Blood Relatives

4

The detectives weren’t too terribly surprised. Disappointed, yes, but not surprised. Even Walt Lefferts, who’d been mistakenly identified as the killer, wasn’t surprised. They were all experienced cops and familiar with the unreliability of witnesses. At the Police Academy, in fact, they had all sat through a variation of what was known as the “Window Washer Bit.” During a lecture unrelated to identification or witnesses or testimony, a man would unobtrusively come into the room, cross quietly behind the instructor and then go to the window, where he would busy himself working on a latch there. The man had brown hair. He was wearing brown trousers, a blue jacket, and brown shoes. He was carrying nothing but a screwdriver. He would work on the window for five minutes, and then cross quietly behind the instructor again and let himself out of the room. The moment he was gone, the instructor would interrupt his lecture and ask the students to describe this man who had just been in the room for five minutes. Specifically, he wanted to know:

(1) The color of the man’s hair.

(2) The color of his trousers.

(3) The color of his jacket.

(4) The color of his shoes.

(5) What he was carrying, if anything.

(6) What he did while in the room.

Well, the color of the man’s hair was variously described by the students as black, brown, blond, red, and bald. (Some said he was wearing a hat.) Thirty percent of the students correctly identified the color of the trousers as brown, but an equal percentage said they were blue. The remainder of the students opted for beige or gray. As for the man’s blue jacket, it was described in descending order of preference as brown, green, gray, blue, tan, and yellow. The brown shoes were described by most of the students as black. When it came to what the man was carrying, an astonishing 62 percent of the students said a bucket of water. Presumably, this was because a similar percentage reported that he had washed the windows while in the room. Only 4 percent of the students reported accurately that he had been carrying a screwdriver and that he had worked on a window latch while in the room. One student said he was carrying a stepladder. It was probably this same student who said the man had changed a lightbulb while in the room. And another student (but he’d undoubtedly been asleep during the lecture) said he had not seen anyone entering the room at all!

So Patricia Lowery’s unreliability wasn’t totally unexpected. In fact, that’s why they’d run a lineup in the first place. They could have done it another way. They could have put Donatelli in the Interrogation Room, facing the one-way mirror. Then they could have brought Patricia into the room next door and asked her to look through the glass. Then they could have said, “Is that the man who killed your cousin?” But they knew too many rape and/or assault victims were ready to identify anyone as their attacker, a response generated more by confusion and fear than by vindictiveness or outrage. The lineup was safer.

When they told Patricia Lowery that Walt Lefferts was a detective 2nd/grade, she would not believe them. She insisted that he was the man who’d killed her cousin. She had been standing not three feet away from the murderer, she had watched him wielding the knife, she had seen him approaching her after he’d finished with Muriel, she certainly knew what he looked like, she would never in her life forget what he looked like. They explained again that Walt Lefferts was a detective, and that he’d been home in bed with his wife of thirteen summers on the night of the murder. Patricia said it was amazing. He looked so much like the man, it was positively amazing. They thanked her for coming up to the squadroom, and then they sent her home in a radio motor patrol car.

There was something that had to be established before they could continue with the investigation. Until now they had been working on the supposition that Patricia Lowery could identify the man who had slain her cousin. Her false identification of Walt Lefferts opened up a whole new can of buttered beans. The question they now asked was: Had she actually seen the man? It was one thing to have seen him and then to have become confused about what he looked like. It was quite another not to have seen him at all. She had told them he was “a perfect stranger,” but if she hadn’t really seen him, how the hell could she know what he was?

As soon as it was dark, they went back to the tenement on Harding and Fourteenth. In their first conversation with Patricia Lowery, they had asked, “Would you recognize him if you saw him again?” and she had replied, “Yes. There wasn’t any light in the hallway, but there was light from the streetlamp.” There was indeed a streetlamp outside the building on Harding Avenue, but its globe and its lightbulb had been shattered, and the area of sidewalk directly in front of the building was in darkness. They climbed the steps and entered the building. The hallway was so black, they had trouble seeing each other, even standing side by side. They waited, reasoning that their eyes would grow accustomed to the dark, but the blackness was so total that even after standing there for ten minutes, Carella could barely discern Kling’s features. There had been no moon on the night of the murder; by Patricia’s own report, it had been raining heavily. If the streetlamp outside had been inoperative, Patricia couldn’t possibly have seen anyone clearly enough to have identified him. If, on the other hand, the streetlamp had been burning...

