them for lewd posing. The policewomen circulated at the local dances, visited the local bars, bowling alleys, movies. We didn’t get a rumble. The Skipper kept us on the case, but it seemed to have bogged down temporarily.

  We’d already gone over the dead girl’s belongings at her home. She’d had an address book, but we’d checked on everyone in it, and they were all apparently only casual acquaintances. We’d checked the wallet the girl was carrying on the night of her murder. Aside from the In-Case-Of card, a social security card, and some innocent pictures taken outside the high school with her girl friends, there was nothing.

  Most of her high school friends said, under questioning, that Jean Ferroni didn’t hang around with them much anymore. They said she’d gone snooty and was circulating with an older crowd. None of them knew who the people in the older crowd were.

  Her teachers at school insisted she was a nice girl, a little subdued and quiet in class, but intelligent enough. Several of them complained that she’d been delinquent in homework assignments. None of them knew anything about her outside life.

  We got our first real break when Mrs. Ferroni showed up with the key. She placed it on the desk in front of Johnny and said, “I was cleaning out her things. I found this. It doesn’t fit any of the doors in the house. I don’t know what it’s for.”

  “Maybe her gym locker at school,” I said.

  “No. She had a combination lock. I remember she had to buy one when she first started high school.”

  Johnny took the key, looked at it, and passed it to me. “Post office box?” he asked.

  “Maybe.” I turned the key over in my hands. The numerals 894 were stamped into its head.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Ferroni,” Johnny said. “We’ll look into it right away.”

  We started at the Williamsbridge Post Office right on Gun Hill Road. The mailmen were very cooperative, but the fact remained it wasn’t a key to any of their boxes. In fact, it didn’t look like a post office key at all. We tried the Wakefield Branch, up the line a bit, and got the same answer.

  We started on the banks then.

  Luckily, we hit it on the first try. The bank was on 220th Street, and the manager was cordial and helpful. He took one look at the key and said, “Yes, that’s one of ours.”

  “Who rents the box?” we asked.

  He looked at the key again. “Safety deposit 894. Just a moment, and I’ll have that checked.”

  We stood on either side of his polished desk while he picked up a phone, asked for a Miss Delaney, and then questioned her about the key. “Yes,” he said. “I see. Yes, thank you.” He cradled the phone, put the key on the desk and said, “Jo Ann Ferris. Does that help you, gentlemen?”

  “Jo Ann Ferris,” Johnny said. “Jean Ferroni. That’s close enough.” He looked directly at the manager. “We’ll be back in a little while with a court order to open that box. We’ll ask for you.”

  “Certainly,” the manager said, nodding gravely.

  In a little over two hours, we were back, and we followed the manager past the barred gate at the rear of the bank, stepped into the vault, and walked back to the rows of safety deposit boxes. “894,” he said. “Yes, here it is.”

  He opened the box, pulled out a slab and rested the box on it. Johnny lifted the lid.

  “Anything?” I asked.

  He pulled out what looked like several rolled sheets of stiff white paper. They were secured with rubber bands, and Johnny slid the bands off quickly. When he unrolled them, they turned out to be eight by ten glossy prints. I took one of the prints and looked at Jean Ferroni’s contorted body. Beside me, the manager’s mouth fell open.

  “Well,” I said, “this gives us something.”

  “We’ll just take the contents of this box,” Johnny said to the manager. “Make out a receipt for it, will you, Mike?”

  I made out the receipt and we took the bundle of pornographic photos back to the lab with us. Whatever else Jean Ferroni had done, she had certainly posed in a variety of compromising positions. She’d owned a ripe, young body, and the pictures left nothing whatever to the imagination. But we weren’t looking for kicks. We were looking for clues.

  Dave Alger, one of the lab men, didn’t hold out much hope.

  “Nothing,” he said. “What did you expect? Ordinary print paper. You can get the same stuff
in any home developing kit.”

  “What about fingerprints?”

  “The girl’s mostly. A few others, but all smeared. You want me to track down the rubber bands?”

  “Comedian,” Johnny said.

  “You guys expect miracles, that’s all. You forget this is science and not witchcraft.”

