A Stab in the Dark

I got dressed and found Jan in the kitchen. She was drinking a glass of pale orange juice. I figured there was something in it to take the edge off her hangover. She'd made coffee in a Chemex filter pot and poured me a cup. I stood by the window and drank it.



We didn't talk. The church bells had taken a break and the Sunday morning silence stretched out. It was a bright day out, the sun burning away in a cloudless sky. I looked down and couldn't see a single sign of life, not a person on the street, not a car moving.



I finished my coffee and added the cup to the dirty dishes in the stainless-steel sink. Jan used a key to bring the elevator to the floor. She asked if I was going out to Sheepshead Bay and I said I guessed I was. We held onto each other for a moment. I felt the warmth of her fine body through the robe she was wearing.



"I'll call you," I said, and rode the oversized elevator to the ground.



An Officer O'Byrne gave me directions over the phone. I followed them, riding the BMT Brighton Line to Gravesend Neck Road. The train came up above ground level at some point after it crossed into Brooklyn, and we rode through some neighborhoods of detached houses with yards that didn't look like New York at all.



The station house for the Sixty-first Precinct was on Coney Island Avenue and I managed to find it without too much trouble. In the squad room I played do-you-know with a wiry, long-jawed detective named Antonelli. We knew enough of the same people for him to relax with me. I told him what I was working on and mentioned that Frank Fitzroy had steered it my way. He knew Frank, too, though I didn't get the impression that they were crazy about each other.



"I'll see what our file looks like," he said. "But you probably saw copies of our reports in the file Fitzroy showed you."



"What I mostly want is to talk with somebody who looked at the body."



"Wouldn't the names of officers on the scene be in the file you saw in Manhattan?"



I'd thought of that myself. Maybe I could have managed all this without coming out to the ass end of Brooklyn. But when you go out and look for something you occasionally find more than you knew you were looking for.



"Well, maybe I can find that file," he said, and left me at an old wooden desk scarred with cigarette burns along its edges. Two desks over, a black detective with his sleeves rolled up was talking on the phone. It sounded as though he was talking to a woman, and it didn't sound much like police business. At another desk along the far wall a pair of cops, one uniformed and one in a suit, were questioning a teenager with a mop of unruly yellow hair. I couldn't hear what they were saying.



Antonelli came back with a slim file and dropped it on the desk in front of me. I went through it, pausing now and then to make a note in my notebook. The victim, I learned, was a Susan Potowski of 2705 Haring Street. She'd been a twenty-nine-year-old mother of two, separated from her husband, a construction laborer. She lived with her kids in the lower flat of a two-family semi-detached house, and she'd been killed around two o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon.



Her kids found her. They came home from school together around three thirty, a boy of eight and a girl of ten, and they found their mother on the kitchen floor, her clothing partly removed, her body covered with stab wounds. They ran around the street screaming until the beat cop turned up.



"Finding anything?"



"Maybe," I said. I copied down the name of the first cop on the scene, added those of two detectives from the Six-One who'd gone to the Haring Street house before switching the case to Midtown North. I showed the three names to Antonelli. "Any of these guys still work out of here?"



"Patrolman Burton Havermeyer, Detective Third-Grade Kenneth Allgood, Detective First-Grade Michael Quinn. Mick Quinn died two, maybe three years ago. Line of duty. He and a partner had a liquor store staked out on Avenue W and there were shots exchanged and he was killed. Terrible thing. Lost a wife to cancer two years before that, so he left four kids all alone in the world, the oldest just starting college. You must have read about it."



"I think I did."



"Guys who shot him pulled good long time. But they're alive and he's dead, so go figure. The other two, Allgood and Havermeyer, I don't even know the names, so they've been off the Six-One since before my time, which is what? Five years? Something like that."



"Can you find out where they went?"



"I can probably find out something. What do you want to ask 'em, anyway?"



"If she was stabbed in both eyes."



"Wasn't there an M.E.'s report in the file whats-his-name showed you? Fitzroy?"



I nodded. "Both eyes."



"So?"



"Remember that case some years ago? They pulled some woman out of the Hudson, called it death by drowning? Then some genius in the Medical Examiner's office took the skull and started using it for a paperweight, and there was a scandal about that, and because of all the heat somebody finally took a good look at the skull for the first time and found a bullet hole in it."



"I remember. She was some woman from New Jersey, married to a doctor, wasn't she?"



"That's right."



"I got a rule-of-thumb. When a doctor's wife gets killed, he did it. I don't give a shit about the evidence. The doc always did it. I don't remember whether this one got off or not."



"Neither do I."



"I take your point, though. The M.E.'s report isn't something you want to run to the bank with. But how good is a witness to something that happened nine years ago?"



"Not too good. Still-"



"I'll see what I can see."



