Manhattan Is My Beat

door lock and the dead bolt, and got it open. Then pushed the door wide. She stepped inside and closed the door quickly.
    And she froze.
    Bastards!
    A tornado had hit the place. The explosive clutter of disaster. Goddamn bastards, goddamn police! Every book was on the floor, every drawer open, the couch slashed apart. The boxes dumped out, clothing scattered. One bald spot in the mess: under Kelly’s floor lamp, next to the chair with its dark, horrible stain and the small bullet holes with spiny brown tufts of upholstery stuffing sprouting outward. Whoever had ransacked the room had stood there—or even sat in the terrible chair!—under the light and examined everything, then thrown it aside.
    Bastards.
    Her first thought had been: The police did this? And she was ready to cab it right back to the police station and give Virgil Manelli hell, the narrow-eyed son of a bitch, but she remembered the detective’s neat desk, his brisk haircut and trimmed mustache. And she decided that someone else had done it. A window was open and the fire escape was right outside the sill. Anybody could’ve broken in. Hell,
she
had.
    But it wasn’t druggies either: the VCR and clock radio were still here.
    Who had it been? And what were they looking for?
    For an hour, Rune browsed through the mountains of Mr. Kelly’s life. She looked at everything—
almost
everything. Not the clothes. Even with the gloves on, they were too spooky to touch. But the rest she studied carefully: books, letters, the start of a diary—only three entries from years ago, revealing nothing except the weather and his sister’s health—boxes of food the bold roaches were already looting, bills, receipts, photos, shoeboxes.
    As she sifted carefully through everything, she learned a bit about Mr. Robert Kelly.
    He’d been born in 1915 in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. He’d come to New York in 1935. Then moved to California. He’d volunteered for the Army Air Corps and served with the Ninth Air Force. A sergeant, supervising ordnance. In some of his letters (he’d used the words “Dearest Sister” or “Darling Mother,” which made Rune cry) he’d written about the bombs that were loaded into the A-20 airplanes on their raids against occupied France and Germany. Sometimes he’d write his name in chalk on the 500-pounders. Proud that he was helping win the war.
    She found pictures of him in performances in the USO for soldiers in someplace called East Anglia. He seemed to be a sad-faced stand-up comic.
    After the war there seemed to be a five-year gap in his life. There was no record of what he’d done from 1945 until 1950.
    In 1952 he’d married a woman in Los Angeles and had apparently begun a series of sales jobs. Insurance for a while, then some kind of machinery that had something to do with commercial printing. His wife had died ten years ago. They’d had no children, it seemed. He was close to his sister. He took early retirement. Somehow he’d ended up back here in the New York area.
    Most of what she found was simply biographical. But there were several things that troubled her.
    The first was a photograph of Mr. Kelly with his sister—their names were on the back—taken five years before. (He looked exactly the same as he had last week and she decided he was the sort that aged early, like her own father, and then seemed frozen in time in their later years.) What was odd about the picture was that it had been torn into pieces. Kelly himself hadn’t done it, since one square had been lying on the dried bloodstain. It had been torn by the ransackers.
    The other thing that caught her attention was an old newspaper clipping. A bookmark in a battered copy of a Daphne du Maurier novel. The clipping, from the
New York Journal American
, dated 1948, read,
Movie Tells True Story of Gotham Crime
. It was underlined and asterisks were in the margin.
    Fans of the hit film
Manhattan Is My Beat,
now showing on Forty-second Street, may recognize on the silver screen the true story of one of New York’s finest
….
    Footsteps sounded outside the door. Rune looked up. They passed by but she thought they’d slowed. A chill of panic touched her spine and wouldn’t leave. She remembered where she was, what she was doing. Remembered that Manelli had warned her not to come here.
    Remembered that the killer was still at large.
    Time to leave …
    Rune slipped the clipping into her bag and stood. She looked at the door, then at the window, and decided the