  I was looking at the pictures spread out on the lab counter. They were all apparently taken in the same room, on the same bed. The bed had brass posts and railings at the head and foot. Behind the bed was an open window, with a murky city display of buildings outside. The pictures had evidently been taken at night, and probably recently because the window was wide open. Alongside the window on the wall was a picture of an Indian sitting on a black horse. A wide strip of wallpaper had been torn almost from ceiling to floor, leaving a white path on the wall. The room did not have the feel of a private apartment. It looked like any third-rate hotel room. I kept looking at the pictures and at the open window with the buildings beyond.

  “You think all we do is wave a rattle and shake some feathers and wham! we got your goddam murderer. Well, it ain’t that simple. We put in a lot of time on . . .”

  “Blow this one up, will you?” I said.

  “Why? You looking for tattoo marks?”

  “No. I want to look through that window.”

  Dave suddenly brightened. “How big you want it, Mike?”

  “Big enough to read those neon signs across the street.”

  “Can do,” he said.

  He scooped up all the pictures and ran off, his heels clicking against the asphalt tile floor.

  “Think we got something?” Johnny asked.

  “Maybe. We sure as hell can’t lose anything.”

  “Besides, you’ll have something to hang over your couch,” Johnny cracked.

  “Another comedian,” I said, but I was beginning to feel better already. I smoked three cigarettes down to butts, and then Dave came back.

  “One Rheingold beer billboard,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “And one Hotel Mason. That help?”

  The Hotel Mason was a dingy, grey-faced building on West Forty-Seventh. We weren’t interested in it. We were interested in the building directly across the way, an equally dingy, gray-faced edifice that was named the Allistair Arms.

  We walked directly to the desk and flashed our buzzers, and the desk clerk looked hastily to the elevator bank.

  “Relax,” Johnny said.

  He pulled one of the pictures from under his jacket. The lab had whitened out the figures of Jean Ferroni and her male companion, leaving only the bed, the picture on the wall, and the open window. Johnny showed the picture to the desk clerk.

  “What room is this?” he said.

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “Look hard.”

  “I tell you I don’t know. Maybe one of the bellhops.” He pounded a bell on the desk, and an old man in a bellhop’s rig hobbled over. Johnny showed him the picture and repeated his question.

  “Damned if I know,” the old man said. “All these rooms look alike.” He stared at the picture again, shaking his head. Then his eyes narrowed and he bent closer and looked harder. “Oh,” he said, “that’s 305. That picture of the Injun and the ripped wallpaper there. Yep, that’s 305.” He paused. “Why?”

  I turned. “Who’s in 305?”

  The desk clerk made a show of looking at the register. “Mr. Adams. Harley Adams.”

  “Let’s go, Johnny,” I said.

  We started up the steps, and I saw Johnny’s hand flick to his shoulder holster. When the hand came out from under his coat, it was holding a .38. I took out my own gun and we padded up noiselessly.

  We stopped outside room 305, flattening ourselves against the walls on either side of the door.

  Johnny reached out and rapped the butt of his gun against the door.

  “Who is it?” a voice asked.

  “Open up!”

  “Who is it?”

  “Police officers. Open up!”

  “Wha . . .”

  There was a short silence inside, and then we heard the frantic slap of leather on the floor.

  “Hit it, Johnny,” I shouted.

  Johnny backed off against the opposite wall, put the sole of his shoe against it, and shoved off toward the door. His shoulder hit the wood, and the door splintered inward.

  Adams was in his undershirt and trousers, and he had one leg over the windowsill, heading for the fire escape, when we came in. I swung my .38 in his direction and yelled, “You better hold it, Adams.”

  He looked at the gun, and then slowly lowered his leg to the floor.

  “Sure,” he said. “I wasn’t going anyplace.”

  We found piles of pictures in the room, all bundled neatly. Some of them were of Jean Ferroni. But there were other girls and other men. We found an expensive camera in the closet, and a darkroom setup in the bathroom. We also found a switch knife with a six-inch blade in the top drawer of his dresser.

  “I don’t know anything about it,” Adams insisted.

  He kept insisting that for a long time, even after we showed him the pictures we’d taken from Jean Ferroni’s safety deposit box. He kept insisting until we told him his knife would go down to the lab and they’d sure as hell find some trace of the dead girl on it, no matter how careful he’d been. We were stretching the truth a little, because a knife can be washed as clean as anything else. But Adams took the hook and told us everything.

