“Yeah, yeah, come in,” Coop said.
He did not offer me a chair. He pointed his finger at me instead, and said, “Don’t ever say you’re Walsh again, you hear me?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Let me hear what you’ve got.” An odd smile suddenly replaced his frown. A moment ago he had told me he was going to enjoy this. He was now beginning to enjoy it even before I began talking.
“The bus is registered to a man named Arthur J. Wylie at 574 Waverly Street,” I said. “S22 dash 9438.”
Coop was still smiling. He was making me very nervous. I realized he knew something I didn’t know.
“Tell me,” I said.
‘Tell you what, Benny? I simply wish to commend you for your fine work. You’re still a good cop, it’s a shame you’re not on the force.”
“You already know who owns the bus, is that it?”
“We know.”
“How long have you known?”
“Ever since the FBI got back to us.”
“You found some latents on the crowbar,” I said. “That’s what was in the lab report.”
“On the pendant,” Coop said, and nodded. “A good thumb print. The I.S. came up negative, so we ran it through the FBI. They got back to us around five o’clock. Turns out the guy who left the thumb print was in the Navy during the Korean War. He didn’t have a criminal record, but his prints were on file.”
“Arthur J. Wylie,” I said.
“That’s who,” Coop said.
“So the next thing you did was call the MVB.”
“Very good,” Coop said. “And they told us they had a red-and-white Volkswagen bus registered to an Arthur J. Wylie at 574 Waverly Street. We put out a teletype right away.” He was grinning from ear to ear now; it was thoroughly obscene.
“And then O’Neil drove uptown to talk to Helene Wylie.”
“That’s exactly what he did,” Coop said. “He wasn’t too thrilled to hear you’d already been there. He must’ve missed you by maybe ten minutes.”
“Did she tell him she hasn’t been able to locate her husband since July?”
“She told him. Gave us a nice picture of him, too.”
“Big blond guy, bushy hair, walrus mustache?’
“Yes.”
“He doesn’t look like that any more, Coop.”
Coop seemed startled for a moment, but before he could say anything, the telephone on his desk rang. He picked up the receiver. “Captain Cupera,” he said. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. Where is it? Okay, right away.” He hung up, immediately pressed a button in the base of the phone, and waited. “Danny,” he said, “I just got a call from the Fifth downtown. They’ve found that VW bus.” He listened for a moment, and then said, “All right, come on down. I’d like to go with you.” He hung up and looked at me across the desk. “You heard,” he said.
“I heard.”
He lifted the receiver again, pressed another button in the base of the phone, and then said, “Sergeant, I’ll be out with O’Neil. If Horowitz calls in, tell him we’re down near the Tolliver Street Bridge, the approach road. He’ll find it.” He hung up, and looked at me again.
“Let me go with you, Coop,” I said.
“We don’t need you,” he answered.
“There were times when you did,” I said.
He didn’t answer. But when O’Neil came downstairs, he told him I’d be following them to the scene. O’Neil frowned. He was wearing his hat on the back of his head, like a movie cop of the thirties. A day’s beard stubble was on his chin and his cheeks. His mouth tightened.
“Why?” he asked Coop.
“He’s been helpful,” Coop said flatly. “I want him along.”
The two men looked at each other.
“Just don’t get in the way,” O’Neil said to me, saving his dignity in the presence of his commanding officer. “This is a homicide we’re investigating.” He hitched up his pants, and I followed him and Coop outside.
Twenty-Six
The Tolliver Street Bridge spans two sections of the city, crossing the Meredith River at its narrowest point downtown. Warehouses line the streets in most of the surrounding area, and the neighborhood is deserted after dark. The approach road to the bridge runs along the river’s edge, on Avenue L. There is a metal guardrail separating the road from the steep embankment dropping away to the river, but a twenty-five-foot section of it was under repair, and it was precisely at this spot that the Volkswagen bus had crashed through the erected sawhorse barricades. It now lay smoldering on its side some fifty feet below the road surface. Firemen were still dragging hoses up the incline when we arrived. A pair of radio motor patrol cars, their red dome lights flashing, were parked across either end of Avenue L, sealing off the block. Another patrol car was parked alongside one of the two fire engines. The driver of that car was the man who’d radioed the accident report to the Fifth Precinct.
The desk sergeant there had recognized the license-plate number as the one in Coop’s teletype, and had immediately phoned the Twelfth.
In the Police Department’s Homicides and Suspicious Deaths Manual, the investigating officer is advised to ask six questions of the first officer at the scene. It is further suggested that he can remember these six questions by utilizing the code word NEOTWY, which is composed of the last letter in each of the key words used to frame the questions. Anyone but an amnesiac would remember the six key words, but in this city the Police Department takes no chances with its hired help. These six words are:
N —When
E — Where
O —Who
T — What
W — How
Y — Why
The investigating officer is told to use these words in their exact order. Detective Daniel O’Neil used them in their exact order now as he questioned the patrolman who’d called in the report. Coop and I stood beside him, listening. Everywhere around us, fireman were reeling in hoses and carrying equipment back to their engines. In the distance, I could hear the shriek of an ambulance siren.
“When did you discover the accident?” O’Neil asked.
“Must’ve been around seven-thirty,” the patrolman said. “We just finished a circle of the warehouses, and was heading north up Avenue L when we spotted the fire down there. I called it in while Freddie, my partner, ran down the embankment with a fire extinguisher. It didn’t help a damn, that thing was really blazing. Freddie come back up to the car, gave me the license-plate number, and I called that in, too. He was lucky. He was no sooner up here than the gas tank blew.”
O’Neil skipped the “Where” question. He already knew where the VW bus was; it was fifty feet down the embankment. He went on to the “Who,” phrasing his question somewhat differently than prescribed in the manual.
“Anybody in the bus?” he asked.
“There’s a guy behind the steering wheel,” the patrolman said. “Or what’s left of him, anyway. I told the sergeant we were gonna need a meat wagon.”
“You didn’t touch him, did you?”
“No, sir,” the patrolman said. He seemed offended that such a question had even been asked.
“Find anything on the street up here?” O’Neil asked. This was a variation of the “What” question. He was trying to determine exactly what had happened to cause the bus to crash through the wooden barricade.
“Like what, sir?” the patrolman asked.