A Dog's Ransom

  Morton Street was parallel with Commerce, one street south. Or had Rowajinski gone ahead into Barrow Street? Commerce made a slight jog to the right and became Barrow Street. Clarence hesitated at the jog, then plunged into Barrow Street, which was dark. Clarence heard the abrupt grate of an ashcan, as if someone had bumped into it, on his side of the street. Now he saw the Pole, or a scurrying figure that looked like him, silhouetted for an instant against the fuzzy yellow lights of Hudson Street, a wide street where traffic flowed. This time he would so scare Rowajinski, maybe even break his nose, that he’d never dare come anywhere near Macdougal Street, Clarence was thinking. Rowajinski ducked into a dark doorway, vanishing. Clarence tried to estimate which door it was, because they all looked alike here: narrow brownstones.

  At that instant, Kenneth was pulling closed the sticky front door of a tiny foyer that smelled of urine. There was no light and if the cop hadn’t seen him, he was safe. What the hell was the cop so mad about tonight? Kenneth squatted so that he could not be seen through the half-glass door. Kenneth had seen a tall fellow go into Mariline Coomes’s building half an hour ago, and he hadn’t been sure it was Dummell, but Kenneth had waited, curious whether it really was the cop boyfriend. Kenneth had expected some hell to break loose earlier, Saturday or Sunday, because the girl must have got his letter Saturday, and he had watched her house at various times Saturday (without being seen, he was pretty sure) but nothing had happened. And no one at all had come to see him in regard to his letter, which had been in a way a disappointment, yet a triumph if he cared to look at it that way: people were afraid to come to see him, perhaps, or were plotting something bigger against him than a mere visit with a reprimand. Dummell evidently had been afraid to visit his girlfriend, or she’d chucked him. Then tonight he had turned up.

  Kenneth heard running footsteps, and the door that sheltered him was pushed open. The cop’s fist hit him in the side of the head.

  Clarence yanked the little man up effortlessly by the front of his clothing. Rowajinski’s hat fell off, his mouth opened, his eyes goggled and he yelled.

  Why do you do it? Clarence wanted to say. He bashed the Pole against the wall and his head gave a crack. Clarence pulled his gun out. He felt it not as a gun but as if it were a weapon like a rock, and he slammed the side of Rowajinski’s head with it.

  Kenneth, dazed, was aware that his own cries stopped. He was suddenly nothing, limp, vanishing somehow. It was like a mountain falling on him, an avalanche of stones crushing him so that he could not move. Yet it was only one man doing this. That was his last thought. The rest became dream, and the merest ghost of a curse.

  Clarence, when one shoe slipped in blood, bumped against a wall and came near falling. In catching himself, he did drop his gun, and groped around on the dark floor for it, as fast as he could, as if Rowajinski would make a grab for it and get it away from him, but he knew the man was knocked out and then some. Clarence opened the door and went out. He went towards Hudson, west.

  A young woman with a scarf over her head walked towards him from Hudson Street, glanced at him quickly and passed him. Clarence breathed through his mouth. He was carrying his gun in his right hand and he fumbled under his topcoat and put it away in its holster. In the yellow lights at Hudson Street, he looked at his right hand and saw that it had some blood on it. Carefully, suddenly tired and not thinking, he used his left hand to search for a handkerchief, found one in a back pocket of his trousers, not a handkerchief but a paper tissue. He wiped his right hand. The yellow streetlights made the blood on the tissue look black. There was not much of it. Three or four people walked past him. Clarence did not look at them, and was vaguely aware that he did not care what they thought. He started walking uptown, still getting his breath back, limbering his body like someone who had been cramped. He took the north side of 14th Street and walked to Broadway, then zigzagging without thought made his way to his apartment, dead tired.

  17

  When Clarence awakened, the events of last evening went tumbling through his mind until he stopped them by deliberate effort. The Pole might be dead, he thought. And if he wasn’t dead? He would say it was the cop Dummell who—had attacked him and beaten him nearly to death. Clarence knew that he had flung himself on Rowajinski like a maniac. He had hit Rowajinski with his gun.

