Doll

Chapter 1

The child Anna sat on the floor close to the wall and played with her doll, talking to it, listening. She could hear the voices raised in anger coming from her mother’s bedroom through the thin separating wall, but she busied herself with the doll and tried not to be frightened. The man in her mother’s bedroom was shouting now. She tried not to hear what he was saying. She brought the doll close to her face and kissed its plastic cheek, and then talked to it again, and listened.

In the bedroom next door, her mother was being murdered.

Her mother was called Tinka, a chic and lacquered label concocted by blending her given name, Tina, with her middle name, Karin. Tinka was normally a beautiful woman, no question about it. She’d have been a beautiful woman even if her name was Beulah. Or Bertha. Or perhaps even Brunhilde. The Tinka tag only enhanced her natural good looks, adding an essential gloss, a necessary polish, an air of mystery and adventure.

Tinka Sachs was a fashion model.

She was, no question about it, a very beautiful woman. She possessed a finely sculptured face that was perfectly suited to the demands of her profession, a wide forehead, high pronounced cheekbones, a generous mouth, a patrician nose, slanted green eyes flecked with chips of amber; oh, she was normally a beauty, no question about it. Her body was a model’s body, lithe and loose and gently angled, with long slender legs, narrow hips, and a tiny bosom. She walked with a model’s insinuating glide, pelvis tilted, crotch cleaving the air, head erect. She laughed with a model’s merry shower of musical syllables, painted lips drawing back over capped teeth, amber eyes glowing. She sat with a model’s carelessly draped ease, posing even in her own living room, invariably choosing the wall or sofa that best offset her clothes, or her long blonde hair, or her mysterious green eyes flecked with chips of amber; oh, she was normally a beauty.

She was not so beautiful at the moment.

She was not so beautiful because the man who followed her around the room shouting obscenities at her, the man who stalked her from wall to wall and boxed her into the narrow passage circumscribed by the king-sized bed and the marble-topped dresser opposite, the man who closed in on her oblivious to her murmuring, her pleading, her sobbing, the man was grasping a kitchen knife with which he had been slashing her repeatedly for the past three minutes.

The obscenities spilled from the man’s mouth in a steady unbroken torrent, the anger having reached a pitch that was unvaried now, neither rising nor falling in volume or intensity. The knife blade swung in a short, tight arc, back and forth, its rhythm as unvaried as that of the words that poured from the man’s mouth. Obscenities and blade, like partners in an evil copulation, moved together in perfect rhythm and pitch, enveloping Tinka in alternating splashes of blood and spittle. She kept murmuring the man’s name pleadingly, again and again, as the blade ripped into her flesh. But the glittering arc was relentless. The razor-sharp blade, the monotonous flow of obscenities, inexorably forced her bleeding and torn into the far comer of the room, where the back of her head collided with an original Chagall, tilting it slightly askew, the knife moving in again in its brief terrifying arc, the blade slicing parallel bleeding ditches across her small breasts and moving lower across the flat abdomen, her peignoir tearing again with a clinging silky blood-sotted sound as the knife blade plunged deeper with each step closer he took. She said his name once more, she shouted his name, and then she murmured the word ‘Please’, and then she fell back against the wall again, knocking the Chagall from its hook so that a riot of framed color dropped heavily over her shoulder, falling in a lopsided angle past the long blonde hair, and the open red gashes across her throat and naked chest, the tattered blue peignoir, the natural brown of her exposed pubic hair, the blue satin slippers. She fell gasping for breath, spitting blood, headlong over the painting, her forehead colliding with the wide oaken frame, her blonde hair covering the Chagall reds and yellows and violets with a fine misty golden haze, the knife slash across her throat pouring blood onto the canvas, setting her hair afloat in a pool of red that finally overspilled the oaken frame and ran onto the carpet.

Next door, the child Anna clung fiercely to her doll.

She said a reassuring word to it, and then listened in terror as she heard footfalls in the hall outside her closed bedroom door. She kept listening breathlessly until she heard the front door to the apartment open and then close again.

She was still sitting in the bedroom, clutching her doll, when the superintendent came up the next morning to change a faucet washer Mrs Sachs had complained about the day before.

April is the fourth month of the year.

It is important to know that — if you are a cop, you can sometimes get a little confused.