He was gone a little longer this time, and he had a funny expression on his face when he returned. "Bad luck case," he said. "Allgood's dead, too. And the patrolman, Havermeyer, he left the department."



"How did Allgood die?"



"Heart attack, about a year ago. He got transferred out a couple of years back. He was working out of Centre Street headquarters. Collapsed at his desk one day and died. One of the guys in the file room knew him from when he worked here and happened to know how he died. Havermeyer could be dead, too, for all I know."



"What happened to him?"



He shrugged. "Who knows? He put in his papers just a few months after the Icepick thing. Cited unspecified personal reasons for returning to civilian life. He'd only been in for two, three years. You know what the drop-out rate's like for the new ones. Hell, you're a drop-out yourself. Personal reasons, right?"



"Something like that."



"I dug up an address and a number. He probably moved six times between then and now. If he didn't leave a trail, you can always try downtown. He wasn't here long enough to have any pension rights but they usually keep track of ex-cops."



"Maybe he's still in the same place."



"Could be. My grandmother's still living in three little rooms on Elizabeth Street, same apartment she's been in since she got off the boat from Palermo. Some people stay put. Others change their houses like they change their socks. Maybe you'll get lucky. Anything else I can do for you?"



"Where's Haring Street?"



"The murder scene?" He laughed. "Jesus, you're a bloodhound," he said. "Want to get the scent, huh?"



He told me how to walk there. He'd given me a fair amount of his time but he didn't want any money for it. I sensed that he probably didn't-some do and some don't-but I made the offer. "You could probably use a new hat," I said, and he came back with a tight grin and assured me that he had a whole closetful of hats. "And I hardly ever wear a hat these days," he said. I'd been offering him twenty-five dollars, cheap enough for the effort he'd expended. "It's a slow day at a quiet precinct," he said, "and how much mileage can you get out of what I just gave you? You got anybody in mind for that Boerum Hill killing?"



"Not really."



"Like hunting a black cat in a coal mine," he said. "Do me one favor? Let me know how it comes out. If it comes out."



I followed his directions to Haring Street. I don't suppose the neighborhood had changed much in nine years. The houses were well kept up and there were kids all over the place. There were cars parked at the curb, cars in most of the driveways. It occurred to me that there were probably a dozen people on the block who remembered Susan Potowski, and for all I knew her estranged husband had moved back into the house after the murder and lived there now with his children. They'd be older now, seventeen and nineteen.



She must have been young when she had the first one. Nineteen herself. Early marriage and early childbirth wouldn't have been uncommon in that neighborhood.



He probably moved away, I decided. Assuming he came back for the kids, he wouldn't make them go on living in the house where they found their mother dead on the kitchen floor. Would he?



I didn't ring that doorbell, or any other doorbells. I wasn't investigating Susan Potowski's murder and I didn't have to sift her ashes. I took a last look at the house she'd died in, then turned and walked away.



THE address I had for Burton Havermeyer was 212 St. Marks Place. The East Village wasn't that likely a place for a cop to live, and it didn't seem terribly likely that he'd still be there nine years later, on or off the force. I called the number Antonelli had given me from a drugstore phone booth on Ocean Avenue.



A woman answered. I asked if I could speak to Mr. Havermeyer. There was a pause. "Mr. Havermeyer doesn't live here."



I started to apologize for having the wrong number but she wasn't through. "I don't know where Mr. Havermeyer can be reached," she said.



"Is this Mrs. Havermeyer?"



"Yes."



I said, "I'm sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Havermeyer. A detective at the Sixty-first Precinct where your husband used to work supplied this number. I'm trying to-"



"My former husband."



There was a toneless quality to her speech, as if she was deliberately detaching herself from the words she was speaking. I had noted a similar characteristic in the speech of recovered mental patients.



"I'm trying to reach him in connection with a police matter," I said.



"He hasn't been a policeman in years."



"I realize that. Do you happen to know how I can get hold of him?"



"No."



"I gather you don't see him often, Mrs. Havermeyer, but would you have any idea-"



"I never see him."



"I see."



"Oh, do you? I never see my former husband. I get a check once a month. It's sent directly to my bank and deposited to my account. I don't see my husband and I don't see the check. Do you see? Do you?"



The words might have been delivered with passion. But the voice remained flat and uninvolved.



I didn't say anything.



"He's in Manhattan," she said. "Perhaps he has a phone, and perhaps it's in the book. You could look it up. I know you'll excuse me if I don't offer to look it up for you."



"Certainly."



"I'm sure it's important," she said. "Police business always is, isn't it?"



THERE was no Manhattan telephone book at the drugstore so I let the Information operator look for me. She found a Burton Havermeyer on West 103rd Street. I dialed the number and no one answered.