“And the guy had a knife.”
“Right,” I said. “That’s how it was, but it’s another way an investigating officer might get confused. How did the guy know Phil was going to come to the door? Most times the host opens the door, and the rest of the time it’s only one chance in five it’ll be Phil. Would the guy be ready, knife in hand? And would Phil just open up without making sure who it was?”
I held up a hand. “I know, that’s how it happened. But I think it might be worth your while to stage a more plausible scenario, something a lot easier for the cops to come to terms with. Suppose we forget the intruder. Suppose the story we tell is that Phil was cheating at cards and someone called him on it. Maybe some strong words were said and threats were exchanged. Phil went into his pocket and came out with a knife.”
“That’s …”
“You’re going to say it’s far-fetched,” I said, “but he’d probably have some sort of weapon on him, something to intimidate anyone who did catch him cheating. He pulls the knife and you react. Say you turn the table over on him. The whole thing goes crashing to the floor and he winds up sticking his own knife in his chest.”
I walked across the room. “We’ll have to move the table,” I went on. “There’s not really room for that sort of struggle where you’ve got it set up, but suppose it was right in the middle of the room, under the light fixture? Actually that would be a logical place for it.” I bent down, picked up the throw rug, tossed it aside. “You’d move the rug if you had the table here.” I bent down, poked at a stain. “Looks like somebody had a nosebleed, and fairly recently, or you’d have had the carpet cleaned by now. That can fit right in, come to think of it. Phil wouldn’t have bled much from a stab wound to the heart, but there’d have been a little blood loss, and I didn’t spot any blood at all where the body’s lying now. If we put him in the right spot, they’ll most likely assume it’s his blood, and it might even turn out to be the same blood type. I mean, there are only so many blood types, right?”
I looked at them one by one. “I think it’ll work,” I said. “To sweeten it, we’ll tell them you’re friends of mine. I play in this game now and then, although I wasn’t here when Phil was. And when the accident happened the first thing you thought of was to call me, and that’s why there was a delay reporting the incident. You’d reported it to me, and I was on my way here, and you figured that was enough.” I stopped for breath, took a moment to look each of them in the eye. “We’ll want things arranged just right,” I went on, “and it’ll be a good idea to spread a little cash around. But I think this one’ll go into the books as accidental death.”
“They must have thought you were a genius,” Elaine said.
“Or an idiot savant,” I said. “Here I was, telling them to fake exactly what had in fact happened. At the beginning I think they may have thought I was blundering into an unwitting reconstruction of the incident, but by the end they probably figured out that I knew where I was going. ”
“But you never spelled it out.”
“No, we maintained the fiction that some intruder stuck the knife in Ryman, and we were tampering with the evidence.”
“When actually you were restoring it. What tipped you off?”
“The body blocking the door. The lividity pattern was wrong, but I was suspicious even before I confirmed that. It’s just too cute, a body positioned where it’ll keep a door from opening. And the table was in the wrong place, and the little rug had to be covering something, or why else would it be where it was? So I pictured the room the right way, and then everything sort of filled in. But it didn’t take a genius. Any cop would have seen some wrong things, and he’d have asked a few hard questions, and the four of them would have caved in.”
“And then what? Murder indictments?”
“Most likely, but they’re respectable businessmen and the deceased was a scumbag, so they’d have been up on manslaughter charges and probably would have pleaded to a lesser charge. Still, a verdict of accidental death saves them a lot of aggravation. “
“And that’s what really happened?”
“I can’t see any of those men packing a switch knife, or pulling it at a card table. Nor does it seem likely they could have taken it away from Ryman and killed him with it. I think he went ass over teakettle with the table coming down on top of him and maybe one or two of the guys falling on top of the table. And he was still holding the knife, and he stuck it in his own chest.”
“And the cops who responded — ”
“Well, I called it in for them, so I more or less selected the responding officers. I picked guys you can work with.”
“And worked with them.”
“Everybody came out okay,” I said. “I collected a few dollars from the four players, and I laid off some of it where it would do the most good.”
“Just to smooth things out.”
“That’s right.”
“But you didn’t lay off all of it.”
“No,” I said, “not quite all of it. Give me your hand. Here.”
“What’s this?”
“A finder’s fee.”
“Three hundred dollars?”
“Ten percent,” I said.
“Gee,” she said. “I didn’t expect anything.”
“What do you do when somebody gives you money?”
“I say thank you,” she said, “and I put it someplace safe. This is great. You get them to tell the truth, and everybody gets paid. Do you have to go back to Syosset right away? Because Chet Baker’s at Mikell’s tonight.”
“We could go hear him,” I said, “and then we could come back here. I told Anita I’d probably have to stay over.”
“Oh, goodie,” she said. “Do you suppose he’ll sing ‘Let’s Get Lost’?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said. “Not if you ask him nice.”
I don’t remember if he sang it or not, but I heard it again just the other day on the radio. He’d ended abruptly, that aging boy with the sweet voice and sweeter horn. He went out a hotel room window somewhere in Europe, and most people figured he’d had help. He’d crossed up a lot of people along the way and always got away with it, but then that’s usually the way it works. You dodge all the bullets but the last one.
