Masters Of Noir Vol Iv Part 11

"My feet hurt," Romano answered.

Grierson said, "Did Ferguson come to? Did he identify The Butcher?"

Romano covered his mouth with his hand and belched. He said, "Ferguson came to. I talked to him a few minutes. He says he saw a face that wasn't human staring at him through a window that isn't there."

"One of those," said Grierson.

"We've got to believe it," Romano replied. He was trying to convince himself, not Grierson. "We've got to believe he saw The Butcher's face. Later on he may remember and tell us something we can work on. He's got a heart condition. He had a slight stroke when he got home last night, the medics say. When he came out of it and saw the body, his mind was fogged. He thinks the window was directly opposite the door. It isn't. But he could have stepped around the body, turned right and seen the face there in the only window. We've got to keep on thinking he did."

"The lab finished with the knife," said Grierson. "It adds up to nothing. The fingerprints were only smudges."

Romano nodded glumly. "Like usual," he said. "I've been on the force since you were playing hopscotch. In all that time I've seen just one murder solved by fingerprints. The murderer was considerate. He left his prints in a pot of jeweler's wax."

Grierson said, "The p.o.o.p on Ferguson is on your desk. Top folder. I looked it over. He's a solid citizen. n.o.body had a word to say against him. Manages a book store on lower Fifth Avenue that sells Bibles and religious stuff. He's a pillar of the church. All his neighbors and his clergyman and the shopkeepers he deals with had a good word to say for him. He met his wife at his church. They've been married six years. No children."

"That's all?" Romano asked.

"Not quite," said Grierson. "He was a student at a Divinity College when the war broke out. He wanted to be a minister. He could have been deferred from the draft, but he enlisted in a combat unit. He was an infantryman. He was with Clark's Fifth Army all the way up The Boot. His record was good. Bronze Star decoration. Made staff sergeant. Was wounded slightly and got a Purple Heart. He was hospitalized a long time. It wasn't the wound. He also suffered battle shock or combat fatigue or whatever it was they called it."

"That means he's a nut?" Romano asked. "It means he might see faces in windows that aren't there?"

Grierson shrugged and yawned again. "Not unless a couple of million other guys who are walking the streets are nuts," he answered. "There were at least that many cases of combat fatigue during the war, I understand. It's a temporary breakdown of the nervous system, that's all."

"Thanks, Grierson," Romano said. Sometimes he resented these new cops, the eager-beaver kind who had college degrees and studied law in night school. But they were useful. Romano hated to wade through long reports and Grierson knew it. Grierson could type with all ten fingers. He did most of the clerical p.o.o.p that was part of a cop's job. Romano hated to peck at the typewriter with two thick fingers. He always made mistakes. After doing it for more than twenty years, he made mistakes.

The lieutenant began to skim through the report on Ferguson. He didn't read it carefully. He could depend on Grierson. Suddenly he paused and his thick eyebrows knit together.

"He was in that vet's place right over on Staten Island," he said.

Grierson said, "That's right. Bay Heaven. It's one of the biggest Army general hospitals in the country."

"Get your hat," Romano said. Romano was tying his shoe laces. "Why?" asked Grierson.

"We're going over to Staten Island," Romano answered. "There just might be some medic still around who remembers Ferguson."

Grierson rose and stretched. "Oh, well," he said, "it's a nice day for a ferry ride."

They left the police car parked on the lower deck of the ferry and climbed up to the top. They stood by the rail, letting the wind whip their faces, watching the skyline of Manhattan recede into the distance. More than eight million people lived and worked and had their being in this immediate area, Romano thought. One of them was called The Butcher.

"I wish I had some easy job," the lieutenant said aloud. "Like finding a needle in a haystack."

It took nearly two hours of questioning and waiting and checking the files at the hospital before they found a doctor named Bowers. He was an elderly man with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. After he had glanced over the files he remembered Lester Ferguson among the thousands of patients who had been under his care during the last dozen years. He remembered him quite clearly.

"A most interesting case," Bowers said. "His wound was comparatively trivial, a fragment of sh.e.l.l in the leg that required surgery, but did no permanent damage. He didn't even limp as a result. But he was in shock for an incredible length of time. Weeks, months, even. Sometimes he would lapse into a catatonic state. He would lie there on his cot, his body rigid, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. And he would murmur something in a kind of awed and frightened whisper. 'The face,' he'd say, 'the face.' He'd murmur that over and over again.

