“I can’t answer that in too much detail,” he said. “I don’t know that much about Big Mike. About all I can tell you for certain is that he was some sort of a contact man between the syndicate and the politicians. Executive level I guess you would call it. And it has been thirty years at least since the last time he was in court or behind bars.”
“Do you mean — he was in jail?”
“Yes, I checked on it, he’s got a criminal record and a couple of convictions. But nothing recently, it’s the punks who get caught and sent up. Once you operate in Mike’s circle the police don’t touch you. In fact they help you — like this investigation.”
“I don’t understand…”
“Look. There are five, maybe ten killings in New York every day, a couple of hundred felonious assaults, twenty, thirty cases of rape, at least fifteen hundred burglaries. The police are understaffed and overworked. We don’t have time to follow up any case that isn’t open and shut. If someone gets murdered and there are witnesses, okay, we go out and pick the killer up and the case is closed. But in a case like this, frankly, Miss Greene, we usually don’t even try. Unless we get a make on the fingerprints and have a record on the killer. But the chances are that we don’t. This city has a million punks who are on the Welfare and wish they had a square meal or a TV or a drink. So they try their hand at burglary to see what they can pick up. We catch a few and send them upstate on work gangs, breaking up the big parkways with pickaxes to reclaim the farmland. But most of them get away. Once in a while there is an accident, maybe someone comes in while they are pulling a job, surprises them while they are cleaning out the place. If the burglar is armed there may be a killing. Completely by accident, you understand, and the chances are ninety-nine out of a hundred that something like this happened to Mike O’Brien. I took the evidence, reported the case — and it should have died there. It would have if it had been anyone else. But as I said, Big Mike had plenty of political contacts and one of them put on some pressure to make a more complete investigation, and that is why I am here. Now — I’ve told you more than I should, and you’ll do me a big favor if you forget all about it.”
“No, I won’t tell anyone. What happens next?”
“I ask you a few more questions, leave here, write up a report — and that will be the end of it. Lots of other work is piling up behind me and the department has already put more time into the investigation than it can afford.”
She was shocked. “Aren’t you going to catch the man who did it?”
“If the fingerprints are on file, we might. If not — we haven’t got a chance. We won’t even try. Aside from the reason that we have no time, we feel that whoever did Mike in performed a social service.”
“That’s terrible!”
“Is it? Perhaps.” He opened his notepad and was very official again. He had finished with the questions by the time Kulozik came back with latent prints from the cellar window and they left the building together. After the cool apartment the air in the street hit like the blast from an open furnace door.
7
It was after midnight, a moonless night, but the sky outside the wide window could not equal the rich darkness of the polished mahogany of the long refectory table. The table was centuries old, from a monastery long since destroyed, and very valuable, as were all the furnishings in the room: the sideboard, the paintings, and the cut-crystal chandelier that hung in the center of the room. The six men grouped around the end of the table were not valuable at all, except in a financial sense, although in that way they were indeed very well off. Two of them were smoking cigars, and the cheapest cigar you could buy cost at least ten D’s.
“Not every word of the report if you please, Judge,” the man at the head of the table said. “Our time is limited and just the results will be all we need.” If anyone there knew his real name they were careful not to mention it. He was now called Mr. Briggs and he was the man in charge.
“Surely, Mr. Briggs, that will be easy enough,” Judge Santini said, and coughed nervously behind his hand. He never liked these sessions at the Empire State Building. As a judge he shouldn’t be seen here too often with these people. Besides, it was a long climb and he had to think about his ticker. Particularly in this kind of weather. He took a sip of water from the glass in front of him and moved his glasses forward on his nose so that he could read better.
“Here is what it boils down to. Big Mike was killed instantly by a blow on the side of the head, done with a sharpened tire iron that was also used to break into the apartment. Marks made on a jimmied-open basement window match the ones on the door and they both fit the jimmy, so it looks as though whoever did it got in that way. There were clear fingerprints on the iron and on the basement window, the same prints. So far the prints appear to be of a person unknown, they do not match any of the fingerprints on file in the Bureau of Criminal Identification, nor are they the prints of O’Brien’s bodyguard or girl friend, the ones who found the body.”
“Who do the fuzz think done it?” one of the listeners asked from around his cigar.
“The official view is — ah, death by misadventure you might say. They think that someone was burgling the apartment and Mike walked in and surprised him, and Mike was killed in the struggle.”
Two men started to ask questions but shut up instantly when Mr. Briggs began to speak. He had the gloomy, serious eyes of a hound dog, with the matching sagging lower lids and loose dewlaps on his cheeks. The pendant jowls waggled when he talked.
“What was stolen from the apartment?”
Santini shrugged. “Nothing, from what they can tell. The girl claims that nothing is missing and she ought to know. The room was taken apart, but apparently the burglar was jumped before he finished the job and then he ran in a panic. It could happen.”
Mr. Briggs pondered this, but he had no more questions. Some of the others did and Santini told them what was known. Mr. Briggs considered for a while then silenced them with a raised finger.
“It appears that the killing was accidental, in which case it is of no importance to us. We will need someone to take over Mike’s work — what is it, Judge?” he asked, frowning at the interruption.
Santini was sweating. He wanted the matter settled so he could go home, it was after 1 A.M. and he was tired. He wasn’t used to being up this late any more. But there was a fact that he had to mention, it might be important and if it was noticed later and it came out that he had known about it and said nothing… it would be best to get it over with.
“There is one thing more I ought to tell you. Perhaps it means something, perhaps not, but I feel we should have all the information in front of us before we—”
“Get on with it, Judge,” Mr. Briggs said coldly.
“Yes, of course. It’s a mark that was on the window. You must understand that all the basement windows are coated with dust on the inside and that none of the others were touched. But on the window that was jimmied open, through which we can presume the killer entered the building, there was a design traced in the dust. A heart.”
“Now what the hell is that supposed to mean?” one of the listeners growled.
“Nothing to you, Schlacter, since you are an American of German extraction. Now I am not guaranteeing that it means anything, it may just be a coincidence, meaningless, it could be anything. But just for the record, just to get it down, the Italian word for heart is cuore.”