Too Soon Dead Read online

  She gave a tired smile. “Nothing I’d cross the street for,” she said. “Some of those men should go on diets and try to get regular exercise.”

  8

  The apartment Fox’s body was found in had been rented by a I German expatriate group called the Verein für Wahrheit und Freiheit, which translates as the “Truth and Freedom Society.” What had brought them together was a shared distaste for the social policies of Adolf Hitler. They used the mimeograph machine in the apartment to put out pamphlets with titles like “The Truth About National Socialism,” “What Hitler Intends,” and “Europe—Wake Up!” in six different languages, which they distributed to anyone who would read them. Since the members had little else in common, and their politics ranged from monarchist to communist, their meetings often dissolved into shouting contests, enlivened with occasional fisticuffs. Apparently, no one ever got seriously hurt, and the meetings broke up with everyone joining in the beer of forgiveness at the corner bierstube and agreeing that fighting Hitler was more important than fighting one another. Their ages ranged from the early twenties to the late seventies, with those years over fifty predominating. None of them looked like they had ever done any heavy lifting.

  A gaggle of them were gathered in that apartment, spilling out into the hallway and the apartment across the hall, when Brass and I returned to the scene of the crime at about nine that evening. They were busily and noisily engaged in a meaningful discussion, but since it was in German, the topic of the evening eluded me. A rotund man with a red face yelled an emphatic German phrase at Brass as we came up the stairs. When Brass failed to respond, he grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him down the hallway to an area that was relatively free of babble. I followed close behind. “You are not more police, yes?” he asked in a deep, gravelly voice. “You are too goddamn well dressed.”

  “I am not more police, no,” Brass agreed. “I am a newspaperman.”

  “That is good,” the man said, bobbing his head up and down. “You will write about us, yes? You will tell what the Gestapo are doing to us, yes?”

  “Now come on,” I said from behind him. “The New York police aren’t that bad.”

  He wheeled and jumped back, as though I had just prodded him with a hot needle.

  “I’m with him,” I said, indicating Brass. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  He relaxed a little. “I am not speaking of the New York police,” he said. “I am speaking of the Geheime Staatspolizei—the Gestapo. Heinrich Himmler’s own revenge apparatus.” He lowered his voice. “You are United States of America citizens, yes? Also you are New York City newspapermen, yes?”

  Brass took the leather case holding his press pass from his pocket and showed it to the red-faced man. “Yes,” he said. “We are.”

  I pulled out mine for emphasis and held it before his face. He seemed duly impressed. Considering that the passes were made up in the World’s composing room, and had no official status, they had served us well over the years.

  “Ah, truly,” the man said, peering closely at Brass’s card. “You are the renowned Alexander Brass. I, myself, was a writer for a monthly journal of political opinion in München—Munich—until the day last July when our editor was removed to a concentration camp for his health. He was suffering from that contagious disease known as socialism. For my health—although I am not, you understand, a socialist—I was on the next train to Geneva, leaving behind my job, my dachshund, and my mistress; all of whom, I’m sure, were goddamn better off without me.” He bowed slightly from the neck. “Willi Grosfeder at your service.”

  “What’s happening?” Brass asked, indicating the fracas before us with a wave of his hand.

  Grosfeder filled us in on the Verein, and then explained, “They are trying to decide whether they should hire a lawyer for Max or deny any connection with him. Some of them say one, some the other; some say neither, some say both; several are arguing over what Karl Marx would have done; Gumple, over there, is explaining something about Martin Buber, and Hollberger—that tall man in the doorway—is going to burst into tears at any minute and tell anyone who will listen that this is all pointless, and we are all ineffectual intellectuals, a phrase he is overly fond of. He’s right, of course, but it changes nothing to say so.”

  “Who is Max, and why does he need a lawyer?” Brass asked.

  “Ah! I assumed you knew. Max von Pilath is the head of our little group. That is his apartment across from where the body was found. About an hour ago he was arrested for the murder of that poor reporter.”

