The Drill Is Death Read online

  The Drill Is Death

  A Nathan Shapiro Mystery

  Frances and Richard Lockridge

  I

  As Reginald Grant came through the doorway of his apartment he ducked his head. This was involuntary; he was not conscious of it. When a man has been somewhat in excess of six feet tall since the age of eighteen—a period, in Grant’s case, of some twenty years—he learns to duck under lintels. Do not enquire; bob the head down. Let conditioned reflex relieve the mind of a tiresome series of estimates. This is no more than reflex’s duty.

  If, as he came out into the hall corridor and walked toward the staircase, one had suddenly asked Reginald Grant what floor he was on he would, as involuntarily as he had ducked, have said that he was on the first floor. Then, probably, he would have snapped his fingers and smiled pleasantly enough—he had a wide mouth for smiling—and admitted that, once more, he had been caught out. One bows to usage as to low-hung lintels. When in America speak, within reason, as Americans speak. If they chose to call the first floor the second, that is clearly their affair. Reginald Grant was a tolerant man.

  Going down the stairs—a loose-limbed man, with a long face; a man with pale brown hair fitting as smoothly along skull as a Siamese cat’s fur fits the cat’s long body—Grant maintained a tolerant mood, although at the moment this was a bit difficult. Call the first floor the second if they liked. But why schedule lectures (and mispronounce “schedule” into the bargain) for the vexing hour of eight in the evening? For almost two months, and twice each week, Grant had asked himself that question, and received no answer.

  When did they expect a man to eat? It was hardly possible that they did not know that poets ate like other men—provided, of course, that they were poets of independent means. And when did they themselves eat, the hundred or so intelligent people, of varying ages, who would assemble in the Forsythe Theater, of Dyckman University (Downtown Branch) to hear a lecture on The Poet in the Modern World? Did they snatch a hamburger or a hot dog—both potentially satisfactory enough in their proper places—before assembling? Or did they wait until after it all was over? In short, why not schedule mass culture for nine o’clock, and so avoid mass indigestion?

  Once each Tuesday and each Friday since mid-September, Reginald Grant had speculated on this matter while descending the stairway from the first—no, the second—floor of the house near Gramercy Park in which he had, until the first of the year, sublet a flat—no, an apartment. It was as good a thing to wonder about as any other, on the way to lecture. In his case, to be sure, the issue was somewhat academic. Lecturing gave him indigestion whether he ate before or after. His stomach—his father would have said his liver—did not want to lecture. The rest of Reginald Grant rather did, on the whole. Nobody had, as they said here in New York, “twisted his arm.” He had come willingly, even eagerly, from London to this fantastic city to talk about the one thing that, scratch him deep enough, he cared a damn about.

  As he opened the outer door of the vestibule, and went down the street stairs, Grant discovered that it was still raining. It had been raining when he got home from his afternoon discussion class—for undergraduates, that one was, and taken for “credit”—it had been raining, steadily if a little listlessly. Now, in addition to rain, there was fog. London did them thicker but not, it occurred to Reginald Grant, clammier. He hunched his Burberry higher, and felt the night trickle on his head. He looked to his right and lifted an arm hopefully. The lights of Joe’s cab came on; the cab moved out from the curb. (Grant’s mind did not waste time with the spelling.) The cab crossed diagonally in the oneway street and stopped in front of Grant, who had shifted two books—with slips of paper marking pages he would read from—from under right arm to under left in preparation. Grant opened the taxi door and said, “Evening, Joe.”

  “Evening, Professor,” Joe Abrams said.

  Grant had explained about that, the second time Joe had driven him from the street just off Gramercy Park to Washington Square. By the second time Joe had adopted him. It sometimes occurred to Grant that, among the many pleasant people he had met in New York, on his first visit to New York, he had got to know Joe Abrams best. Joe had seen to that and, after a few moments of surprise, Grant had happily acquiesced. He had never, however, been able to persuade Joe Abrams that he was not a professor.