“Let’s Get Lost.” I heard the song, and not twenty-four hours later I picked up the Times and read an obit for a commodities trader named P. Gordon Fawcett, who’d succumbed to prostate cancer. The name rang a bell, but it took me hours to place it. He was the guy in the blazer, the man in whose apartment Phil Ryman stabbed himself.
Funny how things work out. It wasn’t too long after that poker game that another incident precipitated my departure from the NYPD, and from my marriage. Elaine and I lost track of each other, and caught up with each other some years down the line, by which time I’d found a way to live without drinking. So we got lost and found — and now we’re married. Who’d have guessed?
My life’s vastly different these days, but I can imagine being called in on just that sort of emergency — a man dead on the carpet, a knife in his chest, in the company of four poker players who only wish he’d disappear. As I said, my life’s different, and I suppose I’m different myself. So I’d almost certainly handle it differently now, and what I’d probably do is call it in immediately and let the cops deal with it.
Still, I always liked the way that one worked out. I walked in on a cover-up, and what I did was cover up the cover-up. And in the process I wound up with the truth. Or an approximation of it, at least, and isn’t that as much as you can expect to get? Isn’t that enough?
Monica said, “What kind of a gun? A man shoots himself in his living room, surrounded by his nearest and dearest, and you want to know what kind of a gun he used?”
“I just wondered,” I said.
Monica rolled her eyes. She’s one of Elaine’s oldest friends. They were in high school together, in Rego Park, and they never lost touch over the years. Elaine spent a lot of years as
a call girl, and Monica, who was never in the life herself, seemed to have no difficulty accepting that. Elaine, for her part, had no judgment on Monica’s predilection for dating married men.
She was with the current one that evening. The four of us had gone to a revival of Allegro, the Rodgers and Hammerstein show that hadn’t been a big hit the first time around. From there we went to Paris Green for a late supper. We talked about the show and speculated on reasons for its limited success. The songs were good, we agreed, and I was old enough to remember hearing “A Fellow Needs a Girl” on the radio. Elaine said she had a Lisa Kirk LP, and one of the cuts was “The Gentleman Is a Dope.” That number, she said, had stopped the show during its initial run, and launched Lisa Kirk.
Monica said she’d love to hear it sometime. Elaine said all she had to do was find the record and then find something to play it on. Monica said she still had a turntable for LPs.
Monica’s guy didn’t say anything, and I had the feeling he didn’t know who Lisa Kirk was, or why he had to go through all this just to get laid. His name was Doug Halley — like the comet, he’d said — and he did something in Wall Street. Whatever it was, he did well enough at it to keep his second wife and their kids in a house in Pound Ridge, in Westchester County, while he was putting the kids from his first marriage through college. He had a boy at Bowdoin, we’d learned, and a girl who’d just started at Colgate.
We got as much conversational mileage as we could out of Lisa Kirk, and the drinks came — Perrier for me, cranberry juice for Elaine and Monica, and a Stolichnaya martini for Halley. He’d hesitated for a beat before ordering it — Monica would surely have told him I was a sober alcoholic, and even if she hadn’t he’d have noted that he was the only one drinking — and I could almost hear him think it through and decide the hell with it. I was just as glad he’d ordered the drink. He looked as though he needed it, and when it came he drank deep.
It was about then that Monica mentioned the fellow who’d shot himself. It had happened the night before, too late to make the morning papers, and Monica had seen the coverage that afternoon on New York One. A man in Inwood, in the course of a social evening at his own home, with friends and family members present, had drawn a gun, ranted about his financial situation and everything that was wrong with the world, and then stuck the gun in his mouth and blown his brains out.
“What kind of a gun,” Monica said again. “It’s a guy thing, isn’t it? There’s not a woman in the world who would ask that question.”
“A woman would ask what he was wearing,” Halley said.
“No,” Elaine said. “Who cares what he was wearing? A woman would ask what his wife was wearing.”
“A look of horror would be my guess,” Monica said. “Can you imagine? You’re having a nice evening with friends and your husband shoots himself in front of everybody?”
“They didn’t show it, did they?”
“They didn’t interview her on camera, but they did talk with some man who was there and saw the whole thing.”
Halley said that it would have been a bigger story if they’d had the wife on camera, and we started talking about the media and how intrusive they’d become. And we stayed with that until they brought us our food.
When we got home Elaine said, “The man who shot himself. When you asked if they showed it, you didn’t mean an interview with the wife. You wanted to know if they showed him doing it.”
“These days,” I said, “somebody’s almost always got a camcorder running. But I didn’t really think anybody had the act on tape.”
“Because it would have been a bigger story.”
“That’s right. The play a story gets depends on what they’ve got to show you. It would have been a little bigger than it was if they’d managed to interview the wife, but it would have been everybody’s lead story all day long if they could have actually shown him doing it.”
“Still, you asked.”
“Idly,” I said. “Making conversation.”
“Yeah, right. And you want to know what kind of gun he used. Just being a guy, and talking guy talk. Because you liked Doug so much, and wanted to bond with him.”
