Grief Street

carpeting. They go to hang up their suits in the closet, and they are naturally outraged to discover their wallets were lifted out of their pants.”
    “The classic mistake,” I said. “Johns are always ignoring the whereabouts of their pants.”
    “Jesus, men are stupid. I ask myself sometimes, Is there any hope? What do you think, Detective?”
    “Men are idiots, and I notice women are making great brides toward equality.”
    ‘I guess that’s something to think about.”
    “About these poor downtrodden victims you’re showing he pictures to. Did they come to you on the rebound?”
    Of course. Central Robbery doesn’t want to deal with the creeps. So they’re bounced on over here. It makes the vies think the department gives a damn about their losses.”
    “Kowalski solicits the bounce?”
    “The boss enjoys having dickprint candidates around.”
    “Short of that, what’s your resolution?”
    “Flipping through the mug files of known pross lets them vent. That’s about as far as it ever goes. I tell them there might be a trial, that the opposing attorney will want to be asking a lot of public questions.”
    I wanted a drink. So I changed the subject.
    “The other night, when I met up with you and Webster on West Forty-first…”
    “After the Good Friday killings. Those guys marching with the cross?”
    “That’s it. At the same time, in the next block, you’d collared this John named Irvine.”
    “Another beauty from Jersey. Makes his living off the Fetus and Flag set.”
    “That’s the one, the Christian Coalition guy.”
    “Naturally he was getting it on with a tranny.”
    “That I don’t care about. This Irvine guy, he saw a gunman escape—”
    “Sure, the one they’re calling the Ghost Killer—the shadow. You know, I went back there to take a look at where Irvine said the guy came down off the roof of that recording studio.”
    “Good. Save me some time, Matson. Tell me how it played to you.”
    “Seems strange—they got all that high-priced hardware up on the roof, satellite dishes and like that, and yet it’s nothing to scale the wall.”
    “How so?”
    “Crates are stacked up near the loading docks, like a regular stairway. A man gets to the top of the pile, it’s nothing to hop a little, grab hold of the parapet, and scramble on over the top by kicking his legs.”
    “Still, he’d have to be in pretty good shape.”
    “Oh, I don’t know. I think even you could do it.”
    “Thanks a lot, Matson.” So I could eliminate Superman from my list of suspects, I said to myself. Any schlub in need of gym sessions could scale that studio roof from the back end, do his shooting at the front, then drop back down to the dark emptiness of West Forty-first. “I’ll be back to you later."
    “Anytime.”
    Next, I called up Central Homicide. I expected little, which came in the form of Officer Caras.
    “Naw, nobody’s remembering seeing nothing but the shadow,” he said. “I got all the reports right here in front of me. No weapon recovered, not to mention the rabbi’s face.”
    “The killer just walked into the service like he belonged? Then did what he had to do?”
    “That’s the way it plays.”
    “Forensics recover anything at all?”
    “Nothing spectacular. Some wool threads. Charcoal gray. Full of dirt and smelling funky, like the guy never heard of a dry cleaner. The blood, that all checks out to Rabbi Paznik. The usual kind of street schmutz from shoes tracking through the carpet. Of course, it’s only a guess whose shoes made the prints, you know? Turns out the rabbi and the killer, they’re about the same size.”
    “Did you background the witnesses?”
    “Sure we did. Fourteen straight-arrow Jew retirees, except for this one broad’s a notorious mah-jongg cheat and one of the old gents one time fed poison hamburger to a dog owned by an upstairs neighbor because the yapping was driving him nuts. Which in my personal book don’t make him such a bad guy, since I hate dog owners.”
    “Why is that, Caras?”
    “People who keep dogs, they don’t have the guts to bite people themselves.”
    “I see. So you’re telling me that none of what you’ve got so far is going anywhere.”
    “No, it ain’t.”
    “Anything more out of Mr. Glick?”
    “Oh yeah... he says he wants to be helpful. To you, Hockaday, since you’re some kind of... Oh, I don’t know, he starts in with that Hebe jabber and I don’t follow. That’s why I had to go and write down