Blood Relatives

6

Cops know crime statistics.

Which is why hardly anything surprises a cop. Shocks him, yes. He is capable of being shocked. Surprised, rarely. Not where it concerns crime. Carella was shocked when he saw the torn and mutilated body of Muriel Stark in the hallway on Fourteenth and Harding, but he was not surprised that a knife had been the murder weapon. He was not surprised because he knew that 40 percent of the annual murders in this city were caused by the use of knives or other sharp instruments, whereas only 27 percent were caused by the use of firearms. He suspected this was due to the city’s stringent gun laws; in the United States as a whole, a staggering 54 percent of all murders were committed with firearms, the most lethal weapon used in assaults to kill, seven times more deadly than all other weapons combined. Despite whatever the National Rifle Association had to say about man’s inherent right to bear arms and to go romping in the woods in search of game, Carella (and every other cop in the city) would have liked nothing better than a law forbidding private citizens to own or carry a gun of any kind for any purpose whatever. But police officers did not have a powerful lobby in Washington, even though they were the ones who daily reaped the whirlwind while the gun manufacturers reaped the profits.

Statistics.

It shocked Carella, too, that Andrew Lowery had most probably killed his own cousin. It shocked Carella, but it did not surprise him, because he knew that whereas 20 percent of all homicides stemmed from lovers’ quarrels, an overwhelming 30 percent resulted from family conflicts of one sort or another. In real life, you rarely got anyone planning a brilliant murder for months and months, and then executing it in painstaking detail. What you got instead was your brother-in-law hitting you over the head with a beer bottle because he was losing at poker. Your brilliant murders were for television, where the smart cop always tripped up the dumb crook who thought the cop was dumb but who was really dumb himself, heh-heh. Bullshit. Carella always turned off the television set whenever a cop show came on. He sometimes wondered if doctors turned off the set when a doctor show came on. Or lawyers. Or forest rangers. Or private eyes. Carella didn’t know any private eyes. He knew a lot of cops, though, and hardly any of them behaved the way television cops did. But a lot of them watched television cop shows. Probably gave them ideas on how to deal with the good guys and the bad guys. Television cop shoves a pistol at a thief, tells him, “This ain’t a pastrami on rye, sonny,” gives the real-life cop an idea. Next time the real-life cop makes an arrest, he remembers what the television cop said. So he shoves his piece at the thief, and he says, “This ain’t a pastrami on rye, sonny,” and the thief hits the real-life cop on the ear with a lead pipe and rams the pistol down his throat and makes him eat it, proving if it’s not a pastrami on rye, it’s at least a baloney on whole wheat with mayonnaise. Television cops were dangerous. They made real-life cops feel like heroes instead of hard-working slobs. Carella did not feel like a hero when he got back from the Criminal Courts Building that afternoon. He had left the down-town area at 11:45, and it was now almost 12:30, and he still hadn’t had lunch, and the first thing he saw on his desk when he walked into the squadroom was a memo from the Police Commissioner. The memo may not have disturbed Carella had he not just been thinking about life imitating art imitating life and so on. But it disturbed him now. It very definitely disturbed him. This is what the memo read:

The memo was signed by the Police Commissioner, Alfred James Dougherty. There was only one trouble with the memo. In signing it, the commissioner, or his secretary, or one of his aides had used a rubber stamp.

Carella looked at the memo and at the rubber stamp signature.

The commissioner had clearly ordered that effective this date rubber stamp signatures could not be used on any official correspondence. The memo also stated that any orders or instructions signed with a rubber stamp signature were to be ignored.

Carella’s perplexity was monumental.

He sat at his desk and read the memo again, and then he read it a third time, and tried to decide what he should do about it. His deductive reasoning went something like this:

Carella blinked, and looked up at the clock. Only two minutes had passed since the commissioner started causing him heartburn. He decided to go out to lunch.

Until the moment Patricia Lowery made her accusatory statement to the police, they had been looking for a stranger. They were now working directly for the district attorney’s office, and looking for evidence to bolster the case against Andrew Lowery. No one doubted in the slightest that the grand jury would, on the basis of Patricia’s statement, indict her brother Andrew. In this city a grand jury consisted of twenty-three men, and their purpose was to hear evidence, determine whether a crime or crimes had in fact been committed, whether it was reasonable to assume that the defendant had committed the crime or crimes, and exactly what the nature and extent of the crimes were, for the purposes of indictment. If and when they indicted, the Bureau of Indictment would then make out a list of charges, and two days after that the case would be set for General Sessions, Part I, where the defendant would be arraigned for pleading. The plea in a homicide case was an automatic plea of Not Guilty. At that hearing, clerks from the DA’s office would assign the case to a particular judge and a particular part of General Sessions, and a date for the trial would be set. The case against Andrew Lowery was a strong one, even without additional evidence; a sister accusing her own brother of murder was hardly something to be taken lightly. But the DA would be grateful nonetheless for whatever else the police could come up with before the case went before a jury. It was for this reason that Carella had tried to get a search warrant while he was downtown at the Criminal Courts Building that morning.

