Inside Job Page 3

  “Detective Brody sitting right over there will take care of you, won’t you Detective Brody?”

  “Certainly, Detective Shannon.”

  Brody stood as the girl approached his desk. She appeared frightened and unsure of herself.

  “Have a seat,” he said with a smile.

  “Thank you.” She sat on the old wooden chair beside his desk.

  He settled into his chair. “What can I do for you, miss?”

  “Well, I’m having a problem with a man,” she said, looking down at her hands folded in her lap. “I didn’t want to come to the police, but I’m getting afraid.”

  “If somebody’s bothering you, you’ve come to the right place. Why don’t you tell me what’s happened.”

  “Well, I hate to make trouble for him. He’s sort of a pathetic person and I don’t know if he’s really dangerous or not.”

  “Maybe you should let us decide whether he’s dangerous or not. I think we’re better qualified to decide this than you.”

  She looked at him and nodded. “Okay, I’ll tell you everything. I’m a dancer with the New York City Ballet. I’m in the corps—I’m not famous or anything like that—but sometimes they let me dance a solo, and sometimes I get fan letters from men who tell me they’re in love with me. It’s really weird, because I mean, they don’t even know me. Well, one afternoon about a month ago I was walking into my building, and standing in front was this man. He was tall and frail, sort of poetic looking, with very pale skin, as if he never got any sun. He walked toward me and said, ‘Hello, I know that you’re Christine Hyatt, and I’ve seen you dance with the New York City Ballet. I’ve taken the trouble to find out where you live because I want you to marry me.’ “ She threw up her hands. “Well, I knew I should have just walked away from him, but there was something about him that seemed very interesting, maybe it was his fragility, I don’t know. So I said, ‘Are you serious?’ He said, ‘I’ve never been more serious in my life.’ I said, ‘If you’re really serious, I’d never marry you, because you can’t be very mature if you just propose to somebody you don’t know.’ He said, ‘Your dancing reveals all that’s important about you. Will you marry me?’ I said, ‘Don’t you think people should get to know each other before they get married?’ He said, “I will marry you and take care of you for the rest of your life. I will never be unfaithful to you and I will never lie to you. This is the highest offer a man can make to a woman in our society, and I make it to you now.’ Well, at this point I realized he was a little sick. Total strangers just don’t talk to each other that way. If he’d asked me to dinner or something like that, I probably would have accepted, but to hit me with all that marriage stuff right off the bat, really turned me off. In fact, he scared me a little and I wanted to get away from him. I told him I had to get going. He asked if he could see me later, and he looked so weird when he said it that I was afraid to say no, so I said maybe. I asked him to give me his phone number and said I’d call him later. We said goodbye and I went home. That evening I didn’t have to dance, so I went out to the movies with a girlfriend of mine. I forgot all about the guy—his name is Albert Carson, by the way. The next day there was a letter from him in my mailbox. It didn’t have a stamp on it. Somehow he’d opened my mailbox and put it in himself.” She opened her purse, took out a letter, and handed it to Brody. “Here it is.”

  Brody read the letter. It accused Christine of being a liar, a cheat, and a dishonorable person. Albert said he’d waited for her to call until four in the morning. However he said he would forgive her because he had already given his word that he would marry her and take care of her for the rest of his life. Brody handed the letter back to her. “Anything else?”

  “He called me, and I told him I didn’t want to have anything to do with him. I hung up on him. Then the presents started showing up: jewelry, ballet tickets, dolls, and a framed photograph of him. I called him and told him I didn’t want any of it, and that if he’d give me his address I’d send everything back. He gave me his address and begged me to keep everything, but I sent everything back anyway. Then last night I came home after the performance at Lincoln Center, and there was a bouquet of roses in the middle of my living room floor. In the flowers was another letter from him.” She took the letter out of her purse and handed it to Brody.

  “Did he threaten you in the letter?” he asked.

  “No, it was just a letter.”

  He waved his hand. “Then I don’t have to see it. What else?”

