“Hello there, we have a message for you. The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Thank you for calling and please give our number to a friend. This is a recorded response. Hello there, we have a message for you. The gift of God is—”
I passed Brannigan the receiver. He listened a minute, hung it up and then stood there picking his teeth with a discolored thumbnail. If the glad tidings had made his day any brighter he was doing his best to hide it. “The Black Knight of Germany,” he said after a little.
“I’m listening.”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. I was just remembering a game we used to play on the barn roof, being air aces after the first war. Me and two other kids. The names we always used were von Richthofen, Eddie Rickenbacker and Georges Guynemer. They always stick together in my mind, always in the same order.”
“Too early for me. Tom Mix, Buck Jones and Ken Maynard, maybe. Which one do you want to see first?”
“That Ned Sommers I suppose. Bank Street’s only two blocks up.”
I called Sally before we went out, telling her that Duke had been roped and that she could come home. She had been asleep. It occurred to me that I could probably use some sack time myself, but it had not caught up with me yet. We left the key under the rubber again.
It was pushing eleven o’clock and the asphalt was already the texture of secondhand chewing gum. They had cleared out the intersection up at Seventh. Brannigan drove the half-block to Fourth Street and turned north.
“You expect to get anything out of these guys?” I asked him.
“Who knows? Some background, anyhow. We’ll take it all back to the office later and sort it out with everything else that comes in. Hell, it’s all routine, you know how it goes.”
“I suppose,” I said.
The address we had for Ned Sommers was a beat-up old brownstone with an entrance below street level. Four chipped slate steps went down past a battered regiment of empty trash cans into a tile alcove. It said Sommers — 1-R, on one of the bells, but the front door was unlatched and we went in without ringing. Uncarpeted steps went up again along the left-hand wall but 1-R would probably be back under them. The hallway smelled like a sanatorium for cats with kidney disorders. We found the door where we expected it to be and Brannigan knocked.
It took a minute, and then the door did not open.
“Who is it?”
“Ned Sommers?”
“Who wit?”
“Sommers?”
It could go on that way until one of them got laryngitis before Brannigan would say “Police.” More than one accommodating flatfoot has gotten his wife’s name on the department’s relief list for needy widows by doing that. He just stood there waiting calmly. Finally we got a crack big enough to pass mail through.
“Ned Sommers?”
He peered out at us, furrowing his forehead. He was a sallow-faced man of about twenty-eight, lean almost to the point of being undernourished. I judged him to be close to six-feet-even but he would not have gone in as more than a welterweight. He had wavy black hair which he had gotten cut for his grade school graduation and not since, pale brown eyes and a nose which had been flattened once. It was a nose which might have made another man look belligerent. It only made Sommers look like someone who ought to have known better. He was wearing cord slacks and nothing else, and if he had been dressed there would have been a library card in his shirt pocket.
“I’m Sommers,” he said finally.
One of his hands was on the inside knob and his other was on the door jamb. Brannigan identified himself then, flashing his shield. “We’d like to ask you some questions.”
Sommers continued to frown at us. “Questions about what? I’m pretty busy.”
We were standing there. Sommers had glanced behind himself, pursing his lips. He turned back. “Let me get a shirt on. I’ll come out.”
“Step away from the door,” Brannigan told him.
“Oh, now look, a man has a right to privacy in his own—”
He moved aside. He had to, since Brannigan was already on his way in. The expression on his face suggested that he would have liked nothing better than to bop one of us with a choice volume of the Cambridge History of English Literature. I could see the fall set on the wall behind him, along with what looked like every other juicy bit of bedtime reading from The Nicomachean Ethics to The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones. I couldn’t see the woman, but she would be behind the door someplace.
She wasn’t quite, but only because the bed wasn’t there. It was along the far wall to our left. She was sitting up in it with the sheets drawn around her shoulders. I supposed she might have ducked into another room if that hadn’t been the only room there was.
One room. It seemed hardly adequate for Sommers’s creative pursuits. The books went from floor to ceiling along two walls. There were enormous piles of what must have been every issue of the New York Times since Harper’s Ferry and Sommers appeared to be reading all of them simultaneously. There were copies of Time with pictures of Neville Chamberlain and John Nance Garner on the covers. There were a hundred different photographs tacked on the two empty walls, and every one of them was of Ernest Hemingway.
The girl’s clothes were scattered among the debris as if she’d been caught in a cyclone without enough safety pins.
She was staring at us, still as cut stone. An adder being held by the back of the jaws would have had the same expression in its eyes. She was a Negro and as beautiful a girl as I had ever seen.
Brannigan turned to Sommers, red-necked. “Out front,” he said. “And make it quick.” He turned around and went out without looking at me.
We waited at the foot of the steps below the sidewalk. Across the way a sign in an unwashed store window said: Sonny Tom Laundry Will Moving at Monday for Corner Fourth Street Down-flight. Brannigan had taken out a cigar and stripped it but did not light up.
Sommers got there in a minute. He had pulled on a yellow sports shirt and thonged leather sandals and he was smoking.
He glanced at me, dismissed me as a mere adjutant, then waited expressionlessly for Brannigan.
Brannigan was above him on the steps. “I suppose you were here all night?”
“Most if it, yes.”
“What time did you get in?”
“Three-thirty, perhaps four. Why?”
“Any other people with you before that?”
“Yes. Two or three young writers who come to me for advice and—”
“Where?”
“The White Horse Tavern, then a coffee shop down on Mac-dougal. Exactly what is all this, anyhow?”
“There any gap between the time you left the others and came here?”
“No, none at all. They walked me up, in fact. These other fellows haven’t been published yet, so it’s sort of an obligation to let them hang around as much as they—”
“Okay, okay, you’re a famous writer and the disciples cluster around like flies. We get the general drift, Sommers. The girl with you all evening long?”
Sommers’s face had darkened. He didn’t answer.
“I asked you if the girl was around all night.”
“Yes. Now look, I don’t think I have to answer any of this. If I don’t get an explanation I—”
“ Wherfs the last time you saw Catherine Hawes?”