  He had said that being invited to a university to give a series of lectures—the Bingham Lectures, specifically—did not make a man a professor, and that teaching a few courses to undergraduates (for credit) did not either. Joe had said, “Sure, I get you, Professor,” and it had never gone beyond that, although by this Tuesday (15 November) Grant knew a great deal about Joe Abrams (four children, one of them studying law; a wife named Rachel and “mama”) and accepted that Abrams knew a good deal about him—a degree from Cambridge, unmarried, a man who wrote, and wrote about, poetry. And, evidently, talked about it.

  “The weather is lousy,” Joe told Reginald Grant, and started the big cab.

  The size of the cab had been the initial bond between Grant and Joe Abrams. If you are a tall man and come upon one of the old cabs—the five-passenger cabs—you grapple it with hoops of steel. Grant had learned that in his first New York fortnight.

  Grant said, “Quite,” with conviction, and looked through the window at it—at gray night and night of mist; with the lights in the fenced park seeming dimly to waver in the grayness. The lights drip, Grant thought; it is a night of dripping light. He wondered how many, on such a night, would venture out to hear talk of poetry.

  “Anyway,” Joe said, and stopped for a traffic light, “it ain’t snow. You got to give it that.”

  Grant gave it that and looked away from the window and at the back of Abrams’s head and said, “How’s mama, Joe?” Mama had been ailing. It had seemed that nothing the doctor gave her did much good. Not that Doc Cohen wasn’t a good man, but still—

  “She’s about—” Joe Abrams said and then Grant saw it—saw it on the floor, against the opposite door—and said, “Joe!” His tone stopped Joe Abrams. Joe said, “Yeah?”

  “Somebody’s left a coat on the floor,” Grant said, but even as he said this he no longer thought it was only a coat on the floor, so that the tension in his voice did not match his words. It was the timbre of the voice, not the words, which made Joe pull abruptly to the curb and stop.

  “People all the time leave—” he began, going on with the ordinary because of a kind of inertia in his mind. But by then, although he had not yet turned, he knew that it was not only a coat lying on the floor of the cab.

  By the time Joe was on the sidewalk, was opening the right rear door, Reginald Grant was on his knees on the cab floor, trying to lift what was huddled there, wedged there against the door. Except that his position was so awkward, Grant would have had no trouble lifting the girl from floor to seat. She was so light that he thought, when he first touched her, that he touched a child. It was only when he, with Joe helping, had got her up to the seat that he realized she was not a child—had not been a child. He was, by then, quite certain that she was dead—and that the hands which had touched her body were wet with her blood.

  A layman cannot always be sure, and Reginald Grant told himself this as he looked at the girl in the faint light—the dripping light. But he was sure, and Joe Abrams was sure and said, “God. Oh, God,” in a strange, grating voice.

  The wound was in the back. Grant could not tell what had caused the wound, only that blood had poured from it. He sought a pulse and thought, There can’t be enough blood left in her to make a pulse, not with what has soaked into the sweater, the tweed skirt; not with what is pooled there on the floor.

  Not a child, but not much more than a child. Under twe
nty, surely—a small girl and slight, weighing so little—so heartbreakingly little. So far from ready for the harsh maturity of death, and death of this nature, that a massive incongruity seemed to flatten Grant’s mind, even as he gave up fingering a lifeless wrist and looked across the dead girl at Joe Abrams, who was looking at the girl as if he did not really see her, or see anything and saying over and over, “God. God. God,” in a strange, uninflected voice. Then he said, “She’s dead, ain’t she?”

  “Yes,” Grant said. “I think so.”

  “Listen,” Joe said, “she’s just a kid. Look at her. She’s just a kid. Not any older than Becky.”

  Rebecca was his oldest daughter; he had told Grant about Rebecca.

  “Just look at her,” Abrams said, again.

  Grant had looked at her, but, as if it were a duty he owed Joe Abrams—as if, somehow, he had to look carefully at the dead girl so that he could tell Joe Abrams that she was not his daughter—he looked again.