  “Is this Max von Pilath a very large man?” Brass asked, spreading his arms out from his waist to indicate in which dimension he meant this largeness. “And not very kempt?”

  “Not very… Ach, so—I see! What you Americans do to your language; it is to be admired. On the contrary, Max is slender, ascetic-looking, and unnaturally well groomed. Also he speaks with a pronounced stutter except when he is standing on a podium addressing an audience, which fact I have always found of the utmost fascination.”

  “Why did they arrest him? Why do they think he murdered Fox?” Brass asked.

  “They didn’t say,” Grosfeder said.

  “Well, perhaps we should go find out,” Brass said. “Thank you, Mr. Grosfeder. Come, DeWitt.”

  We shouldered our way through the nattering crowd and out onto Eighty-second Street. It was nine-thirty in the evening, but the street had not retired for the night. There were people on the stoops and in doorways and standing in little groups in shadowed areas along the sidewalk. No one ventured out into the pools of yellow light cast by the streetlamps except a few passersby like us, who had business elsewhere.

  We caught a cab on First Avenue, and Brass directed it to Seventy-seventh and Lexington and sat impassively, staring, as far as I could tell, at the back of the driver’s head for the five minutes it took us to make the trip.

  There are two homicide squads in Manhattan: Homicide South and Homicide North. Homicide South is in the Police Headquarters Building downtown on Centre Street, and Homicide North takes up most of the third floor of the 23rd Precinct building on Seventy-seventh between Lexington and Third. Fifty-seventh Street is the dividing line for their jurisdiction. There is a possibly apocryphal story about a man who was found dead on an uptown bus. The investigation into his demise was delayed for a week while the two squads squabbled over whether he died above or below Fifty-seventh Street.

  The desk sergeant at the 23rd Precinct—or the two-three, as the cops call it—beamed at us as we came in. “Mr. Brass,” he said. “Good to see you.”

  “And you, Kelly,” Brass said.

  “You’ll be wanting to go upstairs. You know the way.”

  “Indeed I do,” Brass agreed. We took the wide staircase up to the second floor, and then the narrower staircase up to the third. The homicide squad room was empty, except for Alan Shine, who was sitting on a wooden bench that ran along the wall and absently folding his hat into a variety of shapes it had never been intended to assume. He looked up when we came in. “You got here quick,” he said. “I just called it in.”

  I took his hat out of his hand, punched some shape into it, and stuck it on his head. “Called what in?”

  “They’ve got someone for the Fox killing. They’re in there talking to him now.”

  “What have they got on him?” Brass asked.

  “They haven’t told me,” Shine said. “Say, you hear the one about the guy at the soup kitchen who says, ‘Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup,’ and the waiter leans forward and says, ‘Keep it quiet, we don’t have enough flies to go around’?”

  “They don’t have waiters in soup kitchens,” I said.

  “Shaddup,” Shine explained, grinning at me. He took his hat off and twisted it into a shape that looked like what a butterfly would look like if a butterfly looked like a hat.

  Brass sat on the bench next to the World’s ace crime reporter. “What’s been happening?”

  “You tel
l me,” Shine said. “They brought this guy in about—what?—two hours ago. I just found out from a source that he’s being held for Billy’s murder. But they won’t release so much as his name, and they won’t let me talk to him.

  “What source?” I asked.

  Shine rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “A five-dollar source,” he said. That meant it was one of the patrolmen. A sergeant or one of the detectives would be a ten-dollar source. “None of the other boys have it yet, so with any luck I’ll have an exclusive. If any of the homicide dicks will come out here to talk to me.”

  “I have a little for you,” Brass told him. “His name is Max von Pilath. He’s the president, or whatever, of the Verein für Wahrheit und Freiheit, which is the group renting the room William’s body was found in.”

  A notebook and pencil appeared in Shine’s hand. “Spell that,” he said. Brass did so, and translated it. “Also, he lives in the apartment across the hall,” he added. “Why the police think he killed Fox, I don’t know.”