  “What else? Nothing. When I saw that he’d actually been in my apartment, I really got scared. I mean, he’s liable to go crazy and kill me while I’m asleep. I don’t know. So I spend the night with one of my girlfriends, and she told me I should go to the police. So here I am.”

  Brody offered her a cigarette.

  “I don’t smoke,” she said.

  “Mind if I do?”

  “Not at all.”

  Brody lit his cigarette. “Well, there’s not much we can do. He hasn’t actually threatened you or anything like that.”

  “What about the flowers in my apartment?”

  “You couldn’t prove that he put them there.”

  “But who else would put them there?”

  “Only him, but you couldn’t prove it.”

  She looked discouraged. “So you can’t help me.”

  “I didn’t say that. I’ll go talk to him. Maybe me and my shield can throw a scare into him.”

  Her features went loose on her pretty face. “Now maybe he might really do something crazy.”

  “You don’t want me to talk to him?”

  “No, talk to him.”

  “Okay, write your name and address, and his name and address, here.” He shoved a notepad to her, then got up and walked to Shannon’s desk. “The lady’s being bothered by a creep, and I thought maybe I could go talk to him while you’re working on your report.”

  “Go ahead, but be back here in two hours. We have to investigate that burglary case.”

  Brody returned to his desk, and Christine handed him the notepad. She lived a few blocks away and Carson lived on East 86th Street. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll go see him now and get back to you later. Can I drop you off anywhere?”

  “That’s okay, I can get home by myself.”

  “You live on the way to where this Albert Carson lives. It won’t be any trouble.”

  “I can get home by myself.”

  He walked down with her to the lobby of the station house, and the cops standing around winked at him and threw him the high sign. They all assumed he was plunking Christine just as he always assumed they were plunking whatever woman they were with. Inspector Levinson once said that if Frankenstein wore a police uniform he could get laid on the East Side.

  In front of the station house, he turned to her and said, “I’ll call you after I speak to Carson.”

  She pulled her hair away from her eyes. “Okay.”

  “Bye now.”

  “Bye.”

  Christine walked east on the sidewalk and Brody crossed the street to the green Plymouth he shared with Shannon. He got in, started it up, and drove off. At Third Avenue he turned right and headed uptown. As he drove past the expensive restaurants and singles bars, the supermarkets and antique stores, he thought of Christine Hyatt and her sweet voice. He had loved the way she moved her hands when she spoke to him. They had been like two butterflies floating in front of him. She must be a helluva dancer. She probably wouldn’t be too bad in the sack either.

  The truth of the matter was that Brody hadn’t been very faithful to Doris during the past five years. After their first three years together, when the marriage started going sour, he started fooling around. It wasn’t that he went looking for pussy, but if it happened to fall into his lap he didn’t push it away like he did before. There had been a lot of lonely women out in Flatbush, and many could turn heads on Fifth Avenue. There had been one Jewish divorcee who had begged him to marry her, but he told her t
hat Catholics didn’t get divorced. That’d been a lie, of course, to evade the issue. Catholics got divorced like other people, well maybe not as much as other people. But they still got divorced and Brody wasn’t that religious anyway. If Doris didn’t get over whatever she was going through, she’d find herself alone.

  He didn’t stop to think that from Doris’ point of view, she was alone already.

  Brody parked in a bus stop area between Second and First Avenues on 86th Street. He pulled down the visor on the passenger side; on it was a sign that read: OFFICIAL POLICE INVESTIGATION with the seal of the N. Y.P.D. Getting out of the car, he touched his leather jacket over the spot where his .38 was holstered on his belt, just to make sure it was still there. He buttoned the jacket and walked down the block to a white apartment tower that resembled an egg crate laid on its side.

  The doorman was standing in the vestibule beside all the buttons. “May I help you sir?”

  Brody showed him his shield and kept on walking. He passed the elevator and took the stairs up to the second floor, where Carson’s apartment was. He walked down the corridor and knocked on the door. There was a sign on the door that read: ROBERT CARSON, ARCHITECT.