In this city, patrolmen were required to report lamp outages observed during the night. The printed form called for the location of the lamp, the lamppost number, the time the lamp went out (if known), the time the lamp was relighted, and whether it was the globe, the bulb, or the mantle that had been broken — the patrolman was to indicate this by putting a check mark in the appropriate space. At the bottom of the form, the words ACTION TAKEN were printed, and there were three blank lines beneath those words. The patrolman was supposed to indicate on those lines whether he had taken any special action short of climbing the pole and replacing the lightbulb himself. Normally — unless the lamppost was just outside a bank or a jewelry store or some other establishment that was a prime target for a nighttime burglary — the patrolman took no action other than to turn in the outage report at the completion of his tour. The desk sergeant then notified the electric company, which got around to repairing the lamp in its own sweet time — the very next day, or three days later, or in some sections of the city, two or three weeks later.

Patrolman Shanahan, who had discovered Muriel Stark’s body, had not turned in a lamp outage report after his tour of duty that Saturday night, but perhaps he’d been too busy reporting the homicide. Patrolman Feeny, on the other hand, had walked that same beat on Friday night’s graveyard shift. And when he’d reported back to the station house at 8:00 Saturday morning, he had handed a lamp outage report to the desk sergeant, and on it he had indicated that the precinct was the 87th, the precinct post was post number 3, and the date was September 6. He had located the lamppost at the corner of Harding and Fourteenth, and had identified it as lamppost number 6 — there were six lampposts on the block, three on each side of the street. He had not indicated when the lamp went out, presumably because he hadn’t known. Nor had he written in a time for when the lamp had been restored to service. He had put check marks alongside the words Broken Globe and also Broken Bulb. There were no comments under ACTION TAKEN. He had signed the bottom of the form with his rank, his name, and his shield number. The report told Carella that the light had been out on Friday night, and he knew from his visit to the scene that the light was out now as well. What he did not know was whether it had been repaired sometime after the Friday outage, and then broken again after the Saturday night murder.

He immediately called the electric company.

The man who answered the phone said, “Yes, that outage was reported.”

“When was it repaired?” Carella asked.

“Look, you know how many damn outages we get in this city every night of the week?” the man asked.

“I only want to know about this particular outage,” Carella said. “Lamppost number six, on the corner of Fourteenth and Harding. According to what we’ve got here, our patrolman reported a broken bulb and globe on the morning of Saturday, September sixth, and presumably the desk sergeant—”

“Yes, it was reported to us. I already told you it was reported.”

“Was it repaired?”

“I would have to check that.”

“Please check it,” Carella said. “I’m specifically interested in knowing whether it had been repaired by eleven o’clock that Saturday night.”

“Just a second.”

Carella waited.

When the man came back onto the line, he said, “Yes, that lamp was repaired at four fifty-seven P.M. on Saturday, September sixth.”

“It’s out again now,” Carella said.

“Well, so what? If you didn’t happen to know it, that lamp happens to be right outside an abandoned building that’s being torn down. You’re lucky we repaired the damn thing at all.”

“I’d like it repaired again,” Carella said. “We’re investigating a homicide here, and it’s important for us to know whether that streetlamp could have illuminated—”

“Well, shit, put your own emergency service on it.”

“No, I want it fixed the way the electric company would have fixed it. Your lightbulb, your globe.”

“Who’s this I’m talking to?”

“Detective Carella.”

