Blood Relatives (87th Precinct) Read online

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Did that in fact ever happen?”

  “What, sir? Did what happen?”

  “That either of the two walked into that hallway in the middle of the night? To go to the bathroom?”

  “Well, I suppose so. I mean, it’s perfectly natural for people to get up at night and—”

  “Yes, but did your sister or Muriel in fact ever do so?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “You saw them in that hallway?”

  “I suppose I saw them.”

  “Your door was open?”

  “Sometimes I sleep with the door open. In the summertime, usually. It’s cooler that way.”

  “What were the girls wearing on those occasions when they were in that hallway in the middle of the night? Were they wearing nightgowns? Or were they in fact wearing any—?”

  “I think that’s enough, Counselor,” Harris said.

  “I was merely…” Locke started.

  “Yes, I know what you were merely,” Harris said. “And I am merely telling you that my client will not answer any further questions. Gentlemen, I believe we’re finished with the interrogation. Let’s get on with what you have to do.”

  It was now five minutes to 9:00. In the days before Miranda-Escobedo, cops involved in a big homicide case would try to keep a defendant at the station house long enough to avoid night court. Nine P.M. was usually a safe hour. If the interrogation and the booking and the mugging and the printing went past 9:00 P.M., the prisoner would have to stay at the station house over-night and would not be arraigned till the next morning. Since Miranda-Escobedo, the police were required to begin their questioning as soon after arrest as possible, and were not permitted to keep a man in custody for more than a reasonable amount of time before booking him. “Soon after arrest” and “reasonable amount of time” were not euphemisms. The police respected Miranda-Escobedo because they did not want airtight cases kicked out of court on technicalities of questioning or custody. So these days, even publicity-seeking cops could not delay an interrogation or a booking in order to hit the morning papers with news of having cracked a homicide.

  The interrogation of Andrew Lowery was completed by five minutes to 9:00, but they still weren’t through with him. While the assistant district attorney smoked a cigarette and philosophized to Carella about the nicest-seeming kids turning out to be the most vicious killers, Kling took three sets of Lowery’s fingerprints, one for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, another for the state’s Bureau of Criminal Identification, and a third for the city’s Identification Section. As he took the prints, he chatted with Lowery, putting him at ease—the same way an internist will chat with a patient while simultaneously peering through a sigmoidoscope. He told Lowery that in this city a defendant in a murder case was never allowed bail, and he also explained that unless a material witness agreed to be fingerprinted, he wouldn’t be allowed bail in any kind of case. He wiped Lowery’s hands when the fingerprinting was done, and then asked if he would mind having his picture taken. Lowery asked if they wouldn’t be taking it anyway when he got to jail, and Kling said, Yes, they’d be taking his picture in the morning, but the squad liked to have a record, too, though Lowery could say no if he wanted to. Lowery agreed to have his picture taken, and Kling took a Polaroid photo of him. Then he filled out two arrest cards, and turned the prisoner over to Carella, who had originally caught the squeal, and who was responsible for booking Lowery now.

  Together with Lowery’s attorney, and the assistant district attorney, Carella and the prisoner went down to the muster room. By that time an assistant deputy inspector had been sent over from Headquarters—this was a homicide arrest—and was waiting at the muster desk. The desk sergeant asked Lowery his name and address, which he wrote into the book, and then he looked up at the clock and wrote down the time and the date, and asked Carella if this was his case. Carella said it was his case, and the desk sergeant wrote his name into the book, too, and then asked him what the case number was, and Carella said it was 12-1430B, and the sergeant wrote that into the book as well. Then, after all of this, he wrote the words “Arrested and charged with (1) Homicide and (2) First-Degree Assault in that the defendant did commit the crimes aforesaid.” And he listed as being present at the booking—in addition to Detective 2nd/Grade Stephen Louis Carella—Assistant District Attorney Roger M. Locke, and Assistant Deputy Inspector Michael Lonergan, and attorney for the defendant, Gerrold R. Harris. In the upper right-hand corner of the page, he wrote the arrest number, and then he asked Lowery to empty his pockets, and he made a list of all of Lowery’s personal property, and tagged the stuff, and put it into an envelope. In the book, he wrote “And to cell,” and then he summoned a patrolman to take Lowery down to the basement, where the precinct’s eight holding cells—four for men, four for women—were located. The cells were small, scrupulously clean, each fitted with a toilet bowl and sink, and furnished with a bed and blanket. Locke watched Lowery as he was led out of the muster room. He had not been in handcuffs during the interrogation, but he was in handcuffs now. Several moments later a light on a panel behind the muster desk flashed red, telling the sergeant that one of the holding-cell doors was open. In another moment the light winked out. Locke lit another cigarette. Exhaling the smoke, he said to Carella that this one looked like real meat.

