“The job’s finished, I know that. But it still bothers me.”
“Okay,” said Crawley. He sat down behind the desk again and put his feet up on the scarred desk top. “Let’s straighten it out. Where does it bother you?”
“All over. Number one, motivation. You don’t kill a man for being a pompous ass. Not when you turn around a minute later and say he was your best friend.”
“People do funny things when they’re pushed far enough. Even to friends.”
“Sure. Okay, number two. The murder method. It doesn’t sound right. When a man kills impulsively, he grabs something and starts swinging. When he calms down, he goes and turns himself in. But when you poison somebody, you’re using a pretty sneaky method. It doesn’t make sense for you to run out and call a cop right after using poison. It isn’t the same kind of mentality.”
“He used the poison,” said Crawley, “because it was handy. Gruber bought it, probably had it sitting on his dresser or something, and Perkins just picked it up on impulse and poured it into the beer.”
“That’s another thing,” said Levine. “Do you drink much beer out of cans?”
Crawley grinned. “You know I do.”
“I saw some empty beer cans sitting around the apartment, so that’s where Gruber got his last beer from.”
“Yeah. So what?”
“When you drink a can of beer, do you pour the beer out of the can into a glass, or do you just drink it straight from the can?”
“I drink it out of the can. But not everybody does.”
“I know, I know. Okay, what about the library books? If you’re going to kill somebody, are you going to bring library books along?”
“It was an impulse killing. He didn’t know he was going to do it until he got there.”
Levine got his feet. “That’s the hell of it,” he said. “You can explain away every single question in this business. But it’s such a simple case. Why should there be so many questions that need explaining away?”
Crawley shrugged. “Beats me,” he said. “All I know is, we’ve got a confession, and that’s enough to satisfy me.”
“Not me,” said Levine. “I think I’ll go poke around and see what happens. Want to come along?”
“Somebody’s going to have to hand the pen to Perkins when he signs his confession,” said Crawley.
“Mind if I take off for a while?”
“Go ahead. Have a big time,” said Crawley, grinning at him. “Play detective.”
Levine’s first stop was back at Gruber’s address. Gruber’s apartment was empty now, having been sifted completely through normal routine procedure. Levine went down to the basement door under the stoop, but he didn’t go back to Gruber’s door. He stopped at the front apartment instead, where a ragged-edged strip of paper attached with peeling scotch tape to the door read, in awkward and childish lettering, SUPERINTENDENT. Levine rapped and waited. After a minute, the door opened a couple of inches, held by a chain. A round face peered out at him from a height of a little over five feet. The face said, “Who you looking for?”
“Police,” Levine told him. He opened his wallet and held it up for the face to look at.
“Oh,” said the face. “Sure thing.” The door shut, and Levine waited while the chain was clinked free, and then the door opened wide.
The super was a short and round man, dressed in corduroy trousers and a grease-spotted undershirt. He wheezed, “Come in, come in,” and stood back for Levine to come into his crowded and musty-smelling living room.
Levine said, “I want to talk to you about Al Gruber.”
The super shut the door and waddled into the middle of the room, shaking his head. “Wasn’t that a shame?” he asked. “Al was a nice boy. No money, but a nice boy. Sit down somewhere, anywhere.”
Levine looked around. The room was full of low-slung, heavy, sagging, over-stuffed furniture, armchairs and sofas. He picked the least battered armchair of the lot, and sat on the very edge. Although he was a short man, his knees seemed to be almost up to his chin, and he had the feeling that if he relaxed he’d fall over backwards.
The super trundled across the room and dropped into one of the other armchairs, sinking into it as though he never intended to get to his feet again in his life. “A real shame,” he said again. “And to think I maybe could have stopped it.”
“You could have stopped it? How?”
“It was around noon,” said the super. “I was watching the TV over there, and I heard a voice from the back apartment, shouting, ‘Al! Al!’ So I went out to the hall, but by the time I got there the shouting was all done. So I didn’t know what to do. I waited a minute, and then I came back in and watched the TV again. That was probably when it was happening.”
“There wasn’t any noise while you were in the hall? Just the two shouts before you got out there?”
“That’s all. At first, I thought it was another one of them arguments, and I was gonna bawl out the two of them, but it stopped before I even got the door open.”
“Arguments?”
“Mr. Gruber and Mr. Perkins. They used to argue all the time, shout at each other, carry on like monkeys. The other tenants was always complaining about it. They’d do it late at night sometimes, two or three o’clock in the morning, and the tenants would all start phoning me to complain.”
“What did they argue about?”
The super shrugged his massive shoulders. “Who knows? Names. People. Writers. They both think they’re great writers or something.”
“Did they ever get into a fist fight or anything like that? Ever threaten to kill each other?”
“Naw, they’d just shout at each other and call each other stupid and ignorant and stuff like that. They liked each other, really, I guess. At least they always hung around together. They just loved to argue, that’s all. You know how it is with college kids. I’ve had college kids renting here before, and they’re all like that. They all love to argue. Course, I never had nothing like this happen before.”
“What kind of person was Gruber, exactly?”
The super mulled it over for a while. “Kind of a quiet guy,” he said at last. “Except when he was with Mr. Perkins, I mean. Then he’d shout just as loud and often as anybody. But most of the time he was quiet. And good-mannered. A real surprise, after most of the kids around today. He was always polite, and he’d lend a hand if you needed some help or something, like the time I was carrying a bed up to the third floor front. Mr. Gruber come along and pitched right in with me. He did more of the work than I did.”
“And he was a writer, wasn’t he? At least, he was trying to be a writer.”
“Oh, sure. I’d hear that typewriter of his tappin’ away in there at all hours. And he always carried a notebook around with him, writin’ things down in it. I asked him once what he wrote in there, and he said descriptions, of places like Prospect Park up at the corner, and of the people he knew. He always said he wanted to be a writer like some guy named Wolfe, used to live in Brooklyn too.”
“I see.” Levine struggled out of the armchair. “Thanks for your time,” he said.
“Not at all.” The super waddled after Levine to the door. “Anything I can do,” he said. “Any time at all.”
“Thanks again,” said Levine. He went outside and stood in the hallway, thinking things over, listening to the latch click in place behind him. Then he turned and walked down the hallway to Gruber’s apartment, and knocked on the door.
As he’d expected, a uniformed cop had been left behind to keep an eye on the place for a while, and when he opened the door, Levine showed his identification and said, “I’m on the case. I’d like to take a look around.”
The cop let him in, and Levine looked carefully through Gruber’s personal property. He found the notebooks, finally, in the bottom drawer of the dresser. There were five of them, steno pad size loose-leaf fillers. Four of them were filled with writing, in pen, in a slow and careful hand, and the fifth was still half blank.