A search warrant is an order in writing, in the name of the people, signed by a magistrate, directed to a peace officer, commanding him to search for personal property and to bring it before the magistrate. The warrant is usually quite specific. The peace officer requesting the warrant must show probable cause and must support this by affidavit, naming or describing the person and particularly describing the property, and the place to be searched. A detective, for example, after being duly sworn and deposed, would state in writing that he had information based upon his personal knowledge and belief and/or facts disclosed to him that an armed robbery had been committed, and then would disclose the results of his investigation before requesting that he be granted permission to search for a suspect revolver that he now believed was hidden in the bread box of the man arrested for the crime.

Neither Carella nor Assistant DA Locke felt they had the slightest chance of getting a warrant allowing them to search Andrew Lowery’s room in the apartment on Fourteenth Street and St. John’s Road. But hope springs eternal, and besides, Carella was downtown anyway, so he took a whack at it, boldly stating in his affidavit that there was probable cause to believe that if there existed in Andrew Lowery’s room any clothes bearing bloodstains of the O group or of the A group, then these might constitute evidence of the crime of murder. The magistrate had read the affidavit, and then had fixed Carella with a baleful eye and asked point-blank, “What do you mean by if? Do you have any personal knowledge of the existence of such clothing?” Carella had been forced to admit that No, your Honor, he had no personal knowledge of the existence of such evidence, but it was reasonable to assume that perhaps Andrew Lowery — and the magistrate had interrupted to say he was denying the warrant on the grounds that Carella was about to conduct a fishing expedition that would clearly constitute an illegal search. So Carella had gone back to the squadroom, disappointed but not surprised, only to find the Commissioner’s baffling memo on his desk.

After lunch he went over to the Lowery apartment without a search warrant. The situation here was an interesting one in that the victim and the accused had both lived in the same apartment, and whereas Carella would have needed a warrant to conduct a search of Lowery’s room, he did not need a warrant to search Muriel Stark’s room — no more than he would have needed a warrant, for example, to look for bloodstains or a murder weapon at the scene of a crime. Lillian Lowery opened the door for him, and when he told her why he was there, she asked him to come in. He had been in this apartment before, on the day of Muriel’s funeral, but on that occasion he had been concerned solely with positive identification of the murder weapon. He was here today in search of evidence, and he looked at the place differently now, his trained observer’s eye automatically summarizing and editorializing.

The apartment was in a fairly decent neighborhood, not quite as good as Silvermine Oval, and nowhere near as elegant as Smoke Rise, but certainly not bad for the 87th Precinct. You wouldn’t find any buildings with doormen on St. John’s Road, but neither would you find a row of broken mailboxes or hallways stinking of urine. Nor was the Lowery apartment the sort of railroad flat you found in the ghetto sections of the precinct, one room leading directly into another, without benefit of corridor, rather like a string of boxcars following behind a locomotive. Instead, the apartment was arranged like a nest of different-sized boxes, the entrance hall serving as a small receiving chamber off of which one entered the kitchen on the right and living room on the left. The kitchen was a dead-end room, leading nowhere, its two windows opening on the rear brick wall of the building opposite. Curtains on the windows, white nylon sheer; not quite lacecurtain Irish, the Lowerys, nor were they shanty, either. A door directly opposite the entrance door led to what Carella supposed was the bathroom Andrew Lowery had mentioned the night before. In the living room on the left of the entrance foyer, there was a three-piece suite — sofa and two large easy chairs — upholstered in a floral-patterned fabric. Television set against the far wall, framed picture of Jesus above it: one of those trick pictures where the eyes followed you all around the room. Television set was a color console, Carella noticed. On another wall, a picture of a farmer looking up at the sky, possibly hoping for rain.

Mrs. Lowery sat on the sofa under this picture and asked Carella if he’d care for something to drink. He wondered now if she’d been drinking before his arrival. He had not smelled whiskey on her breath, but she’d knocked back three fast ones in a row on the day of the funeral, and he suspected it did not take much to encourage her. She was, and he had not noticed this before, a woman who could be considered attractive, with her daughter’s dark-brown eyes and black hair, an abundance of hip and bosom, a rather sensuous mouth. Her eyes were red-rimmed; he guessed she’d been crying. He did not want to chat with her, the afternoon was getting on. But she had already poured herself a shot glass full of whiskey, and had put the bottle down on the coffee table in front of the sofa, and she urged Carella again to have a drink. When he refused, she downed her own drink with one quick toss and swiftly poured herself another.