  Shine jumped up. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll phone this in.” He trotted over to one of the empty desks and picked up the phone.

  Inspector Raab and two of his flunkies came out of an office across the room. They started toward the interrogation rooms, but when Raab saw us he turned and headed straight for Brass. “Well, well,” he said, stopping two feet short of Brass and glaring at him. “What brings you here?”

  “Max von Pilath,” Brass said.

  “And just how the hell did you know that? Can’t they keep anything secret for at least an hour or two around here?”

  “DeWitt and I went to Eighty-second Street. A group of German pamphlet-writers are there trying to decide whether to hire an attorney for von Pilath, who is their titular head, or disown him.”

  “Yeah?” Raab pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, muttered, “I gotta quit smoking!” and stuffed it back. “If I were them,” he told Brass, “I’d go for the disowning. Either that or see if Darrow is still taking cases.”

  “So he did it?” Brass asked.

  “His fingerprints are all over the room—”

  “He worked there,” I said before I could stop myself.

  Raab glared at me. “His fingerprints, as I was saying, are all over the room. They are also on the murder weapon. And, we have an eyewitness. If that isn’t enough to get a conviction, I’ll retire to Connecticut and raise sheep.”

  “What kind of sheep?” Brass asked.

  “How should I know?” Raab took the pack of cigarettes back out, glared at it, and thrust it back into his pocket. “Small ones.”

  “Why did he do it?”

  Raab sighed. “So far we got no idea,” he said. “He won’t talk. He says we can beat him all we want to, but we’ll get no information from him. He’s very adamant. I have a feeling that if we did beat him, he’d clam up even tighter. We don’t beat up people anymore. We use kindness. It often startles them into confessing. Back in the days when we did beat people, it wasn’t his sort we beat anyway.”

  “What sort did you beat?” I asked.

  Raab stared at me for a moment. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “When I first joined the force, a while before you were born, I had occasion to apprehend a lad who had been hitting his mother with a baseball bat. When I brought him into the station house, the desk sergeant listened to the charge and then said—it was a sort of accusation—‘There’s not a mark on him. He didn’t resist arrest?’

  “‘No, Sarge,’ I said.

  “‘Well, take him out back and have him resist arrest for a while,’ the sergeant told me. ‘I don’t want to see nobody that beats their mother in here before they’ve resisted a lot of arrest.’ And I did that. And I’ve never been sorry for it.”

  “That’s a good story,” Brass said. “I haven’t heard that one before.”

  Raab thrust his hands deeply into his jacket pockets. “I’m saving it for my memoirs,” he said. “So don’t use it.”

  “Scout’s honor,” Brass said.

  “Somehow the image of you as a Boy Scout is frightening,” Raab said.

  “Then you’re safe,” Brass said. “I never was. Who is the eyewitness?”

  “A Spaniard named Velo who runs a travel agency across the street. He saw Fox enter the building and this von Pilath go in right behind him. And about ten minutes later he saw von Pilath leave with a brown paper bag, which he tossed into a trash can. The Spaniard pointed it out to one of my men, and they searched the can and found the bag. Inside it was a knife with an eight-inch blade, covered with blood.”

  Shine looked up from his telephone. “How do you spell that name, Inspector?”

  Raab sighed a deep and heartfelt sigh. “I didn’t see you sitting there,” he said. “The city didn’t buy that desk for your use.”

  “Come on, be a sport,” Shine said.

  Raab transferred his glare to Brass, and then briefly to me, and then back to Shine, as though trying to decide how to apportion guilt. “V-E-L-O,” he said. “Now get off the phone.”

  “Sure thing,” Shine agreed, “whatever you say. I believe in working with the authorities. Say, did you hear the one—”

  “Out!” Raab bellowed. “Up from the desk and downstairs to that little, airless room that we provide for the working press.”

  “Sure thing,” Shine repeated. He murmured into the phone for a last second, and then hung it up and sprung to his feet. “I’ll be downstairs if you want me,” he said to the room at large, and headed out the door.

