Shirley Read online

  Suddenly, Shirley was very hungry, and she found herself accepting a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a container of coffee.

  “Only I’d rather think it was on City Hall than on you.”

  “I can afford it. They got money problems,” Burton answered as she bit into the sandwich. Either it was very good or she was hungrier than she had thought.

  “I know how they feel with that last-meal stuff,” she mumbled, her mouth full of sandwich. “Tell me, Lieutenant, when did they last execute a woman in this state?”

  “That’s no way to talk or think.”

  “Well, how would you feel,” Shirley asked, “if somebody just told you that you killed two men?”

  “That’s not to the point, Miss Campbel. I didn’t say you committed a crime. I only want to find out why these two men were after you. And what made you think they were going to kill you?”

  “Because they were killers.”

  “Have you ever known a killer?”

  “Once is enough. It’s like parachute jumping. You don’t need to practice.”

  “Did you ever see either of them before?”

  “Never.”

  “Were you ever mixed up in anything hot? I want you to tell me the truth.”

  “What’s hot?”

  “Dope, for example.”

  “You mean am I a junkie? The answer is no.”

  “Prostitution? Confidence?”

  “That’s a fine way to talk!” Shirley snapped.

  “I have to ask the questions. Do you want some Danish pastry? I have plain and with prunes, so you have a choice.”

  “No, thank you. I got to watch my figure, even if I don’t use it professionally.”

  “So do I. My wife says I’m getting fat as a house. And what it comes down to is coffee and Danish and peanuts. You watch, I’ll eat both of these.”

  “You know,” Shirley said, “you’re not a bad guy for a cop, Lieutenant, but you got the disease of all cops. Everybody you talk to, they got to be a phony. Otherwise, why would you be talking to them? Well, let me tell you this, I never took nothing from no one that I didn’t pay whatever the price was. I made it the hard way, no matter how I comb my hair. My father walked out on my mother a month before I was born. I don’t even know if they were married, and she hit her head against so many walls that she became a lush, God help her, so you can see what kind of a spoon I was born with in my mouth. But I made it, and nobody ever called me a whore. Not until today.”

  “Miss Campbel,” Burton sighed, “I did not call you a whore or was there any such implication. Not by any means. I’m just trying to get to the bottom of something.” He pushed the photos toward her. “Look at these again, Miss Campbel. As far as I’m concerned, they’re pictures of you.”

  Shirley looked at the pictures again. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re not,” she said.

  “No doubts?”

  “None.”

  “And as far as you know, you have never been mixed up in anything that could make people desire your death?”

  “I have been out with some cookies,” Shirley grinned, “the way they acted, they could desire it. But none of them had enough money to hire a car and two pros. No—I haven’t any enemies, Lieutenant. Not that kind of enemies. Maybe I’m nobody, but whoever I know, I try to give them a square deal.”

  The phone rang and Burton picked it up, listened for a minute or so, and then asked, “Where are they? St Vincent’s? OK.” He put down the phone and said to Shirley, “All right, Miss Campbel—I’m not going to make any charge and I’m not going to hold you. So as far as the manslaughter thing is concerned, you can forget it for the time being.”

  With a sigh of relief, Shirley asked him what made him change his mind.

  “I didn’t really change my mind—it was just a technical point. Maybe you’re holding back on me, maybe not I think those are pictures of you. But maybe they’re pictures of someone who looks that much like you. We’ll go along with you for the time being, and see if we can track down someone who looks like those pictures. Meanwhile, we got a make on the little man in the car. That means an identification. His name is Francis Bannister, and he’s wanted for armed robbery, murder and a few other things—in Detroit and Chicago. That helps your story, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s still a story to you.”

  “Well, I don’t know exactly what to make of it, Miss Campbel. The trouble is that there’s no proof. There’s no proof that you ever were in that car. You don’t have a scratch on you, and that car was pretty badly smashed up from what I’m told. There’s no proof that those two men wanted to kill you or threatened you. And there’s no proof that these aren’t photographs of you. We haven’t identified the other man yet. Conceivably, he could be a friend of yours—carrying your picture on him.”

