Sally Read online

  “That’s not fair,” she protested.

  “Of course it’s fair. You know it’s fair. Now look, Miss Dillman, maybe we wind up this thing today, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day—I don’t know how long it’s going to take. But you and me, now, we got the worst possible kind of a thing to do. We’re moving into something and we don’t know what it is. See? It’s just cloudy and murky, and we don’t even know what waits for us. We can assume certain things. We can assume that someone wants to kill you and that he’s going to try to kill you. We can also assume that I’m going to break my professional back so you don’t get killed. We can also assume that you don’t want to get killed. Is that right?”

  “You know it’s right,” she whispered. “Why are you doing this? Why are you making fun of me?”

  “I’m not making fun of you. I’m trying to explain the situation we’re in and the situation we’re going to be in and that it’s getting worse. I’m trying to knock away all the crap. That’s a nasty word, but there’s no other word that fits just right. Let’s say we’re both of us in different ways loaded with crap—your kind of crap—my kind of crap. Whatever it is, if it interferes with what we got to do the next two—three days, we knock it aside. We throw it off. You understand? I’m a Puerto Rican. Maybe in the next two or three days we’ll have moments—maybe an hour—maybe two hours—we’ll sit down and talk and I’ll try to explain to you what it means to grow up in New York City and be a Puerto Rican and to make it. Maybe at the same time you’ll explain to me what it means to grow up in Timmerville, New York, the way you grew up. We got to know each other a little better. But meanwhile, don’t allow or accommodate for anything. Don’t trust anything. Don’t jump to any assumptions, because that guy back there—that man across the street—I’m worried about him.”

  “If you were worried about him,” she said, “why didn’t you do something about him?”

  “Because I will be worried about a hundred other men and I can’t do something about all of them. I can’t walk up and arrest a man and say, ‘I’m arresting you because I don’t like the way you look at this woman here, this Miss Dillman.’ I can’t do that. I’ve got to have a reason. I’ve got to have evidence. That’s the way we work. You understand? I don’t want to scare you. You’ll be no good if you’re scared. But I want you to understand that.”

  “I think I understand,” she said softly. “At least I’m trying.”

  “All right. That’s better. It clears the air.”

  “Only,” she continued, “you’re not very nice. You know, I think this whole city’s like that, Detective Gonzalez, a city of people who have never given a second thought to being nice. Oh, they can be a lot of other things, but nice—no, I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we are not nice. Maybe we got no virtue here in New York. Maybe we got one or two virtues. That’s not important now. What is important, as I told you before, is what we’re going to do. Do you read me?”

  She became silent then, and Gonzalez watched the river for a while, sunlight dancing over the water, and then closed his eyes and thought about things, and then opened them to look at her. She sat very stiffly. He thought of telling her to relax. Then he decided he had pushed her around sufficiently. He watched the river again.

  The trip downtown was a quick one. They were turning off the express highway when she asked him, “What is a morgue like?”

  He opened his eyes and regarded her thoughtfully. “A morgue,” he said, “is where we put the bodies. It’s a big city. There are always bodies. The morgue is just a big icebox. You don’t have to be afraid of anything there unless you’re afraid of bodies. Some people are. Some people are terribly afraid of them, I suppose.”

  “I am not afraid of bodies,” she said quietly. “It’s just that I’ve never been in a morgue. You’ve been through a great many things, so you think that everything is easy. But things that may be very simple and easy to you are not so simple and easy to a person like myself.”

  “I don’t think that things are simple and easy,” he said.

  “Well, that’s the impression you give me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe—well, maybe I don’t say things just the way I should say them. I am honestly sorry. Will you believe me that I am sorry?”

  “All right,” she said. “I don’t want there to be a war between us. I’m trying to know you. Believe me, I am trying.”

  Gonzalez nodded. “I appreciate that,” he said.

  They had turned off onto First Avenue, and at Thirtieth Street the car drew up in front of Bellevue Hospital.

  “The morgue is here at the hospital,” Gonzalez explained. “It won’t be half as bad as you might think it would be.”

  She nodded and followed him. They walked into the hospital, along a corridor, and down the stairs. They passed through two sets of doors and they were in the morgue.

  Gonzalez watched her curiously as the attendants opened one of the lockers and pulled the body out and turned back the sheet from the face. She held back, standing rigidly across the room from the body. Gonzalez went over to her and very gently took her by the elbow and pointed to the corpse.

  “That’s it,” Gonzalez said. “You’ve got to look at it. It’s no use coming down here if you don’t look at it. It won’t do any harm. It won’t even be something that will frighten you when you do it.”

  “How did you feel the first time?” she asked him.

  “There have been so many times that I don’t remember it any more,” Gonzalez said. “Anyway, I’m a rotten Catholic, but I like to think that maybe in some kind of a way I’m a religious man, and I think if you got a little religion, you can understand that a dead body is nothing. It’s only the life that’s important. So come over, would you?”

  She nodded and walked across the room with him to the corpse. Again Gonzalez watched her as she looked down at the pasty, discolored face. She looked at it steadily for about thirty seconds, and then she turned away and took a few rapid steps. Gonzalez came after her.