  After he was gone, Brass asked Raab, “Did Señor Velo see the fat man that Fox was following?”

  “He says nobody else went in or out around the same time. We didn’t ask him specifically about a fat man. We don’t want to go putting ideas into his head.”

  “What an original concept,” Brass said. “Any chance of my seeing the prisoner?”

  Raab thought it over. “He won’t talk to us,” he said. “Who knows? Maybe he’ll talk to you. If he says anything useful, can you keep it to yourself until we have a chance to look at it?”

  “Scout’s honor,” Brass said.

  Raab snorted. “Come this way.”

  He led us down a corridor to the interrogation rooms and pushed the first door open. A thin, dapper man was sitting behind a small table with his hands together on the tabletop. One detective was standing over him, while another was leaning back on a rickety chair across the room. Nobody was saying anything as the door opened. “This is Alexander Brass,” Raab said to the dapper man. “He wants to talk to you. He’s a newspaperman. I’ll give you ten minutes.” He gestured to the two detectives, and they joined us outside the room as Brass entered. Raab closed the door and we continued down the hall to the next room. “Let’s keep it quiet in here,” Inspector Raab said as we entered the room. “Sound goes right through the wall.” One of the detectives closed the door and turned the light off, and Inspector Raab slid open a panel in the wall, and a large one-way glass gave us a full view of the interrogation room.

  I found it a curious feeling, watching someone I knew couldn’t see me. Even though he wasn’t doing anything but sitting at the table and staring stolidly at the mirror on the far wall, behind which I was staring back at him. Brass stood beside the table and silently examined the prisoner. Max von Pilath returned the silence, but not the examination. He didn’t so much as turn his head enough to see what Brass looked like.

  The silence stretched out.

  Brass straddled the old wooden chair by the side of the table and leaned forward until his face was scant inches from von Pilath’s. “The knife has your fingerprints on it,” he said softly. “Did you use it to cut bratwurst?”

  For a minute von Pilath stayed mute, staring rigidly ahead. Then he turned his head slowly until he was looking at Brass. “You can b-b-beat me,” he said. “I will not t-t-talk.”

  “I can’t beat you,” Brass told him. “The police union won’t let me. It’s a jurisdictional thing: If I
beat you, local 104 will go on strike. All I’m allowed to do is pop flashbulbs in your face and ask you annoying questions.”

  “I will not t-t-t-talk!” von Pilath stubbornly repeated.

  “That’s okay,” Brass said encouragingly. “You stick with that. It’ll look good in the paper. ‘Arrested for the murder of New York World star reporter William Fox, Max von Pilath, head of a mysterious German organization in whose offices Fox’s body was found, stands mute in the face of intensive police questioning.’ Actually you’re sitting mute, but that’s not a trite enough phrase to clear rewrite.”

  Von Pilath shrunk away from Brass slightly. Then something of what Brass had said seemed to sink in. “You are t-t-truly a j-journalist?” he asked. For the rest of the conversation I will leave out the repeated consonants. Von Pilath’s stutter was actually fairly soft and unobtrusive, and it looks worse on the printed page than it was. Just keep in mind that a fair bit of gentle stuttering was going on from von Pilath’s side of the table.

  Brass took out his all-purpose press card and displayed it to von Pilath. “Really,” he said.

  Von Pilath took several deep breaths and then leaned back and relaxed. Then he stiffened again. “Why are they letting you speak with me?” he demanded.

  “The freedom of the press,” Brass told him. “It’s the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America,” he explained, the syllables rolling off his tongue like a Fourth of July speech. “They have to.”

  “Ah!” von Pilath said. “I have heard of this.”

  “Did you kill William Fox?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Then why don’t you tell the police that you’re innocent?”

  “I will say nothing to the police. It would not matter what I said. They work with the Gestapo; it is a clearly established fact.”

  On my side of the wall Inspector Raab made a soft muttering sound, and then shut up.