More often than not, your confusion will be compounded of one pan exhaustion, one part tedium, and one part disgust. The exhaustion is an ever-present condition and one to which you have become slowly accustomed over the years. You know that the department does not recognize Saturdays, Sundays, or legal holidays, and so you are even prepared to work on Christmas morning if you have to, especially if someone intent on committing mischief is inconsiderate enough to plan it for that day — witness General George Washington and the unsuspecting Hessians, those drunks. You know that a detective’s work schedule does not revolve around a fixed day, and so you have learned to adjust to your odd waking hours and your shorter sleeping time, but you have never been able to adjust to the nagging feeling of exhaustion that is the result of too much crime and too few hours, too few men to pit against it. You are sometimes a drag at home with your wife and children, but that is only because you are tired, boy what a life, all work and no play, wow.

The tedium is another thing again, but it also helps to generate confusion. Crime is the most exciting sport in the world, right? Sure, ask anybody. Then how come it can be so boring when you’re a working cop who is typing reports in triplicate and legging it all over the city talking to old ladies in flowered house dresses in apartments smelling of death? How can the routine of detection become something as prescribed as the ritual of a bullfight, never changing, so that even a gun duel in a nighttime alley can assume familiar dimensions and be regarded with the same feeling of ennui that accompanies a routine request to the B.C.I.? The boredom is confusing as hell. It clasps hands with the exhaustion and makes you wonder whether this is January or Friday.

The disgust comes into it only if you are a human being. Some cops aren’t. But if you are a human being, you are sometimes appalled by what your fellow human beings are capable of doing. You can understand lying because you practice it in a watered-down form as a daily method of smoothing the way, helping the machinery of mankind to function more easily without getting fouled by too much truth-stuff. You can understand stealing because when you were a kid you sometimes swiped pencils from the public school supply closet, and once a toy airplane from the five and ten. You can even understand murder because there is a dark and secret place in your own heart where you have hated deeply enough to kill. You can understand all these things, but you are nonetheless disgusted when they are piled upon you in profusion, when you are constantly confronted with liars, thieves and slaughterers, when all human decency seems in a state of suspension for the eight or twelve or thirty-six hours you are in the squadroom or out answering a squeal. Perhaps you could accept an occasional corpse — death is only a part of life, isn’t it? It is corpse heaped upon corpse that leads to disgust and further leads to confusion. If you can no longer tell one corpse from another, if you can no longer distinguish one open bleeding head from the next, then how is April any different from October?

It was April.

The tom and lovely woman lay in profile across the bloody face of the Chagall painting. The lab technicians were dusting for latent prints, vacuuming for hairs and traces of fiber, carefully wrapping for transportation the knife found in the corridor just outside the bedroom door, the dead girl’s pocket book, which seemed to contain everything but money.

Detective Steve Carella made his notes and then walked out of the room and down the hall to where the little girl sat in a very big chair, her feet not touching the floor, her doll sleeping across her lap. The little girl’s name was Anna Sachs — one of the patrolmen had told him that the moment Carella arrived. The doll seemed almost as big as she did.

‘Hello,’ he said to her, and felt the old confusion once again, the exhaustion because he had not been home since Thursday morning, the tedium because he was embarking on another round of routine questioning, and the disgust because the person he was about to question was only a little girl and her mother was dead and mutilated in the room next door. He tried to smile. He was not very good at it. The little girl said nothing. She looked up at him out of very big eyes. Her lashes were long and brown, her mouth drawn in stoic silence beneath a nose she had inherited from her mother. Unblinkingly, she watched him. Unblinkingly, she said nothing.

‘Your name is Anna, isn’t it?’ Carella said.

The child nodded.

‘Do you know what my name is?’

‘No.’

‘Steve.’

The child nodded again.

‘I have a little girl about your age,’ Carella said. ‘She’s a twin. How old are you, Anna?’

‘Five.’

‘That’s just how old my daughter is.’

‘Mmm,’ Anna said. She paused a moment, and then asked, ‘Is Mommy killed?’

‘Yes,’ Carella said. ‘Yes, honey, she is.’

‘I was afraid to go in and look.’

‘It’s better you didn’t.’

‘She got killed last night, didn’t she?’ Anna asked.

‘Yes.’

There was a silence in the room. Outside, Carella could hear the muted sounds of a conversation between the police photographer and the m.e. An April fly buzzed against the bedroom window. He looked into the child’s upturned face.

‘Were you here last night?’ he asked.

‘Um-huh.’

‘Where?’

‘Here. Right here in my room.’ She stroked the doll’s cheek, and then looked up at Carella and asked, ‘What’s a twin?’

‘When two babies are born at the same time.’

‘Oh.’

She continued looking up at him, her eyes tearless, wide, and certain in the small white face. At last she said, ‘The man did it.’