  The door was opened by a tall, delicately built man with long blond hair. Brody figured him for a sissy and a weirdo right away.

  “Yes?” said the man with a smile. He wore thick glasses and had pale blue eyes.

  Brody showed him his shield. “Are you Robert Carson?”

  The man’s head twitched as he stared at the badge. “Yes I am.”

  “I’d like to talk to you about something. May I come in?”

  “Sure.”

  Brody could see that the guy was scared shitless. They entered a room in which there was a draftsman table, chair, various cabinets, and some other chairs. Architectural drawings were affixed to bulletin boards, and near the window was a telescope on a tripod, and a 35 mm camera with a telephoto lens, also on a tripod. So the fucker was into peeping across the street at his neighbors, and taking pictures of people on the street. Definitely a weirdo.

  Carson sat at his desk and tried to be cool, but he was trembling all over. “Have a seat,” he said in a quavering voice, pointing to the chair beside his desk.

  Brody sat down, remembering that Christine had said she had been attracted to this guy a little at first. He wondered why. The guy looked like a breeze would blow him over.

  “Do you know a Christine Hyatt?” Brody asked, crossing his legs.

  Carson’s face drained of color. “Yes.”

  “You’ve been writing her letters and stuff?”

  “Yes.”

  “Opening her mailbox?”

  Carson looked ready to faint.

  “Don’t you know that’s against the law?”

  “I didn’t think about it.”

  “How about when you brought those flowers into her apartment? That’s breaking and entering.”

  “I didn’t steal anything.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You have no right to enter other people’s apartments whenever you feel like it.”

  Carson made a face of impatience. “I don’t enter other people’s apartments. I went to Christine’s because I asked her to marry me.”

  “Did she say yes?”

  “She didn’t answer definitely either way. I thought I’d pursue the matter until I get a definite no from her.”

  “She told me that she told you no.”

  “She’s lying. She never said, ‘I don’t want to marry you.’”

  “Didn’t she tell you that she didn’t want to see you anymore?”

  “Yes, but that’s not the same thing.”

  Brody scratched his head. “What makes you think she wanted to marry you if she said she didn’t want to see you anymore?”

  “I wanted her to say, ‘I don’t want to marry you’ because until she says that, my offer to her stands, and I’m not free to marry somebody else.”

  Brody smiled. “What do you want to get married for, Mister Carson? Don’t you know when you’re well off?”

  Carson didn’t smile back. “If a man cannot be celibate, the only honorable thing to do is get married.”

  “Oh. Well, Miss Hyatt doesn’t want to marry you. She doesn’t want to have anything to do with you anymore. If you break into her mailbox once more, or bother her in any way, I’m going to arrest you for malicious mischief, understand?”

  Carson sat stiff in his chair. “I give you my word that I’ll never have anything to do with her again.”

  “Good.” Brody stood up.

  “But I’m still not free to marry anyone else until she gives me a definitive answer to my proposal of marriage.”

  “That’s not my problem.”

  “Please tell her that.”

  “I give you my word that I’ll tell her that,” Brody said.

  “Thank you very much.”

  Brody went back to his car and drove downtown on Second Avenue, passing through the neighborhood of Yorkville, which still had a lot of Slavs and Germans despite the invasion of chic East Siders. He saw fancy blondes and old ladies in babushkas on the sidewalks. It was a peaceful scene, but Brody knew that you could bet on a horse in that pizza parlor, buy a pound of grass in that apartment building, and find an expensive hooker in the building across the street. Just as an architect like Carson would focus on the architectural details of buildings, Brody saw the landscape of crime. Five years with the N.Y.P.D. did that to you.

  Back in the Nineteenth Precinct, Shannon looked up when Brody walked into the office area.

  “How did it go?” Shannon asked.

  “A piece of cake. The guy was scared shitless.”

  “So now you’re going to call the babe and tell her what a hero you were, right?”

