“I always caught the crooks,” I said. I tapped the side of my head. “You had to be smart, even when you were playing.”
“Now somebody ain’t playing, Joe. They’re going for real.”
“Well, I’ll see what I can do. Keep it quiet though.” I pushed some change across to him and we finished our beer and left while Fat Mary was still heaping the plates of the customers that were left.
Getting into René’s old apartment was no trouble. The padlock the landlord had put on opened with a sharp rap from my gun butt and the door swung open. Marta found the light switch and pulled it after making sure the shades were drawn.
The police had checked the rooms, found nothing, the landlord had made a partial attempt at cleaning it up, emptying the garbage and piling dishes in the sink, so anything of significance would have been destroyed. Like the other apartments, this was typical of a slum section. It was the front half of a partially renovated brownstone building, the flat containing a living room with a battered TV, a pair of worn mohair chairs and a couple of end tables. The bedroom was furnished with a single bed, chair and table. René’s clothes came from a low cost outlet store, all bore the marks of hard usage except for two pairs of expensive shoes that hadn’t been worn at all. The kitchen was a hodgepodge of rickety pieces, the dishes chipped and cracked, the closet over the refrigerator empty. But there had been plenty of groceries in there. The marks showed in the dust where cans had been stacked and a cash register slip caught in a crack was for forty-two dollars. The landlord wasn’t going to leave all that stuff for the next tenant.
When Marty came back from looking around I asked, “Find anything?”
“Possibly. Come back in the living room a minute.” She pointed to the floor and indicated a series of scratches that led from one chair to the other. “We know what we’re looking for... so do those mean anything?”
I got her point. “Somebody dragged that chair up to the other to make a bed?”
“That’s right. So René did have somebody here.” She looked at me carefully and sat on the arm of the chair. “You see the same picture, don’t you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Tell it to me.”
I nodded and started pacing the room. “Nobody who knew better would trust René. It had to be someone who knew him well enough to be able to handle him. René was a sharpie. So let’s say this guy needs a hideout and is prepared to pay. He approaches René who kicks Noisy Stuccio out and takes this guy in. Now René starts sharpshooting. He’s going to try to take this guy for his bundle and sets something up, only he makes a mistake in underestimating his new boarder. The guy gets wise and kills him.
“That gets us to Noisy Stuccio. People don’t change and Noisy was a mean little punk who never liked to be second rated. He was always in somebody’s business and he would have wanted to know what was going on and somehow he found out who the boarder was. If this guy knew René, then he certainly would have known Noisy. When René was killed Noisy got the score and made his bid for the loot this guy was packing.”
Marta said, “And wound up the same way.”
“This guy is a pure psychopath. He’ll kill at the drop of a hat. He’s an old experienced hand with the crazy intuitive values psychos have and can kill without leaving a trace. That’s the most difficult part,” I said. “There doesn’t even have to be a motive. He doesn’t go into wild flight that attracts attention and anybody in his way is simply disposed of.”
She frowned and nibbled at a fingernail. “But Hymie Shapiro...”
I cut her off with, “I’ll have to go back to when we were kids. Hymie and Noisy were a couple of sharpies who stuck together. Hymie used to plan little chintzy jobs and leave them up to Noisy to pull off. Could be that Noisy didn’t want to move in on this by himself because he knew he wasn’t capable of pulling it off alone. He always was a lippy guy with Hymie. Suppose he talked it over with Hymie and they laid it out together. Our guy would have moved out after he killed René, but they found out where he was holed up and Noisy went to see him. So the guy makes a date to pay off and instead lets Noisy have a bullet, but not before Noisy tried to insure himself staying alive by reminding the guy someone else knew the play.”
“It sounds good, Joe.”
“What it means is that Noisy didn’t have to tell him who it was that knew. Our guy automatically understood, popped Noisy, then went looking for Hymie and found him.”
“And that brings us up to Doug Kitchen,” Marta said.
“Paula Lees saw that action. Doug saw the guy and recognized him. That’s what got him killed. He started across the street to say hello, then saw what was going to happen and started to run. He was the only one shot in the back.”
“Gus Wilder?”
“They all knew him. Hell, everybody around here knows everybody else, especially when they’re hardcases.”
I stopped pacing then and stared at the dark green surface of the dirty window shade. Marta asked, “What are you thinking of, Joe?”
“There’s a hook in this someplace. I have the feeling that somebody I’ve talked to has fed it to me already and I can’t remember what it is.”
“It’ll come.”
“But I want it now.”
“Relax,” she said softly.
I turned around and grinned at her. “Sure, little Giggie. Come on and let’s try it from another angle.”
When we reached the street there was a slight jolt in the air, concussion from thunder far off, and the sky over Jersey turned a momentary pink. It was cooler now, the smell of rain coming in with the west breeze.
We turned south, reached the corner and saw Hal McNeil, the beat cop, just closing the door of the call box. He touched his cap in a salute and said, “Evening, Lieutenant. I was just going to look you up.”
“What’s doing?”
“Sergeant Brissom wants you to call him back.”
“Thanks, Hal. You got anything on Loefert and his buddies?”
The cop nodded. “They’re doing a lot of poking around. The way it looks, they’ve sectioned the neighborhood off and are scouting the areas. The only one I could reach said they were looking for a strange face. A lot of drifters come through, but they weren’t interested. It’s somebody that would be known but hasn’t been seen for a while.”
“No names?”
“You know these people, sir. They aren’t going to stick their necks out. Too many killings have scared them silly.”
I left him talking to Marta and opened the call box and got the duty officer to put me through to Mack Brissom. “Scanlon, Mack. What’s the pitch?”
“Hi, Joe. We have an opening on the action down there. Now get this bit... one of the Chicago hoods was picked up on an old murder second charge and the D.A. got some talk out of him because the guy hoped to drop the charge down to manslaughter.”
“What’s it about?” I asked him.
“The wheels inside the mob gave the go ahead signal to a group to set up one hell of a big heist and was going to take care of the cover and protection for a fifty percent bite if it came off. Well, it came off, all right, only the one guy who was holding the loot had it hijacked out of his hands by an outsider and broke up the whole deal.”
“Which heist, Mack?”
“Could be the Montreal job. How this outsider got into it is anybody’s guess. He could have known one of the boys, had a few drinks with him and the story came out. They’ll talk to their own kind sometimes. This time, knowing they had the mob’s protection, they’d figure nobody would have the guts to try to move in.”
“What’s the connection?”