“I can’t believe any of this,” she said. Her voice, he now realized, was whiskey-seared — the lady was a drinker, funerals or not. He glanced swiftly at her legs, and saw the black-and-blue marks on her shins, the habitual marks of a drunk who bangs into furniture. “Not any of it,” she said. “First that Andy could do something like this, and then that his sister would tell the police about it. I simply... It’s a nightmare. I woke up last night, I thought it had gone away. I sat up in bed, I thought, Dear God, it was all a bad dream, it’s gone away. But it was still there, I realized it was still there, my son had killed his own cousin, my daughter had seen him do it, she had seen him. Oh my God, it was still there.” Mrs. Lowery lifted the second drink to her lips, tilted the glass, and drained it. As she began talking again, she poured herself a third drink. “Can you have any idea how I feel?” she asked. “I loved that girl like my own daughter, I loved her. But how can I believe Andy did a thing like this? And yet I know Patricia doesn’t lie, she’s not a liar that girl, I know what it must have taken for her to go to the police. I love them all, do you see? I’m caught in this thing, I love them all. And one of them is dead, and the other one did it, and the third one saw him, oh my God...” She lifted the shot glass, drank half the whiskey in it, and then put it down on the tabletop. “May I talk openly with you?” she asked.

“Yes, certainly,” Carella said

“I know you’re here to gather evidence against Andy, I know that. I also know that the strongest evidence against him is Patricia’s identification. I know that, too. But... can you realize how difficult this... this other thing is to... to accept? The... the idea of the sex? That he... that he forced Muriel to... to...” Mrs. Lowery shook her head. “And then wanted his own sister to...” She shook her head again, violently this time, as though the motion would dislodge whatever filthy pictures she had conjured. “This is... my son,” she said. “I haven’t even begun to think of him as a man yet, he’s still a boy in my mind. And now I’m being asked to think of him not only as a man but as some sort of... of perverted... per... per—”

She suddenly put her hands over her face, and began weeping into them. Carella sat watching her, not knowing quite what to say. It was, after all, the same old story, wasn’t it? The quiet neighborhood boy setting fire to his dear old grandmother and lopping off his sister’s head with a meat cleaver. Always had a cheerful word for me, the next-door neighbor would say. Hard-working lad, the grocer who’d employed him would say. Bright and alert in class, never caused any problems, his teacher would say. Sang beautifully in choir, the minister would say. But also forced his cousin to commit sodomy, and then brutally stabbed her to death, and turned the same knife upon his sister. What could you say to a woman who had just discovered her only son was a monster?

He waited.

“I suppose you hear this all the time,” she said, as though reading his mind. “But I keep trying to remember, I keep looking for clues, anything that would indicate he was... was capable of this, could do this, do you know what I mean? You see, I never once suspected he... he was harboring... was... was... May I speak frankly?”

“Yes, please.”

“I wouldn’t have cared,” Mrs. Lowery said suddenly, and lifted the shot glass, and drained it. “I mean, what the hell difference does it make? So they were cousins, so what? Haven’t cousins fallen in love before, even married before? I’m not suggesting there was even the slightest... but even if there was, so what? Would that have been any worse than... than wanting her so desperately he... he had to, to force, to... to... to do what he finally did... to take her by force and kill her? What’s wrong with this world, Mr. Carella? I tell you, I swear on my eyes, I tell you I wouldn’t have cared what the two of them were doing, if only it hadn’t come to this. If only it hadn’t come to the knife.”

Carella said nothing.

“You’re thinking, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, What about the sister? He also tried to... he also made demands on the sister. Oh my God, I don’t know what to think any more. I wish I were dead. I wish the ceiling would fall in on me, I wish I would die, please, dear God, let me die, how can I possibly live through this?”

She began to weep again, and he watched her and still said nothing, and at last the tears were spent, and she rose and dried her eyes and said, “You wanted to see Muriel’s room.”

“Please,” Carella said.

She took the bottle from the table, carried it to the cabinet from which she’d taken it earlier, put it on a shelf, and then closed the cabinet door. “Andy’s room is just across the hall,” she said. “Did you want to see that, too?”

“I’m not permitted to,” Carella said.

“What’s to stop you?” she asked wearily.

“The law,” he said.

