How do you buy things without money?
You don’t.
The Cadillac agency from which Kramer had purchased the automobile reported that it had been purchased during the latter part of the preceding September, and that Kramer had paid for it in cold, hard cash. The Buick station wagon had been purchased on the same day from an agency across the street in Isola’s Automobile Row. Again, the purchase had been made in cash.
Kramer had rented his apartment in September. He had paid for the furniture and the decorator in cash. The total bill had come to $23,800. His suits had been ordered in September, delivered in October. They had cost him $2,000—and he had paid for them with green United States currency.
Kramer, in short, had barefootedly run through $36,000 in cash in less than a month—and had managed to acquire a lovely mistress named Nancy O’Hara during that same wild spending spree. And then, on October twenty-third, he had deposited the staggering amount of $21,000 in his bank account!
From where had that original $36,000 come?
And from where had the subsequent deposits of $21,000 in October, $9,000 in January, and $15,000 in April come?
And had that $15,000 deposit been intended as the last one? Or had more payments been scheduled to come? Who had been making the payments? Who had already paid a total of $81,000, and had this person been let off the hook only because Kramer was now dead?
And had not the extortion of $81,000 been sufficient reason for murder?
The body of Sy Kramer lying in the morgue seemed to indicate that it had indeed been reason enough.
THE GRAND AND GLORIOUS Fourth came in with a bang.
Some of the bulls of the 87th had the holiday off; the rest had to work. There was plenty to keep them occupied. In cooperation with the uniformed cops of the precinct, they tried to keep the day a safe and sane one. It was not.
Despite the city’s law against fireworks, the importers had been busy, and everyone from six to sixty stood ready and anxious to apply a match to a fuse and then to stand back with his fingers in his ears. A kid on South Thirtieth lost an eye when another kid hurled a cherry bomb at his face. On Culver Avenue, two boys were shooting skyrockets from the roof. One fell over the edge and died the instant he hit the pavement.
It was not a very hot Fourth—there had been hotter Fourths—but it was a very noisy one. The noise was an excellent cover for those citizens who wanted to fire revolvers. You couldn’t tell an exploding firecracker from an exploding .32 without a program, and nobody was selling programs that day. The police were busy chasing kids with fireworks, and turning off fire hydrants, and trying to stop burglaries that were being committed under cover of all the confusion and all the noise. The police were busy watching sailors who came uptown for a piece of exotica and very often went back downtown with a piece of their skulls missing. The police were busy watching the teen-age kids, who, now that school was over, now that time lay heavily on their hands, now that the asphalt streets and the concrete towers cradled them with boredom, now that there was nothing to do and plenty of time to do it in, were anxious for excitement, anxious for kicks, anxious for a little clean-living adolescent sport. They roamed the streets, and they roamed Grover Park, spoiling for action, and so the cops were kept busy.
Everyone was celebrating but the cops.
The cops were cursing because they had to work on a goddamn holiday.
Each of them wished he’d become a fireman.
AT THE FIREHOUSE in the 87th Precinct territory, the gongs were ringing and the men were sliding down poles and grabbing for helmets, because there’d be more damn fires today than on any other day of the year.
And each of the firemen wished he’d become a cop.
6.
HAL WILLIS was a detective 3rd/grade.
He earned $5,230 a year.
He earned this whether he was being shot at by a thief, or whether he was typing up a report in triplicate back at the squad. He earned it even when he was tailing a woman who tried to hide the swell of her curves by wearing potato-sack suits. The potato-sack suits, he supposed, made it interesting—like watching a stripper who never took off her clothes.
I am getting sick, he thought. There are no strippers who never take off their clothes.
In any case, and in any sense of the word, he did not mind the tail on Lucy Mencken. It had been agreeable work thus far, and he could not imagine how this charming housewife with a peekaboo body could possibly have shaken Meyer. Meyer is getting old, he thought. We’ll have to put him out to pasture. We’ll have to make him a stud bull. He will become the sire of a proud line of law-enforcement officers. They will erect a statue to him in Grover Park. The chiseled lettering at the base of the statue will read, MEYER MEYER, SIRE.
Sick, Willis thought. Sick, for sure.
He was a small man, Willis, barely clearing the five-foot-eight minimum-height requirement for policemen. Among the other detectives of the squad, he looked like a midget. But his deceptive height and his deceptively small bone structure did not fool any of the bulls who worked with him. There were not many men on the squad who wanted to fool with Willis. He was, you see, expert in the ways of judo. Hal Willis could, if you will allow your imagination to soar for a moment, seize the trunk of a charging elephant and—within a matter of seconds—cause that beast to sail through the air and land on his back with possible injury to his spinal column. Such was the might and the power of Hal Willis. Along more prosaic lines, and during the mundane pursuit of his chosen profession, Willis had disarmed thieves, dislocated bones, dispensed severe punishment, dispelled foolish notions about small men, disturbed virile giants who suddenly found themselves flat on their asses, dismayed crooks who did not realize bones could break so easily, and discovered that judo—good, clean fun that it was—could also become a way of life.
Weight and balance, that was the secret. Fulcrum and lever. Wait for your opportunity, seize it, and you had the world on its back.
Lucy Mencken was not, at the moment, on her back—although the thought, in all honesty, had often crossed Willis’s mind since he’d begun tailing her. He had been warned by Carella, and later by Meyer, that Mrs. Mencken bore all the characteristics of a camouflaged munitions dump. Both Carella and Meyer were respectable married men who rarely, if ever, thought lewd, lascivious, or obscene thoughts. If they had seen fit to warn Willis about the necessity for keeping his mind on his work, then Mrs. Mencken was indeed highly explosive.
He had, at first, been disappointed. The woman who emerged from the house in Peabody looked more like a dowdy librarian than a bawdy libertine. It was after he’d been tailing her for a while that he began to appreciate the warnings of his colleagues. It was the most annoying damned thing, not that it wasn’t also pleasant. The woman wore a suit that had surely been manufactured by Omar the tent maker. And yet, beneath that suit, there was the suggestion of vibrant flesh. The suggestion became more than that when the material tightened over her thigh as she stepped from her automobile, or molded the persistent flesh when she stooped to pick up her dropped purse. Lucy Mencken, no matter how she dressed, was voluptuous. And Willis did not at all mind tailing her, except that it was difficult to concentrate.