  “Just tell yourself you don’t feel sick. You don’t feel anything. And you won’t be sick.”

  “I think I am going to be sick.”

  “No, you are not. Now you tell yourself that—hard. You understand? Just say it out loud, 1 won’t be sick.’ Say it out loud or it’s no good.”

  “I won’t be sick,” she repeated out loud. “I won’t be sick.”

  “You want to look at it again?”

  “I won’t be sick,” she said a third time.

  “Good,” Gonzalez agreed. “That’s right. Now you don’t feel so sick, do you?”

  “No,” she said, “I feel a little better now.”

  “Do you want to look at the face again?” Gonzalez asked.

  “No,” she said. “It’s Compatra.”

  “You’re sure? A dead man doesn’t look like a living man.”

  “I’m sure,” she said. “You notice the split in his lip. It’s a kind of congenital thing. It’s not a harelip, but almost like a harelip.”

  “I noticed that,” Gonzalez said.

  “It’s not something you forget,” she said. “It’s him all right. God rest his soul. It’s Compatra.”

  “All right,” Gonzalez said, “that’s good enough. I am glad someone has a good word for what passes for his soul. We’ll go upstairs and I’ll phone the lieutenant and tell him about it.”

  They went upstairs then, and she waited in the long, dim hospital corridor while Gonzalez was in the office, phoning his precinct. When Gonzalez came out, he looked at his watch and said to her, “It’s lunch time. Can I buy you a lunch, Miss Dillman? Or do you have some other plans?”

  She smiled so wanly at this poor pleasantry that his whole heart went out to her. “Other plans? Oh, my goodness, what other plans could I possibly have?” she asked him.

  The squad car had gone back to Sixty-seventh Street. Gonzalez said to her very carefully, as if he were now a teacher of sorts
, “I sent the squad car away. It was no good to us. You see, Miss Dillman—”

  She interrupted him and said that he might as well call her Sally now. “If we’re going to be together for one or two or three days, don’t you think you should call me Sally? I’ll call you Frank. But what happens then? I mean—suppose after three days we still don’t know who he is or if he is or even if he exists?”

  “I’ll call you Sally,” he said. “That would be very nice. And you call me Frank. As for the contract man, he exists.”

  “I was thinking—the man inside,” she said, pointing to the hospital, “Joey Compatra. Well, he’s dead. I mean, suppose he just took the money from me and put it in his pocket?”

  “He didn’t,” Gonzalez told her.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I’m sure,” Gonzalez told her. “There’s a stinking thing called honor in this business. You see, Compatra’s dead. Your killer could just walk away from it. Who’s going to hold him to his contract?”

  “Then I’m safe?”

  “Like hell you are. He’s a killer. He does what pleases him, and killing pleases him. Also he’s got pride. He holds his head up because he has his filthy pride. It makes him a big man, and he needs that more than anything else. So he’ll kill—or try and try.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know. I’m a pro too. God help me, I know.”

  They began to walk east on Thirtieth Street, and Gonzalez explained about the squad car.

  “You can’t live in a squad car,” he said. “And we have to live. We have to do this as if we were just living ordinarily. Otherwise it’s no good. If we sit in the squad car, nothing’s going to happen.”

  “Then you want it to happen,” she said.

  “Yes, it has to happen. I mean, you must realize that. Either you get out of this city and disappear and never come back, or it has to happen—one way or another.”

  “I see.”

  “No, not really. I mean you don’t see, Sally. Because it has to happen does not mean that either of us has to be hurt. I am in this business to stay healthy and alive and maybe make my mother happy some day by getting married or by passing my Bar exam or something like that. And I think it’s the same way with you.”

  “You mean when I pass my Bar exam,” she said a little sadly.

  “No, I mean you are not going to be hurt, and I am glad you can wisecrack about it. You are not going to be killed. I swear to God about that. I’ll make it a good solid oath that’s a shame for someone in my position to make, because I haven’t been inside of a church for three years. But I swear by the Virgin that nothing will happen to you—that I will take care of you—and I want you to just relax and believe me.”

  “Do you often say things like that to a woman?” she asked him.

  “Never. Never. What can you be thinking about me?”

  “I don’t know. You seemed to say it so easily.”

  “If that’s what you think, you’re wrong,” he said indignantly.

  They walked westward. He took her to an Armenian restaurant on Lexington Avenue, and he ordered pine nuts wrapped in vine leaves, and after that shish kebab, and then sweet honey pastry and Turkish coffee. She ate everything with a huge appetite and babbled about how delicious and strange and wonderful everything was. She told him that she had never eaten anything like it before in her life. She lit a cigarette and leaned back in what Gonzalez felt was most unlikely and curious contentment.

  “I suppose not,” he said. “You’re a foreigner. Where would a foreigner get things like this to eat?”

  “You really mean that, don’t you? You really mean that I’m a foreigner.”

  “Well, not in a way to hurt your feelings, Sally. I mean you’re not like the city.”