“Paisan, have a heart, huh? I’m up to my ass in orders here. I’ll be lucky if I get through them by the Fourth of—”

“I need that lamp fixed,” Carella said. He looked up at the wall clock. “It’s a quarter past seven,” he said. “My partner and I are going out for a bite, we’ll be back at the scene there by eight, eight-thirty. I want it fixed by then.”

“You sure you’re Italian?” the man from the electric company said, and hung up.

Carella buzzed the desk sergeant, asked for Patrolman Shanahan’s home number, and immediately dialed it. Shanahan barked “Hello!” into the phone, and then immediately apologized when Carella identified himself. He said his sixteen-year-old daughter kept getting phone calls day and night from her girl-friends or from these pimply-faced jerks who kept coming to the house, man couldn’t get a moment’s peace, phone going like sixty all the time.

“So I’m sorry for snapping your head off,” he said.

“That’s okay,” Carella said. “There was just one thing I wanted to ask you. On Saturday night, when you found that girl’s body—”

“Damn shame,” Shanahan said.

“... would you remember whether the streetlamp was working?”

“Sure, it was working.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, I just know it was working. I automatically look for outages, know what I mean? I see a busted lamp, I fill out a report. But aside from that, I could see the girl’s hand. Up on the top step there, know what I mean? Now if the lamp had been out, it would’ve been blacker’n a witch’s asshole on that corner. Couldn’t have seen the hand, know what I mean? But I could see it. Laying palm up, right there outside the doorway. Didn’t put my flashlight on till after I’d climbed the steps. Threw my beam inside the doorway then and saw the body.”

“Did you see anything inside the hallway before you turned on your flash?”

“I could see the outline of the body, yes. I knew there was a body inside there, yes.”

“Okay, thanks a lot,” Carella said.

“Don’t mention it,” Shanahan said.

At a quarter past 8:00 that Monday night, Carella and Kling went back to Harding Avenue. The streetlamp was burning again. It cast a circle of light onto the sidewalk and into the gutter. The circle of light included the entire front stoop of the building in which Muriel Stark had been murdered. The detectives went into the hallway. The only light was the bounce from the lamp outside, but on the floor they could clearly make out the chalked outline of Muriel Stark’s body, and on the walls they could see scribbled graffiti and spatters they assumed were bloodstains. Standing against the wall opposite Kling, Carella could even distinguish the color of his eyes. There was no question but that the reflected light in that hallway was sufficient for identification. They had to believe that Patricia Lowery had indeed seen a dark-haired, blue-eyed man stabbing her cousin to death. This being the case, they further had to believe that she’d mistakenly identified Walt Lefferts only because he resembled the killer more closely than any of the other men in the lineup. They realized with dismay that Patricia’s value to them had been totally destroyed by this false identification. They were looking for a dark-haired, blue-eyed man who looked like Walt Lefferts, yes, but even if they found him, and even if Patricia pointed an accusing finger at him, how could they know for certain that he was the man she’d really seen committing the murder? She had also seen Walt Lefferts committing the murder, hadn’t she?

As far as they were concerned, they were still looking for someone Patricia had described — accurately, it now seemed — as “a perfect stranger.”

The kids knew somebody had been killed in that building on Saturday night, but this was Tuesday afternoon and the barricades the City Housing Authority had put up on either end of the block made the street perfect for stickball. It was still early September, and there’d be plenty of daylight before dinnertime. So they congregated at about 4:00, chose up their sides and chalked their bases onto the asphalt, and got down to the serious business at hand.

The boy playing center field was standing almost directly opposite the hallway in which Muriel Stark had been found. He wasn’t thinking about Muriel Stark, he didn’t even know Muriel Stark. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t thinking about murder or sex maniacs or anything but how hard and how far the batter on the other team would hit the rubber ball. They had two guys on base now, and a hit would put them ahead. This was a tense moment, much more important than who had got killed in the building on Saturday night, or who had done it. The boy saw the pitcher on his team wind up and fling the ball toward the other team’s batter. The ball bounced on the asphalt paving, came up toward the batter waist-high. The broomstick handle came around in a powerful swing, the narrow round of wood colliding with the rubber ball and sending it soaring over the pitcher’s head, and then the second baseman’s head, to bounce somewhere between second base and center field. The boy came running in, glove low. The ball was still bouncing, and he was running to meet it, the way he’d been taught — run to meet the ball, don’t wait for it to come to you. It took a bad hop some four feet from his glove, veered off to the right and rolled into the sewer at the curb.

