Vito Geraldi planted himself alongside Martucci’s chair, and Martucci sat down again, at the edge. “Who’d you tell her to call, Vince?” Vito put a friendly hand on Martucci’s shoulder and said in a raspy, personal voice, “In the old days, you used to have Louis Galgonzola.”
“Galgonzola? What are you saying? Galgonzola’s been dead for ten, fifteen years. What—”
Vito spoke right over Martucci; he told Tim, “His top hit man in the old days, Captain. They used to call Galgonzola ‘the Beast,’ which will give you an idea of the guy if punks
like this one
called
him
a beast.” He turned his full attention again to Martucci. “Who’s your beast now, Vincent? Because it would have to be one helluva beast to have done these two little kids.”
There was a fine line of moisture over Martucci’s upper lip, and he blotted it with the back of a manicured hand, twisting away from Vito’s grip on his shoulder. “Captain Neary, I came here in good faith, hoping I could help, but ...”
I moved Vito away and sat down again next to Martucci, who wasn’t sure if he should try to leave or not. “Look, Vince, I personally think that Vito’s wrong. I think the whole thing was a mistake, an accident.” I turned to Neary. “Tim, remember what we talked about before, how the whole thing might have been just a terrible accident.”
“It’s possible,” Tim said.
“Look, Mr. Martucci,” I said. “The way I figure it, Kitty choked the first kid by accident; hell, it’s easy enough to do to a little kid. Then she gave the second kid sleeping pills, to quiet him down, and then she realized what she’d done and panicked. Then she called you; you’re a good friend, why wouldn’t she call you? So you told her who to call; someone you could trust, who would fake a kidnap-murder, to get her off the hook. Look, I’m not saying what you did was right, hell, I don’t know. Maybe I’d do the same thing in the same situation.”
“If that’s the way it was, Martucci,” Tim Neary said, “tell us now. Right now. Because, technically, you’re an accessory to the fact. Three thousand miles away or not, the minute Kitty called you and told you what happened, you became legally responsible. Keeler will probably be able to get away with manslaughter. She was under emotional pressure; maybe she can even pull off a temporary-insanity plea. But you won’t have anything to go with, Martucci. This one isn’t going to just go away. We’re gonna deal, Vincent; we don’t deal with you, we deal with Keeler.”
He wasn’t buying. Not that anyone expected he would. He realized that no one was going to stop him from leaving this time.
“Since I have nothing further to say, Captain, I am going. The next time we speak, if there
is
a next time, my attorney will be present. He’ll be very angry that I accompanied your two men here tonight, but I let my concern for Kitty and my sorrow for her children overcome my good sense. It will not happen again.”
He stood up, turned and walked out. Neary nodded at Geraldi, who went to the window and signaled a waiting team of detectives that Vincent Martucci was on his way. They would be with him wherever he went.
“Okay, Vito,” Tim said, “pick up Kitty Keeler and show her what her kids look like.”
I
GAVE VITO ABOUT
an hour and a half to get up to Yonkers, pick up Kitty Keeler, then drive down to the morgue in Manhattan. By the time I got there, reporters, photographers and TV cameramen were standing around casually as though they had been waiting for a long time.
The old guy behind the desk at the door squinted at my shield, then checked my face and made me sign a sheet of paper attached to a clipboard. In case any stiffs are missing, they know who to question. There were two names between Vito’s and mine, so my timing was pretty good. The old guy looked like a collection of worn-out bones jangling around in a baggy navy-blue uniform. I didn’t ask him if he was a former cop; I was afraid he’d say yes.
I spotted Vito before he saw me. Even from halfway down the long corridor, it was obvious that he was upset. He paced back and forth, head thrust forward and down, one large hand massaging the hell out of the back of his neck. He spun toward me and stamped down the hall. There was a dull red flush in Vito’s face, down his neck into his sweaty shirt collar. He was breathing in loud short snorts and he grabbed my arm and shoved me into an alcove where there was a series of telephones.
Vito’s eyes were blazing and he flexed his heavy jaw a few times, like he was testing it for biting. “Jesus Christ, Joey. Swear to God, this bitch is iron, Joe. I tell ya, she’s iron and stone.” He positioned himself for a good view of the corridor.
“What happened, Vito? Where is she? You been downstairs yet?”
