Vito Geraldi pulled away from the windowsill, lowered his head bull-like. “You’re really all broke up about them kids, aren’t you, Kitty?”
She made a deep gagging sound, like she’d just been hit in the throat, but she pulled out of it and concentrated all of her energy and strength at Vito. She stood up, rigid, and jabbed an index finger at him. She whispered something harshly in Italian; all I could make out were the words “your mother.” Geraldi seemed to swell toward her rather than lunge. I caught him full against my chest and heard Kitty, behind me, saying coldly, “You keep that fat mother-fucking bastard away from me!”
Vito’s face had gone purple, and when I put my hand on his shoulder and tried to kid him out of it he pulled away, crossed the squad room and headed toward the men’s room. When Vito played bad guy, he went all out. Walker, Vito’s young partner, came from Neary’s office.
“Captain wants ya, Joe. Jeez, Vito got sore, didn’t he? She shouldna said that about his mother.”
“John, any guy over fourteen who takes that kind of remark to heart has a problem.”
Walker started to protest, but I went past him back into Tim’s office. Quibro was collecting his index cards, and Tim told me he’d called a ten-minute coffee break. Apparently Ed Quibro didn’t trust us with his cards and he checked his watch just before leaving the room. Neary went to the electric coffee pot and poured two mugs which he brought over to Kitty, setting one on the edge of his desk. He took one sip from his cup, looked up, and excused himself when Walker called to him through the opened door. Tim closed the door quietly behind him.
“You want the coffee?”
She waved a hand at me. “Go ahead, drink it.”
“Can I get you something else?”
Kitty Keeler dragged on her cigarette, pursed her lips and blew the smoke in a steady beam right at me. She pulled her mouth to one side thoughtfully. “It’s a helluva way you people have of making a living. Do you have a lot of fun digging into people’s private lives?”
I thought about it for a minute, then told her, “Not much.”
“It really shakes the hell out of you. All of you. Doesn’t it? That a woman can have a full, active sex life. It’s different when it’s one of the boys, right? Then you all think, boy, this guy’s great. But let a woman live the way she wants and—”
“Mrs. Keeler, you’re talking to the wrong guy. All I want to know is what happened to your boys. Anything else, I couldn’t care less. It’s you, not me. Right?”
She ran her tongue around the inside of her cheek and studied me carefully, shrewdly. A small dimple worked in and out of her cheek and she pointed a finger at me and said in a phony sweet voice, “Hey, now I got it. You’re the
good guy.
The rest of them,” she waved her arm around the room, “all the rest of them are the
bad
guys. And that pig, that Geraldi, he’s the bull, the
main bad guy,
right? And you’re the soft-soap artist, the one I turn to, right? Joe Peters, that’s your name?” There was nothing soft left in her, and her voice was ice. “Well, I’m wise to you, Peters. I’m wise to all of you.”
For some reason, it really got to me; made me really sore as though she wasn’t right about anything. I shoved the chair back and said, “Look, lady. I don’t know what the hell games you think we’re playing or what games you’re playing. I don’t give a damn about you, your sex life, your life style or any other goddamn thing. I’m a cop and I’ve been assigned to find out who the hell killed your kids. With or without your cooperation. I’ve been working my ass off for the last two days trying to get some leads. It would probably be easier
with
your help, but with it or without it, we’ll find out what happened.”
She said softly, “What’s the matter, Peters, did I hurt your feelings?”
I don’t know if I was pissed off because she saw through us so easily, or if I really did feel offended; after all,
I
hadn’t given her a hard time.
The interrogation resumed, without Vito. When Quibro asked her what time she had called her husband the night of the murders, she replied, “It was ten-fifteen.”
Quibro looked up. “Are you sure?”
Kitty took that as a challenge. “Yeah, I’m sure. It was ten-fifteen.”
“Could it have been later? Maybe closer to eleven o’clock? Maybe even later than that, say eleven-fifteen or eleven-twenty?”
