87th Precinct 24 - Jigsaw

  “J”

  * * * *

  1

  It was the first of April, the day for fools.

  It was also Saturday, and the day before Easter.

  Death should not have come at all, but it had. And, having come, perhaps it was justified in its confusion. Today was the fool’s day, the day for practical jokes. Tomorrow was Easter, the day of the bonnet and egg, the day for the spring march of finery and frills. Oh, yes, it was rumored in some quarters of the city that Easter Sunday had something to do with a different sort of march at a place called Calvary, but it had been a long long time since death was vetoed and rendered null and void, and people have short memories, especially where holidays are concerned.

  Today, Death was very much in evidence, and plainly confused. Striving as it was to reconcile the trappings of two holidays — or perhaps three — it succeeded in producing only a blended distortion.

  The young man who lay on his back in the alley was wearing black, as if in mourning. But over the black, in contradiction, was a fine silken shawl, fringed at both ends. He seemed dressed for spring, but this was the fool’s day, and Death could not resist the temptation.

  The black was punctuated with red and blue and white. The cobbled floor of the alley followed the same decorative scheme, red and blue and white, splashed about in gay spring abandon. Two overturned buckets of paint, one white, one blue, seemed to have ricocheted off the wall of the building and come to disorderly rest on the alley floor. The man’s shoes were spattered with paint. His black garment was covered with paint. His hands were drenched in paint. Blue and white, white and blue, his black garment, his silken shawl, the floor of the alley, the brick wall of the building before which he lay — all were splashed with blue and white.

  The third color did not mix well with the others.

  The third color was red, a little too primary, a little too bright.

  The third color had not come from a paint can. The third color still spilled freely from two dozen open wounds on the man’s chest and stomach and neck and face and hands, staining the black, staining the silken shawl, spreading in a bright red pool on the alley floor, suffusing the paint with sunset, mingling with the paint but not mixing well, spreading until it touched the foot of the ladder lying crookedly along the wall, encircling the paintbrush lying at the wall’s base. The bristles of the brush were still wet with white paint. The man’s blood touched the bristles, and then trickled to the cement line where brick wall touched cobbled alley, flowed in an inching stream downward toward the street.

  Someone had signed the wall.

  On the wall, someone had painted, in bright, white paint, the single letter. J. Nothing more — only J.

  The blood trickled down the alley to the city street.

  Night was coming.

  * * * *

  Detective Cotton Hawes was a tea drinker. He had picked up the habit from his minister father, the man who’d named him after Cotton Mather, the last of the red-hot Puritans. In the afternoons, the good Reverend Jeremiah Hawes had entertained members of his congregation, serving tea and cakes which his wife Matilda baked in the old, iron, kitchen oven. The boy, Cotton Hawes, had been allowed to join the tea-drinking congregation, thus developing a habit which had continued to this day.

  At eight o’clock on the night of April first, while a young man lay in an alleyway with two dozen bleeding wounds shrieking in silence to the passersby on the street below, Hawes sat drinking tea. As a boy, he had downed the hot beverage in the book-lined study at the rear of the parish house, a mixture of Oolong and Pekoe which his mother brewed in the kitchen and served in English bone-china cups she had inherited from her grandmother. Tonight, he sat in the grubby, shopworn comfort of the 87th Precinct squadroom and drank, from a cardboard container, the tea Alf Miscolo has prepared in the clerical office. It was hot tea. That was about the most he could say for it.

  The open, mesh-covered windows of the squadroom admitted a mild spring breeze from Grover Park across the way, a warm seductive breeze which made him wish he were outside on the street. It was criminal to be catching on a night like this. It was also boring. Aside from one wife-beating squeal, which Steve Carella was out checking this very minute, the telephone had been ominously quiet. In the silence of the squadroom, Hawes had managed to type up three overdue D.D. reports, two chits for gasoline and a bulletin-board notice to the men of the squad reminding them that this was the first of the month and time for them to cough up fifty cents each for the maintenance of Alf Miscolo’s improvised kitchen. He had also read a half-dozen FBI flyers, and listed in his little black memo book the license-plate numbers of two more stolen vehicles.

  Now he sat drinking insipid tea and wondering why it was so quiet. He supposed the lull had something to do with Easter. Maybe there was going to be an egg-rolling ceremony down South Twelfth Street tomorrow. Maybe all the criminals and potential criminals in the 87th were home dyeing. Eggs, that is. He smiled and took another sip of the tea. From the clerical office beyond the slattered rail divider which separated the squadroom from the corridor, he could hear the rattling of Miscolo’s typewriter. Above that, and beyond it, coming from the iron-runged steps which led upstairs, he could hear the ring of footsteps. He turned toward the corridor just as Steve Carella entered it from the opposite end.

  Carella walked easily and nonchalantly toward the railing, a big man who moved with fine-honed athletic precision. He shoved open the gate in the railing, walked to his desk, took off his jacket, pulled down his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt.

  “What happened?” Hawes asked.