She turned to look at him. Her eyebrows went up a trifle. She seemed in that moment to be taking his measure anew. Then she turned away and went out into the corridor, and walked directly past the door opening into her son’s room. As Carella went past the room behind her, he saw a portion of a bed covered with a blue spread; a wingback chair; a maple dresser against the wall, a mirror over it; a maroon pennant on the wall, gold lettering spelling out HADLEY HS.

“My bedroom is on the other side of Andy’s,” Mrs. Lowery said. “The girls’ room is here at this end of the hall.” She opened a door and stepped aside to let him enter.

It was September on the street, but in that room it was April. Green shag rug and white lacquered dressers. Ruffled bedspreads in yellow and green, curtains running rampant with daisies. A full-length mirror in a white lacquered frame. A desk just under the windows, white Formica top, white legs, three drawers. On its top, a yellow lacquered tray for papers, and a lamp with a frosted white globe. Greens in subtly shifting shades, yellows that roamed the spectrum, and a constant white that unified the color scheme. Together they gave to the room the quick bold look of spring-time — or of youth.

“This side of the room is Patricia’s, here by the windows,” Mrs. Lowery said. “Everything on this side of the room is hers. The other side was Muriel’s. The girls shared a closet, it’s the walkin closet here by the door, the left-hand side of it was Muriel’s, the right-hand side is Patricia’s.” She hesitated, and then said, “Will you need me? I feel suddenly exhausted.”

“I won’t take too long,” Carella said.

“Mr. Carella?”

“Yes?”

“He couldn’t have done it.”

“Mrs. Lowery—”

“But she saw him, didn’t she?”

“Yes, Mrs. Lowery.”

“His own sister saw him.”

“Yes.”

“Still...” she said, and seemed to debate the rest silently — tiny shakes of her head, small shrugs, and finally a sigh of defeat. She turned and went out of the room, and Carella heard her shuffling to her own bedroom at the other end of the hall. A door opened and then closed. A key turned, a lock clicked shut.

There were two distinct personalities in this room. He had never seen Muriel Stark alive, had known her only as a corpse on the floor of a tenement hallway, the ceiling above her about to burst from a water leak that had swollen it to grotesque proportions. But she was here in this room as certainly as was Patricia Lowery, and the contrast between the two girls was as palpable as their possessions.

In Patricia Lowery, there seemed to be much of the child.

Full-color photographs of Robert Redford and Paul Newman covered the wall behind her bed, but at the same time — though surely she had outgrown them long ago — a collection of dolls sat like rag-and-plastic siblings on the shelves above and to either side of her dresser. The dresser top itself was neatly arranged with collections of shells, bottles, glass animals, scraps of brightly colored cloth, oddly shaped pieces of driftwood. She had stapled last year’s Christmas cards onto a strip of pink ribbon, and had hung this from the ceiling like a mobile; it twisted gently now in the faint breeze that came through the partially opened window. On another ribbon she had similarly stapled picture postcards, and these hung above the full-length mirror. The mirror was lined with photographs tucked into the lacquered white frame, pictures of girls mostly, probably classmates, one of Muriel making a face at the camera, another of her brother Andrew standing on his head and grinning.

In the desk drawers Carella found her stationery (pink with P. L. in the left-hand corner, in delicate script lettering) and an address book, and school notebooks, and an assorted collection of letters she’d been saving for years, some of them addressed to her in Bunk 11 at a camp called Bilvic in Arlington, Vermont. The postmark on the envelopes told Carella she’d been at the camp five years ago, when she was ten. The letters were all from her parents or her brother Andrew. And in those same drawers were compositions Patricia had written in the sixth grade (How to Train a Turtle was the title of one of them) and arithmetic tests from God knew how long ago (she was apparently very good in math — all of the tests were graded in the high nineties) and some poems he guessed were recent, judging from the greater sophistication of the handwriting. A look at the paperback novels on one of the shelves told him that her taste in fiction ran to Gothics, or books about nurses, or in one instance (an obvious regression), a book about a little girl and her horse. The magazines she read were Seventeen and Mad. The calendar on her side of the room was a Charlie Brown calendar, and her piggy bank was a replica of Snoopy. Her records were rock. Hard rock, acid rock, schlock rock — but strictly rock. The clothes in her dresser drawers and on her side of the closet reflected a taste that was somewhat uncertain, somewhat experimental, sometimes babyish, sometimes outrageously sexy; her clothes, in short, were the clothes of a fifteen-year-old moving uneasily toward womanhood.

Muriel Stark, at seventeen, seemed to have got there already.

