“You want me to round him up?”
“I think you’d better. The super came in. He’s on his way up here now. But for every fact the super knows, the switchboard operator will know a hundred.”
Walt nodded and turned to open the door.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Before you go on the prowl for that guy, take a run over to—” I paused long enough to glance at my notebook — “to 917 West Seventy-second Street. You remember the girl that called here? Well, that’s her address. We don’t know enough about the dead girl yet, and maybe this other girl can help us out. It may take a while to get hold of the switchboard operator, so you’d better grab the girl first. Her name’s Tyner.”
“What’s the apartment number?”
“Look on the mailboxes. She said it was Ann, but she’s listed in the phone book as Wilma A.”
“Anything else?”
“That’ll do it for a while.”
He opened the door just as the patrolman and the super came abreast of it. He stood back to let them in, gave me a mock salute, and left.
“You want me to stay here, sir?” the patrolman asked.
I shook my head. “No. Thanks, Sam.”
“There are some reporters down in the lobby.”
“You’ll be taking Walt Logan down in the elevator. Tell him I said to give them a fast statement. He’ll know how to handle it.”
“Yes, sir.” He hurried after Walt.
I turned back to the super. “How are you, Mr. Brokaw?”
He stared at me sullenly, a short, muscular, flat-featured man with pale skin that sagged away from his jowls and eyes — as if he had once been much heavier than he was now, had lost weight, and the skin had remained stretched and sagging. The bursted blood vessels around his nose and in his eyes showed he’d done his share of whiskey drinking in his fifty-odd years. He didn’t seem drunk now, but he did appear to be suffering from a hangover.
“What’s going on here in my house?” he asked. He spoke with scarcely any movement of his lips, and his voice had that deep huskiness that heavy drinkers sometimes have. “I come home, and the first thing that happens, I get stopped by a cop. Now I’m up here. For why?”
“I wonder if you’d mind stepping out into the kitchen with me, Mr. Brokaw? These men are trying to work here, and we’re only in their way.”
He muttered something beneath his breath, but he turned and followed me to the kitchen. I sat down at one end of the white enamel table and motioned him to the chair at the other. He sat down heavily and glanced about him.
“I hope this don’t take long,” he said. “Me, I got work to do.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ll make it as short as I can.”
“You going to tell me what the hell this is all about?”
“Did you know the girl who had this apartment, Mr. Brokaw?”
“Had? Hell, she’s still got it. Nobody gets an apartment here, unless I give the word.”
“Did you know her pretty well?”
He grasped the fingers of one big hand with the fingers of the other and began cracking his knuckles. “Yeah. I guess you’d say I know her pretty good. Why?”
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Yesterday. I didn’t see her to talk to, though. I just seen her leaving the building.” He hunched forward in his chair, cracking the knuckles a little louder now. “What’s the difference when I seen her? She in trouble?”
“Just let me ask the questions, Mr. Brokaw. It’ll go faster that way.”
“This sure ain’t getting my work done.”
“You know where the switchboard operator might be?”
“Benny? Listen, I never know where that guy is. Ever since he started working a double shift, he’s been coming in late. The people that own this place have been warning him about it. But Benny — he don’t listen to nobody. He’s like a damn mule, Benny is.”
“He’s the only switchboard operator, I understand.”
“Yeah, and we ain’t going to have him long, the way he’s been laying down on the job. We used to have two of them here, you know. One of them would work from eight till four, and the other one’d come on at four and work up till midnight. But the other guy quit — guess it’s been all of two months ago now — and old Benny, he talked the owners into letting him work both shifts. Don’t ask me how he done it — he just done it, that’s all. Damn fool was putting in sixteen straight hours. ’Course he took a nip on his jug now and then, to help him along. He—”
“But you don’t have any idea where he is now?”
“No — and I don’t give a damn. Maybe they’ll fire him for sure this time and we’ll get somebody around here that’ll show up mornings, like they’re supposed to.”
I drummed on the table top with my fingertips a moment. “Your wife tells us you weren’t home last night, Mr. Brokaw.”
The knuckle-popping stopped for a moment, then started up again. “So?”
“Mind telling me where you were?”
“I don’t see where that’s any of your goddamned business.”
I took out my pack of cigarettes and extended it across the table to him. “Smoke, Mr. Brokaw?”
“I just smoke cigars. Listen, fella. What I do at night, and who I do it with — that’s all up to me, understand? I don’t have to answer to you, or any other copper.” He half rose from his chair. “That plain enough for you?”
I put my cigarettes back into my pocket without lighting one.
“Miss Lawson was killed last night,” I said casually, and watched closely for his reaction.
The hard-guy look left his face as quickly as if it’d been wiped off with a towel. He stared at me incredulously.
“You’re horsing me, ain’t you?”
I shook my head.
“Miss Lawson? She’s dead?”
“Killed.”
“Ahhh. Ahhh, no...”
I waited.
“How... how’d she get killed?”
I studied him. Generally, we tell people as little as we can, hoping that during the questioning they’ll reveal knowledge which they could not have had if they were not in some way involved. But that’s always up to the detective, and sometimes we hunch it differently and play it that way.
“She was stabbed to death. Up on the roof.”
“Stabbed... My God... Who did it?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“You think I...?”
“We would like to know where you were last night. Say, from midnight until three o’clock.”
Brokaw put his hands on the table and folded them and stared at the thick, knobbed fingers. “I guess I’m kind of in the crack, ain’t I?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it looks to me like I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. If I don’t tell you where I was, you’ll take me over to the station house and slug the hell out of me. And if—”
“That’ll be enough, Mr. Brokaw. You know better than that.”
“Well, maybe so. Yeah, I guess I do know you wouldn’t do that. But you sure wouldn’t give me no rest.”
I nodded. “It isn’t likely.”
“Yeah. But if I do tell you, then my wife’s going to find out.”
“Find out what?”
“That’s just it. She’s pretty damn sickly, you know. Never hardly even gets out of bed.” He paused. “It ain’t easy on a man, fella. I try to do right by her, but it sure ain’t easy. There’s times...”
“Is that what happened last night?”
“Yeah.”
I got out my notebook. “Tell me the woman’s name,” I said.
“It ain’t myself I care about so much,” Brokaw said. “It’s Maude. She drives herself pretty near crazy, just suspecting me of stuff like that. If she finds out I really done it... God, I think it’d damn near kill her. I ain’t just talking, mister. Maude — she’s sicker’n hell. Been that way forever, it seems like.”