  Real meat or not, at 8:00 the next morning Andrew Lowery was taken by police van to the Headquarters building downtown on High Street, where he was photographed again—this time with a number on his chest—and where the lieutenant assigned checked the fingerprint record that had been forwarded from the Identification Section. The fingerprints were on a mimeographed yellow form, and had been copied by the IS from the originals Kling had sent down the night before. Andrew Lowery had never had one before, but he now possessed what the police called a “yellow sheet” or a “B-sheet,” and it would follow him for the rest of his life. It followed him to the Criminal Courts Building now, where his name was entered in yet another book before he was turned over to the Department of Corrections. At 9:45 A.M. both Stephen Louis Carella and Gerrold R. Harris were waiting in the Complaint Room of Felony Court when Andrew Lowery was brought in. A clerk drew up a short-form complaint listing the charges against Lowery, and some ten minutes later he was in court with two dozen other defendants, all of whom were waiting to be arraigned. The bridge—the court attendant sitting in front of the judge’s bench—read off a defendant’s name and the charge against him, and the judge disposed of the case and then the bridge read off another name and another charge. It took quite a while to get to Lowery, because the names were being read in alphabetical order. When Lowery’s name was finally called, he stepped up to the bench, and Harris and Carella joined him there immediately. The bridge read off the charges and asked Carella if they were correct as read. Carella said that they were. The judge then said to Lowery exactly what he had said to the ten or twelve defendants who’d been called before him.

  “You may have a hearing in this court, or an adjournment for the purpose of obtaining a lawyer or witnesses, or you may waive that hearing and let the case go to a grand jury. Do you have a lawyer?”

  “I am representing the defendant, your Honor,” Harris said.

  “How does the defendant plead?” the judge asked.

  “Not guilty,” Lowery said.

  “The defendant pleads not guilty, your Honor,” Harris said, “and requests that the case be held over for a grand jury.”

  “Very well,” the judge said. “The defendant will be held without bail in the House of Corrections until such time as the Homicide Bureau of the district attorney’s office shall prepare and submit its case to the grand jury.”

  And that was it.

  Cops know crime statistics.

  Which is why hardly anything surprises a cop. Shocks him, yes. He is capable of being shocked. Surprised, rarely. Not where it concerns crime. Carella was shocked when he saw the torn and mutilated
body of Muriel Stark in the hallway on Fourteenth and Harding, but he was not surprised that a knife had been the murder weapon. He was not surprised because he knew that 40 percent of the annual murders in this city were caused by the use of knives or other sharp instruments, whereas only 27 percent were caused by the use of firearms. He suspected this was due to the city’s stringent gun laws; in the United States as a whole, a staggering 54 percent of all murders were committed with firearms, the most lethal weapon used in assaults to kill, seven times more deadly than all other weapons combined. Despite whatever the National Rifle Association had to say about man’s inherent right to bear arms and to go romping in the woods in search of game, Carella (and every other cop in the city) would have liked nothing better than a law forbidding private citizens to own or carry a gun of any kind for any purpose whatever. But police officers did not have a powerful lobby in Washington, even though they were the ones who daily reaped the whirlwind while the gun manufacturers reaped the profits.

  Statistics.