  “The same thing that always happens,” Carella said. He sighed heavily and rubbed his hand over his face. “Is there any more coffee?” he asked.

  “I’m drinking tea.”

  “Hey, Miscolo!” Carella yelled. “Any coffee in there?”

  “I’ll put on some more water!” Miscolo yelled back.

  “So what happened?” Hawes asked.

  “Oh, the same old jazz,” Carella said. “It’s a waste of time to even go out on these wife-beating squeals. I’ve never answered one yet that netted anything.”

  “She wouldn’t press charges,” Hawes said knowingly.

  “Charges, hell. There wasn’t even any beating, according to her. She’s got blood running out of her nose, and a shiner the size of a half-dollar, and she’s the one who screamed for the patrolman — but the minute I get there, everything’s calm and peaceful.” Carella shook his head. “‘A beating, officer?’“ he mimicked in a high, shrill voice. “‘You must be mistaken, officer. Why, my husband is a good, kind, sweet man. We’ve been married for twenty years, and he never lifted a finger to me. You must be mistaken, sir.’“

  “Then who yelled for the cop?” Hawes asked.

  “That’s just what I said to her.”

  “What’d she answer?”

  “She said, ‘Oh, we were just having a friendly little family argument.’ The guy almost knocked three teeth out of her mouth, but that’s just a friendly little family argument. So I asked her how she happened to have a bloody nose and a mouse under her eye and — catch this, Cotton — she said she got them ironing.”

  “What?”

  “Ironing.”

  “She said the ironing board collapsed and the iron jumped up and hit her in the eye, and one of the ironing board legs clipped her in the nose. By the time I left, she and her husband were ready to go on a second honeymoon. She was hugging him all over the place, and he was sneaking his hand under her dress, so I figured I’d come back here where it isn’t so sexy.”

  “Good idea,” Hawes said.

  “Hey, Miscolo!” Carella shouted. “Where’s that coffee
?”

  “A watched pot never boils!” Miscolo shouted back cleverly.

  “We’ve got George Bernard Shaw in the clerical office,” Carella said. “Anything happen since I left?”

  “Nothing. Not a peep.”

  “The streets are quiet, too,” Carella said, suddenly thoughtful.

  “Before the storm,” Hawes said.

  “Mmmm.”

  The squadroom was silent again. Beyond the meshed window, they could hear the myriad sounds of the city, the auto horns, the muffled cries, the belching of buses, a little girl singing as she walked past the station house.

  “Well, I suppose I ought to type up some overdue reports,” Carella said.

  He wheeled over a typing cart, took three Detective Division reports from his desk, inserted carbon between two of the sheets and began typing.

  Hawes stared at the distant lights of Isola’s buildings and sucked in a draught of mesh-filtered spring air.

  He wondered why it was so quiet.

  He wondered just exactly what all those people were doing out there.

  Some of those people were playing April Fool’s Day pranks. Some of them were getting ready for tomorrow, which was Easter Sunday. And some of them were celebrating a third and ancient holiday known as Passover. Now that’s a coincidence which could cause one to speculate upon the similarity of dissimilar religions and the existence of a single, all-powerful God, and all that sort of mystic stuff, if one were inclined toward speculation. Speculator or not, it doesn’t take a big detective to check a calendar, and the coincidence was there, take it or leave it. Buddhist, atheist, or Seventh Day Adventist, you had to admit there was something very democratic and wholesome about Easter and Passover coinciding the way they did, something which gave a festive air to the entire city. Jews and Gentiles alike, because of a chance mating of the Christian and the Hebrew calendars, were celebrating important holidays at almost the same time. Passover had officially begun at sunset on Friday, March thirty-first, another coincidence, since Passover did not always fall on the Jewish Sabbath; but this year, it did. And tonight was April first, and the traditional second seder service, the annual re-enactment of the Jews’ liberation from Egyptian bondage, was being observed in Jewish homes throughout the city.

  Detective Meyer Meyer was a Jew.

  Or at least, he thought he was a Jew. Sometimes he wasn’t quite certain. Because if he was a Jew, he sometimes asked himself, how come he hadn’t seen the inside of a synagogue in twenty years? And if he was a Jew, how come two of his favorite dishes were roast pork and broiled lobster, both of which were forbidden by the dietary laws of the religion? And if he was such a Jew, how come he allowed his son Alan — who was thirteen and who had been barmitzvahed only last month — to play Post Office with Alice McCarthy, who was as Irish as a four-leaf clover?

  Sometimes, Meyer got confused.

  Sitting at the head of the traditional table on this night of the second seder, he didn’t know quite how he felt. He looked at his family, Sarah and the three children, and then he looked at the seder table, festively set with a floral centerpiece and lighted candles and the large platter upon which were placed the traditional objects — three matzos, a roasted shankbone, a roasted egg, bitter herbs, charoses, watercress — and he still didn’t know exactly how he felt. He took a deep breath and began the prayer.

  “And it was evening,” Meyer said, “and it was morning, the sixth day. Thus the heaven and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day, God had finished his work which He had made: and He rested on the seventh day from his work which he had done. And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it, because that in it He rested from all his work, which God had created in order to make it.”