“That’s only a double!” he shouted immediately. “That’s only a double, it went down the sewer.”

There was no argument, they all knew the rules. The batter grumbled a little about losing a sure homer, but rules were rules and the ball had rolled down the sewer and that made it an automatic double. They gathered around the sewer grating now, half a dozen of them. Two of them seized opposite sides of the grating, their hands reaching down to clasp the cast-iron crossbars, and they lifted the grating and moved it onto the pavement, and then the smallest boy in the group lowered himself into the sewer.

“You see it?” somebody asked.

“Yeah, it’s over there,” the boy answered.

“So get it already.”

“Just a second, I can’t reach the damn thing.”

“What’s that over there?” somebody else asked.

“Let me get the ball first, okay?”

“Over there. That shiny thing.”

They had found the murder weapon.

Or, to be more exact, they had found a knife near the scene of a murder, and they immediately turned it over to the police.

The blade of the knife was three and three-quarter inches long. It was a paring knife, with a pointed tip and a razor-sharp stainless-steel blade. Two stainless-steel rivets held the blade fastened to the curved wooden handle, which was itself four and a half inches long. The overall length of the knife, from the end of the wooden handle to the pointed tip of the blade, was eight and a quarter inches. The rain had washed the blade clean of any blood, but blood had soaked into the wooden handle and stained it, and it was this that the laboratory reported on. There were two types of blood on the handle of the knife. O and A. Presumably Muriel’s and Patricia’s. And presumably the killer had first slain Muriel, and then slashed Patricia, and then — instead of pursuing her when she’d run away from the building — had come down the steps to the curb and thrown the murder weapon into the sewer.

There were no usable fingerprints on the handle of the knife.

The funeral took place on Wednesday afternoon.

From the funeral home on Twelfth and Ascot, the black limousines drove out to the cemetery on Sands Spit. There were six limousines, and behind them a row of family cars with their head-lights on, and behind those one of the 87th Precinct’s unmarked sedans. Carella was at the wheel, Kling was riding shotgun beside him. The day was one of those September miracles that made living in this part of the country almost worthwhile. The black cars moved slowly against a sky blown clear of clouds, utterly blue and dazzling with light. There was not the slightest trace of summer lingering on the air; the bite promised imminent autumn, threatened winter on the distant horizon.

At the cemetery, they walked from the cars to the open hole in the ground where the coffin was poised on canvas straps, waiting to be lowered hydraulically into the earth. A pair of gravediggers stood by silently, leaning on their shovels, hats in their hands. The Lowerys were Catholic, and the priest and clergy stood by the coffin now, waiting for the mourners to make their way along the gravel path to the burial site. Overhead, a pair of jays, blue against the bluer sky, cawed as though resenting intrusion. When the family and friends had gathered around the open grave, the priest sprinkled the coffin and the grave with holy water, and then incensed both, and said, in prayer, “Dearest brothers, let us faithfully and lovingly remember our sister, whom God has taken to himself from the trials of this world. Lord, have mercy.”

“Christ, have mercy,” the chanter of the first choir said.

“Lord, have mercy,” the second choir responded.

“Our Father,” the priest said, and sprinkled the coffin again, “who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and lead us not into temptation—”

“But deliver us from evil.”

“From the gate of hell.”

“Rescue her soul, O Lord.”

“May she rest in peace.”

“Amen.”

“O Lord, hear my prayer,” the priest said.

“And let my cry come to you.”

“The Lord be with you.”

“And with your spirit.”

