Detective Samuel Rabinowitz and a probie wrote it up, the probie drawing the scene with templates that had cutouts for arrows and rooms and bodies. Sam asked the owner if he could remember anything else. “Yeah, there was this one, hung back by the stairs. He had a crew cut and red hair. Very pale, like an albino. He was screaming while the shooter grabbed my money and Jimmy was moaning on the floor. I loved that Jimmy, like a son he was. I’m gonna make pig-slop out of them that did it, soon as I can.”
Was Mike Kelley the only redhead with a crew cut in the borough of Manhattan? Of course not. But Sam’s impulse was to go with what you know.
He took a jog off his assigned route after looking up the fur store Mike’s uncle on his father’s side owned. Mr. Kelley had to buzz him in-so many walk-away thefts going on, he explained. Mike was in the back; he’d get him.
Mike and Sam stood squeezed between two racks of furs. Sam’s nose itched. He barely even had to open his mouth when Mike, after being sure his uncle was out of earshot, said, “Not here, Sammy.” He told Sam to meet him in Tompkins Square Park. “That giant elm in the center? The one, you know, half of it’s dead from beetles? Nine o’clock. It’s dark by then.”
Under a light pole, the light further helped by a full moon, Sam eyed Mike’s boots as the men sat down on the bench. “Fancy wear there, partner.”
“Pampa boot. Cost a few pennies, yeah.”
He was going to comment on Mike’s shirt, too, but Mike beat him to it to criticize his own. “Hawaiian now? Stylish. Police work must be good to you.”
They nodded affirmative to each other and looked across the pathway at the silhouettes of a girl and guy making out on the grass. “You need to go break that up?” Mike asked. “Oh, you don’t have your badge on.”
“Mike. What you got to tell me?”
“I wasn’t there.”
“You wasn’t where?”
“That game room that got shot up. Somebody told me someone saw a redhead. It wasn’t me. I heard.”
“You seen Tino Caruso lately?”
Mike got up and went to the edge of the walkway. All of a sudden he started doing jumping jacks. He said for Sam to come join him and laughed stupidly.
Sam went over and grabbed him by the back of the collar and shoved him back onto the bench. “Izzy. What happened with Izzy? You know. I know you know.”
Mike’s face shone from a burst of July sweat. His eyelashes were pale smiles from the side. But Mike wasn’t smiling, and in a swift motion he lowered his head, and put his hands to his face, and silently sobbed.
Sam got it out from him. Tino Caruso had had Izzy wiped. The mother wasn’t supposed to be part of it. When Mike heard Mrs. Jacobs had been violated besides having taken a pistol shot to the back of the head, he disappeared for two days, later making an excuse that he tripped on a curb and knocked himself out, and spent those days in a hospital unidentified. That explained the bruises from banging his head against an alley wall, the reason his eyes were ringed in green and black. “He’ll bump me off too, he knows I talked to you.”
“Doesn’t he live around here? Why’d we come here, then?”
“Uptown, near Stuyvesant. He’s loaded now, from rip-offs. He works for a big guy named Harry Gross. Some he does on his own, on the side.”
“Why in hell did you get involved, Mike?”
“The take-down on Thirteenth, he made me come along. I swear I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
“And why’d he do Izzy? Why carve up his face like that?”
“Tino didn’t do it himself.”
“I don’t care about that. I want the guy who did it. His name?”
“He goes by Hambone. Izzy flapped his yap about Tino’s new career. Somebody talked to somebody. That somebody was a cockroach. He told Tino. I’m scared like I never been, Sammy. What’ll I do?”
“You have to go down, Mike, you know that.”
“Pop me now, Sammy. They send me upriver, I’m meat for the taking.” Then he sank to his knees and cried so hard, no sound came out. Sam pulled him sideways and squeezed, telling him it would be all right, although of course it wouldn’t be. Again, nothing was the same. Nothing ever would be.
Sam walked Mike to the street, where they were going to go their separate ways. Then Mike said he was sure he saw Hambone’s car drive slowly by. Hambone, the muscle for Tino. The one who cut up Izzy and maybe got nasty with Mrs. Jacobs. A groan came out of Mike, right before he turned and puked in the grass.
Sam had his handkerchief out for him when he rose back up. “You’re coming with me.”
When he got Mike to the station, Detective Hirsch convinced the captain to put him in a safe house in Queens until he could be used in a courtroom for state’s evidence.
When he lifted his cigarette from the ashtray, Hirsch’s fingers made the cig look like a toothpick. Sam wished he had those damn fine weapons. He told Hirsch that Mike Kelley said that Tino meant the game room disaster to be strategic, to send a message to all his suckers.
“Tino’s IQ can’t lift a fly off a feather. I can locate him before anyone else can. The piece of dirt acting as his muscle is Fishel Gross, a nephew of mobster Harry. He goes by Hambone. Let me put the word out that I maybe want in on Tino’s action. We set it up, we take him down.”
Detective Hirsch raised his voice to tell Sam to stay out of it until he could put a team together. “For now, you’re under orders to cool it.” Sam left the meeting with an ache in his gut. He liked Hirsch. He liked the job, his brothers, his badge. Don’t do this, he kept telling himself.
He’d already found out from Mike that Tino’s routine on Thursdays after eating out was to go home, call up a girl, do their business, and have her gone by midnight so he could fall asleep reading Captain America comics with his Magnavox radio set to WMCA. Clockwork. Sam recalled that was the one thing Tino was good at.
The night air was stifling, windows open everywhere. Sam studied the building to locate where Tino’s window would be. He took the fire escape on the north side. Some people kept wooden sticks in the window so it would open only so far. Not Tino. He must feel invincible, Sam thought. He stepped through, not even a curtain or drape to push aside, right into his bedroom.
Tino’s weapon lay on the side table where anyone could lift it. Sam tucked the gun in his waistband and then leaned down to clamp a hand over Tino’s mouth. He almost drew back. The man slept with his nose on-Groucho glasses hooked to a nose, without the furry eyebrows. Did he wear those with his lady visitors? Maybe they thought it was cute.
He covered Tino’s mouth to wake him up, then made him sit in a chair. Tino, naked except for shorts, kept wrapping his torso with his arms as if he’d never been in a military shower. Sam told him he could put his clothes on in a minute. Sam sat on the edge of the bed with his gun on his leg and decided he wasn’t going to lay it all on Tino right there, right then, but he did say, “It wasn’t your nose you lost, Tino. It was your heart.”
Tino’s face was scarred beyond what the rifle bullet had done. He must have had some failed surgeries that affected his cheeks; hence, the casual comment about it looking waxy.
“You don’t know,” Tino said.
“I know plenty.” Sam stood and walked a few steps, faced him, and asked, “Were you always a creep, Tino? If not for the war, would you have ever killed a friend and molested an old lady?”
“I didn’t do any of that!” Tino’s eyes shifted just a fraction of a second.
That’s when Sam felt a shadow-pull, a flutter-fall of instinct, the way the mystery alert in the Belgian woods had given him the awareness to cancel the intent of a sniper.