‘What man?’ Carella asked.

‘The one who was with her.’

‘Who?’

‘Mommy. The man who was with her in her room.’

‘Who was the man?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you see him?’

‘No. I was here playing with Chatterbox when he came in.’

‘Is Chatterbox a friend of yours?’

‘Chatterbox is my dolly,’ the child said, and she held up the doll and giggled, and Carella wanted to scoop her into his arms, hold her close, tell her there was no such thing as sharpened steel and sudden death.

‘When was this, honey?’ he asked. ‘Do you know what time it was?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, and shrugged. ‘I only know how to tell twelve o’clock and seven o’clock, that’s all.’

‘Well… was it dark?’

‘Yes, it was after supper.’

‘This man came in after supper, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did your mother know this man?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Anna said. ‘She was laughing and everything when he first came in.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘I don’t know.’ Anna shrugged again. ‘I was here playing.’

There was another silence.

The first tears welled into her eyes suddenly, leaving the rest of the face untouched; there was no trembling of lip, no crumbling of features, the tears simply overspilled her eyes and ran down her cheeks. She sat as still as a stone, crying soundlessly while Carella stood before her helplessly, a hulking man who suddenly felt weak and ineffective before this silent torrent of grief.

He gave her his handkerchief.

She took it wordlessly and blew her nose, but she did not dry her eyes. Then she handed it back to him and said, Thank you,’ with the tears still running down her face endlessly, sitting stunned with her small hands folded over the doll’s chest.

‘He was hitting her,’ she said. ‘I could hear her crying, but I was afraid to go in. So I… I made believe I didn’t hear. And then… then I really didn’t hear. I just kept talking with Chatterbox, that was all. That way I couldn’t hear what he was doing to her in the other room.’

‘All right, honey,’ Carella said. He motioned to the patrolman standing in the doorway. When the patrolman joined him, he whispered, ‘Is her father around? Has he been notified?’

‘Gee, I don’t know,’ the patrolman said. He turned and shouted, ‘Anybody know if the husband’s been contacted?’

A Homicide cop standing with one of the lab technicians looked up from his notebook and said, ‘He’s in Arizona. They been divorced for three years now.’

Lieutenant Peter Byrnes was normally a patient and understanding man, but there were times lately when Bert Kling gave him a severe pain in the ass. And whereas Byrnes, being patient and understanding, could appreciate the reasons for Kling’s behavior, this in no way made Kling any nicer to have around the office. The way Byrnes figured it, psychology was certainly an important factor in police work because it helped you to recognize that there were no longer any villains in the world, there were only disturbed people. Psychology substituted understanding for condemnation. It was a very nice tool to possess, psychology was, until a cheap thief kicked you in the groin one night. It then become somewhat difficult to imagine the thief as a put-upon soul who’d had a shabby childhood. In much the same way, though Byrnes completely understood the trauma that was responsible for Kling’s current behavior, he was finding it more and more difficult to accept Kling as anything but a cop who was going to hell with himself.

‘I want to transfer him out,’ he told Carella that morning.

‘Why?’

‘Because he’s disrupting the whole damn squadroom, that’s why,’ Byrnes said. He did not enjoy discussing this, nor would he normally have asked for consultation on any firm decision he had made. His decision, however, was anything but final, that was the damn thing about it. He liked Kling, and yet he no longer liked him. He thought he could be a good cop, but he was turning into a bad one. ‘I’ve got enough bad cops around here,’ he said aloud.

‘Bert isn’t a bad cop,’ Carella said. He stood before Byrnes’s cluttered desk in the comer office and listened to the sounds of early spring on the street outside the building, and he thought of the five-year-old girl named Anna Sachs who had taken his handkerchief while the tears streamed down her face.

‘He’s a surly shit,’ Byrnes said. ‘Okay, I know what happened to him, but people have died before, Steve, people have been killed before. And if you’re a man you grow up to it, you don’t act as if everybody’s responsible for it. We didn’t have anything to do with his girl friend’s death, that’s the plain and simple truth, and I personally am sick and tired of being blamed for it.’

‘He’s not blaming you for it, Pete. He’s not blaming any of us.’

‘He’s blaming the world, and that’s worse. This morning, he had a big argument with Meyer just because Meyer picked up the phone on his desk. I mean, the goddamn phone was ringing, so instead of crossing the room to his own desk, Meyer picked up the closest phone, which was on Kling’s desk, so Kling starts a row. Now you can’t have that kind of attitude in a squadroom where men are working together, you can’t have it, Steve. I’m going to ask for his transfer.’