"It was trauma, of course, some shocking experience that had been repressed and had made a lasting impression on him. We couldn't bring out what it was or when it had occurred. It might have been in his childhood. It might have been anything and it might have happened at any time. I always say a thing like that is a splinter under the skin of the mind. You have to extract it somehow. We tried various techniques. None of them seemed to work. Finally, we hit on sodium pentothal, the stuff the newspapers call truth serum. I doubt we'd use it now we have the new relaxing drugs, but it did the trick. When he was under the influence of the drug we questioned him, and we finally brought it out, removed the splinter, you might say.

"He'd seen a face, or thought he'd seen one, staring at him through a broken window during street fighting while they were mopping up some little town in Italy. He thought it was the Face of Evil, as he called it. It must have been a pretty horrible experience for him. He was wounded right afterward, but the face stayed in his mind. Once we got him to tell us about it, we purged the thing and he was on his way to recovery."

"You think he saw a real face in the window?" Romano asked. "Or was it just some sort of delusion?"

The doctor shrugged. "It's hard to say," he answered. "It could have been a real face. It could have been the face of some enemy sniper trapped there in a ruined building. The street was piled with dead and dying men, probably. Such faces aren't very pretty. Whatever it was he saw, he thought it was the Face of Evil. He called it that. You have to understand that Ferguson was a very religious man. He'd been studying for the ministry when he went into the Army. Killing is a terrible experience for any man. That was especially true for a man like Ferguson. Most soldiers go through a war never knowing for sure that the shots they fire have killed an enemy. Ferguson knew for sure. Just a few days before he was wounded, a few days before he saw the face, he'd been decorated for wiping out an enemy strongpoint with a grenade. Five machine-gunners were killed by the grenade."

"And when you brought it out, when you made him tell you about the face-this Face of Evil-he was cured?" Romano asked.

"From the clinical view, he was," Bowers answered. "He came out of shock. The catatonic periods did not recur. We kept him around awhile for observation. He was perfectly normal when he was discharged."

"Ferguson saw the face again last night," Romano said flatly.

Bowers said, "I'm sorry. That is bad, of course, but it happens sometimes, years later. Usually it's some shattering experience that brings it on."

"It was a shattering experience," Romano told the doctor. "Ferguson's wife was killed by a murderer they call The Butcher."

The Lieutenant rose and nodded to Grierson. He was ready to leave.

As the police car rolled off the ferry onto Manhattan Island, Grierson said, "It's nearly five. Do we knock off now and catch some shuteye, or are we starting another tour of duty?"

"Drive to City Hospital," Romano answered. "I want to try and talk to Ferguson again."

Inside the hospital, Romano saw the same doctor he had spoken to that morning, the thin man with the high cheekbones and the small mustache.

"I'd like to talk to Ferguson again," he said. "I won't be but a little while."

The doctor said, "Didn't you get our message, Lieutenant?"

"What message?" Romano asked.

"We called your office and left word. Lester Ferguson died of a cerebral hemorrhage about an hour ago."

Romano merely nodded, accepting it.

Grierson shook his head angrily. "So the only person who could tell us what The Butcher looked like died without identifying him," the young detective said.

"Oh, he identified him," Romano answered softly. "Come on, Grierson. I want to look in on Ferguson's flat."

The Fergusons had occupied the ground floor of a house of mellowed brick on a pleasant, tree-lined street in Greenwich Village. Romano got the key of Ferguson's apartment from the superintendent. Daylight still showed through the windows, but the apartment was shadowy and Romano switched on lights.

He said, "Ferguson must have been sitting in that chair right there when he came back to consciousness after his stroke." He crossed the room and sat down in a chintz-covered easy chair.

"He came to," Romano continued. "He was confused. He probably wasn't too sure where he was, even. He called to his wife, and she didn't answer."

Romano got to his feet. "The bedroom door was closed. Ferguson walked toward it." Romano walked toward the bedroom door and opened it. He switched on another light, stood in the doorway.

"He looked down and saw his wife's body on the floor, right inside the doorway. Then he looked up and saw the murderer's face staring at him through a window."

Romano drew aside, "Come over here, Grierson," he said. "Stand here in the doorway."