  Clarence saw the gun belt on one of his straight chairs. He went to the gun, thinking at the same time that he ought to turn the radio on for the news, in case they said anything about Rowajinski. But first check the gun. He couldn’t see any blood on it, but he wet a facecloth in the bathroom basin, wrung it out, and wiped the gun carefully. A little pink came off. He opened the cylinder, removed the bullets and washed and dried the chambers and replaced the bullets. At the same time he was wondering if he could deny having killed Rowajinski, if a great many facts were against him? Maybe it was hopeless. He was unable to think. But it seemed wisest to get any bloodstains off. He washed his shoes, checked also the soles. He examined his dark brown tweed topcoat in the light by the window. No sign of blood that he could see, either on the front of it or on the cuffs. His trousers. He had hung them, and he went to the closet. On the blue of the left trouser leg, he saw a darker streak about an inch and a half long. He scrubbed at the streak with the wet cloth. The cloth showed a faint pink. He put the topcoat and the trousers on a chair by the door. They should go to the cleaners. Possibly also his jacket. He examined his jacket and saw nothing on the sleeves or its front. Homicide might ask to examine his clothes—all his clothes—and Clarence knew that a microscopic amount of a person’s blood somewhere could convict a person.

  On the right cuff of his white shirt, there was a smudge two inches long. He soaked the shirt in the basin in cold water, scrubbed for a minute with the nailbrush until it came out, almost. Should he get rid of the shirt? If Homicide questioned him today, it was possible they would look even in the garbage. He scrubbed some more at the cuff, and decided to take it, with a couple of other shirts and a pair of pajamas, to the laundry on Second Avenue.

  The 10 a.m. news had nothing about Rowajinski. Who would find him, unconscious or dead? Surely someone lived in that house, though it was strange no one yelled down at them, considering the noise they must have made. How long had he hit Rowajinski? One minute? Two?

  Would Rowajinski have been found last night or this morning—about now? Could he have come to and walked to his place on Morton Street? No, Clarence thought, because he would at once have screamed for justice to be done against the cop Dummell. Rowajinski must be dead. Clarence felt a little faint. He opened a window and began to move just to keep moving, showered, made coffee. He wanted to telephone Marylyn and couldn’t, as if something paralyzed him for this particular act. Also it was early for her. He realized he wanted to get out of his apartment. Tonight he was off duty. He might go to see his parents. If he felt worse there, he could say he was tired and wanted to sleep in his room. Or he could take a long walk in Astoria. He dialed his parents’ number, and was rather surprised that his mother was in. She was delighted that he could come out. Clarence said yes of course he had the house key, if she had to be out. He would be there before noon.

  Clarence did not need to take anything with him. He took only a book with him, and the trousers and coat for the cleaners, the bundle for the hand laundry.

  His mother was out, as she had said she might be, but came in twenty minutes later with a big bag of groceries. Clarence helped her unload the groceries in the kitchen.

  “How is Marylyn? Are things all right?”

  “I suppose so. Sure,” Clarence said in a tone that meant of course things were all right and there was nothing to talk about.

  “One of our little girls, Edith Freyer—she’s ten, a thalidomide case. Mrs. Furst, that’s our supervisor, made a bad mistake and took her to a center where kids were being fitted for prosthetic limbs. Sometimes that helps, you know, if they see other k
ids like themselves. But when she saw all those crippled kids she went hysterical. Mrs. Furst was terribly upset, and apologized to Edith’s mother. I think Mrs. Furst was more upset than the child. Edith was hysterical for hours.”

  Clarence understood. He could imagine it exactly and it pained him. “God what a nightmare.”

  “Yes, but how’s one to know? Sometimes it’s good to go by the book, sometimes by instinct. Edith’s not one of my children. I might have known better, but maybe I wouldn’t have known better.” Nina was preparing lunch.

