“Why shoot a man who’s doing everything you’re telling him to do?” Reardon said. “He was moving over to the bar. just the way they told him.”
“So what?” Farmer said.
“You say this happened at midnight?” Ruiz asked the old lady.
“Yes. twelve o’clock sharp,” she said. She was wearing a woolen hat pulled down over her ears. She was wearing a black cloth coat. She was wearing leg warmers over her pantyhose, but she didn’t look like a Broadway dancer.
“If you come in to rob a place, why do you shoot a man without robbing anything?” Reardon asked.
“He’s got a point, Loot,” Gianelli said.
“Knocked on the door and said he was your husband, huh?” Ruiz said.
“That’s right,” the old lady said.
“Stop looking for mysteries, Reardon,” Farmer said.
“I’m saying...”
“There are no mysteries in police work. There are only crimes and the people who commit those crimes.”
“Maybe it was your husband,” Ruiz said. “Was your husband home at the time?”
“My husband’s been dead for twenty years,” the lady said.
“Oh,” Ruiz said. “Okay, let’s take down some information, okay?”
“You’ve got two hungry punks here who tried to rip off a restaurant,” Farmer said. “And panicked. And killed the owner. That’s what you’ve got here.”
“If they were so hungry...” Reardon said.
“Run it by the book,” Farmer said. “Ask your questions, check your M O. file, find out which punks just got paroled after doing time for armed robbery. You got a man commits an armed robbery, he’s going to do it again and again ’cause it’s the only line of work he knows.”
The phone on Hoffman’s desk rang. He picked up the receiver.
“Fifth Squad,” he said. “Detective Hoffman.”
“I wouldn’t have shot a man before I cleaned out the register,” Reardon said. “Not if I went in there to steal.”
“Me, neither,” Gianelli said.
“Uh-huh.” Hoffman said into the phone. “Just a second, okay?”
“Who says thieves have to make sense?” Farmer asked, and tossed the D.D. report onto Reardon’s desk. “Get a copy of this to Homicide,” he said. “And Reardon...”
“Bry? For you,” Hoffman said.
“Find those punks,” Farmer said, and limped into his office.
Reardon picked up the extension phone.
“Hello?” he said. “Oh, Martin, good, glad you got back to me.”
“What apartment was this?” Ruiz asked the old lady.
“Apartment fourteen,” she said.
“And you say this was around midnight.”
“Midnight exactly,” the lady said.
“Well, what I want to know is does she have the right to send my kid to Jersey,” Reardon said into the phone. He listened. “Her parents there,” he said, and listened again. “Sixty-five, something like that. Her father used to work for the phone company, he’s retired now.” He listened again.
“Has this happened before?” Ruiz asked.
“All the time,” the lady said.
“What?” Ruiz said.
“What?” Reardon said. “Well, how the hell do I know if we can show they’re unfit?”
“What do you mean by all the time?” Ruiz asked.
“Every night,” the lady said.
“Every night?”
“At midnight. I think he’s in love with me.”
“Uh-huh,” Reardon said into the phone. “Uh-huh. All right, how about this afternoon sometime? No, I can’t right now, Martin. How about lunch? Well, when are you free? Okay, two o’clock, I’ll see you then, fine,” he said, and hung up.
“Do you know who this man is?” Ruiz said.
“Yes. He’s John Travolta,” the lady said.
Ruiz looked at her.
“He’s in love with me,” she said.
“Who was that?” Hoffman asked Reardon.
“My lawyer,” Reardon said. “The fucking asshole.” He glanced quickly to where the old lady was now telling Ruiz about Travolta jumping off the screen one time to kiss her.
“What’s the problem now?” Hoffman asked.
“I’m trying to see my daughter, that’s the problem.”
“Calm down,” Hoffman said. “I’m not the one who sent her to Jersey.”
“Yeah,” Reardon said, but he was still steaming.
Hoffman picked up the report from where Farmer had dropped it on the desk. “There’s something missing from this,” he said.
“There’s a lot missing from it,” Reardon said.
“Calm down, willya?”
“There’s a goddamn family been busted up for no reason at all,” Reardon said.
“Whose family are you talking about, Bry?” Hoffman asked. “The D’Annunzios... or yours?”
Reardon stared at him.
Ruiz said, “I’ll call Mr. Travolta personally and tell him to stop bothering you.”
“No, don’t tell him to stop bothering me,” the lady said. “Just tell him to stop doing it so late at night.”
“I’m sorry,” Reardon said.
“Just don’t let it get to you, okay?” Hoffman said.
“What about the report?”
“Remember the people we were questioning on the street?”
“Yeah?”
“Where was Sadie?”
“Who?”
“Sadie. The shopping bag lady. She’s usually in that doorway across from the restaurant, isn’t she? That’s where she lives. Bry. That doorway is her home.”
“Maybe she went south for the holidays,” Reardon said. “Found herself a warmer doorway on Chambers Street.”
“I think we ought to look for her,” Hoffman said.
“Tell him to bother me around nine, nine-thirty,” the old lady said as she left the squadroom.
New York City’s Bowery was a desperate place at any time of the year, but today, with soot-stained snow piled against the gutters and a harsh wind blowing, it seemed more forbidding than usual. The drunks appeared paralyzed. Normally, they would be out in the middle of the street, offering to wipe the windshields of cars stopped for traffic lights, hoping to pick up a quarter here, a nickel there. Or they would be on the sidewalks, making their pitch to whatever pedestrian happened to pass, people here to shop the various wholesale supply houses that lined either side of the avenue. Below Delancey, you had your stores selling lighting fixtures and a handful of stores selling glassware and cutlery. Above Delancey, the restaurant supply stores took over in earnest — kitchen equipment, cash registers, china, plumbing, pizza ovens — and in the midst of all this, an advance scout probing enemy terrain, was a lone Chinese chicken market. The drunks, the homeless of this city, sat huddled in doorways, staring glassy-eyed into the cold, all of them candidates for freezing to death. The thermometer outside one of the banks on Canal Street had read twelve degrees when Reardon and Hoffman drove past it. It felt colder than that now that they were out of the car.
“It’s the wind-chill factor,” Hoffman said.
They played the canvass by the book, the way Farmer would have liked it.
“Lady in her sixties. Her name’s Sadie. The shopping bag lady. Sadie. You seen her around?”
“What’s her last name?” a drunk asked. He was sitting in a doorway near the Bowery Mission. He had tied newspapers around his trouser legs. He had wet his pants, and the urine had soaked through the newspapers.
“We don’t know her last name. She’s Sadie. She’s around all the time. Everybody knows Sadie.”
“Don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” the drunk said.