“Nope. I’ll take my goodnight kiss on the steps, thank you.”
He tried showing spirit the whole way to Sally’s place, but he knew his body odor was growing, and he kept his arms to his side. In front of her door he kissed her deeply, let her go in, and waved goodbye through the glass. Then he took himself to the scene of the crime: the old tenement apartments on Avenue C, where Sally’s brother Izzy and her mother lived. He didn’t know what was going on exactly, but he sure didn’t want her there.
Number 216.
Detective Hirsch threaded his way down the sidewalk and up the stoop, where barrier rope stretched across the front of the handrails. He showed his ID to the beat cop, then saw Sam approaching and waited. Other cops were keeping away the googly eyes and one female tenant coming home from a shift job. Nothing to see but cop cars on the street.
Inside was another matter. Inside was blood in moats along the hardwood floor between the walls and carpet. Speckled lampshades and pictures. A blotch of blood had soaked into the shoulder of the light-green couch near the window, where Mrs. Jacobs had held back the curtain the last time Sam saw her. The white doilies were off the headrest and one arm.
Izzy’s body lay in the kitchen. At the moment Sam came up, the photog was snapping a close-up of Izzy’s face, where a V-shaped cut had been made near his mouth all the way to the cheekbone. Detective Hirsch said that kind of slice was usually meant for chumps in prison, the scarring designed as a dead-sure label for a snitch. It was “off” to have it carved on a corpse. “You taking notes, Rabinowitz?”
Sam had his notebook out, but had only entered the brush-blood on the doorjamb of the apartment. His head felt full of gelatin. Those weren’t watery eyes, oh no. That wasn’t sour gag in his throat.
Iz. Stickball Iz. Model airplane Iz. Comrade-in-arms Private Isadore Jacobs. Soon to be brother-in-law Izzy. How could it be? Sam’s thoughts raced to Sally. How could she endure this? He held her in his mind as if he held her in his arms, as if the power could transfer. God help her if anyone told her before he did.
Detective Hirsch led Sam down the hallway to the bedroom, pointing out smears at elbow level. “He was dragging her. Look here at the marks on the floor,” he said, pointing to black marks. Old lady Jacobs always wore lace-up witch shoes with black soles.
In the room, Hirsch nodded toward the bed where Mrs. Jacobs lay on her stomach in the middle, head over the side as if searching for something that fell on the floor. Sam could see the side of her face, so he knew it was her, though her hair was tinted red, not the gray as he’d last seen it. Tinted because her mood had improved so much, and Sally had gone over and helped her mother do it, and they almost did it to her own.
Detective Hirsch said, “Come closer.” Sam did, near the legs of Mrs. Jacobs, and knew what he was supposed to see, and didn’t want to. Hirsch shone his flashlight on her flank, where pale red bruises had formed under smears of blood and feces.
When Sally buzzed to let Sam in, she was still in her nightgown. With Sam was Sally’s aunt, who lived in Brooklyn. Sally flicked her glance between them but didn’t need to say a thing to know she was about to absorb a horror. They guided her to the couch, and the two sat with Sally and then told her, and took turns cradling the child she became.
Sam was parked in a room by himself at the station, a closet that had been turned into a place where officers could write reports. Detective Hirsch wanted him to have no distractions. He told him to write down the name of every person he thought Isadore Hadwin Jacobs knew, from kindergarten to Krautland.
Izzy’s father had also been informed, of course, and was told to come to the station the next day for an interview, but Sam doubted he was involved.
Sam kept asking Detective Hirsch if he would please have someone check on Mike Kelley to make sure his friend was all right. Why wouldn’t he be? Sam asked himself, even as he kept seeing Mike and Izzy, Izzy and Mike in most every memory flashing in.
Because Sam’s mother had gone to Florida for a wedding of a childhood friend, he was able to bring Sally over to his apartment that night. They lay in his bed while she talked and cried, and then they got up and he fixed her something to eat, and they talked, and they lay back down and talked some more. Next to Sam’s bed was a pull-down shade with a chomp at the side. He didn’t remember how it got there. The moon filled it, and the gray shadows of its face seemed to be laughing at him. They slept. He woke with Sally kissing him. It didn’t take long before he entered her, and afterward he was saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and she was whispering, “No baby, I wanted you to, I wanted you to.”