She leaned forward and spoke directly to the stenotypist, who didn’t know what to do, so he just kept taking down words. “Hey, you. You at the machine. Read him back my answer. He doesn’t seem to have heard me. I told him I called my husband at ten-fifteen. Isn’t that what you took down?” Then, to Neary, “Is that guy hard of hearing or does he need permission to speak?” Then, to the stenotypist, “Speak! C’mon, good boy, speak!”
The stenotypist hunched himself closer to his machine and just kept hitting the soft-clicking keys; he never looked up at Kitty.
She was prepared to be questioned about the telephone calls to Vincent Martucci. They had discussed business: the opening of the new spa; nothing else.
When Patti MacDougal’s statement was read to her, the portion describing her visit at 2:30
A.M.
to the Keeler apartment, Kitty held up her hand. “You have to know Patti,” she said. “She didn’t come near my apartment that night. She probably
thought
about it by the time she got home. Patti
means
well, but she hardly ever follows through on a good impulse. She did call me at three
A.M.
and gave me the story about having tried to return the car earlier, but I knew she hadn’t.”
She told this calmly, shrugging Patti MacDougal off without much trouble. What I had seen of Patti didn’t really contradict Kitty’s view of her: a girl who means well, but.
Finally, Quibro rested his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. “Just a few more questions, Mrs. Keeler, but I must urge you to consider them most carefully. You have previously stated that you last tended your two sons between one and one-thirty
A.M.
Thursday, April seventeenth, 1975. Is that right?”
Her voice seemed tired, stretched thin. “Yes. Yes.”
“At that time, Mrs. Keeler, how did your son George appear to you?”
“Appear to me?” She pulled herself straight in the chair and became sharper, more alert. “What do you mean? George had fever. He threw up a little and cried. It always upsets him. And I cleaned him up, changed him and all, and he went back to sleep. That’s all.”
“And your son Terry. Did your son Terry appear to be in a normal condition?”
“Normal condition?” She regarded Quibro carefully, weighing the questions, trying to find the direction they were taking. “I don’t know what you mean, normal condition?”
In his monotone, flat and irritating, Quibro said, “According to your earlier statement, you saw Terry in the bathroom and then back in his bedroom. In any way, did he appear to be different than he normally was?” When she didn’t answer, just stared at him, Quibro said, with a touch of impatience, “Did he appear to be hurt, or injured? Did he seem to be ... drugged?”
“Drugged?” Kitty frowned; she glanced from Quibro to Neary to Walker to me, then back to Quibro. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. He was ... sleepy. He went back to bed and went back to sleep. What do you mean?”
“Mrs. Keeler, did you at any time during the night of Wednesday, April sixteenth, and Thursday, April seventeenth, 1975, leave your children alone in the apartment?”
I might have imagined it, but she seemed to falter, to hesitate for about a split second, as though coming to a decision; no one else noticed; Tim’s face was still set and unmoving.
Kitty Keeler shook her head and her voice sounded weary, exhausted, tired of it all at last. “No, I didn’t leave them alone at any time.”
“Mrs. Keeler, do you have any idea, at all, as to who may have been involved in this matter?”
“In ‘this matter’?” She mimicked Quibro coldly; he didn’t react, just stared at her blankly. “Is that what you people consider the murder of my two children? Is that how you refer to it:
this matter?”
“Mrs. Keeler, I believe your husband is waiting for you in the outer office. Detective Walker will drive you to your brother’s house. That is where you’re staying, isn’t it?”
She stood up without answering Tim and started for the door, then stopped as though she’d just remembered something. “Captain Neary, when will we be able to get into our apartment and get some clothes? I have hardly anything with me. Can we go in and take out some clothes?”
“In another day or two, Mrs. Keeler; we’ll let you know.”
I opened the door and stood back for her to pass. She stopped again, bit her lip, inhaled and seemed to hold it. She turned again to Tim.
“Captain Neary, when will they release the boys’ bodies? We have to make funeral plans and no one’s told us yet.”
“We’ll let you know as soon as we know, Mrs. Keeler.”
Vito had been standing just outside the door, in the squad room. He stepped back elaborately to let her pass and she never blinked at him. He went into Tim’s office and said, “Holy Christ, Tim.
First
she asks when she can get some of her clothes. And
then
she remembers to ask about her kids’ bodies.”