“Yeah. We been downstairs. Where is she? I’ll tell ya where she is, Joe. She’s in the ladies’ room, Joe, fixing her makeup. Swear to God, Joe, fixing her makeup. She says, ‘I have to fix my makeup for those cameramen.’ How about that, Joe, huh?”
Vito bit the end off a cigar and spit it to the floor. He drew on the cigar and finally, behind a haze of bitter smoke, he decided to tell me what made him so upset.
“It was like this, Joey, see, we go downstairs.” He interrupted himself. “Jeez, I hate this damn place, ya know? Like the minute I walk into this building, it gets to me. Okay, okay, so we’re headin’ downstairs, this bitch and me, and I’m beginning to feel, like tight inside, ya know, Joe? and I look at her and nothin’, Joe. No expression; nothin’. Like, she
knows
where we are by now, she
knows
what we’re gonna see; so I’m thinkin’, Okay, lady, just wait. Then that guy down there, Jenson, Johnson, whatever, that little guy in charge of the stiffs, Jeez, he looks like somethin’ out of a Frankenstein movie, right, so he comes and takes us to where the boys are.”
Vito swiped his hand over his wet red forehead, then blotted it on the side of his jacket. He dropped his cigar and covered it with his huge shoe absently. “Joey, I gotta tell ya, I seen those kids yesterday and I thought it was pretty bad then. But it’s worse today, Joe. Them little kids ... them corpses, they’ve been working on them, Joe. They been slicin’ and cuttin’ them all up for the autopsy. I could hardly look at them myself. I felt a little sorry for her, Joe, God’s honest truth I did. So I moved aside for her and she stands there and she looks at what’s left of her two kids. They was beautiful kids, Joe. I seen the pictures of them, they was dolls. And she looks at them and then she looks at me, swear to God, Joe, she says to me, ‘They’re so dirty. Couldn’t someone clean them up?’ ” His voice was a bitter imitation of a woman’s. Vito squeezed my arm, just below the elbow, to relieve some of the horror he was feeling. “On my mother’s grave, Joe, that’s what she said—‘They’re so dirty. Couldn’t someone clean them up?’ That’s what bothered her, Joe. They was dirty.”
I tapped Vito’s hand and he released my arm just before the bone could snap. “Maybe she was just in shock, Vito.”
“Shock my ass,” he muttered. “That dame didn’t bat an eye, Joe, God’s truth. She says then, ‘Where’s the ladies’ room, I gotta fix my makeup for those cameramen.’ ” He moved his foot, then stared at the crushed, shredded cigar in surprise. “Jesus, Joe, that was my last one. Gimme a cigarette.”
Kitty Keeler walked toward us, a slash of electric blue against the sick-green walls; her platform shoes clicked and echoed in the empty corridor.
Vito turned away. “I’ll see you back in the office, Joe, I don’t wanna look at her right now. Swear to God, this bitch makes me sick to my stomach.”
She had her hair pulled back softly at the sides, and her eyes picked up the color of her dress with a hint of green from the walls. She stood nearly three inches taller in her platform shoes, and she held her head to one side, waiting for me to say something.
“Mrs. Keeler, you weren’t supposed to be brought down here. Your husband already made the necessary identification. Your being here was a mistake.”
“Really? Is that what it was?”
I offered her a cigarette and she let her hand rest on mine as she touched the cigarette to the match. Her touch was cold and dry and she looked up at me as she blew the first smoke from her lungs.
Vito had been wrong. She wasn’t iron and stone, though she hardly seemed flesh and blood. Beneath the fresh layer of makeup she had just applied, she was the color of putty. It showed through just a little, along the edges and sides of her face. There was a fine blue-white circle around her mouth, which glistened with a bright, moist lipstick. And there was something in her eyes, not easily seen, but it was there. Some touch of horror or expectation which I had seen just before George and I left the apartment to identify her dead sons.
She made a subtle but determined effort to shield herself in anger, not unlike the sort of anger she had directed at me when I had first questioned her. Before the boys were found. She fixed the anger coldly on her face and along her thin, rigid shoulders as we walked briskly through the mob of newsmen. I was puzzled by what was under this crisp, controlled façade, but I knew, even if Vito didn’t, that she
had
been affected by what she’d seen.
