CHAPTER 2

The China Chip

Some ten hours earlier a thin sixty-three-year-old woman named Thelma Connors had left the small gloomy apartment she shared with her daughter Elaine on East Sixty-first Street and walked to a branch bank on Lexington Avenue a few blocks away. There she drew out one hundred and twenty dollars from their joint savings account, leaving only twelve dollars to keep the account alive. A white-haired, pathetically proper woman with a slight limp that expensive surgery could have repaired, she confided to the teller that she and Elaine were leaving by interstate bus that night for Chicago and a visit with her son, and she specifically asked for a hundred dollar bill to pin to her clothing for safekeeping.

Later, under the deluge of probing questions by detectives, the teller recalled that a tall man whom he did not remember ever seeing in the bank before, a man in some kind of wool jacket or shirt, had stood in the line with several others waiting for Mrs. Connors to complete her garrulous transaction. The teller could not recall definitely whether or not the man had come up to the window. If he had it had been only to get a bill changed.

Mrs. Connors stopped at a nearby grocery for some sandwich meat and then walked home in crystal November sunshine, a happily excited wisp of woman in a decent black cloth coat. A neighbor, one Mrs. Anders, who was sitting on the steps of a dingy apartment building, spoke to Mrs. Connors. A moment later Mrs. Anders saw a man walk up the steps and go into the vestibule. He seemed to study the mailboxes, and when she asked who he was looking for, he did not reply or look at her but went into the building. It was his incivility more than anything else that made her remember him later: a tall, thin man with a bitter face and wearing a checkered woolen jacket.

The wife of the building janitor, a Mrs. Lombardi, also glimpsed him. She was coming down from the fourth floor when she saw him standing before Mrs. Connors’ apartment on the second. She heard him say something like, “I’m from the office, ma’am,” when the door opened and she saw him step quickly in.

She went on downstairs, noticed Mrs. Anders outside and paused to smoke a cigarette with her. They were tête-à-tête over a match when the first outcry came. They looked at each other over the burning match.

“Did you hear that?”

“A kid maybe?”

They paused, uneasily sensing something wrong yet unwilling to accept that anyone near them could be in such fearful distress as was expressed by that quick yell of terror.

There came a weaker cry and the faint vibrating sound of something falling and then a last, loud cry that was punctuated by a shot.

“My God!” Mrs. Anders’ hand went guiltily to her mouth. They knew they should have taken the meaning of the earlier scream and gone to someone’s assistance.

They ran into the hall together and saw a tall, rangy man running toward the back door. Mrs. Lombardi yelled, “Stop thief!” and the man turned a snarling face at them as he ran. He shouted something which neither of them could even begin to describe later, and which might have been directed at someone ahead of him, a confederate perhaps. The door banged behind him.

The man was seen by someone else. A telephone company employee named Betty Leonard, who shared an apartment with another telephone operator on the second floor, had been preparing to leave for work. Hearing the scream and shot, she apprehensively opened her door a slit and saw the man in the wool jacket gallop downstairs.

She went to the Connors’ door and called. Getting no reply and hearing Mrs. Lombardi’s hail from below, she pushed her way, frightened, into the living room. It was darkly gloomy but one light bulb was shining oddly up at her from the carpet.

Then she saw the rest of it and she too screamed.

* * * *

The usual RMP car got there first. Its crew found Mrs. Connors lying face up near the living-room table, a bloody laceration on the right side of her forehead and blood running into her sightless eyes. The remains of a table lamp which apparently had been used as a bludgeon lay beside her, its cheap pottery base smashed into a thousand fragments, its bulb incongruously alight. In the right side of her head above the ear, black-haloing the thin silvery hair, was a bullet hole.

One of the RMP men called the precinct and the routine notifications began. The precinct sent two detective teams at once; one of them was Ryan and Jablonski, who when the call came in had been looking over the post condition on the bulletin board in the East Fifty-first Street station before starting the afternoon trick.

The radio car was still double-parked in front of the apartment when they got there. Going up the steps they took out gold, blue-centered badges and pinned them to their coats so cops from other squads and bureaus would know they were policemen and not reporters or the ever-present curious.

The deputy chief inspector who was commanding officer of Manhattan East detectives was already there, and his early presence was enormously significant. For several weeks there had been a mounting wave of assaults and muggings throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn; the newspapers had begun to get sharply critical. Ryan and Jablonski went into the apartment briefly to take a look and tacitly let the deputy chief know they were there. He gave them an angry look as though this somehow was their fault, and they went back into the hall to await orders and not clutter up the place. That was all routine.