  The cuckoo clock over the kitchen door came to life: 12:30. Marylyn would detest that clock.

  In the afternoon, Clarence felt uncontrollably drowsy, as if he had taken sleeping pills. His mother told him to take a nap, so Clarence went up to his room intending to read, but he was asleep in five minutes. He slept for three hours, washed his face, and went downstairs. His father had just come home.

  “Well, hello Clare! To what do we owe this honor?”

  “I’m bored with New York,” Clarence answered smiling.

  “You see, Ralph,” said his mother, “we’re less boring than New York!”

  “If New York was so fascinating, I’d be living there myself,” said Ralph. “The air may not be perfect here, but it’s a lot better than New York’s.”

  The usual conversation. They were having steak for dinner, from his mother’s favorite butcher, Mueller, on Ditmars. She was sure Clarence never got such good steaks in New York, even in the best restaurants. He looked thinner, they both agreed. How was Marylyn?

  “I trust we’ll have the pleasure some day,” said Ralph. “You haven’t even showed us a picture. Don’t you ever take any snapshots?”

  “He’s working at night half the time and sleeping in the daytime,” said Nina.

  “What about flash cameras?”

  At 7 p.m. the TV series was on the living-room. Clarence was drinking a pre-dinner beer with his father. Among the last brief items was: “The body of a man identified as Kenneth Rowajinski, unemployed construction worker aged fifty-one, was discovered today in the hallway of a Greenwich Village apartment house. Death was caused by blows about the head. His attacker is still unknown.” The announcer’s voice lowered its tone at the end as if in genuine respect for the dead.

  Ralph, not listening any longer, had begun talking during the last words. Clarence had no appetite, to his mother’s disappointment. She had made a lemon pie for desert, Clarence’s favorite. Clarence was wondering if the Reynoldses had heard the same news? If Marylyn had? She had a TV but seldom turned it on. What would she think of Rowajinski’s being killed on Barrow Street, probably some time Tuesday night? Clarence could imagine her glad he had done it, almost admiring him for having the guts to do it, but what if she took the opposite view, that he had been another fuzz with a gun, another brutal pig?

  Just after eight, while they were having coffee, the telephone rang. Ralph answered it.

  “Yes . . . Yes, he is. Just a minute. For you, Clare.” His father handed the telephone to him. “They never let you alone, do they?”

  “Hello, Clarence. Santini here. Listen, did you know that Pole Rowinsk is dead? Somebody clobbered him down on Barrow Street. You know anything about that? Got any ideas?”

  “No. I just heard it on the news.”

  “Well, Homicide wants to see you. Detective Fenucci. I’ll give you his number. Got a pencil?”

  Clarence took down the name, number and extension number.

  “Mac said you were keeping an eye on this guy and you might know who could’ve done it. Any ideas?”

  “No, I haven’t sir. Never saw him with anybody. Except his landlord.”

  Santini chuckled. “I hear his landlord’s blowing a gasket. Yeah, I gather he wasn’t exactly popular. Listen, Clarence get on to Homicide right away. They want to see you tonight.”

  Clarence turned to his parents and said, “I’ve got to go in to New York.”

  “Oh, Clare, really?” His mother already looked distressed.

  “Your night off!” asked his father.

  They had been talking while he spoke on the telephone. “Emergency. It can’t be helped.”

  “Crime,” murmured Ralph, “has no days off.”

  Clarence picked up the telephone and dialed Fenucci’s number. He identified himself. Fenucci wasn’t there but was due in less than an hour. Could Clarence come to Fifth Division Headquarters now?

  A few minutes later, Clarence was walking towards the Ditmars Boulevard elevated station. He went direct to the Fifth Division Headquarters on West 126th Street. He had a ten-minute wait, then Fenucci arrived with two other men. Detective Fenucci, a paunchy man of about forty, took Clarence into an empty office, sat down behind a desk and opened his briefcase.

  “I understand you’d seen this man—Rowajinski—a few times?” asked Fenucci after the preliminary questions about Clarence’s precinct and rank and length of time on the force.