‘That’d be the worst thing that could happen to him.’

‘It’d be the best thing for the squad.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Nobody’s asking your advice,’ Byrnes said flatly.

‘Then why the hell did you call me in here?’

‘You see what I mean?’ Byrnes said. He rose from his desk abruptly and began pacing the floor near the meshed-grill windows. He was a compact man and he moved with an economy that belied the enormous energy in his powerful body. Short for a detective, muscular, with a bullet-shaped head and small blue eyes set in a face seamed with wrinkles, he paced briskly behind his desk and shouted, ‘You see the trouble he’s causing? Even you and I can’t sit down and have a sensible discussion about him without starting to yell. That’s just what I mean, that’s just why I want him out of here.’

‘You don’t throw away a good watch because it’s running a little slow,’ Carella said.

‘Don’t give me any goddamn similes,’ Byrnes said. ‘I’m running a squadroom here, not a clock shop.’

‘Metaphors,’ Carella corrected.

‘Whatever, ’ Byrnes said, ‘I’m going to call the Chief tomorrow and ask him to transfer Kling out. That’s it.’

‘Where?’

‘What do you mean where? What do I care where? Out of here, that’s all.’

‘But where? To another squadroom with a bunch of strange guys, so he can get on their nerves even more than he does ours? So he can—’

‘Oh, so you admit it.’

‘That Bert gets on my nerves? Sure, he does.’

‘And the situation isn’t improving, Steve, you know that too. It gets worse every day. Look, what the hell am I wasting my breath for? He goes, and that’s it.’ Byrnes gave a brief emphatic nod, and then sat heavily in his chair again, glaring up at Carella with an almost childish challenge on his face.

Carella sighed. He had been on duty for close to fifty hours now, and he was tired. He had checked in at eight-forty-five Thursday morning, and been out all that day gathering information for the backlog of cases that had been piling up all through the month of March. He had caught six hours’ sleep on a cot in the locker room that night, and then been called out at seven on Friday morning by the fire department, who suspected arson in a three-alarm blaze they’d answered on the South Side. He had come back to the squadroom at noon to find four telephone messages on his desk. By the time he had returned all the calls — one was from an assistant m.e. who took a full hour to explain the toxicological analysis of a poison they had found in the stomach contents of a beagle, the seventh such dog similarly poisoned in the past week — the clock on the wall read one-thirty. Carella sent down for a pastrami on rye, a container of milk, and a side of French fries. Before the order arrived, he had to leave the squadroom to answer a burglary squeal on North Eleventh. He did not come back until five-thirty, at which time he turned the phone over to a complaining Kling and went down to the locker room to try to sleep again. At eleven o’clock Friday night, the entire squad, working in flying wedges of three detectives to a team, culminated a two-month period of surveillance by raiding twenty-six known numbers banks in the area, a sanitation project that was not finished until five on Saturday morning. At eight-thirty a.m., Carella answered the Sachs squeal and questioned a crying little girl. It was now ten-thirty a.m., and he was tired, and he wanted to go home, and he didn’t want to argue in favor of a man who had become everything the lieutenant said he was, he was just too damn weary. But earlier this morning he had looked down at the body of a woman he had not known at all, had seen her ripped and lacerated flesh, and had felt a pain bordering on nausea. Now — weary, bedraggled, unwilling to argue — he could remember the mutilated beauty of Tinka Sachs, and he felt something of what Bert Kling must have known in that Culver Avenue bookshop not four years ago when he’d held the bullet-torn body of Claire Townsend in his arms.

‘Let him work with me,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘On the Sachs case. I’ve been teaming with Meyer lately. Give me Bert instead.’

‘What’s the matter, don’t you like Meyer?’

‘I love Meyer, I’m tired, I want to go home to bed, will you please let me have Bert on this case?’

‘What’ll that accomplish?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I don’t approve of shock therapy,’ Byrnes said. ‘This Sachs woman was brutally murdered. All you’ll do is remind Bert—’

‘Therapy, my ass,’ Carella said. ‘I want to be with him, I want to talk to him, I want to let him know he’s still got some people on this goddamn squad who think he’s a decent human being worth saving. Now, Pete, I really am very very tired and I don’t want to argue this any further, I mean it. If you want to send Bert to another squad, that’s your business, you’re the boss here, I’m not going to argue with you, that’s all. I mean it. Now just make up your mind, okay?’

Take him,’ Byrnes said.

‘Thank you,’ Carella answered. He went to the door. ‘Good night,’ he said, and walked out.