  It shocked Carella, too, that Andrew Lowery had most probably killed his own cousin. It shocked Carella, but it did not surprise him, because he knew that whereas 20 percent of all homicides stemmed from lovers’ quarrels, an overwhelming 30 percent resulted from family conflicts of one sort or another. In real life, you rarely got anyone planning a brilliant murder for months and months, and then executing it in painstaking detail. What you got instead was your brother-in-law hitting you over the head with a beer bottle because he was losing at poker. Your brilliant murders were for television, where the smart cop always tripped up the dumb crook who thought the cop was dumb but who was really dumb himself, heh-heh. Bullshit. Carella always turned off the television set whenever a cop show came on. He sometimes wondered if doctors turned off the set when a doctor show came on. Or lawyers. Or forest rangers. Or private eyes. Carella didn’t know any private eyes. He knew a lot of cops, though, and hardly any of them behaved the way television cops did. But a lot of them watched television cop shows. Probably gave them ideas on how to deal with the good guys and the bad guys. Television cop shoves a pistol at a thief, tells him, “This ain’t a pastrami on rye, sonny,” gives the real-life cop an idea. Next time the real-life cop makes an arrest, he remembers what the television cop said. So he shoves his piece at the thief, and he says, “This ain’t a pastrami on rye, sonny,” and the thief hits the real-life cop on the ear with a lead pipe and rams the pistol down his throat and makes him eat it, proving if it’s not a pastrami on rye, it’s at least a baloney on whole wheat with mayonnaise. Television cops were dangerous. They made real-life cops feel like heroes instead of hard-working slobs. Carella did not feel like a hero when he got back from the Criminal Courts Building that afternoon. He had left the down-town area at 11:45, and it was now almost 12:30, and he still hadn’t had lunch, and the first thing he saw on his desk when he walked into the squadroom was a memo from the Police Commissioner. The memo may not have disturbed Carella had he not just been thinking about life imitating art imitating life and so on. But it disturbed him now. It very definitely disturbed him. This is what the memo read:

  ATTENTION ALL UNITS, BY ORDER OF THE COMMISSIONER

  1] EFFECTIVE THIS DATE, RUBBER STAMP SIGNATURES MAY NOT BE USED ON ANY OFFICIAL CORRESPONDENCE.

  2] EFFECTIVE THIS DATE, ANY ORDERS OR INSTRUCTIONS SIGNED WITH A RUBBER STAMP SIGNATURE ARE TO BE IGNORED.

  The memo was signed by the Police Commissioner, Alfred James Dougherty. There was only one trouble with the memo. In signing it, the commissioner, or his secretary, or one of his aides had used a rubber stamp.

  Carella looked at the memo and at the rubber stamp signature.

  The commissioner had clearly ordered that effective this date rubber stamp signatures could not be used on any official correspondence. The memo also stated that any orders or instructions signed with a rubber stamp signature were to be ignored.

  Carella’s perplexity was monumental.

  He sat at his desk and read the memo again, and then he read it a third time, and tried to decide what he should do about it. His deductive reasoning went something like this:

  (1) The commissioner’s memo had been signed with a rubber stamp.

  (2) Therefore, the commissioner’s memo was to be ignored.

  (3) If the memo was to be ignored, then the use of a rubber stamp signature on official correspondence was still permitted.

  (4) And if the rubber stamp signature was still permitted, then any orders or instructions signed with such a signature were not to be ignored.

  (5) Therefore, the commissioner’s memo was not to be ignored.

  (6) But if the commissioner’s memo was not to be ignored, then it outlawed all rubber stamp signatures, and since the memo had been signed with a rubber stamp, it clearly was to be ignored.

  (7) Therefore, the commissioner’s memo was to be ignored and was also not to be ignored.

  Carella blinked, and looked up at the clock. Only two minutes had passed since the commissioner started causing him heartburn. He decided to go out to lunch.

  Until the moment Patricia Lowery made her accusatory statement to the police, they had been looking for a stranger. They were now working directly for the district attorney’s office, and looking for evidence to bolster the case against Andrew Lowery. No one doubted in the slightest that the grand jury would, on the basis of Patricia’s statement, indict her brother Andrew. In this city a grand jury consisted of twenty-three men, and their purpose was to hear evidence, determine whether a crime or crimes had in fact been committed, whether it was reasonable to assume that the defendant had committed the crime or crimes, and exactly what the nature and extent of the crimes were, for the purposes of indictment. If and when they indicted, the Bureau of Indictment would then make out a list of charges, and two days after that the case would be set for General Sessions, Part I, where the defendant would be arraigned for pleading. The plea in a homicide case was an automatic plea of Not Guilty. At that hearing, clerks from the DA’s office would assign the case to a particular judge and a particular part of General Sessions, and a date for the trial would be set. The case against Andrew Lowery was a strong one, even without additional evidence; a sister accusing her own brother of murder was hardly something to be taken lightly. But the DA would be grateful nonetheless for whatever else the police could come up with before the case went before a jury. It was for this reason that Carella had tried to get a search warrant while he was downtown at the Criminal Courts Building that morning.

