“Yes.”
“Nope. I just told you. I haven’t seen Artie in almost two weeks.” A sudden spark flashed in Loomis’ eyes and he looked at Hawes and Meyer guiltily.
“Oh-oh,” he said. “What’d I just do? Did I screw up Artie’s alibi?”
“You screwed it up fine, Mr. Loomis,” Hawes said.
8
Irene Granavan, Finch’s sister, was a twenty-one-year-old girl who had already borne three children and was working on her fourth, in her fifth month of pregnancy. She admitted the detectives to her apartment in a Riverhead housing development, and then immediately sat down.
“You have to forgive me,” she said. “My back aches. The doctor thinks maybe it’ll be twins. That’s all I need is twins.” She pressed the palms of her hands into the small of her back, sighed heavily, and said, “I’m always having a baby. I got married when I was seventeen, and I’ve been pregnant ever since. All my kids think I’m a fat woman. They’ve never seen me that I wasn’t pregnant.” She sighed again. “You got any children?” she asked Meyer.
“Three,” he answered.
“I sometimes wish ...” She stopped and pulled a curious face, a face which denied dreams.
“What do you wish, Mrs. Granavan?” Hawes asked.
“That I could go to Bermuda. Alone.” She paused. “Have you ever been to Bermuda?”
“No.”
“I hear it’s very nice there,” Irene Granavan said wistfully, and the apartment went still.
“Mrs. Granavan,” Meyer said, “we’d like to ask you a few questions about your brother.”
“What’s he done now?”
“Has he done things before?” Hawes said.
“Well, you know ...” She shrugged.
“What?” Meyer asked.
“Well, the fuss down at City Hall. And the picketing of that movie. You know.”
“We don’t know, Mrs. Granavan.”
“Well, I hate to say this about my own brother, but I think he’s a little nuts on the subject. You know.”
“What subject?”
“Well, the movie, for example. It’s about Israel, and him and his friends picketed it and all, and handed out pamphlets about Jews, and…You remember, don’t you? The crowd threw stones at him and all. There were a lot of concentration-camp survivors in the crowds you know.” She paused. “I think he must be a little nuts to do something like that, don’t you think?”
“You said something about City Hall, Mrs. Granavan. What did your brother —”
“Well, it was when the mayor invited this Jewish assemblyman — I forget his name — to make a speech with him on the steps of City Hall. My brother went down and — well, the same business. You know.”
“You mentioned your brother’s friends. What friends?”
“The nuts he hangs out with.”
“Would you know their names?” Meyer wanted to know.
“I know only one of them. He was here once with my brother. He’s got pimples all over his face. I remember him because I was pregnant with Sean at the time, and he asked if he could put his hands on my stomach to feel the baby kicking. I told him he certainly could not. That shut him up, all right.”
“What was his name, Mrs. Granavan?”
“Fred. That’s short for Frederick. Frederick Schultz.”
“He’s German?” Meyer asked.
“Yes.”
Meyer nodded briefly.
“Mrs. Granavan,” Hawes said, “was your brother here last night?”
“Why? Did he say he was?”
“Was he?”
“No.”
“Not at all?”
“No. He wasn’t here last night. I was home alone last night. My husband bowls on Saturdays.” She paused. “I sit at home and hug my fat belly, and he bowls. You know what I wish sometimes?”
“What?” Meyer asked.
And, as if she had not said it once before, Irene Granavan said, “I wish I could go to Bermuda sometime. Alone.”
“The thing is,” the house painter said to Carella, “I’d like my ladder back.”
“I can understand that,” Carella said.
“The brushes they can keep, although some of them are very expensive brushes. But the ladder I absolutely need. I’m losing a day’s work already because of those guys down at your lab.”
“Well, you see —”
“I go back to the synagogue this morning, and my ladder and my brushes and even my paints are all gone. And what a mess somebody made of that alley! So this old guy who’s sexton of the place, he tells me the priest was killed Saturday night, and the cops took all the stuff away with them. I wanted to know what cops, and he said he didn’t know. So I called headquarters this morning, and I got a runaround from six different cops who finally put me through to some guy named Grossman at the lab.”
“Yes, Lieutenant Grossman,’ Carella said.
“That’s right. And he tells me I can’t have my goddamn ladder back until they finish their tests on it. Now what the hell do they expect to find on my ladder, would you mind telling me?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Cabot. Fingerprints, perhaps.”
“Yeah, my fingerprints! Am I gonna get involved in murder besides losing a day’s work?”
“I don’t think so,” Carella said, smiling.
“I shouldn’t have taken that job, anyway,” Cabot said. “I shouldn’t have even bothered with it.”
“Who hired you for the job, Mr. Cabot?”
“The priest did.”
“The rabbi, you mean?” Carella asked.
“Yeah, the priest, the rabbi, whatever the hell you call him.” Cabot shrugged.
“And what were you supposed to do, Mr. Cabot?”
“I was supposed to paint. What do you think I was supposed to do?”
“Paint what?”
“The trim. Around the windows and the roof.”
“White and blue?”
“White around the windows, and blue for the roof trim.”
“The colors of Israel,” Carella said.
“Yeah,” the painter agreed. Then he said, “What?”
“Nothing. Why did you say you shouldn’t have taken the job, Mr. Cabot?”
“Well, because of all the arguing first. He wanted it done for Peaceable, he said, and Peaceable fell on the first. But I couldn’t —”
“Peaceable? You mean Passover?”
“Yeah, Peaceable, Passover, whatever the hell you call it.” He shrugged again.
“You were about to say?”
“I was about to say we had a little argument about it. I was working on another job, and I couldn’t get to his job until Friday, the thirty-first. I figured I’d work late into the night, you know, but the priest told me I couldn’t work after sundown. So I said why can’t I work after sundown, so he said the Sabbath began at sundown, not to mention the first day of Peace— Passover, and that work wasn’t allowed on the first two days of Passover, nor on the Sabbath neither, for that matter. Because the Lord rested on the Sabbath., you see. The seventh day.”
“Yes, I see.”
“Sure. So I said, ‘Father, I’m not of the Jewish faith,’ is what I said, ‘and I can work any day of the week I like.’ Besides, I got a big job to start on Monday, and I figured I could knock off the church all day Friday and Friday night or, if worse came to worse, Saturday, for which I usually get time and a half. So we compromised.”
“How did you compromise?”
“Well, this priest was of what you call the Conservative crowd, not the Reformers, which are very advanced, but still these Conservatives don’t follow all the old rules of the religion is what I gather. So he said I could work during the day Friday, and then I could come back and work Saturday, provided I knocked off at sundown. Don’t ask me what kind of crazy compromise it was. I think he had in mind that he holds mass at sundown and it would be a mortal sin if I was outside painting while everybody was inside praying, and on a very special high holy day, at that.”