The RMP man on the door repeated to them what the women had told him and his partner. The deputy inspector, a heavy-faced man with hair like springy black wire, looked out the door.

“Seventeenth Squad, sir,” said Jablonski.

“Start on the tenants. The guy who did it was seen. It was a clumsy job—he may have been an amateur. Ask about relatives. There’s a daughter and we’ve sent down for her. She’s at work.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Medical Examiner and his assistant came up the stairway, laden and puffing.

In thirty minutes Jablonski and Ryan and one of the other teams that arrived after them talked to all the tenants who were at home, learned who knew the Connors, and had located who had heard or seen anything of the intruder. Meanwhile the Medical Examiner reached a preliminary verdict: death by bullet wound, which had occurred at the time the other witnesses heard the shot. The men from the Picture Gallery made photographs, and then two serious-looking lab men took over, opened a heavy black kit and began dusting for fingerprints, making preliminary blood stain tests and examining the dead woman’s clothing, hands and fingernails. It was routine.

But the crime wasn’t. They all felt that. One of the picture men, packing away his camera and tripod, paused to study the slender figure crumpled on the floor like a dropped handkerchief and said, “Jeez,” softly.

“Yeah,” said a detective next to him. “This was a real son of a bitch.”

“I can’t wait to read the Telegram tonight,” said the picture man sarcastically.

This was a heavy one. It had to be cleaned up fast, and whether it was depended on themselves—on their pooled skills and brains, courage and tenacity, on the clues they found and how assiduously they ran them down, on the empirical soundness of the conclusions they drew, on the leads they developed and the patience with which those leads were proven and disproven.

The precinct relayed word that the team that had gone down for the daughter reported she said her mother had been going to the bank that day. Lieutenant Bauer who had come over from the precinct growled an order and two detectives ran downstairs and hurried to the bank. Jablonski in response to another order assembled the three principal witnesses in Miss Leonard’s chintz-decorated apartment. When they had seated themselves expectantly, Jablonski began to talk earnestly, while Ryan leaned against the door and felt useless.

“My name’s Jablonski,” Jablonski began. “This is my partner, Detective Ryan. A very serious crime was committed here an hour ago, ladies. A man followed your neighbor Mrs. Connors home from the bank, tried to rob her and hit her with a lamp. When that failed to…ah, render her unconscious, he killed her. You ladies saw him. You’re the only persons who did.”

They listened to what they already knew with hypnotized interest.

“It’s likely,” Jablonski went on, “that, the killer was a known criminal, known to the police, that is. So if you ladies will cooperate, it may be possible for us to find out who he is right away and effect an arrest, ah, immediately.”

Confronted with an audience, Jablonski used phrases he hardly knew were in his lexicon.

“What do you want us to do?” asked Miss Leonard.

“We’d like to drive you down to police headquarters,” said Jablonski, “and show you some pictures of muggers and robbers who answer this guy’s description. It won’t take long. All you do is look at the pictures and if you recognize him, tell us. We’ll drive you back, of course. Okay, girls?”

Eagerness made Jablonski grow too friendly, Ryan recognized. That made the women suspicious.

“I’ve got a switchboard to get to,” said Miss Leonard determinedly. “I’m late as it is.”

“I’ll call your supervisor for you, miss, and explain how things are,” Ryan offered politely. He smiled diffidently at her, as though he thought she was pretty nice-looking.

She smiled back. He was nice-looking himself, she thought. “Well, if you did that, Mr. Ryan,” she said more cordially.

“Yeah,” said Mrs. Lombardi in another tone. “But supposing we pick out this guy’s picture and then his friends come looking for us, huh? How about that, mister?”

Mrs. Anders looked frightened as the meaning struck her. “Yes—how about that? It’s all right for you policemen—”

“Look, girls,” said Jablonski anxiously. “Is this too much to ask for the sake of your neighbor, Mrs. Connors, lying dead in there? Aren’t you willing to even—” He gestured helplessly.

The women looked rebellious.

Ryan moved from the door.

“Look, ladies,” he said. “All you do is drive downtown with us and look at some pictures. If you recognize one, just point. Nobody knows who picked it out or anything else.” His glance deliberately engaged Betty Leonard’s. “Won’t you please help us?” he said gently, and he knew that he had her.

He looked at the two older women. “It’s just a matter of our getting our hands on the man who did this before he can come back here or attack some other helpless woman in a building like this. Won’t you please help do that?”

It was an appeal Mrs. Lombardi could not resist. She rose. “C’mon, Mary,” she said.

Jablonski looked at his partner in surprised approval.