  “Conceivably he couldn’t!” Shirley snorted.

  “I’m not saying so. I’m simply pointing out that things could be that way. Personally, I’m inclined to believe most of your story. Maybe when we start tracking down these pictures, I’ll be ready to believe all of it. But I don’t see that you have committed any crime that you should be held for.”

  “Thank you for nothing,” Shirley said, standing up. “My life is threatened, guns are poked into me, I am taken for a ride and come out of an auto crash alive by some miracle, and you tell me that you don’t see that I have committed any crime. That’s great. I will write the Mayor a letter and suggest you for promotion. Can I go home now?”

  “I’ll take you home,” Burton smiled. “But I’m afraid that you have to come with me to the morgue first. It’s not a pleasant business, but we have to have a formal identification of the two men by you.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, that’s the way it works. You are the only one who can put them in the car with you, and it has to go on the record that way. It will only take a few minutes.”

  “I don’t like morgues. I never was in one,” Shirley protested.

  “You’re a strong girl, Miss Campbel, and your nerves seem to be pretty good. Actually, this is not the police morgue. The bodies are over at St Vincent’s, and I imagine they’ll be down in pathology, waiting for autopsy.”

  “That’s great,” said Shirley. “That makes it just a picnic. I always like pathology rooms, whatever they are.”

  Shirley found herself shivering as she stood with Burton in the Pathology Room of the hospital, while an attendant uncovered the faces of the two corpses. She fought against an inclination to be sick, as she nodded and whispered to Burton that these were the two men.

  “All right. That’s that,” Burton said, and then he took her by the arm and led her out When they were upstairs, in the main entranceway of the hospital, he said to her:

  “Well, Shirley—you don’t mind my calling you that?—what are we going to do about you?”

  “Let me go to sleep. Even if a war starts tonight, I got to be up at seven in the morning. I work for a character called Mr. Morrow, and he would like to make a pass at me but can’t get up enough nerve to do it, so he would like to fire me, and his assistant is Mr. Bergan who keeps making passes and doesn’t get anywhere, so between the two of them it’s like walking a tightrope. Still, it’s what stands between me and the unemployment office, so what I need is a good night’s sleep.”

  “It’s just not as simple as that, Shirley.”

  “Nothing is simple. I want to go home, it’s not as simple as that I want a night’s sleep, it’s not as simple as that.”

  “Aren’t you worried?”

  “I’m tired.”

  “Look, my girl,” Burton said to her, “either you’re in some kind of big trouble or you look enough like someone who is to make it very uncomfortable for you.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Shirley sighed. “Put a cop outside my door? Does he follow me to work? Does he go and stand outside the john when I’m inside? Does he go dating with me?”

  “It’s not easy, is it?”

 
“All I want is to go to sleep, Lieutenant”

  Detective Burton drove her home then.

  3. The Bullfighter

  Before he dropped her off in front of her house on Minetta Street, Burton said to Shirley, “If I were you, Shirley, I’d keep quiet about this for the time being. The newspapers have the story about the car, but we made nothing about the story of a girl running away from the car. It seems someone saw you, but now he’s not convinced of what he saw. Do you want me to walk to your apartment with you?”

  Shirley said, “No, I don’t need anyone to walk upstairs with me. I got over being afraid of the dark when I was ten.” Then she took a deep breath and said, “Maybe you’d better.”

  Burton went up the stairs with her, and when she opened her door, he went in first and prowled through her tiny apartment and peered into the closets.

  “You might as well look under the bed,” Shirley said.

  He looked under the bed.

  “I’m glad you take your work seriously. Now all I got to worry about are bad dreams.”

  “I think so. Lock your door, Shirley, and if anything suspicious happens, call me at the precinct. Or at home. Take down both numbers.” She wrote down the numbers, and Burton said, “We’ll be in touch.”