  A search warrant is an order in writing, in the name of the people, signed by a magistrate, directed to a peace officer, commanding him to search for personal property and to bring it before the magistrate. The warrant is usually quite specific. The peace officer requesting the warrant must show probable cause and must support this by affidavit, naming or describing the person and particularly describing the property, and the place to be searched. A detective, for example, after being duly sworn and deposed, would state in writing that he had information based upon his personal knowledge and belief and/or facts disclosed to him that an armed robbery had been committed, and then would disclose the results of his investigation before requesting that he be granted permission to search for a suspect revolver that he now believed was hidden in the bread box of the man arrested for the crime.

  Neither Carella nor Assistant DA Locke felt they had the slightest chance of getting a warrant allowing them to search Andrew Lowery’s room in the apartment on Fourteenth Street and St. John’s Road. But hope springs eternal, and besides, Carella was downtown anyway, so he took a whack at it, boldly stating in his affidavit that there was probable cause to believe that if there existed in Andrew Lowery’s room any clothes bearing bloodstains of the O group or of the A group, then these might constitute evidence of the crime of murder. The magistrate had read the affidavit, and then had fixed Carella with a baleful eye and asked point-blank, “What do you mean by if? Do you have any personal knowledge of th
e existence of such clothing?” Carella had been forced to admit that No, your Honor, he had no personal knowledge of the existence of such evidence, but it was reasonable to assume that perhaps Andrew Lowery—and the magistrate had interrupted to say he was denying the warrant on the grounds that Carella was about to conduct a fishing expedition that would clearly constitute an illegal search. So Carella had gone back to the squadroom, disappointed but not surprised, only to find the Commissioner’s baffling memo on his desk.

  After lunch he went over to the Lowery apartment without a search warrant. The situation here was an interesting one in that the victim and the accused had both lived in the same apartment, and whereas Carella would have needed a warrant to conduct a search of Lowery’s room, he did not need a warrant to search Muriel Stark’s room—no more than he would have needed a warrant, for example, to look for bloodstains or a murder weapon at the scene of a crime. Lillian Lowery opened the door for him, and when he told her why he was there, she asked him to come in. He had been in this apartment before, on the day of Muriel’s funeral, but on that occasion he had been concerned solely with positive identification of the murder weapon. He was here today in search of evidence, and he looked at the place differently now, his trained observer’s eye automatically summarizing and editorializing.

  The apartment was in a fairly decent neighborhood, not quite as good as Silvermine Oval, and nowhere near as elegant as Smoke Rise, but certainly not bad for the 87th Precinct. You wouldn’t find any buildings with doormen on St. John’s Road, but neither would you find a row of broken mailboxes or hallways stinking of urine. Nor was the Lowery apartment the sort of railroad flat you found in the ghetto sections of the precinct, one room leading directly into another, without benefit of corridor, rather like a string of boxcars following behind a locomotive. Instead, the apartment was arranged like a nest of different-sized boxes, the entrance hall serving as a small receiving chamber off of which one entered the kitchen on the right and living room on the left. The kitchen was a dead-end room, leading nowhere, its two windows opening on the rear brick wall of the building opposite. Curtains on the windows, white nylon sheer; not quite lacecurtain Irish, the Lowerys, nor were they shanty, either. A door directly opposite the entrance door led to what Carella supposed was the bathroom Andrew Lowery had mentioned the night before. In the living room on the left of the entrance foyer, there was a three-piece suite—sofa and two large easy chairs—upholstered in a floral-patterned fabric. Television set against the far wall, framed picture of Jesus above it: one of those trick pictures where the eyes followed you all around the room. Television set was a color console, Carella noticed. On another wall, a picture of a farmer looking up at the sky, possibly hoping for rain.