  She had blond hair, worn in what they called a “pony tail.” She wore a sweater and skirt and the odd, low-heeled shoes so many of them wore. She had a rounded face and the high, straight forehead—the almost infantile forehead—some women have; the forehead which seems, to many men, an assurance of an inner, abiding innocence. But, even as he looked at her, Grant thought that, under other circumstances, he would not have looked at her a second time because, obscurely, looking at her once was like looking at her a second time—or a third or fourth, or a hundredth. America bred them so, he thought—somewhere under a surge of pity, of revulsion that this could have happened—bred them by the hundreds and by the thousands; quick, bright girls, pretty with youth; girls uniformed in costume and in vocabulary; hard for the outsider to tell apart. He had them in his classes; in the warren which was the downtown branch of Dyckman they seemed to fill the halls.

  Hours ago—but not many hours—this heartbreaking child had been one of them, like any of them. And, now, slumped dead on the seat of a taxicab, no longer one with any of them, but unique in death.

  “We gotta take her to the cops,” Joe Abrams said. “That’s the best thing to do.”

  It was Joe Abrams’s city; these were his streets. He was the one to decide. “Right,” Grant said, and held the limp body up for a moment so that Joe could close the door.

  “West Twentieth, I guess,” Joe said. “Headed that way.” He went back to his seat, started the car. “Don’t see what else to do,” he said. “We call and wait around, and that’s where we go anyhow. Maybe East Twenty-second, but what the hell?”

  He seemed to be debating with himself and this, Reginald Grant thought, probably was good for him—this arguing with himself about trivial things; in an odd manner talking shop to himself. Not thinking of a girl named Rebecca, about the age of—about the age this girl had been, who now was without age.

  The Tenth Precinct station house, in West Twentieth Street, is also the headquarters of Homicide, Manhattan West. It did not take Joe long to reach it, and park in front of it between signs which said “No Parking.”

  “You want I—?” Joe said, as a completed sentence, and Grant said, “Yes. I’ll stay with her,” and watched Joe Abrams run across the sidewalk and into the station house. He came back out almost at once, and two uniformed policemen were with him. One of them looked into the cab, without opening the door, and said, “Jeeze, another kid.” Then he looked across the girl’s body at Grant. He did not say anything.

  Another uniformed man came out of the station house, hurrying. Behind him a man in civilian clothes came out and both looked in at the dead girl.

  “Switchblade,” the uniformed man said to the man in civilian clothes. “Another goddamn lousy punk.” The other man merely nodded.

  “O.K.,” the uniformed man—a sergeant, from his chevrons—said to Grant. “Better come along in and tell us about it, mister.”

  Grant got out of the cab on the side away from the curb. He went around the cab and into the station house, and felt, strangely, that he deserted the girl dead on the cab seat.

  They were taken to a small, scantily furnished, room on the second floor. The sergeant and the man in civilian clothes took them; it was the man in civilian clothes who asked the questions—their names first. After Grant had given his name, the detective said, “You’re English,” as a statement. Grant went on with it, briefly, adding occupation to a name, a New York address.

  “Oh,” the detective said, “that Grant,” as if much had been clarified. This puzzled Grant; the detective had a long, melancholy face, but it seemed unlikely that he was a reader of poetry. Very few people were, and Grant did not suppose that many of them were policemen.

  “You didn’t know the girl?” the detective said, and Grant shook his head. “I—” he said, but this time the detective shook his head and turned to Abrams and said, “All right, let’s have it.”

  “Never saw her before,” Joe Abrams said. “Must have been while I was having dinner.”

  He was told to go ahead.

  At about seven, Abrams said, he had parked the cab in its usual place—its usual place for that hour of the evening—and gone around the comer to a lunch counter and had a pastrami sandwich and coffee and a piece of pie. He had come back in about twenty minutes.

  “Because,” he said, “it was one of the professor’s nights and we’ve sort of got it set.”

  The detective looked at Grant then.

  “Joe’s been picking me up the past few weeks,” Grant said. “Call it an informal arrangement.”

  “Convenient this kind of weather,” the detective said. “So—you came back and got in the cab. Didn’t look in the back?”