Grierson obeyed.

"Look straight ahead of you," Romano said. "You see, Ferguson was right. There is a window."

Grierson was a good cop and a conscientious one, but sometimes his mind did not work too fast. He turned to Romano, his face blank.

Romano said, "You want me to draw you a picture? Ferguson saw the face of the man who killed his wife in what he called a window, the thing that's right in front of you. He called it The Face of Evil, but it was The Butcher's face, the face of the psycho who killed five women in this neighborhood."

Grierson didn't see a window.

All he saw was his own face reflected in the mirror on the wall.

TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF by WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT

I finally caught up to her around eleven o'clock in a bar just off Windward Avenue. Windward Avenue is in Venice and Venice is not what you would call the high-rent district in the Los Angeles area.

A juke box was doling out the nasal complaints of a hillbilly songstress and most of the men at the bar looked like they worked with their hands. At the far end of the bar from the doorway, Angela Ladugo was sitting in front of what appeared to be a double martini.

The Ladugo name is a big one in this county, going way back to the Spanish land grants. Angela seemed to have inherited her looks from mama's side of the family, which was mostly English.

I paused for a moment in the doorway and she looked up and her gaze met mine and I thought for a moment she smiled. But I could have been wrong; her face was stiff and her eyes were glazed.

The bartender, a big and ugly man, looked at me appraisingly and then his gaze s.h.i.+fted to Miss Ladugo and he frowned. A couple of the workingmen looked over at me and back at their gla.s.ses of beer.

There was an empty stool next to Angela; I headed toward it. The bartender watched me every step of the way and when I finally parked, he was standing at our end, studying me carefully.

I met his gaze blandly. "Bourbon and water."

"Sure thing," he said.

"New around here, are you?"

"Where's here here-Venice?"

"Right."

Before I could answer, Angela said, "Don't hit him yet, Bugsy. Maybe he's a customer."

I looked over at her, but she was looking straight ahead. I looked back at the bartender. "I'm not following the plot. Is this a private bar?"

He shook his head. "Are you a private cop?"

I nodded.

He nodded, too, toward the door. "Beat it."

"Easy now," I said. "I'm not just any any private cop. You could phone Sergeant Nystrom over at the Venice Station. Do you know him?" private cop. You could phone Sergeant Nystrom over at the Venice Station. Do you know him?"

"I know him."

"Ask him about me, about Joe Puma. He'll give you a good word on me."

"Beat it," he said again.

Angela Ladugo sighed heavily. "Relax, Bugsy. Papa would only send another one. At least this one looks-washed."

The big man looked between us and went over to get my whiskey. I brought out a package of cigarettes and offered her one.

"No, thank you," she said in the deliberate, carefully enunciated speech of the civilized drunk on the brink of the pit.

"Do you come here for color, Miss Ladugo?" I asked quietly, casually.

She frowned and said distinctly, "No. For sanctuary."

The bartender brought my bourbon and water. "That'll be two bucks."

He was beginning to annoy me. I said, "Kind of steep here, aren't you?"

"I guess. Two bucks, cash." cash."

"Drink it yourself," I told him. "Ready to go, Miss Ladugo?"

"No." she said. "Bugsy, you're being difficult. The man's only doing his job."

"What kind of men do that kind of job?" he asked contemptuously.

A silence. Briefly, I considered my professional decorum. And then I gave Bugsy my blankest stare and said evenly, "Maybe you've got some kind of local reputation as a tough guy, mister, but frankly I never heard of you. And I don't like your insolence."

The men along the bar were giving us their attention now. A bleached blonde in one of the booths started to giggle nervously. The juke box gave us Sixteen Tons. Sixteen Tons.

Angela sighed again and said quietly, "I'm ready to go. I'll see you later, Bugsy. I'll be back."

"Don't go if you don't want to," he said.

She put a hand carefully on the bar and even more carefully slid off the stool. "Let's go, Mr.-"

"Puma," I supplied. "My arm, Miss Ladugo?"

"Thank you, no. I can manage."

She was close enough for me to smell her perfume, for me to see that her transparently fair skin and fine hair were flawless. She couldn't have been on the booze for long.

Outside, the night air was chilly and damp.

"Now, I'll take your arm," she said. "Where's your car?"