REDMOND, HERRING AND PERERRO picked Marks up at a few minutes past nine the next morning, Pererro at the wheel.
“Who’s minding the store?” Marks asked.
Redmond, whose mood was as gray as the sky overhead, said: “The Inspector himself came round to cheer us up.”
“Yes,” Marks said, “he cheered me up this morning too. I failed to turn him in a report on yesterday’s business. But he’s right on one thing. I’ve goofed on Mather. He might have broken if we’d sweated him early.”
“Let’s concentrate now on Corrales,” Redmond said. “At most Mather is accessory to the murder, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes, to give the devil his due, I think that’s about right. He didn’t expect Bradley’s death. I spent the midnight hours doing up my own dossier on him. It reads like a term paper in psychology. I can’t wait to show it to the Inspector.”
For the first time that morning Redmond laughed.
They drove north through Central Park, up Seventh Avenue and then across to Lenox through a bleak and angry slum. Pererro pointed out one of the children’s homes he and Herring had visited.
“Rats and rickets,” Herring said. “Uncle Sam, take it away. No hablo Español.”
“I didn’t think of that,” Redmond said, reminded by Herring’s remark. “For his own convenience Corrales may not speak English.”
“He got through clear enough to old Fred Bolardo at the lumberyard except for his name,” Herring said, “if he’s the same doc.” Then he added: “Man, he’s got to be.”
As soon as they got out of the car, one of the men on the stake-out joined them and pointed out the second-floor window of Dr. Corrales’s office. The red brick building was roughly divided, first-floor shops, second-floor offices, and residential from there up to judge by the milk bottles, beer cans, and laundry in the windows.
“Any patients with him?” Redmond asked.
“No, sir. No morning office hours. He’s been on the phone most of the time.”
“Is the place bugged?”
“Yes, sir, but not by us.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Redmond growled.
“Or that Corrales doesn’t know,” Marks added. “Where’s his car?”
“The black sedan wedged into that no-parking zone.” The detective pointed to the corner.
“Let’s get the technical truck up here,” Marks said. “The main thing: any fragments of glass that might have clung to his shoes, glass from an electric light bulb. There might just be a chance on the foot pedals.”
Dr. Corrales looked startled as the four detectives walked through the shabby waiting room and through the open door of his office. Cutting his phone conversation short, he flashed them a smile. It was something he turned off and on easily, Marks thought, and his good looks came and went with it. He stood up to meet them. “Gentlemen of the police, I presume.”
Redmond pocketed his identification. “You were expecting us, Doctor?”
“I am not exactly a stranger to the American constabulary. I am sometimes honored, sometimes reprimanded. Which is it this morning?”
No wonder Bolardo couldn’t understand him, Herring thought: he spoke too good English.
Corrales motioned to several yellowing oak chairs. “Please.”
Marks could not remember having encountered a revolutionary before, but from the quick intensity of the doctor’s eyes, he could suppose him a vivid example. He was lithe and muscular despite the slightness of his build. Forty.
“We’d like to know your whereabouts last Monday, Doctor, from say six o’clock in the evening on.”
“Monday the twenty-fourth.” Corrales flipped the pages back on his desk calendar, studied his appointments of the day, tracing them with a well-manicured finger. A hand scarcely to be associated with rats and rickets. “You know I suppose that I sometimes work at a clinic on Eleventh Street?”
“Yes.”
“I was there before six and until, perhaps, eight o’clock. Then I picked up my car and came uptown, stopping for my dinner at a favorite restaurant of mine—Las Palmas on Fourteenth Street. I sometimes meet with my friends there. I made two calls, yes—a child with pneumonia whom I moved that night from the Misericordia Orphanage on Lenox Avenue to the hospital.”
“You moved the child yourself?”
“Certainly not. I arranged the ambulance.”
“What time was this, Doctor?”
“It was well after ten when the ambulance got there. I was going to be late for a meeting.”
“Let’s back up, Doctor. You went to dinner at, say, eight fifteen?”
“Approximately.”
“How long did you spend in the restaurant? We’ll check this, you know.”
“An hour? It must have been about that. It’s my only relaxation.”
“And what time did you reach the hospital?”
“A quarter to ten? I can’t drive uptown in less than a half-hour.”
“All right, Doctor. The other call? You said you made two.”
“I stopped for a few minutes to pay my respects to the family of a friend—a funeral parlor on 108th Street near Lexington.”
“What time, Doctor?”
“Ten thirty?”
“And the meeting, where was that?”
For the first time Corrales showed his impatience. “In the old Hispanic Hall on East Ninetieth. I spoke last—and it was unfortunate. I should have been on the program earlier as scheduled. They lost money having me wind up the meeting, you see. The collection suffered. I am assuming you know the cause, gentlemen? Cuban liberation?”
Herring had made notes throughout.
At this point Marks took over the interrogation. “Dr. Corrales, you drive a black sedan—a 1959 Chevrolet?”