  “What for?” Abrams said. “No. She was—” He hesitated. Grant could see him swallow. “Down on the floor,” Abrams said. “The professor thought at first somebody had left a coat. See what I mean? No, I didn’t look.”

  The detective waited for him to go on.

  “That’s the size of it,” Joe Abrams said. “Somebody put her in there while I was eating.”

  The detective turned back to Grant, then.

  “You saw her as soon as you got into the cab?”

  Grant told him about that—told him that, safely out of rain and fog, he had at first looked through the window at the night, and not at the interior of the cab. Why he had not seen her as he got in—he shrugged his shoulders. Perhaps one saw only what one was looking for. There was little light in the cab.

  “Light ought to go on when the door’s opened,” Joe said. “Only it’s out of whack. Been meaning to get it fixed.”

  “When you did see her,” the detective said, “she was on the floor? Against the door?”

  Grant nodded his head.

  “You lifted her up onto the seat?”

  “We both did,” Grant said. “I—we didn’t know she was dead. Anyway—a child—I thought she was a child—lying there on the floor. It—it seemed quite wrong.”

  “Sure,” the detective said. “Only thing you could have done, I guess. You’d never seen her before?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  The detective looked, then, at the uniformed sergeant. The sergeant nodded his head, briefly.

  “I don’t,” the detective said, “think we need to bother you any longer just now, Mr. Grant.”

  This surprised Reginald Grant, puzzled him. Surely, even here, in this fantastic city, the murder of a child was not something thus to be brushed off, pushed aside.

  “You’ll want to wash your hands,” the detective said and Grant, who had forgotten, looked at his hands. Looking at them, he felt a little sick.

  He had been sitting on a wooden chair. He started to stand up.

  “Perhaps,” the detective said, “you think we’re taking this lightly, Mr. Grant?” He spoke in a sad voice; his face was sad. It was as if new melancholy were, in that moment, laid on over the old. “We don’t, I assure you. We’ll find the killer, Mr. Grant. And—it’ll probably turn out to be another
kid—some punk with a knife; some punk who’s in a gang. Killed her for some reason only a vicious child would understand, and put her in the cab to—to get her out of sight. You were just unlucky, Mr. Grant. Give you a bad impression of the way things are here, I’m afraid.” He sighed. “Not that they aren’t,” he said. Then he looked at his watch.

  “You want to go on to the lecture?” the detective said.

  And this, also, startled Reginald Grant, partly because he had, in all that mattered, forgotten that, not much more than half an hour ago, he had got into a cab to go to Dyckman University (Downtown Branch) to talk of poetry; partly because he was surprised that this depressed policeman should have remembered what he had himself forgotten. He looked at his own watch and realized that, below the surface of his mind, he wanted it to be too late to go to the lecture. Still—

  “There isn’t anything more I can do about this?”

  “No,” the detective said. “I can’t think of anything. If you do—if you remember anything—you’ll get in touch.”

  “There will be people waiting,” Grant said. “For me. It—it is merely that it seems incongruous.”

  “A good deal is,” the detective said. “It’s up to you, of course. We’ll take you in a cruise car, if you like. Make better time that way.”

  It occurred to Reginald Grant that he was being urged, gently, to do his duty—was, at the least, being offered an opportunity to make so right a decision. He had never been so tempted to use the American’s procrastinating “We-ll.”

  “Decent of you,” he said. “You’re probably right, Mr.—”

  “Shapiro,” the sad detective said. “It’s entirely up to you.”

  “I’d appreciate the car,” Grant said. He looked at his hands. “And—” There is a limit beyond which the incongruous cannot be allowed to progress; one may not lecture on poetry with a child’s blood on one’s hands.

  And, when he stood behind the lectern, apologized for his lateness without explaining it, it occurred to Reginald Grant that he was probably the first poet in history to be hurtled through foggy streets, with a siren clearing the way ahead, in order that he might, in academic cloister, discuss his art. Tomorrow it would be unbelievable that any of this had happened.