“Were you going to go see the Lee Bronsons again?”
“If the lead didn’t check out. I was going to rough ’em a little and see if they knew about any papers Danny could have left. Now that you guys know I’ve been doing some good, you can stop kidding me about getting me fired off this parole thing. I can do good in that job and I like it. How about letting me help on the killing?”
Ben Wixler looked at the long, loose-mouthed face with its stain of viciousness. He let the silence grow. Keefler, during his police career, had typified the kind of officer Wixler despised.
“Johnny, I wouldn’t let you put an overtime tag on a tricycle. I don’t think you should be permitted to be in legal contact with any paroled convict. I think it was a sad mistake to give you the job. And I’m going to make it my business to see that it’s taken away from you. Your police pension will carry you. And if you are found meddling in police affairs in any way from now on, I can assure you that you will handled with the utmost severity. Don’t try to bring up your record because I know your record, and it stinks. Arid don’t hint about any influential friends, because I don’t think you have a friend in the city. Now you can go.”
Keefler did not move for perhaps ten seconds. Then he made his previous tirade sound, by comparison, mild and reasonable. Wixler watched the contortions, listened to the invective, and suddenly realized without great surprise, the man was insane. He glanced at Dan and Dan moved closer to Keefler. Keefler’s scene was shocking, disturbing. Wixler found himself following a tiny thread of coherence. There was something about somebody named Mose being knifed to death. And some names, and deaths told of with smacking satisfaction. Rillyer. Gennetti. Casey.
“...soft!” Keefler yelled. “Every damn one of you! Mush! Soup! You gotta go after the bastards. You got to get ’em one way or another. Get ’em off the streets. Any way you can. Got to get ’em like I got Kowalsik. Filth! They’re all filth! They killed Mose. They tried to kill me. You mushbellies don’t understand what it is to be a cop. You don’t...”
Ben Wixler let the words fade from his consciousness as he leafed through old files, old names. The open file on murder was much larger in Hancock than it should have been. He had been through the file many times. Many of the murders had been committed long before he had joined the force, but there was no statute of limitations on murder. He remembered the grimy label on the faded file folder, a folder of a type no longer in use. Kowalsik, Gilbert Peter. And a particularly unsavory glossy photograph of the body flashed into his mind. Tortured to death. Body found in the lake.
“...try to lose me my job, a pansy cop like you, and I’ll go to every paper in town and I’ll...”
“Shut your mouth!” Ben roared. It startled Dan Means as much as it startled Keefler. Keefler sagged back in the chair.
“I want to hear just a little bit more about how you got Gilbert Kowalsik, Johnny,” he said gently. “Tell me a little bit more.”
Keefler looked at Wixler. He snapped his head around and looked at Dan Means. His eyes were wide and staring and curiously blank. He looked like a man suddenly awakening from a sound sleep. His eyes narrowed. He looked down at his artificial hand. In far too casual a voice he said, “I didn’t say anything about Gil Kowalsik. I don’t know where you got an idea like that.”
Ben didn’t even have to glance at Dan Means to have him come in on cue. “We both heard you, Johnny. We want to know about it.”
“Tell us,” Ben said. “First you called him just Kowalsik. I called him Gilbert Kowalsik, but you called him Gil. I guess you knew him pretty well.”
“Gil? Oh! Oh, sure, I knew Gil. When I was a kid. I think he got killed. I remember something about it. A long time ago, I think.”
“But, Johnny. You didn’t say you fixed him. You didn’t use a word like that. You said you ‘got’ him. I think you were explaining how a good cop takes the law into his own hands. We both heard you, Johnny. We just want to know how you got Kowalsik.”
“You guys are nuts. I didn’t say anything about him. You didn’t hear me right.”
Ben leaned back. “You know something? We got all night, Johnny. All night long. Dan, suppose you go pull the Kowalsik file. Check the estimated time of death. Send somebody into dead records to pull Keefler’s duty reports for the estimated time of death. Bring the file back up here. And bring a fresh pot of coffee.”
“You guys are way off the beam,” Keefler mumbled.
“We’ve got all the time in the world, Johnny.”
The sedan pulled away and Ben walked up his front walk in the first pale gray of dawn. He managed to undress so quietly Beth didn’t stir. But when he eased himself into bed the sag of the bed aroused her.
“ ’Lo, honey,” she murmured. “Gosh, s’nearly morning.”
“Go to sleep, baby.”
She braced herself on one elbow and looked at him. “You got the grumps, haven’t you? Bad night?”
“I’ve got to be back at nine. We’ve got a hot one. But I guess it was a good night. We took an old one off the books. Got a confession. In detail. Seems a cop did it.”
“Oh, honey! How awful for you!”
“An ex-cop, but he was a cop when he did it, and I personally think he’s been crazy all his life, and he did it in a way that turned my stomach and I... The hell with it. Good night, baby.”
She kissed him. “Sleep fast because you haven’t got much sleeping time, darling.”
Chapter Ten
Paul Verney
Verney awoke at six on Wednesday morning. During the first few moments of consciousness he wondered only why the alarm had been set so early, and then it all came roaring back into his mind. He remembered the curious things that had happened to him after he had grabbed the woman. It seemed that he had stood a little bit aside from himself and heard the hollow metallic sound as he kept slamming her head against the edge of the sink. It seemed to him that he had gotten back into himself with an effort. She had seemed utterly without weight. Only as he had regained control had he felt the slack heaviness of her and realized she was dead and had been dead for many long seconds.
He had let her slip from his hands and thud to the floor, and he had backed away from her. He remembered telling himself to look at the scene coldly and objectively and see if he had left any clue. Yet in the very next second, it seemed, he was walking down a dark street, walking too fast, breathing too hard, with absolutely no memory of having left the house. He had slowed and stopped, thinking that he should go back and empty drawers and make it look as though a thief had been in the house. Maybe he should take some small things of value and dispose of them.
And again, frighteningly without transition, he found himself trying to turn the door handle of his locked car three blocks from the Bronson house. As he hunted in his pockets for the car keys, he saw the telltale white on the front of his topcoat and on his shoes. He stamped his shoes hard, frantically dusted the white flour from the front of his topcoat. He was still breathing very fast, very deeply, as though he had been running.
He got into the car and he started to think of how the fragile nape of the neck had felt in his right hand... and he was putting his key into the door of his room on the third floor of the Center Club. The hiatus frightened him. It was as though his brain kept cutting out, as though a wire to some essential terminal came loose.
Once he was in his locked room, and deep in the leather chair, his mind began to function in the orderly way he depended upon.
No one had seen him go to her house. No one, he hoped, had seen him leave it. Because it was a self-service elevator, and there was no attendant on the front desk of the club after six, no one could prove how long he had been away from the club. As there was no note under his door, there had been no phone call and no visitor during the hour and a half he had been gone. He was certain no one had seen him in the heavy shadows where he had stood and watched them eat, and watched the man drive away.