“Oh, I was crazy about him. Where does she find them?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but I think she’s got radar. If there’s a jerk out there, and if he’s married, she homes in on him. What did you care what kind of gun it was?”
“What I was wondering,” I said, “was whether it was a revolver or an automatic.”
She thought about it. “And if they showed him doing it, you could look at the film and know what kind of a gun it was.”
“Anybody could.”
“I couldn’t,” she said. “Anyway, what difference does it make?”
“Probably none.”
“Oh?”
“It reminded me of a case we had,” I said. “Ages ago.”
“Back when you were a cop, and I was a cop’s girlfriend.”
I shook my head. “Only the first half. I was on the force, but you and I hadn’t met yet. I was still wearing a uniform, and it would be a while before I got my gold shield. And we hadn’t moved to Long Island yet, we were still living in Brooklyn.”
“You and Anita and the boys.”
“Was Andy even born yet? No, he couldn’t have been, because she was pregnant with him when we bought the house in Syosset. We probably had Mike by then, but what difference does it make? It wasn’t about them. It was about the poor son of a bitch in Park Slope who shot himself.”
“And did he use a revolver or an automatic?”
“An automatic. He was a World War Two vet, and this was the gun he’d brought home with him. It must have been a forty-five.”
“And he stuck it in his mouth and — ”
“Put it to his temple. Putting it in your mouth, I think it was cops who made that popular.”
“Popular?”
“You know what I mean. The expression caught on, ‘eating your gun,’ and you started seeing more civilian suicides who took that route.” I fell silent, remembering. “I was partnered with Vince Mahaffey. I’ve told you about him.”
“He smoked those little cigars.”
“Guinea-stinkers, he called them. DeNobilis was the brand name, and they were these nasty little things that looked as though they’d passed through the digestive system of a cat. I don’t think they could have smelled any worse if they had. Vince smoked them all day long, and he ate like a pig and drank like a fish.”
“The perfect role model.”
“Vince was all right,” I said. “I learned a hell of a lot from Vince.”
“Are you gonna tell me the story?”
“You want to hear it?”
She got comfortable on the couch. “Sure,” she said. “I like it when you tell me stories.”
It was a week night, I remembered, and the moon was full. It seems to me it was in the spring, but I could be wrong about that part.
Mahaffey and I were in a radio car. I was driving when the call came in, and he rang in and said we’d take this one. It was in the Slope. I don’t remember the address, but wherever it was we weren’t far from it, and I drove there and we went in.
Park Slope’s a very desirable area now, but this was before the gentrification process got underway, and the Slope was still a working-class neighborhood, and predominantly Irish. The house we were directed to was one of a row of identical brownstone houses, four stories tall, two apartments to a floor. The vestibule was a half-flight up from street level, and a man was standing in the doorway, waiting for us.
“You want the Conways,” he said. “Two flights up and on your left.”
“You’re a neighbor?”
“Downstairs of them,” he said. “It was me called it in. My wife’s with her now, the poor woman. He was a bastard, that husband of hers.”
“You didn’t get along?”
“Why would you say that? He was a good neighbor.”
“Then how did
he get to be a bastard?”
“To do what he did,” the man said darkly. “You want to kill yourself, Jesus, it’s an unforgivable sin, but it’s a man’s own business, isn’t it?” He shook his head. “But do it in private, for God’s sake. Not with your wife looking on. As long as the poor woman lives, that’s her last memory of her husband.”
We climbed the stairs. The building was in good repair, but drab, and the stairwell smelled of cabbage and of mice. The cooking smells in tenements have changed over the years, with the ethnic makeup of their occupants. Cabbage was what you used to smell in Irish neighborhoods. I suppose it’s still much in evidence in Greenpoint and Brighton Beach, where new arrivals from Poland and Russia reside. And I’m sure the smells are very different in the stairwells of buildings housing immigrants from Asia and Africa and Latin America, but I suspect the mouse smell is there, too.
Halfway up the second flight of stairs, we met a woman on her way down. “Mary Frances!” she called upstairs. “It’s the police!” She turned to us. “She’s in the back,” she said, “with her kids, the poor darlings. It’s just at the top of the stairs, on your left. You can walk right in.”
The door of the Conway apartment was ajar. Mahaffey knocked on it, then pushed it open when the knock went unanswered. We walked in and there he was, a middle-aged man in dark blue trousers and a white cotton tank-top undershirt. He’d nicked himself shaving that morning, but that was the least of his problems.
He was sprawled in an easy chair facing the television set. He’d fallen over on his left side, and there was a large hole in his right temple, the skin scorched around the entry wound. His right hand lay in his lap, the fingers still holding the gun he’d brought back from the war.
“Jesus,” Mahaffey said.
There was a picture of Jesus on the wall over the fireplace, and, similarly framed, another of John F. Kennedy. Other photos and holy pictures reposed here and there in the room — on tabletops, on walls, on top of the television set. I was looking at a small framed photo of a smiling young man in an army uniform and just beginning to realize it was a younger version of the dead man when his wife came into the room.