“I do.”
“May we have the keys to the car?”
“For what purpose, may I ask?”
“To examine the car.”
“I understand that. But isn’t it time I was informed of the purpose of your visit? I’m not sure I shouldn’t have my lawyer present before we go any further.”
“Suit yourself, Doctor. A man of some distinction was the victim of a homicidal attack—not far from your clinic.”
“Ah, yes of course,” Corrales said, leaning back slowly in his chair with the air of someone suddenly realizing graver implications than he had at first suspected. “And closer still to where I have made the arrangement to park my car.” He took his car keys from his pocket and offered them.
Pererro took them and left.
“An unusual parking arrangement, wouldn’t you say?” Marks continued.
“Not at all. I had been the victim of having my car broken into.”
“Something of value was stolen, Doctor?”
Corrales hesitated. “Yes, Lieutenant, a case of surgical instruments.”
Marks heard the sound, almost a snort, from Redmond: he had predicted that the doctor would have a story waiting for them. He did not take his eyes from Corrales, however, and leaning on the desk he asked: “And a handkerchief, Doctor?”
“There were several—two or three at least in the case.”
“Did you report the theft to the police?”
“I did not—which is why I am now distressed. The physicist was knifed, was he not?”
“Beautifully,” Marks said.
The doctor looked at his hands. “I am … distressed,” he repeated.
Marks glanced at Herring: they were coming full circle now to his and Pererro’s wild improvisations, the thing that had put him in mind of Janet Bradley’s picture. “Why did you not report so serious a loss, Doctor?”
Corrales moistened his lips. “I am not licensed to practice surgery in the United States, Lieutenant. I was afraid of that kind of investigation.”
Redmond said: “When was the surgical case stolen, Doctor?”
“Oh, it was two or three weeks ago.”
“Have you replaced it?”
“Not as yet, no.”
“Then why take such precautions in parking the car—after the fact?”
Corrales said: “Because in my other, my patriotic profession—you do not know what it means to have to be a professional patriot, sir—I am often the custodian of certain things I should prefer not to have to carry. I will speak plainly, for your men will soon discover—if the vandals who smashed the window of my car to get what they took from it had broken into the trunk that night, they would have discovered an arsenal.”
The detectives digested that bit of information for a moment. Kid gloves, Marks remembered. The same thought must have occurred to Redmond. He said: “There will be charges growing out of such possession, Doctor.”
But not of homicide, Marks thought, that whole theory seeming to crumble. They were back on the street where Fitzgerald had wanted them in the first place, looking for a gang of thugs who attacked Bradley in the moments of his recovery from the blow on the head; two separate crimes. And yet there was Mama Fernandez’s testimony: the call out of “Doctor!” But wasn’t Bradley himself very often called Doctor?
Herring spoke for the first time: “Dr. Corrales, have you been out of town at any time since Monday night?”
For the first time something happened to disconcert the man, Marks thought, something in his eyes changed. He recovered almost at once: “Ah, I see—the old watchman, Bolardo. I read the newspapers, Officer. Having certain things on my conscience—irrelevant to your investigation, but nonetheless—I did not want to risk such trouble as I am now in. I have not been in the neighborhood since. But neither did I want to call attention to myself by my absence. I telephoned Bolardo with the simple lie.”
“The surgical instrument is not irrelevant to our investigation, Doctor,” Redmond said coldly, and then because he was a man who at some point had to throw away the kid gloves, he added: “You didn’t by any chance give the thief a short course in how to use it?”
Corrales smiled blandly. “I do not understand.”
“Think it over. It may come to you.” He led the way out, Herring and Marks following.
On the wall, near the door to the office, was a picture of Corrales, younger, but with the same smile. He was in uniform. Marks lifted it from the nail. “May I borrow this, Doctor?”
“I would prefer not to have it in the newspapers. I do not wish to further jeopardize the work of our committee by my personal blundering.”
“I don’t intend to give it to the newspapers,” Marks said, and took the picture with him.
On the street, a considerable crowd now pushing the police cordon around them, the technical men had arrived and commenced their work on the car.
A forlorn chance at best, Marks thought.
Redmond was instructing Herring and Pererro. “I want every goddamned step of his itinerary checked out and clocked to the minute.”
Marks and he took a cab, leaving the car with the younger detectives. Neither of them said much on the way downtown. “What are you going to do with that?” Redmond indicated the photograph in Marks’s hands.
“Have a couple of people look at it. Janet Bradley for one.”
A few minutes later Redmond said: “Did you believe him?”
“I’ll bet he could tell it the same way again,” Marks said. “Letter perfect. You prophesied that yourself, remember?”
“So did Anderson,” Redmond growled.
“I wonder if he rehearsed him,” Marks said.
Redmond looked at him: something very close to the same thought had crossed his mind. Then he said: “I don’t think so, Dave. One of our leading physicists is not an expendable. You and I have to believe that. Otherwise …” He left the sentence unfinished.