“Let us pray,” the priest said. “O Lord, we implore you to grant this mercy to your dead servant, that she who held fast to your will by her intentions may not receive punishment in return for her deeds; so that, as the true faith united her with the throng of the faithful on earth, your mercy may unite her with the company of the choir of angels in heaven. Through Christ our Lord.”

“Amen.”

And then it was straight out of Hamlet.

Like some grief-stricken Laertes, he threw himself upon the coffin just as it was being lowered into the grave. Carella recognized him at once as the slender, dark-haired, dark-eyed young man whose photograph had been in Patricia Lowery’s wallet. He was identified by name in the next moment when a dark-haired woman standing alongside the grave shouted, “Andy, no!” and reached over to pull him from the descending casket. Someone shouted an order, the coffin stopped and hung trembling on canvas straps, the young man spread-eagled and sobbing on its shining black lid. The woman was tugging at his arm, trying to break his embrace on the long black box. “Get away from me, Mom!” he shouted, and a terrible keening moan sprang from his lips in the next moment, his arms hugging the casket, his head thrown back, his cry of inconsolable grief rising to frighten even the jays, who responded in terrified flapping clamor. A man broke from the crowd of mourners, the cast was being identified for Carella without benefit of program — Andrew Lowery on the coffin hanging suspended over the open grave, his mother, Mrs. Lowery, still tugging at his arm, and now a man whom Mrs. Lowery addressed as Frank, and to whom she immediately said, “Help me, your son’s gone crazy!” Mother, father, grief-stricken son, and Patricia Lowery standing by and watching her blood relatives with strangely detached eyes, as though they were somehow embarrassing her with their excessive display of emotion. For whereas Andrew Lowery may not have gone quite crazy, he was certainly putting on a fine show of what Hamlet might have called emphatic grief, his phrases of sorrow conjuring the wandering stars and making them stand like wonder-wounded hearers, so to speak. He was pounding on the coffin with his fists now, and shouting, “Muriel, wake up! Muriel, say you’re not dead! Muriel, I love you!” while his father and mother tried to pull him off the casket, fearful that he and it would tumble into the grave together, the priest hastily muttering a prayer for those resting in the cemetery (or at least trying to rest with all the noise Andrew Lowery was making), this time in Latin for the sake of any Roman spectators, “Oremus. Deus, cuius miseratione animae fidelium,” and so on.

For a moment Carella wondered whether he should step in and break up the near-riot at graveside. But finally Frank Lowery managed to pull his son off the coffin, and Mrs. Lowery clutched him to her in embrace and shouted, “We all loved her, oh, dear God, we all loved her!” and the priest concluded his Latin prayer with the words “Per eundem Christum, Dominum nostrum.” The gravediggers — who, like cops, had seen it all and heard it all — simply pressed the button that again sent the coffin descending and the soul hopefully ascending. The skies above were still as blue as though a jousting tournament were to take place that very afternoon, with banners and pennoncels flying, and shields ablaze with two lions gules on an azure field, and lovely maidens in long pointed hats with silken tassels and merry eyes — rather than eyes red with mourning, or squinched in embarrassment, or narrowed in pain.

“She came to live with us when her parents died,” Mrs. Lowery said. “She was fifteen at the time, they were both killed in an automobile accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike — my sister, Pauline, and my brother-in-law, Mike. Muriel came to live with us a month later. I never adopted her, but I was planning to. She always called me Aunt Lillian, but she was like a daughter to me. And certainly like a sister to Andy and Patricia.”

Lillian Lowery carried a bottle of whiskey to the kitchen table and set it down before the detectives. In the other room, her husband Frank was talking to well-wishers who had come back to the house after the funeral.

“I know you’re not allowed to drink on duty,” she said, “but I feel the need for one myself, and I’d appreciate it if you joined me.”

“Thank you,” Carella said.