It hadn’t seemed exactly that way to me; it seemed to me that it was too hard a question for her to ask. That she worked up to asking about the boys by asking about her clothes first. Vito hadn’t seen the dull center of her eyes at that moment; he hadn’t seen the slight twitching of a nerve ending in the corner of her mouth.
Ed Quibro packed and buckled his briefcase, then fondled his head to make sure every hair was in its assigned place.
“Well, boys,” he said, “what do you think about that? According to Kitty Keeler, there was nothing wrong with either of her sons between one and one-thirty
A.M.
According to the Medical Examiner, one kid was dead and the other was drugged unconscious by that time. And she never noticed anything unusual about them.” He pulled his thin lips back into what he thought was a smile. His teeth were little and dingy. “I think that little lady is going to hang herself.”
Tim said, cautiously, since the burden of finding proof was squarely on his shoulders, “We have a helluva lot of work to do before that happens, Ed. We’re just at the beginning of the investigation.”
“Well, I hope you’ll move right along, Captain Neary. Time is of the essence in this particular case.”
Quibro never noticed the way Tim’s eyes glazed over, the way he was breathing through his teeth in a soft, dangerous whistle.
“Hey, Quibro,” I asked him, “you got a cousin in the Bronx? Name of Teddy Riley?”
Teddy Riley was the Ed Quibro of our neighborhood when Tim and I were kids. He was the kid we used to punch when there wasn’t anything else to do.
Tim laughed and turned away from Quibro. Quibro’s beige eyes blinked, but he couldn’t find the joke. “No, my family is from Westchester originally.”
He started out of the office, but couldn’t resist stopping and saying, more for his own benefit than ours, “Yes, sir, I’ll tell you how this whole thing is going to end.
I’m
going to get that little lady indicted on two counts of murder one. Just you wait. You’ll see.”
It was at that exact point, if Ed Quibro had been Teddy Riley, he’d have gotten one right in the mouth.
T
HE MINUTE THE PHONE
rang, I remembered that I hadn’t called Jen. Before she could say a word, I said, “Hi, babe. Sorry I didn’t have a chance to call you last night. Tim’s got us working long hours.”
There was a short silence, then, “You’ve really got me pegged, haven’t you, Joe?” She sounded sharp and tense, like this was the opening line of an argument, but she dropped it and said, her voice trying for lightness, “Hey, I saw you on the late news last night. You really looked good, Joe. How come you’re on that case?”
We talked for a little while about how come I was on the case. Then about our kids: she’d heard from our daughter; she was planning to call our son tonight. We made polite conversation, like two strangers being very careful not to say the wrong thing and not really certain what the wrong thing might be.
Jen quit City College to marry me; she’d been an art major and always planned to go back someday for her degree. We were married nearly three years before I got on the job and we felt we could manage on my salary alone. Instead of going back to college, Jen got pregnant with our daughter. Then we put a down payment on the house in Queens; then we had our son. Jen kept up with her work on her own. She sold some watercolors and a few oil paintings from time to time at different summer art shows. But it always seemed that the more she worked, the less satisfied she was with what she was accomplishing. When the kids reached school age, Jen worked, on and off, in an art gallery; as a freelancer for an advertising agency; as an instructor in an adult-education community center. But she said she always felt “on the fringe of things”; not really into the center of what she felt she could do.
Last year, our daughter got married in June; our son went off on a two-month jaunt across the country before establishing himself at the University of Michigan in September. In August, we did just what we’d promised each other, years and years ago when it was far enough in the future to look like some terrific goal: we sold our house in Queens and bought a brand-new four-room condominium in Florida. Jen went down there and enrolled in the University of Miami as an art-education major. And I’m supposed to retire from my life next November and start “living” down in Florida.
I spent a week with Jen at Christmas. She seemed settled in and happy and busy with classes. I went down for a four-day weekend last month and something happened that I don’t think either of us anticipated. At least, I didn’t.
It was the last night before I was to return to New York. We started to make love.
I
started to make love and Jen seemed to stiffen up, to draw back.
“Why, Joe? Because it’s the last night we’ll see each other for a long time? The way it was always on the last night before you changed tour, for the same reason?”