She got up to go to the bathroom. Back in bed, she said she was bleeding. Again he said he was sorry. She said nothing this time.
Despite himself, he fell back to sleep. As dawn was glowing through the hole of the shade, he felt Sally’s warm breath and then her lips on his and heard her say, “Hold me again, Sammy; you have to hold me, or I can’t live.”
Pain from feeling helpless can be worse than from a thing over and done with, like watching a sick person die versus the death itself. Every day that passed without an answer to who killed Izzy and the mother slapped Sam in the face. He had his own precinct’s assignments, and Sally required much of his off-hours time, so he pestered the detectives in Precinct Seven every other day, until he suspected they conveniently weren’t there to answer. He’d seen Mike Kelley at the services and tried to talk with him, but all Mike did was walk around inside and outside like an ice pop with the color drained out.
A month to the day after the murders, two men in a basement game room on East Thirteenth were rubbed out. One was a gopher for the owner, the other a regular player. The owner lost only a finger from a pistol shot. He said he knew from the get-go it was mobsters imitating the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The dogs, he called them, wore fake cop uniforms, pretending to bust his joint. “I saw dirty shoes coming down the steps. Then this one mope had a button off. Our cops don’t dress like that.” Proud of NYPD cops even while he broke the law. He ordered them out with an unloaded shotgun from a shelf, and that he shouldn’t have done.
Detective Samuel Rabinowitz and a probie wrote it up, the probie drawing the scene with templates that had cutouts for arrows and rooms and bodies. Sam asked the owner if he could remember anything else. “Yeah, there was this one, hung back by the stairs. He had a crew cut and red hair. Very pale, like an albino. He was screaming while the shooter grabbed my money and Jimmy was moaning on the floor. I loved that Jimmy, like a son he was. I’m gonna make pig-slop out of them that did it, soon as I can.”
Was Mike Kelley the only redhead with a crew cut in the borough of Manhattan? Of course not. But Sam’s impulse was to go with what you know.
He took a jog off his assigned route after looking up the fur store Mike’s uncle on his father’s side owned. Mr. Kelley had to buzz him in—so many walk-away thefts going on, he explained. Mike was in the back; he’d get him.
Mike and Sam stood squeezed between two racks of furs. Sam’s nose itched. He barely even had to open his mouth when Mike, after being sure his uncle was out of earshot, said, “Not here, Sammy.” He told Sam to meet him in Tompkins Square Park. “That giant elm in the center? The one, you know, half of it’s dead from beetles? Nine o’clock. It’s dark by then.”
Under a light pole, the light further helped by a full moon, Sam eyed Mike’s boots as the men sat down on the bench. “Fancy wear there, partner.”
“Pampa boot. Cost a few pennies, yeah.”
He was going to comment on Mike’s shirt, too, but Mike beat him to it to criticize his own. “Hawaiian now? Stylish. Police work must be good to you.”
They nodded affirmative to each other and looked across the pathway at the silhouettes of a girl and guy making out on the grass. “You need to go break that up?” Mike asked. “Oh, you don’t have your badge on.”
“Mike. What you got to tell me?”
“I wasn’t there.”
“You wasn’t where?”
“That game room that got shot up. Somebody told me someone saw a redhead. It wasn’t me. I heard.”
“You seen Tino Caruso lately?”
Mike got up and went to the edge of the walkway. All of a sudden he started doing jumping jacks. He said for Sam to come join him and laughed stupidly.
Sam went over and grabbed him by the back of the collar and shoved him back onto the bench. “Izzy. What happened with Izzy? You know. I know you know.”
Mike’s face shone from a burst of July sweat. His eyelashes were pale smiles from the side. But Mike wasn’t smiling, and in a swift motion he lowered his head, and put his hands to his face, and silently sobbed.
Sam got it out from him. Tino Caruso had had Izzy wiped. The mother wasn’t supposed to be part of it. When Mike heard Mrs. Jacobs had been violated besides having taken a pistol shot to the back of the head, he disappeared for two days, later making an excuse that he tripped on a curb and knocked himself out, and spent those days in a hospital unidentified. That explained the bruises from banging his head against an alley wall, the reason his eyes were ringed in green and black. “He’ll bump me off too, he knows I talked to you.”
“Doesn’t he live around here? Why’d we come here, then?”
“Uptown, near Stuyvesant. He’s loaded now, from rip-offs. He works for a big guy named Harry Gross. Some he does on his own, on the side.”
“Why in hell did you get involved, Mike?”