  He’d given the kid a come-on, getting her to pose alone at first, in the nude. From there, it had been simple to get her to pose for the big stuff, the stuff that paid off.

  “She was getting classy,” Adams said. “A cheap tramp like that getting classy. Wanted a percentage of the net. I gave her a percentage, all right. I arranged a nice little party right in my hotel room. Six guys. They fixed her good, one after the other. Then I drove her up to her own neighborhood and left her the way you found her—so it would look like a rape kill.”

  He paused and shifted in his chair, making himself comfortable.

  “Imagine that broad,” he continued. “Wanting to share with me. I showed her.”

  “You showed her, all right,” Johnny said tightly.

  That was when I swung out with my closed fist, catching Adams on the side of the jaw. He fell backward, knocking the chair over, sprawling onto the floor.

  He scrambled to his feet, crouched low and said, “Hey, what the hell? Are you crazy?”

  I didn’t answer him. I left the Interrogation Room, walking past the patrolman at the door. Johnny caught up with me in the corridor, clamped his hand onto my shoulder.

  “Why’d you hit him, Mike?” he asked.

  “I wanted to,” I said. “I just wanted to.”

  Johnny’s eyes met mine for a moment, held them. His hand tightened on my shoulder, and his head nodded almost imperceptibly.

  We walked down the corridor together, our heels clicking noisily on the hard floor.

  A Very Merry Christmas

  Sitting at the bar, Pete Charpens looked at his own reflection in the mirror, grinned, and said, “Merry Christmas.”

  It was not Christmas yet, true enough, but he said it anyway, and the words sounded good, and he grinned foolishly and lifted his drink and sipped a little of it and said again, “Merry Christmas,” feeling very good, feeling very warm, feeling in excellent high spirits. Tonight, the city was his. Tonight, for the first time since he’d arrived from Whiting Center eight months ago, he felt like a part of the city. Tonight, the city enveloped him like a warm bath, and he lounged back and allowed the undulating waters to cover him. It was Christmas Eve, and all was right with the world, and Pete Charpens loved every mother’s son who roamed the face of the earth because he felt as if he’d finally come home, finally found the place, finally found himself.

  It was a good feeling.

  This afternoon, as soon as the office party was over, he’d gone into
the streets. The shop windows had gleamed like pot-bellied stoves, cherry hot against the sharp bite of the air. There was a promise of snow in the sky, and Pete had walked the tinselled streets of New York with his tweed coat collar against the back of his neck, and he had felt warm and happy. There were shoppers in the streets, and Santa Clauses with bells, and giant wreaths and giant trees, and music coming from speakers, the timeless carols of the holiday season. But more than that. For the first time in eight months, he had felt the pulse beat of the city, the people, the noise, the clutter, the rush, and above all the warmth. The warmth had engulfed him, surprising him. He had watched it with the foolish smile of a spectator and then, with sudden realization, he had known he was part of it. In the short space of eight months, he had become a part of the city—and the city had become a part of him. He had found a home.

  “Bartender,” he said.

  The bartender ambled over. He was a big red-headed man with freckles all over his face. He moved with economy and grace. He seemed like a very nice guy who probably had a very nice wife and family decorating a Christmas tree somewhere in Queens.

  “Yes, sir?” he asked.

  “Pete. Call me Pete.”

  “Okay, Pete.”

  “I’m not drunk,” Pete said, “believe me. I know all drunks say that, but I mean it. I’m just so damn happy I could bust. Did you ever feel that way?”

  “Sure,” the bartender said, smiling.

  “Let me buy you a drink.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Bartenders never drink, I know, but let me buy you one. Please. Look, I want to thank people, you know? I want to thank everybody in this city. I want to thank them for being here, for making it a city. Do I sound nuts?”

  “Yes,” the bartender said.

  “Okay. Okay then, I’m nuts. But I’m a hick, do you know? I came here from Whiting Center eight months ago. Straw sticking out of my ears. The confusion here almost killed me. But I got a job, a good job, and I met a lot of wonderful people, and I learned how to dress, and I . . . I found a home. That’s corny. I know it. That’s the hick in me talking. But I love this damn city, I love it. I want to go around kissing girls in the streets. I want to shake hands with every guy I meet. I want to tell them I feel like a person, a human being, I’m alive, alive! For Christ’s sake, I’m alive!”