Assistant District Attorney Ed Quibro had probably been the kind of kid other kids punched around when they had nothing else to do. The first thing he did when Kitty Keeler and I arrived at Tim’s office was to consult his wristwatch, elaborately, pointedly, and even then he had to say it. “We expected you at least fifteen minutes ago.”
“Well, we’re here now.”
He was a precise, compact man and he carefully checked the various cards and papers he had meticulously set out on Tim’s desk. He looked like a large midget with that peculiar tissue-paper skin wrinkling around his pale button eyes. He could be anywhere from an old twenty-five to a young fifty and he was probably somewhere in the middle. His thinning black hair, worn in an old-fashioned style with short sideburns, was combed straight back from his high forehead; it looked damp. He wore a dark suit with a buttoned-up vest on which was displayed his Phi Beta Kappa key, which he frequently fingered. The collar of his white shirt was as stiff as cardboard and dug into his neck, causing an angry red mark. While everyone in the room waited and watched, Quibro went through a ceremony involving his steel-rimmed eyeglasses, breathing on each lens a predetermined number of times, scrubbing them with a large, clean linen handkerchief. Finally, glasses clean and in place, he pulled some heavy rubber bands from several stacks of three-by-five index cards, which he then tapped on the desk.
“Now. For the purposes of this interrogation,” he informed the stenotypist, a hulking mountain of a guy who hunched over his machine like it was a delicate toy, “let it be noted that present besides myself—that’s Assistant District Attorney Edward M-for-Martin Quibro, that’s Q-U-I-B-R-O—on this date, Friday, April eighteenth, 1975, at, yes, at eight-forty
P.M.,
was Captain Timothy Neary, commanding officer of the District Attorney’s Special Investigating Squad, and Detectives ...”
Quibro snapped his fingers at us; Geraldi, Jefferson, Walker and I gave our names and shield numbers.
Slowly, methodically, chronologically, Quibro led Kitty Keeler through a recitation of her activities and the activities of her children on the night of Wednesday, April 16, beginning at 7
P.M.
with the arrival of Dr. Friedman. He stopped her response at several points, demanding more specific information.
“What, besides hamburgers, did you and your son, Terry, have for supper that night, Mrs. Keeler?”
She had been answering softly in a flat tone, the way a kid repeats something that has been memorized. This question puzzled her and she leaned forward slightly. “What else did we have for supper?” When Quibro nodded, she broke the rhythm she had established for herself. “What
difference
does that make? What does that have to do with anything?”
She drew on her anger, carefully, just testing for the sound of it.
Quibro took off his glasses and directed his blank beige eyes at Kitty. In a nasal monotone, as though reading a set of directions, he said, “It is essential that we know what food or other matter was consumed by your children to your knowledge. Then this information will be checked against the contents of their stomachs when they were found.”
Her mouth fell open and she brought her hand up, but dropped it to her lap before it made contact with her lips. “The contents of ... their stomachs?” She clenched her teeth and pressed her lips together.
Quibro tapped his index cards lightly against the desk and continued to wait. No one said anything and I was about to move when I caught something from Tim: Let this come from me, not you.
“Mrs. Keeler,” Tim explained, “there is the possibility that whoever took the boys might have given them something to eat, some candy or cookies or something. If we know, for a fact, that you didn’t feed them something they apparently ate that night, well, that gives us just one more thing to work with.”
She glared at Neary. “One
more
thing to work with? You mean
one more thing
besides my
telephone book?”
She slid around in the chair and blazed at the men standing on the side of the room. “You bastards been having fun? Listen,
you,”
she turned back to Neary, “you want to know about my love life, my sex life, you just ask me.
Ask me
and I’ll tell you whatever the hell you want to know to get your kicks, to make your day.” She leaned back in the chair, folded her arms, tilted her head to one side. “And that’ll save you time, so you won’t have to send all these goddamn overpaid sons-of-bitches digging into my private life. And then maybe,
maybe,
you can start finding out who killed my kids!” Her anger fed itself, generated an even greater fury, strengthened her, made her more than equal to deal with all of us. She gave each of us one quick, scornful glare; she passed Quibro with a small, bitter laugh. “That’s what this is supposed to be all about,” she told us tightly. “Or did you
forget
that two little boys were killed? You so caught up in my sex life that you just forgot all about my kids? You all so fuckin’ hard up you gotta get it secondhand?”