Two policemen at the door. The taller one was Buczynski (he pronounced it buzz-IN-ski) from the Manhattan Burglary Squad. He was average height and thin, and he might have been handsome if only he were better dressed and took all those things-pens, scraps of paper-out of his shirt pocket, and learned not to wear short-sleeve shirts with neckties, and stood up straight, and learned to shave properly and not drench himself so in aftershave. Buczynski did look like a policeman, at least, which was more than you could say for his partner.
This was a little pale-yellow lump of a man with another of those names, Gedaminski-the name rumbled on and on like a freight train behind that G-and no amount of cleaning up was going to salvage him. This man Gedaminski did not seem the police type. He was small, doughy, and rather anemic looking. What chance would he stand against a respectable criminal? One wanted to put him under a warming lamp like a jaundiced baby. He had come all the way from Boston, driven, he said, though one got the sense he would have walked if necessary. He did have a beady little attentiveness about him. Otherwise, nothing. A complete disappointment.
Anyway, it seemed like great fun to talk to policemen. A lark. It would make a marvelous story. To meet them she had dressed simply, in a dove-gray sweater and pants, no jewelry except a watch and very plain stud earrings. She wanted to project that she was more than she seemed-she was the sort of girl who, under different circumstances, would have thrived as a burglary detective, perceptive and ready for action as she was. She did not like that they would make assumptions about her. They would presume. They would dismiss her with two words: Park Avenue. So she was inordinately hospitable. She put out coffee and muffins, the sort of food she imagined policemen enjoyed. She was eager to help.
But really, what could she tell this Gedaminski that she hadn’t already told him on the phone? He had come an awfully long way just to confirm a very simple story.
Gedaminski handed her a photo.
“Yes!” she said. “That’s him.” She was surprised to remember the man so clearly. But he had been handsome. There had been a presence about him. She had thought, upon seeing this man, He is just like me somehow. “Tell me his name. Is that alright? Am I allowed to know his name?”
“Richard Daley.”
“Are you sure he’s the one? It seems like a mistake.”
“Why don’t you just tell me the story again.”
“Alright. Well, it’s just what I told you. Does your friend know the story already?”
Buczynski had agreed to drive his counterpart from Boston as a courtesy. They had worked together before. Gedaminski had been to New York chasing this or that suspect, usually Daley. A real pro, a good thief, often worked out of town, the better to go unrecognized. Gedaminski had long suspected that Ricky Daley had paid a few visits to Manhattan to steal and not be bothered. Gedaminski knew, too, that Ricky worked with the same fences over and over, a trusted few, and none of them were in Boston. There was no better place to fence jewelry than New York. There it could be quickly broken up and moved. Often the only way to catch a good thief was to follow the swag. It was very easy to steal, but very hard to dispose of stolen things once you’d got them. Most thieves had to settle for twenty or thirty cents on the dollar from a fence. Good thieves did better; there was less risk in dealing with them. Burglary detectives spent much of their time trolling pawnshops and jewelers, tracking the swag. Gedaminski would have given his left nut to know where Ricky Daley fenced his stuff. He and Buczynski had canvassed the usual layoffs in New York several times, with no luck. Gedaminski got along fine with Al Buczynski, though Buczynski talked too much, and the Old Spice he wore gave the Bostonian a roaring headache and made him suspicious of the entire NYPD, since perfume on a man was a sort of subterfuge, and perfume on a cop smelled like corruption.
“Well,” the woman said, “it’s just like everybody says: Where were you when you heard Kennedy was shot? I was in Boston. The Harvard-Yale game was that weekend. We were supposed to stay the whole weekend but we didn’t. They wound up postponing the game, anyway. We were staying at the Copley, my husband and I. We sat in front of the TV all afternoon, it seemed like. We were with friends in the Back Bay. And I was drained and just, just exhausted, I suppose. I just couldn’t bear to watch the TV anymore-they were saying the same things over and over again, hour after hour, I couldn’t stand it. So I went back to the hotel, to the room, while my husband stayed to watch.
“When I got back to my floor, I came off the elevator and I was walking down the corridor, getting my room key out and so forth, and there was this sound, not like a gunshot but like a firecracker or a pop, just crack. Well, I was spooked already from that whole day, so it frightened me and I kind of stopped there in the hall a moment. When I got to the door of my room, I was fumbling with the key. My hand was trembling. I was-well, I wasn’t crying exactly, but tears were coming out, you know?-and I was just anxious to get into my room and lie down. So while I’m trying to open my door, a few doors down the hall a door opens and out comes this man-this Richard Daley. He looked much nicer than he does in that picture. He was wearing a very nice suit and he had no luggage. I noticed he did not have a room key, he was not locking the door behind him. He just pulled the door shut.
“He came walking down the hall toward the elevators. He saw me struggling with my door and as he went by me he said, ‘Are you okay?’ I told him my hand was shaking and I could not seem to get my door open. He said, ‘Here, let me help you. I’m good with locks.’ I gave him the key and he put it in my lock and opened my door for me. That was it. He said, ‘It’ll be okay,’ and he smiled and he turned to go.
“He was really very nice. Very nice. You know, something in his face made me think, you know, just for a moment, maybe it really will be okay. I said to him-not that it mattered, but I just wanted him to stay there for another minute, I don’t know why; I liked him, and it was such a crazy day-I said to him, ‘Hey, you forgot to lock your door.’ So he stops and he kind of looks at the door, and he says, ‘It’s not my room. I just checked in and they gave me the wrong room. I asked for a suite. That room is a single.’ So I said something about ‘Well, it’s a horrible day and you can’t really blame the fellow at the front desk for making a mistake.’ And he smiles-not a happy smile, I mean just a reassuring kind of smile-and he says, ‘No. It’s just a mistake. I’ll go right down and straighten it out.’ And that was it. He went down the hall, and I went into my room, and I never thought anything of it. I never even heard about the robbery in that room. We checked out an hour later and came right home. We didn’t want to be away.”
“You’re sure it’s him?”
She picked up the picture and looked at it again. She was absolutely certain and yet she could not quite hold both facts in her head at once-this was the nice, handsome man she had met in the hotel corridor, and this man was a thief. That he would rob someone during the chaos of That Day, well, it was particularly profane and opportunistic, and it added to her confusion.
“I’m sure,” she said. “Richard Daley. But he wasn’t, he didn’t seem…I just-”
“You’re sure it’s him?”
“Yes, it’s the same man but…he was just in the wrong room.”
“Trust me, lady, he’s always in the wrong room.”