  There was a certain beauty to the words, and they lingered in his mind as he went through the ceremony, describing the various objects on the table and their symbolic meaning. When he elevated the dish containing the bone and the egg, everyone sitting around the table took hold of the dish, and Meyer said, “This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt; let all those who are hungry, enter and eat thereof, and all who are in distress, come and celebrate the Passover.”

  He spoke of his ancestors, but he wondered who he — their descendant — was.

  “Wherefore is this night distinguished from all other nights?” he asked. “Any other night, we may eat either leavened or unleavened bread, but on this night only unleavened bread; all other nights, we may eat any species of herbs, but on this night only bitter herbs . . .”

  The telephone rang. Meyer stopped speaking and looked at his wife. For a moment, both seemed reluctant to break the spell of the ceremony. And then Meyer gave a slight, barely discernible shrug. Perhaps, as he went to the telephone, he was recalling that he was a cop first, and a Jew only second.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Meyer, this is Cotton Hawes.”

  “What is it, Cotton?”

  “Look, I know this is your holiday —”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “We’ve got a killing,” Hawes said.

  Patiently, Meyer said, “We’ve always got a killing.”

  “This is different. A patrolman called in about five minutes ago. The guy was stabbed in the alley behind —”

  “Cotton, I don’t understand,” Meyer said. “I switched the duty with Steve. Didn’t he show up?”

  “What is it, Meyer?” Sarah called from the dining room.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Meyer answered. “Isn’t Steve there?” he asked Hawes, annoyance in his voice.

  “Sure, he’s out on the squeal, but that’s not the point.”

  “What is the point?” Meyer asked. “I was right in the middle of —”

  “We need you on this one,” Hawes said. “Look, I’m sorry as hell. But there are aspects to — Meyer, this guy they found in the alley —”

  “Well, what about him?” Meyer asked.

  “We think he’s a rabbi,” Hawes said.

  * * * *

  2

  The sexton of the Isola Jewish Center was named Yirmiyahu Cohen, and when he introduced himself, he used the Jewish word for sexton, shamash. He was a tall, thin man in his late fifties, wearing a somber black suit and donning a skullcap the moment he, Carella and Meyer re-entered the synagogue.

  The three had stood in the alley behind the synagogue not a moment before, staring down at the body of the dead rabbi and the trail of mayhem surrounding him. Yirmiyahu had wept openly, his eyes closed, unable to look at the dead man who had been the Jewish community’s spiritual leader. Carella and Meyer, who had both been cops for a good long time, did not weep.

  There is plenty to weep at if you happen to be looking down at the victim of a homicidal stabbing. The rabbi’s black robe and fringed prayer shawl were drenched with blood, but happily, they hid from view the multiple stab wounds in his chest and abdomen, wounds which would later be examined at the morgue for external description, number, location, dimension, form of perforation and direction and depth of penetration. Since twenty-five per cent of all fatal stab wounds are cases of cardiac penetration, and since there was a wild array of slashes and a sodden mass of coagulating blood near or around the rabbi’s heart, the two detectives automatically assumed that a cardiac stab wound had been the cause of death, and were grateful for the fact that the rabbi was fully clothed. They had both visited the mortuary and seen naked bodies on naked slabs, no longer bleeding, all blood and all life drained away, but skin torn like the flimsiest cheesecloth, the soft interior of the body deprived of its protective flesh, turned outward, exposed, the ripe wounds gaping and open, had stared at evisceration and wanted to vomit.

  The rabbi now owned flesh, too, and at least a part of it had been exposed to his attacker’s fury. Looking down at the dead man, neither Carella nor Meyer wanted to weep, but their eyes tightened a little and their throats went peculiarly dry because death by s
tabbing is a damn frightening thing. Whoever had handled the knife had done so in apparent frenzy. The only exposed areas of the rabbi’s body were his hands, his neck, and his face — and these, more than the apparently fatal, hidden incisions beneath the black robe and the prayer shawl, shrieked bloody murder to the night. The rabbi’s throat showed two superficial cuts which almost resembled suicidal hesitation cuts. A deeper horizontal slash at the front of his neck had exposed the trachea, carotids and jugular vein, but these did not appear to be severed — at least, not to the layman eyes of Carella and Meyer. There were cuts around the rabbi’s eyes and a cut across the bridge of his nose.

  But the wounds which caused both Carella and Meyer to turn away from the body were the slashes on the insides of the rabbi’s hands. These, they knew, were the defense cuts. These spoke louder than all the others, for they immediately reconstructed the image of a weaponless man struggling to protect himself against the swinging blade of an assassin, raising his hands in hopeless defense, the fingers cut and hanging, the palms slashed to ribbons. At the end of the alley, the patrolman who’d first arrived on the scene was identifying the body to the medical examiner as the one he’d found. Another patrolman was pushing curious bystanders behind the police barricade he’d set up. The laboratory boys and photographers had already begun their work.