It was a decayed genteel apartment building, with iron grillwork on the front doors and no elevator. We climbed the stairs to 4A and rang the bell.
Dorothea Campbell was about fifty, tall and stocky and gray-haired. Decayed genteel, like the building. She wore a housecoat and an apron and scuffed slippers. Her face was cold. She had the right and the power to close the door in our faces if she felt like it. She wasn’t used to power, she might abuse it.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m Ray Kelly. This is my brother, Bill. Our father used to be your brother’s lawyer.”
“My brother?” Her voice was cold, too. “What brother?”
“Eddie Kapp.”
She shook her head. “I don’t have any brother.” The door started to close.
“We don’t have any father,” I said.
The door stopped midway. “What do you mean?”
“He’s dead. He did wrong things when he was young. But we never turned our backs on him.”
“Eddie Kapp put me through hell,” she said angrily. But she was being defensive about it. I waited, and then she let go of the door and turned away. “Oh, come in if you have to,” she said. “Tell me what you want.”
“Thank you.”
We went in, and I was the one who closed the door.
The living room was small, and the furniture was all too big for it. The colors were dull. The metal-cabinet television set looked as though it had been left in that corner by accident.
We sat down on a fat green sofa, and she sat facing us in a matching chair. I said, “Did you ever know Willard Kelly? Your brother’s lawyer. People say Bill here looks a lot like he did.”
“I was eight years younger than my brother,” she said. “Even if we’d been the same age, we wouldn’t have known the same people. I never had anything to do with his cronies at all.”
“This wasn’t exactly a crony. It was his lawyer.”
She shook her head stubbornly. She didn’t intend to think about 1940.
I shrugged. She probably didn’t have a memory to avoid, not one that was useful to me. I said, “Is Eddie out of jail yet, do you know?”
“September fifteenth.”
“That’s when he gets out?”
“He sent me a letter. I threw it away. I don’t care what happens to him. Let him rot in prison. I don’t care. I don’t want his dirty money!”
“He offered you money?”
“I don’t need his pity. A man twenty-two years in prison! And he has the gall to pity me!” She remembered she was thinking out loud, and there were strangers present. Her mouth twisted shut like a tricky knot.
“He’s still in Dannemora?”
“How do I know who you are?” she demanded.
I took out my wallet and tossed it into her lap. She looked suddenly ashamed. “I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes, I don’t think there’s any justice in the world at all. I don’t know what to think any more, I don’t know what to do.”
“He’s in Dannemora?”
“I wish he’d stay there. I wish he wouldn’t write me. After twenty-two years of silence.”
“And he’s getting out next Thursday, is that right? The fifteenth?”
“So soon?” Desperation flickered in her eyes. “What am I going to do?”
“He wants to stay here?”
“No, he—He wants me to leave my husband. Brother and sister. He wrote that I was all the family he had. That he had plenty of money. We could live in Florida.” She looked around at what Robert Campbell had given her. “My daughter works for the phone company,” she said suddenly. She looked at me again. “I didn’t realize it was so soon. Next Thursday. I didn’t write him back. I threw his letter away.”
She looked at the window. It faced an airshaft running down through the middle of the building.
I got to my feet, walked over, took my wallet back from her lap. “Thank you,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, distracted. She kept looking out at the airshaft.
Bill and I walked over to the door. I opened it, and then she turned and stared at us as though she’d never seen us before. She said, “What am I going to do?”
I told her, “Don’t count on Eddie.”
She started to cry.
We went downstairs and walked back to the car. Bill said, “Now where?”
“Morris Silber,” I said. “I didn’t find any obituary on him, but there’s nobody by that name in the phone book.”
“Who was he?”
“The landlord Dad defended when he got the write-up in the Times.”
“Hell, kid, that was thirty years ago. He died in Florida long ago.”
I took a cigarette out, but it broke in my fingers. I threw it out the window, and got another one. “I can’t get hold of the story,” I said. “It was all so goddamn long ago. People have died, changed, forgotten, reformed, moved away. Nobody cares any more. Dad had a whole file of regular clients, and most of them came from the underworld. We know two of them. Eddie Kapp and Morris Silber. Kapp’s in jail. God knows where Silber is. Nobody knows or cares who the rest of the clients were. We can’t even be sure it was Eddie Kapp that Dad meant. Or what exactly he was tying to say. Eddie Kapp did it? Eddie Kapp would know who did it? Maybe he meant Eddie Kapp would be on our side. We don’t know enough about anything. And nobody else knows any more, either.”
“Somebody must, or they wouldn’t have started killing people.”
“Morris Silber,” I said. “He might know a couple other clients. They might know some more. With a starting point, after a while we could probably have the whole list.”
“That would take a lot of time, Ray.”
“Time’s the only thing I’ve got.” I looked at him, but he didn’t say anything. I said, “I know, it’s different for you. You’ve got the job, and the kid. House and car and the whole thing. I don’t have any of that.”
“I’m going to have to go back pretty soon, Ray. I’m sorry.”
“If only we had a starting point.”
He scratched his nose and said, “What about the guy who did the profile in the Times?”
Every once in a while, Bill said something brilliant like that. I said, “Let’s go back to Manhattan.”