She poured three shot glasses full to their brims. Carella and Kling waited for her to lift her glass, and then they lifted theirs as well. “Andy will miss her most,” Mrs. Lowery said, and tilted the glass, swallowing all the whiskey in it. Carella and Kling sipped at their drinks. When Carella put his glass down on the kitchen table, Kling put his down too. “They were really like brother and sister,” she said, pouring herself another shot from the bottle. “Except that brothers and sisters sometimes argue. Not Andy and Muriel.” She shook her head, lifted the glass, and downed the whiskey. “Never. I never heard a word of anger between them. Never even a raised voice. They got along beautifully. Well, you saw him at the cemetery, he was beside himself with grief. It’s going to take him a long time to get over this. He blames himself a little, I think.”

“Why do you say that, Mrs. Lowery?” Carella asked.

“Well, he was supposed to go with them to the party, you know. At Paul’s house. Paul Gaddis. He’s one of Andy’s friends. It was his birthday they were celebrating that night. But then at the last minute, Andy got a call from the restaurant, asking if he could come in, so he went to work instead of the party. Even so, he could maybe have saved her, if only he’d been a few minutes earlier.”

“I’m not sure I understand you,” Carella said.

“Well, he went to pick up the girls.”

“Who did? Your son?”

“Yes. Andy.”

“If he was working—”

“Well, he called here from the restaurant and asked if they were home yet. This was about ten-fifteen. I told him they weren’t here, and he said he was through at the restaurant, there’d been a very small crowd for a Saturday night, and he thought he’d head over to Paul’s and pick them up. So I said fine. But what happened, you see, Andy went over to Paul’s house, and the girls had already left.” She shook her head, and poured herself another shot glass full of whiskey.

“Mrs. Lowery,” Carella said, “what did Andy do when he got to the party and found out the girls had gone?”

“He went looking for them.”

“In the street?”

“Yes. But it began raining again, and he thought they might have gone back to the party, so he went back there. But they weren’t there, so he went out looking for them again, and he still couldn’t find them. He got here alone at about twelve-fifteen, which is when I called the police. He was soaking wet. You’d have thought he’d taken a shower with his clothes on.”

The detectives had gone to the funeral for two reasons. To begin with, they knew that killers sometimes attended the funeral services of their victims, and they wanted to make certain there were no dark-haired, blue-eyed strangers in the crowd. Second, they wanted to show the suspect knife to Patricia Lowery and ask her to identify it as the murder weapon. They had not had a chance to talk to her at the cemetery, so Carella asked Mrs. Lowery if they might speak to Patricia now. Mrs. Lowery left the kitchen to get her. Sitting at the kitchen table, Carella and Kling could hear voices whispering in the other room. They felt curiously removed from the tragedy that had shaken this house, and yet intimately involved in it. They sat listening.

When Patricia came into the room, her face was tear-streaked. They expressed their sympathies to her, as they had to her mother, and then Carella put a manila envelope on the kitchen table and unwound the string from the cardboard button on the tie flap. He pulled the knife out by the tag attached to its handle and placed it on the kitchen table in front of Patricia.

“Have you ever seen this before?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

“Where?”

“It’s the knife that killed Muriel,” Patricia said. “It’s the knife the murderer used.”

They went to see Paul Gaddis because there were some things they wanted to know about his party guests. They did not expect to learn what they learned there, and they probably wouldn’t have learned it if Gaddis hadn’t suddenly become hungry. Gaddis was a good-looking young man who’d obviously begun lifting weights at an early age, and who’d just as obviously quit before he’d turned into a muscle-bound clod. He was sinewy and lean, with a firm, almost overpowering handshake, and an eager, helpful expression on his face. He led the detectives into the living room, and they sat there talking in the golden afternoon light. On Carella’s lap was the manila envelope with the tagged murder weapon inside it.

“We want to know who was here at the party,” Carella said.

“Not all the guests,” Kling said.

“Just the ones who were strangers to Patricia.”

“Guys she didn’t know, you mean?” Gaddis asked.

“Yes,” Carella said.