  “What is like the city?” she wanted to know. “You seem to talk about it as if it were some kind of exclusive club that I can have no part of. But you’re Spanish, aren’t you, or Puerto Rican? And the lieutenant, he’s Jewish, isn’t he? And that man who drove us downtown, Gleason, he was Irish. And in the morgue the man had an accent—I suppose he was a Hungarian or a Russian or something of the sort—and you talk as if that is what it is to be an American, and someone like myself doesn’t belong or can’t belong or know what you’re talking about or thinking about. I just don’t accept that kind of thing.”

  “Sally, Sally,” he begged her, “I meant no such thing at all. Absolutely I did not, and I apologize. Believe me, I could not care less where anyone is born or what their father is or what their grandfather is, because, so far as I am concerned, it is only a whip—to whip other people with—and of whips I had enough already when I was ten years old. I want no more of them. So for you and me, I will call you Sally and you will call me Frank, and that is all there is to it. And we will see if we can work all right together.”

  She agreed to that.

  He paid the check. As they stepped outside of the restaurant, he slid his body in front of her, looked up and down the street, and then walked so as to make a protective shield. Whenever a man approached whom he could not see immediately or define immediately, he moved between Sally and that man. He did this unostentatiously. As she watched him, her admiration for his work, his craft, increased. She began to believe that he would do what he had said he would do.

  He said to her in the way of explanation and warning, “Just one thing, Sally. If I yell—if I yell anything—drop down on the sidewalk. Now think about that and plant it inside your mind. Say to yourself, ‘I will drop down on the sidewalk. I don’t care if I tear my stockings, if I dirty my coat, if I dirty my dress. I don’t care if my purse flies open and goes all over the street, when Frank yells, I drop down on the sidewalk or I drop down on the floor wherever I am—flat.’ Can you do it, Sally?”

  “I think I can.”

  “Hands over your head,” he said. “Hands are a good cover. You cover your head. You cover your face with your hands. You drop down flat and you huddle into the ground. And you do that whenever I yell ‘Sally!’ strong and hard. It will make you look foolish if we are—say—in the middle of Times Square or some place like that and I yell, but you will do it anyway, promise me?”

  “I promise.”

  “All right,” he said, “now we get a cab and we go have a look at Mr. Joey Compatra’s gym at Eighth Avenue and Fifty-third Street. The lieutenant said he will meet us there.”

  But they were still early for the time the lieutenant had set, and Gonzalez suggested that before they took the cab they walk downtown a few blocks and look at Gramercy Park. She had never seen Gramercy Park, and as Gonzalez walked down Lexington Avenue with her, he felt for the first time in his life a true sense of New York City proprietorship. This was his city, and he was recommending this part of it and elucidating on that part of it.

  He was very knowledgeable—an aficionado—and he showed her Gramercy Park from the north side and summed up the history and told about the key that barred the park to any but the handful of rich children who dwelt on its perimeter. She was properly shocked and horrified, and Gonzalez added to his story a personal episode about him coming down here, walking all the way down from Spanish Harlem when he was just a kid of nine or ten, and how a cop chased him halfway around the park, called him names, and told him that he didn’t want to see him back there again.

  “So you can see,” said Gonzalez, “that my being a cop was an act of will, not just something I fell into. You can believe me, I had to argue with myself.”

  She squeezed his arm suddenly and said, “Look, over there! Across the square!” But when he turned around and looked in the direction she indicated, he saw nothing.

  “Down farther. He’s walking away.”

  A block away. He had a glimpse of a man disappearing around the corner.

  “Who was it?”

  “I think the same man who was across the street from the precinct. The one you spoke about, when you were so angry at me because I trusted him. Because, as you said,
he had blue eyes and blond hair.”

  “I wasn’t angry at you,” Gonzalez said. “Everything I do, you think I’m getting angry at you. How do you know it was the same man? There could be a thousand men in New York who look like him. Any number of kids—you’ll see ’em around everywhere. The college is down here. As a matter of fact, a few blocks away from here I think there’s a section of City College. Are you sure it was the same man?”

  “I can’t be sure,” she said, “really. But it seemed to be him. It might have been. I didn’t know what to do. What do you want me to do if I see him?”

  “Get behind me,” Gonzalez said shortly.

  “And you think that’s so smart and good,” she said, “that he should shoot you instead?”

  “Just rest assured that nobody is going to shoot me,” Gonzalez told her. “Look, Sally, it is about time you learn that I have a trade. I know how to do what I do. Are you a good teacher or a lousy teacher?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody ever asked me if I was a lousy anything before.”

  “All right, so I got a loud gutter mouth. Were you a good teacher or a bad teacher?”

  “I like to think I was a good teacher.”

  “Then please do me the honor of admitting to yourself that I am a good cop. Nobody is going to shoot me as a set-up target. If you see something that doesn’t look right to you, you tell me and get behind me and do both these things together.”

  “All right,” she said. “And please forgive me, and I’m sorry I even raised the matter. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the man we saw on Sixty-seventh Street.”

  “You are not sorry you raised the matter and you are not to be sorry. You are to use your good sense and stop being insulted, and furthermore, if you are going to be insulted and annoyed like that and get to sulking about me being angry with you every time I open my mouth, then we will get nowhere and probably both of us will be dead by tomorrow.”