  When Burton left Shirley, he went back to his office and called Larry Cohen, who was an assistant district attorney for New York County. “Are you still awake?” he asked Cohen.

  “If I wasn’t, I am now.”

  “I want to see you,” Burton said.

  “Can’t it wait for tomorrow?”

  “No, it can’t wait. I’ll stop by on my way home. If I can work this late, you can survive a short visit.”

  At Cohen’s apartment, Burton gave a short, succinct account of what had happened. “I’m not holding the girl,” he said. “Do you agree?”

  “If you believe her. I didn’t talk to her.”

  “I think I believe her—as much as a cop can believe anyone.” He took out the pictures and showed them to Cohen. “How about this?”

  “That’s a beautiful girl,” Cohen said, “but unhappy.”

  “Did you ever see her before?” It was a shot in the dark, but it would become routine every time Burton showed the pictures to anyone.

  “No—no, I don’t think so. Still, there’s something damn familiar about that face. Damn familiar.”

  Cohen, wrapped in a dressing gown and still not fully awake, blinked at Burton curiously. Then he took the picture from Burton, switched on another lamp and sat down in a chair where the full light of the lamp could fall upon the picture. He stared at it thoughtfully.

  “What has this got to do with it?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Come on, Lieutenant—it’s bad enough that you wake me up in the middle of the night, don’t play footsie with me. You come in here and tell me that a hired limousine, driven by two hoods, crashes on Nineteenth and Sixth, and that both of them are dead and that it’s even money they’re murdered by a dame in the car—”

  “Wait a minute, Larry,” Burton interrupted, “I didn’t say they were murdered. I said killed. And even then there’s a real question to be answered.”

  “Killed. Murdered. It comes down to the same thing—”

  “It does not, and as a lawyer, you should know that.”

  “I don’t know a damn thing. I’m not even awake, to tell you the truth. I don’t even know whether we’re talking about attempted murder, kidnaping, murder, felonious assault, manslaughter, self-defense or what? You tell me that you had someone who claims to have caused this accident or whatever it was, and that you didn’t even book her.”

  “Because there was no reason to book her.”

  “All right, Lieutenant—as you put it, she’s just a kid from the Bronx, a hard-working, tough kid alone in the big city and trying to make both ends connect around the middle. So that’s all I’m trying to do, and you shove this picture into my face. What about this picture? Whose picture is it?”

  “Shirley Campbel’s,” Lieutenant Burton replied.

  “What?”

  “It’s a picture of the kid who was supposedly in the car when it crashed,” Burton said slowly and flatly.

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “No. You heard me, no. This is not a tough working girl from the Bronx. I don’t say it’s not her picture. You saw her, you saw this picture. So you can tell me that.”

  “I told you. It’s her picture.”

  “All right, Lieutenant,” Cohen said patiently. “You saw her. Does she wear her hair the same way?”

  “That’s right. She read an article about how a rich girl combs her hair.”

  “Bunk.”

  “She is also a speech expert,” Burton sighed. “You’re going to put me on that she’s some kind of society kid out for kicks? No, Larry, it won’t work. Even if she were Professor Higgins out of My Fair Lady, she would have to spend ten years in the Bronx to talk the way she talks. She is what she is, a tough, self-sufficient kid who lives alone on Minetta Street and works in the billing department of Bushwick Brothers, a plastic house on Houston Street. That’s what she is and that’s all she is.”

  “She is also someone who claims to have killed two men.”

  “So she claims. But it’s not murder and I don’t even know that it’s manslaughter. If it’s true.”

  “What do you mean, if it’s true?”

  “How do I know she’s telling me the truth? How do I know she was ever in the car? Does her story hold water? Would it work? The man behind the wheel was an oversized hunk of meat and fat, two-fifty, maybe three hundred pounds. Can a kid who weighs no more than a hundred and fifteen, a hundred and twenty at the outside, put her foot down on his and force his foot down?”