They were, in all honesty, clutching at straws. Muriel Stark had been murdered on Saturday night, and the case was now almost four days old. A homicide case usually begins to cool after the first twenty-four hours. If you haven’t got a lead by then, chances are the case won’t be solved except by accident. (Pick up a guy accused of rape sometime next Christmas, and during the course of the questioning he’d tell you that back in September he knocked off a little girl in an abandoned tenement on Harding.) This particular homicide looked more difficult than most because it was the result of random violence. Two girls trying to make their way home through the rain. They stop for shelter in an abandoned tenement, and are suddenly facing a man with a knife. Pure chance. So how do you solve a chance homicide except by getting a few lucky breaks of your own? Thus far, their breaks had been limited to the accidental finding of the murder weapon, but the knife told them nothing they hadn’t already known. They were here now to explore a possibility that would eliminate chance and give them at least some hope of pursuing the case along lines of logical deduction.

“Guys she didn’t know, huh?” Gaddis said. “Okay, now that would break itself down into two categories. There’d be guys she didn’t know at the beginning of the night, but who she might have met before she left the party; and there’d be guys she never got to meet at all. So which ones do you want?”

“We want anybody Patricia might have classified as a perfect stranger.”

“Well, that’d be somebody, say, who came in after she got here, and who hung around in the kitchen with the guys, drinking beer maybe, and who never got to meet her.”

“Yes,” Carella said. “But who might have seen her.”

“Mmm,” Gaddis said. “Are you thinking that somebody who was here at the party—?”

“It’s simply an angle we’re considering,” Kling said.

“Because we haven’t got much else to go on,” Carella said honestly.

“Yeah. Well, the thing is, I don’t want to get anybody in trouble by saying—”

“You won’t be getting anybody in trouble.”

“Because, you know, my own father was here the night of the party, and he never got to meet Patricia, though he probably saw her on the way to the kitchen or the bathroom or something, so that would make him one of the guys you’re talking about, am I right?”

“Well,” Kling said, and looked at Carella.

“Well, did your father happen to leave the apartment shortly after Patricia and Muriel did?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Then that would let him out,” Carella said.

“Then what you want,” Gaddis said, “is the names of any guys who didn’t get to meet Patricia, and who also left early.”

“Let’s start with the ones who didn’t get to meet her.”

“I think Jackie Hogan got here about a quarter past ten, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t meet her. And there was a guy who got here earlier than that, I didn’t even know him, he’d come here with one of the girls. I don’t think Patricia ever got to meet him because this girl just dragged him in the bedroom and was necking in there with him all night long. But he may have got a look at Patricia, because he came up for air once and went out in the kitchen for a beer.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know his name, the girl never introduced him to anybody.”

“Well, what’s her name?”

“Sally Hoyt.”

“Okay, can you think of anyone else?”

“That’s about it, I think. No, wait a minute, there was this fellow came in with Charlie Cavalca, he’s an instructor of Charlie’s down at Ramsey U. Charlie had been downtown in the library, doing some work, and he’d seen the instructor there and told him he was going to a party, so the instructor asked if he could crash. He’s a young guy, he teaches English down there. So Charlie called me and asked if he could bring him along, and they picked up two girls in the library and brought them along too.”

“Sounds like it was a big party,” Kling said.

“There were about fifty people here.”

“Your eighteenth birthday party, huh?”

“Yes, but most of my friends are older than that. I run with an older crowd, I don’t know what it is. I always did. I’m going with a girl who’s twenty-four, for example. My mother can’t understand it.”

“But Patricia Lowery’s only fifteen.”

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t have invited her, I’ll tell you the truth, if it hadn’t been for Andy. He’s my friend, not Patricia. I asked him to come to the party, and he said he wanted to bring his cousin and his sister, so what could I tell him? Could I say no? So I said okay, and then what happens is that he can’t make the damn party, so the two girls come alone. I didn’t mind Muriel, but you know, lots of the guys were kidding me about Patricia, about having jailbait here.”

“Muriel was only seventeen,” Carella said.