Where Patricia still clung to a childhood that was slipping away — the various collections, the correspondence, the school compositions and exams, even last year’s Christmas cards — Muriel already seemed to have thought of herself as a woman. The lack of any souvenirs may have been due to the fact that she’d lost her parents in an automobile crash two years ago and had come to live in someone else’s house; presumably, you didn’t carry a trunkful of seashells with you when you were accepting someone’s hospitality. But in contrast to Patricia’s dresser top, Muriel’s was strictly utilitarian, a place for her to put her perfumes and cosmetics, her nail polishes and her jewelry. There was a good light on the dresser, and a mirror over it, and Carella assumed this was where she applied her makeup after having washed in the hall bathroom. A floral-design paperweight was on the far end of the dresser, and it rested on a sheaf of articles clipped from various magazines, each of them describing various career possibilities for women. She seemed particularly interested in becoming an airline stewardess. In addition to several articles on flying, there were two brochures from two different airlines, explaining their requirements, training programs, salaries, and opportunities. The books on her shelves ran mostly to nonfiction, and reflected an interest in a wide variety of subjects. The magazines she read were Harper’s Bazaar and Cosmopolitan, though on the top shelf of her side of the closet Carella found a copy of Penthouse — presumably an excursion into the forbidden and not part of her normal reading diet. The clothes on her side of the closet clearly expressed an already developed, sophisticated taste. Her record collection (she presumably had shared the record player with her cousin) consisted only of LPs. There were some albums by rock groups, but she seemed to have outgrown these and was moving more into original Broadway show albums and albums by female vocalists — judging from the preponderance of such material on her shelf. One album seemed to have been played countless times; the sleeve was ragged and the disc inside was worn and scratched. This was Carly Simon’s No Secrets.

In the top drawer of the dresser, buried under a pile of nylon bikini panties, Carella found a dispenser for birth-control pills. There were twenty-eight slots in the dispenser. The outside ring showed Carella that the last pill Muriel had removed was from the slot marked SAT. She had been killed on September 6, and September 6 had been a Saturday. There was one pill left in the dispenser.

In the hallway outside, Carella heard footsteps.

The door to the room next door — Andrew’s room — clicked shut. He listened. He could hear the squeak of the bedsprings in the next room as someone’s weight collapsed onto the bed. In a little while he heard someone weeping, the sound clearly penetrating the thin wall that separated the two rooms. He went into the corridor outside, and knocked on Andrew’s door.

“Mrs. Lowery?” he said.

“Yes?”

“I’ll be going now,” he said.

“All right, fine,” she said.

“Mrs. Lowery?”

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Lowery, I wouldn’t drink any more this afternoon, if I were you. It’s not going to help, Mrs. Lowery.” He listened. “Mrs. Lowery?”

“Yes?”

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes,” she said. “I heard you.”

In the lobby of the building downstairs, Carella took out his notebook and was leafing through the pages when he heard an argument at curbside. A uniformed cop was yelling to the superintendent about having put out his garbage cans too early. The super maintained that the garbage trucks would be here at 6:30 the next morning, and unless he chose to get up at the crack of dawn, he had to put them out the night before. Yes, the patrolman agreed, but this isn’t the night before, this is still the afternoon before, this is still only 2:30 the afternoon before. And you’ve got these dozens of garbage cans lined up at the curb here, stinking up the neighborhood to high heaven, and that’s a violation sure as I’m standing here. The super explained that he’d been doing it this way for years now, rolling the garbage cans up from the basement at 2:30, 3:00, and he’d never had any complaints from the cop who used to have this beat. And he sure as hell hoped nobody was looking for a payoff because he wasn’t the type of man to go paying off anybody who was supposed to be doing a damn job for the city. The uniformed cop asked the super if he was insinuating that somebody was on the take, and the super said all he knew was that he was always allowed to roll his garbage cans out at 2:30, 3:00, and now all of a sudden it was a big violation. The cop told him it wasn’t such a big violation, it was in fact a small violation, but it was a violation nonetheless unless he chose to wheel those cans right back down to the basement again, where they wouldn’t stink up the whole neighborhood to high heaven. The super spit on the sidewalk, two inches in front of the cop’s polished black shoes, and then he spit again and said that was probably a violation, too. But he rolled the cans brimming with refuse back down the ramp into the basement. In the morning the Department of Sanitation would find the cans at the curb again, ready to be emptied into the big clanging garbage truck and driven to an area on the Riverhead shore, near the Cos Corner Bridge, where the garbage would be dumped for land fill. But in the meantime, it would not stink up the whole neighborhood to high heaven.

According to Carella’s notes, Muriel Stark had worked as a bookkeeper at the Mercantile Trust on Nestor and Sixth. Carella looked at his watch now. It was indeed a little past 2:30. He’d have to hurry if he wanted to get to the bank before closing.