  Clarence explained how he had seen him, and there was no need to go into the details of the Reynoldses’ dog and the ransom, because Fenucci had that information, also the Bellevue report. Fenucci also knew about Rowajinski accusing Clarence of having taken five hundred dollars, and asked Clarence was it true.

  “No, sir.”

  “I understand he was annoying a friend of yours. Marylyn Coomes on Macdougal Street,” said Fenucci, reading.

  “Yes, sir. He wrote her an unsigned letter. She gave the letter to me to report. My captain said he was sending it to Bellevue.” Had they spoken already to Marylyn? Probably. How stupid of him not to have telephoned her, not to have tried to before coming here?

  “What kind of a man is Reynolds? We’re seeing him this evening. I understand you’re friendly with him . . . Did you ever see Rowajinski talking with anyone in his neighborhood? . . . Is he the kind of man who’d pick a fight with a stranger?”

  “It’s not impossible.”

  “Insult a girl if she was with a man?”

  “That’s possible.”

  Fenucci made a few notes.

  What had Marylyn said? Clarence wondered. That he left her apartment around 10:30 p.m. Tuesday? Or that he had spent the whole night with her? Clarence thought it odd, a little frightening, that Fenucci hadn’t asked him how he had spent last evening.

  “That doorway where he was killed,” said Fenucci, “it wasn’t his house and nobody there knew him. He was running from someone or someone dragged him in there to beat him up. Couple of old ladies live in the house, very poor, you know, on welfare, and an old super lives on the second floor. First floor’s empty—derelict, rats. The people claim they didn’t hear anything. Matter of fact two out of the three are deaf. Fenucci laughed, but he looked very tired, and he might have laughed to wake himself up. “I understand you called on this guy once and got rough with him.” Fenucci consulted a note. “Just a few days ago, the landlord says.”

  “Yes. He’d been loitering around my friend’s house on Macdougal Street. I asked him to stop it.”

  “You saw him on Macdougal?”

  “No. Miss Coomes—”

  “Did you hit the guy? The landlord says there was a lot of noise.”

  “There wasn’t a lot of noise. I did push him and he fell down. I wanted to scare him. I thought if I could scare him once, he’d cut out the heckling.”

  Fenucci nodded with an amused air. “But he didn’t.”

  “Well—I think he did. My friend didn’t mention him loitering in her street after that.” But Clarence realized suddenly that the wine delivery, and the letter to Marylyn, had come after that.

  “You haven’t seen him since then, since that time you called on him?”

  “No,” Clarence said.

  “Where were you last night?”

  “I had a d
ate with my friend—Marylyn Coomes.”

  “Where?”

  “At her apartment on Macdougal Street.”

  “What time did you get there?”

  “About—around ten, I think. She was working before ten.”

  “You went out for dinner?”

  What had she said? Clarence decided to risk it, and he answered, “We stayed in.”

  “Long? How long were you there?”

  “I stayed the night,” Clarence said. He watched for disbelief in Fenucci, but the detective remained perfectly calm, and his slow fingers moved another page of his notes. He made a scribble with his pen.

  “How’d you get to the girl’s house? Subway—”

  “I took the subway from Union Square. I took it to Spring Street.”

  “What time did you leave your apartment?”

  “I suppose—just after nine-thirty.”

  “Did you see—Rowajinski on the street when you arrived?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What time did you leave the next morning?”

  “Oh—I think—seven-thirty or eight.”

  “Did you see Rowajinski then?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I walked home.”

  “Rowajinski was killed around midnight last night, give or take a couple of hours. You were at your girlfriend’s at midnight?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oke-kay.” Fenucci gathered his notes hastily, as if he had to go off somewhere at once—to Mr. Reynolds perhaps. Then he said, “Now we’ll go over to your place, if you don’t mind, Patrolman Duhamell.”

  They went in an unmarked police car, driven by a man in plainclothes. The driver remained in the car, which was parked where it wasn’t allowed.