“I TELL YOU, CAPTAIN, if that doc’s straight I’m crooked as a boomerang,” Herring said.
Pererro added: “It was a mighty slippery story to check out, sir.”
“And look, man—the knife, his story how he lost it.”
“Forget the knife!” Redmond exploded. “We don’t have the knife. We can’t prove the murder weapon was a surgical knife.”
“Yes, sir. All we got’s a might-have-been. And that’s the way his story checks out too. It might’ve been the way he told it to us this A.M. And then again it might not.”
“Let’s have it, point by point,” Redmond said. “Then you can add this to it.” He shoved the technical report on Corrales’s Chevrolet across the desk. Findings: negative.
Pererro gave Dr. Corrales’s statements, Herring the check-out on them.
“I was there (at the Eleventh Street Clinic) until eight o’clock.”
Herring: “Corroborated by Dr. Moore at the clinic. He came on duty when Corrales left. Corrales, by the way, didn’t join the clinic staff until two months ago.”
“Go on,” Redmond said.
“Las Palmas Restaurant on Fourteenth Street.”
“Dr. Corrales ate a full-course dinner, Mexican style. Nobody clocked him, but the waiter says it took an hour at the very least.”
“That’s nine fifteen, give a few minutes either way,” Redmond said. “Bradley had left his house by then.”
“Next stop,” Pererro said. “Misericordia Children’s Home, Lenox Avenue and 103rd Street.”
“A half-hour’s drive,” Redmond said. “A quarter to ten. Bradley was in Miss Russo’s vestibule.”
Herring said: “Miss Juanita Franco, age sixty-nine, on night duty at the children’s home, quote: ‘Dr. Corrales comes, he looks at the child, then he goes and calls the ambulance. Then he curses me for not doing it sooner. But I am not a doctor.’
“Question: ‘Did you go to the phone with the doctor?’
“Answer: ‘I stayed with the child.’
“‘So that you did not actually hear him make the call?’
“‘That is so.’
“Question: ‘What time did the doctor arrive, Miss Franco?’
“‘I do not remember. By eleven o’clock everybody was gone. I went back upstairs to clean the room.’”
Redmond grunted. “He was falling behind schedule, wasn’t he?”
Herring said: “The call for the ambulance was made at ten fifteen.”
Redmond said: “Bradley was dead by at least fifteen minutes.”
“The ambulance rolled at ten twenty. It took them eighteen minutes to get there.”
“Where’s the Reid Hospital?”
“On York Avenue.”
“But God’s teeth, man. The Harlem hospital is virtually next door to that orphanage.”
“Yes, sir,” Herring said. “They get more customers than most, but we checked, and Monday night they could have answered immediately if Corrales had called them. That child didn’t last the night, Captain. Maybe that’s why I’m on him. But I think he’s lying to us all the way.”
Redmond said: “All right. Let’s hear your version of what happened.”
“I got to start from the beginning. The doc says he picked up his car at the lumberyard. I say he walked to the restaurant straight from the clinic. The other boys picked up his car and used it to tail and pick up Bradley. Corrales had plenty of time to enjoy his dinner, man. He wasn’t needed at Miss Russo’s apartment until half-past nine. It was only a five-minutes walk. He did his ‘good deed’ there and drove his own car north. He was moving then, but he took time at Park and Sixty-fourth Street to throw Bradley’s wallet and briefcase in a mailbox. And here’s the thing, Captain: I say he called for the ambulance before he ever got to the orphanage. Maybe one of the other partners even called. Corrales must’ve known all day how sick that child was. He’d seen her in the morning.”
Redmond shook his head. “I’m not saying it couldn’t be that way, Wally. But we can’t use it, not without witnesses.”
“Give us time and we’ll get ’em. I swear we’ll get ’em.”
Redmond said: “Go on with Corrales’s story.”
“The rest checks out. The funeral parlor on 108th Street and the Liberation meeting. Just like he said.”
“It seems odd,” Redmond said, “when he was late for a meeting where he was scheduled to speak that he’d stop at a wake on the way.”
“I don’t think you exactly call it a wake, Captain.” Herring grinned. “This was one of the old-time Latin American revolutionaries, eighty-nine years old. He’s been here since 1927, but they’ve shipped him back to Mexico for burial.”
Redmond looked at him sharply. “When?”
Herring glanced at Pererro. They had in that small particular failed to check. “We’ll have to find out, sir.”
“Get onto it.”
The phone was ringing on Redmond’s desk when the two detectives left his office. When they reached the squadroom downstairs, the report was coming in on the killings in DePeyster Street.