  “I don’t know,” Cohen smiled. “I never thought of it that way. Let’s try it.”

  “How?”

  “You’re not skinny, Lieutenant.”

  “Thank you.”

  Cohen got up and pulled two small chairs together, placing them side by side. “Take the driver’s seat, Lieutenant,” he said.

  “Don’t be foolish, Larry.”

  “Ever a cop. It’s no crime to think, even on the force.”

  “I love you,” Burton said nastily, dropping his huge frame into one of the chairs. “God give me the day when they pull you into my precinct as a drunk.”

  “I’ll mind where I drink.”

  He sat down next to Burton, who raised his toe and placed both hands on an imaginary wheel. As Cohen stamped down on his foot and Burton exclaimed in surprise and pain, Cohen’s wife entered, sleepy, wrapped in a dressing gown and open-mouthed at the charade the two men were performing.

  “Do you always play together at night when I’m asleep?” she asked them. “I remember a fairy tale about the princess who crept out of bed each night to go dancing underground, but it seems to me that you two have her beat by a long mile.”

  “Funny,” Burton growled, rubbing his injured foot.

  “Good evening, Lieutenant,” Mrs. Cohen said. “Now that we’re all wide awake and at play, can I make you some coffee?”

  “I’m sorry,” Cohen apologized to Burton.

  “Coffee?”

  “All right, coffee,” Burton nodded. “Please excuse me, Mrs. Cohen. Your husband hates cops. I live in a world where everyone hates cops. When I was a kid, the head deacon of the church we belonged to was the most hated man in the neighborhood. Everyone despised him, the kids, the other deacons, the women’s auxiliary, just everyone, and one night he was over to our house for a meeting, and my father said to him, ‘Bert, what do they pay you to be head deacon?’ ‘Pay me,’ he said. ‘By golly, they don’t pay me a penny. I do it for the honor.’”

  “I like you, Lieutenant,” Mrs. Cohen smiled.

  “Thank you. How much does Larry weigh?”

  “One-seventy,” Cohen said.

  “One-eighty,” his wife replied.


  “Suppose you sit down here yourself and try it. I’m driving a car. My raised foot is supposed to be on the gas pedal. See if you can put my foot down.”

  “I’m delighted,” said Mrs. Cohen. “It’s nice to be waked up for games like this.” She sat down, and the lieutenant’s foot yielded under hers. “What do we play now?” she asked.

  “So she could have been telling the truth,” Burton said softly.

  Shirley sat down on her bed, and sat there for a few minutes, not really thinking or doing anything at all, but just sitting there and shivering a little. It was just past midnight.

  Then she went back to the door and checked the locks again, and then she went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of tomato juice, and sipped at it and thought and wondered whether she should make some coffee. Coffee would keep her awake, but then she was not very certain that she wanted to sleep or could sleep. She felt resentful at Burton, the way he had walked out of the place and left her alone like this; but on the other hand, she didn’t know what else he could have done. How can you stop people who want to kill you? The thought set her to shivering again, and then the phone rang.

  A voice said to her in Spanish, “Is this you, my dear? Is this Miss Campbel?”

  Shirley reached back through four years of high-school Spanish. She had been good at it. She reached back and sorted out the words in her mind. But she said nothing, and her hand holding the telephone shook a little.

  In Spanish, “Are you there, Miss Campbel?”

  “Yes,” she whispered in English.

  “Then you understand my Spanish?” the voice asked.

  “Yes. I had high-school Spanish,” she added, almost belligerently. “Four years of it,” she said, still speaking English. “That’s why I understand you, so just don’t make anything out of it. Whoever you want, I’m not it—so just call off your hoodlums and leave me alone.”

  Still in Spanish, the man on the telephone said, “May I call you Carlotta and stop this nonsense?”

  “No you may not!” Shirley shouted. “I’m not Carlotta or anybody else you know, and those are not my pictures, and that’s that!”