  “Right.”

  Brody sat at his desk, picked up the phone, and dialed Christine Hyatt’s number.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Miss Hyatt?”

  “Who’s calling please?”

  “Detective Brody at the Nineteenth Precinct.”

  “Oh hi.” She sounded happy to hear from him.

  “I’ve just spoken to Mister Carson. He promised never to contact you or have anything to do with you again, so I think you’ll be all right from now on.”

  “Oh, I feel so relieved, Detective Brody.” Her voice sounded as though she meant it. “He admitted doing those things?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was afraid he’d deny it, and then I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.”

  “I would’ve locked him up. It’s against the law to break into people’s mailboxes and homes. There was enough circumstantial evidence to make him wish he was never born. But there’s just one thing. He said he won’t be free to marry anyone else unless you tell him that you don’t want to marry him. He says that otherwise he’s still under obligation to you.”

  “He’s even weirder than I thought.”

  “I promised him I’d tell you that.”

  “Well I don’t want to talk to him anymore, and I’m certainly not going to write him a letter.”

  “That’s up to you, Miss Hyatt.”

  “I mean, maybe I didn’t say it the way he wants me to say it, but I think he should know by now that I don’t want to marry him. Don’t you think so?”

  “I think so, but he doesn’t.”

  “Well that’s too bad.”

  Brody found himself being pleased by her bitchy attitude. That made her more human to him. “If he bothers you again, don’t hesitate to call me, Miss Hyatt.”

  “I’m very grateful for what you’ve done for me, Detective Brody. I mean, I know how busy you must be.”

  “It was my job, and I was happy to be of help. I’m glad everything has turned out all right so far.”

  She hesitated a few seconds, then said, “I think that I’d Like to show my gratitude in some small way. If you like, I could cook dinner for you some night. I’m very good with Italian cuisine. Do y
ou like Italian food?”

  He chuckled. “Yes, but how could a girl named Hyatt know about Italian food?”

  “My real name’s Brovelli.”

  “Oh. Well, I don’t keep very regular hours, and when I’m on duty I usually don’t have time to sit down for a meal.”

  “When do you get out of work?”

  “Usually around one in the morning.”

  “Well I don’t go to bed until two or three. Maybe you could stop by for a cup of coffee.”

  “Okay—I’ll call before I come over.”

  “That would be nice.”

  They said goodbye and hung up. Brody lit a cigarette and mused upon Christine Hyatt. She was a sweet kid, and he was a married man who could only make her unhappy. If she were more of a bitch he could relate to her better, but she reminded him too much of the nice Catholic girls he’d been raised among. You didn’t screw girls like that—you married them. Then you screwed them for a few years and then you got sick of them. You became cynical. You screwed bimbos on the side. The city was crawling with them.

  Shannon called to him. “You ready to go out?”

  “Any time you are.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Chapter Four

  They drove downtown to Police Headquarters and stopped in at the fingerprint lab. A bald man in a white coat told them he had a good set of prints from the burglary, which had taken place at an East 79th Street penthouse. Jewelry and some cash had been reported missing.

  Shannon and Brody took the prints to the computer room, and an attendant ran them through the IBM 360/40. Out came the name of John Gomez, 360 Boston Road in the East Bronx. He was out on parole for a conviction on three counts of burglary. He had a record as long as his arm, and it included narcotics convictions.

  “Let’s go see this scumbag,” Shannon said.

  They took the East River Drive uptown to the Bronx, and then took Third Avenue to Boston Road. Brody smoked a cigarette and watched the slum buildings of the East Bronx pass by the window.

  Boston Road was a particularly sleazy part of the East Bronx. The sidewalks were swarming with blacks and Puerto Ricans. The storefronts were camouflage for gambling operations and drug dealing. Street murders were common. Brody couldn’t help thinking how different everything looked compared to the fashionable East Side. The only similarity was that the people in both neighborhoods misunderstood and hated each other with equal intensity.