* * * *

The rite in the Bureau of Criminal Identification did not take long, and to the women it even seemed rather casual. Each of them was handed a deck of small photographs and asked to leaf through them slowly. For a few minutes there was absorbed silence, broken by an occasional mutter from Mrs. Lombardi, while Ryan, Jablonski and a BCI man watched them. It was Mrs. Anders who first said. “Well, this looks like him, I must say.”

The BCI man took the picture and when she had finished with her stack of pictures, re-inserted it in a different position and gave the stack to Mrs. Lombardi. Minutes later she cried out, “Oh, that’s him! I’m sure that was him.”

It was the same picture.

Now the stack went to Miss Leonard. She had had the best look at the man. They watched her narrowly while pretending not to, and when suddenly she emitted a little frightened cry, Ryan and the BCI man breathed a sigh of relief. They knew what that meant.

The BCI man showed the women other pictures of the suspect, and those confirmed the identification. Then he took his record from a file:

Harry Derby, 37 years old, male, white. Brown eyes; light brown hair; 6 feet 1½ inches; 163 pounds. Longshoreman; North River and Brooklyn docks and bars.

Under “Distinctive Marks” it said: jagged scar on right shin, pockmarks on left shoulder and left neck, almost invisible knife scar leading from outer corner of left eye. The list of Derby’s arrests took two cards clipped together; they were mostly for felonious assaults, carrying concealed weapons and robbery or suspicion of robbery.

Minutes later the news that Harry Derby was wanted for murder and his description were being teletyped into the hundred and more New York City precinct stations as well as the police headquarters and state police barracks of thirteen Eastern seaboard states. The bulletin ended: “Approach with caution. He is known to be armed.”

Ryan and Jablonski drove the three women home through the clear, cold November twilight and the endless traffic jam of 5:30 p.m.

* * * *

The cluster of photographers and reporters that had been held downstairs in the apartment building’s front hall was gone but there was still a uniformed man on the door.

“Anyone up there?” Jablonski asked.

“Ed Furtig,” the uniformed man said. “He’s carrying it.”

It was a curiously expressive bit of police slang, Ryan thought, not for the first time. He’s carrying it. The homicide men, the lab men, the identification and picture gallery men all would do what their specialties demanded in avenging the murder of Thelma Connors. But it had been assigned especially to one man, a detective in the precinct in which the crime occurred. It was primarily his responsibility, his burden to carry until the murderer was brought to trial—next week, next month, next year.

Ed Furtig sat on the arm of a deep upholstered chair near the window, arms folded, hat pushed back, smoke spiraling from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

“Hi, Jab. The desk said you guys should hit the street.”

“Okay. All yours, huh?”

“All mine,” said Furtig. His lean flexible face grew sardonic. “Naturally. I was starting a forty-eight at midnight.” Furtig used the old police expression, even though the department “week end” was now fifty-six hours.

“They get any prints?”

Furtig shook his head. “Too early to tell. One of the boys thought he got a couple partials.”

While Ryan listened, his eyes ranged over the room. This, was his first good look at it. A few cheap framed pictures decorated the walls, and immaculate doilies the tables and chairbacks. A large crucifix hung on one wall, a yellowed sprig of palm thrust behind it.

“The daughter have anything?”

“God, no. She flipped. A doctor’s with her now, down in the janitor’s apartment. One thing she did say—the old lady had some cuff links she wore with a shirtwaist. One was lying near her, but the other wasn’t anywhere around. The killer may have carried it away unknowingly, if it caught in his clothes.”

Jablonski said nothing. It was something to be remembered, but it would probably never turn up. Things did not happen that conveniently in real life. Ryan, listening, continued looking around.

There were little bursts of fingerprint powder, black and light gray, in unlikely places around doors and table edges. The smashed lamp was gone, taken to the lab for minute examination. The only real sign of violence left in this plain sitting room was their own presence—uninvited strangers who would not be here at all had an old woman’s life been permitted to continue its even way.

No—there was one other sign of violence. Behind a chair leg there was a small yellow chip of china from the shattered lamp base. Ryan knew that it was no longer of evidential value, so he picked it up, studied it and then, reminding himself that this was the first murder in his four years on the force in which he had an active, investigative part he dropped it in his coat pocket on the universal impulse of the souvenir hunter.

“Well…here’s hopin’, Ed,” said Jablonski.

“Thanks.”

“We better roll, Neill.”

They filed out. As he turned to close the door behind them Ryan saw Furtig still sitting hunched forward, smoke drifting up past squinting, unseeing eyes as he pondered what had happened, and the nature of the man who had caused it, and how he might best be overtaken. It was his to carry.