“I didn’t realize that. She looked older. For that matter, Patricia looks older too. But she’s kind of immature, if you know what I mean. After all, fifteen is fifteen, no matter how you slice it. The party was big enough to absorb them both, though, so what the hell. I’m only sorry Andy didn’t get to come. I’m sure if he’d been here, the whole thing wouldn’t have happened later.”

“What time did he get here?”

“Just after the girls left.”

“And he left immediately, huh? To go look for them?”

“Yeah. But then he came back again because it was raining so hard, you see, he figured they might have changed their minds and run back here. But they hadn’t. So he left again.”

“About these other people you mentioned—”

“Right,” Gaddis said. “We can eliminate my father, right? Because he never left the apartment all night long.” Gaddis smiled suddenly and infectiously. “Besides, he’s a very nonviolent type, believe me.”

“Okay, let’s eliminate your father,” Carella said, and returned the smile.

“And I think we can eliminate Sally Hoyt’s boyfriend, because first of all, she didn’t let him out of her sight all night long, and secondly, by the time she got through with him the poor bastard was probably too weak to walk.”

“Okay.”

“So that leaves... Listen, is anybody hungry? I’m starved. Would anybody like a sandwich?”

“No, thank you,” Carella said.

“You mind if I make myself one?”

“Not at all.”

“Come on in the kitchen,” Gaddis said, and rose, and continued talking as they started out of the room. “That would leave Jackie Hogan, who got here about fifteen minutes before the girls left, and who I’m sure didn’t get to meet them. And it would also leave this English instructor Charlie Cavalca brought with him. Trouble is, Jackie didn’t leave the party till way past midnight, so that lets him out, am I right?”

“That’s right.”

They were in the kitchen now. Gaddis opened the refrigerator, took out a slab of butter, a loaf of unsliced rye bread, and some ham wrapped in waxed paper. “So that leaves only the English instructor,” he said, and turned toward the detectives and smiled again, and said, “Personally, I wouldn’t put anything past English instructors, but this guy seemed very straight, and besides, he was with a gorgeous blonde he’d have to have been out of his mind to leave.” Gaddis walked to the cutting board and reached for one of the knives on the rack above it.

Both Kling and Carella saw the knives on the rack at the same moment. There was a bread knife with a nine-inch-long blade, which Paul pulled down from the rack now. There was also a carving knife with a ten-inch-long blade, and a chef’s knife with a six-inch-long blade. But their attention was caught by the paring knives which hung in a row on the rack. There were three of them. They all had wooden handles with stainless-steel rivets in them. They all had blades that appeared to be about four inches long.

“Those knives,” Carella said.

Paul Gaddis looked up from where he was slicing the rye bread.

“On the rack there,” Carella said. “The paring knives.”

“Yeah,” Gaddis said, and nodded.

“Were they here on the night of the party?”

“Oh yeah, been here forever, those knives.”

“Are any of them missing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Should there be four paring knives instead of three?”

“Well, there are four,” Gaddis said, and looked at the rack.

“No, there are only three up there,” Carella said.

“There’re supposed to be four,” Gaddis said.

“Would one of them be in the dishwasher?”

“We never put those knives in the dishwasher,” Gaddis said. “They’ve got wooden handles, we wash them by hand. Those are expensive knives. They’re made in Germany, you know.”

“Would this be the fourth knife?” Carella asked, and opened the manila envelope again, and pulled the knife out by the evidence tag, and put it down on the cutting board. Gaddis looked at the knife.

“Is that... is that the murder weapon?” he asked.

“Yes,” Carella said.

“It looks like one of our knives,” Gaddis said, “but I can’t tell for sure. I mean, I suppose there are lots of knives that are similar to these. I mean, these aren’t unique knives or anything, you can buy them in any good store in the city. But if I had to say, just looking at the knife there, I would have to say yes, it looks as if it could be the fourth knife, it looks as if it could be the fourth paring knife in the set there.” He looked up suddenly. “That means he was here, doesn’t it?” he said. “The one who killed her. If he took that knife from the rack, he was here.”

“Yes,” Carella said. “He was here.”