Heat

9

Manfred Leider was a police psychologist who had once helped Carella while he was investigating the murders of several blind victims. He was a man in his fifties, sporting a gray beard that he thought made him look like a psychiatrist. In this state a psychiatrist had to go through four years of college, four years of medical school, one year of internship, three years of residency, and another two years of clinical practice before taking the written and oral examinations he had to pass for a license to practice. That was why psychiatrists charged a minimum of fifty dollars an hour for their services. Leider was only a psychologist. That was why he was working for the Police Department at an annual salary of $36,400.

When Carella called him early Thursday morning, he was in with a patient, a patrolman who’d suddenly developed conversion hysteria symptoms about drawing and firing his pistol should the need arise. You did not have to be a psychiatrist or even a psychologist to know what a pistol symbolized. Leider’s secretary told Carella that the doctor (he was a doctor, if only a lowly PhD) would call him back when he was free. He returned the call at a quarter past eleven.

“Dr. Leider here,” he said.

“Hello,” Carella said, “how are you? I don’t know if you remember me, this is Detective Carella at the 87th Precinct. We had a talk not too long ago about—”

“Yes, involving a screen memory, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, the nightmares and the—”

“Yes, I remember. How’d that one work out?”

“Well, we got the guy.”

“Good,” Leider said, “glad to have been of help.”

“I’ve got a very simple question this time,” Carella asked.

“Mm,” Leider said. He was used to very simple questions that required marathon explorations.

“I’ve got an apparent suicide victim, overdose of Seconal. The man’s former wife and his brother tell me he was averse to taking medication of any kind.”

“Phobic about it?”

“Had a reaction to penicillin when he was a teenager, wouldn’t go near even an aspirin since.”

“I would say that might be termed phobic.”

“The question: Would such a person have voluntarily swallowed twenty-nine Seconal capsules?”

“Mm,” Leider said.

Carella waited.

“The problem with asking a psychologist such a question,” Leider said at last, “is that I can think of circumstances in which he might have, yes.”

“What circumstances?”

“Well, there are two ways of dealing with a phobia,” Leider said. “The first way is to avoid whatever it is that’s causing the fear. If you’re phobic about open spaces, for example, you stay in your apartment, you simply refuse to go outside, where the phobia will cause extreme anxiety.”

“And the second way?”

“You confront the fear, you rush at it headlong. Many war heroes, for example, were terrified of battle. They conquered their fear, well, that’s too strong a word, ‘conquered.’ They dealt with it by volunteering for dangerous missions, which for them proved more effective in dealing with the phobia than simply sitting still and shaking with terror every time a grenade exploded. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I think so.”

“There’s what we call phobic avoidance, and then there’s the reverse mechanism, counterphobic confrontation. Rushing into the fear itself. When I was in private practice, oh, this was many years ago, I treated an airline pilot who’d become a flier because he was afraid of heights. That was his way of overcoming the phobia.”

“That’s very reassuring,” Carella said.

“Yes, well,” Leider said.

“I mean, for airline passengers,” Carella said.

“Yes,” Leider said, and Carella realized he was dealing with a totally humorless human being. “So,” Leider said, getting immediately back to the point, “your man could have attempted to overcome his phobia to medication by deliberately ingesting more of the barbiturate than was needed as a soporific. When we consider what he was about to do—”

“About to do?”

“You did say this was an apparent suicide?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, the man was about to kill himself—”

“Yes.”

“—which may have been his way of finally submitting to the phobia, rushing into its embrace, so to speak, surrendering to the phobia and to death at the same time. His final solution, so to speak.”

“I see,” Carella said.

“I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you,” Leider said.

“No, no, I’ve got to consider all the—”

“I understand,” Leider said.

But Carella was disappointed.

He had hoped for a conclusive professional opinion unlike the one he’d received from James Brolin only yesterday: I have no way of answering that without knowing the case history of the person in question. Perhaps psychologists were wont to venture where psychiatrists feared to tread, but couldn’t Leider just as easily have said “No, no way. This man definitely would not have taken pills of any kind to commit suicide”? It would have been so easy then. Oh, so very easy. All Carella would have had to do then was find a murderer. There did not seem to be many murderers lurking in the bushes these days.

He knew you couldn’t run a case by intuition alone. He’d known too damn many cops who — obsessively following a wrong lead because they’d felt something about a case — were left holding an empty bag. Maybe it was only intuition that caused him to discount the fragile gallery owner and the former Israeli captain as suspects in a murder that may or may not have been committed, maybe he should have put a team of men on them, have them followed day and night now that the barn door was open and the horse was loose, maybe he was giving up on them too soon. But whereas in this line of work you didn’t always know who was lying, you always knew who was telling the truth. The truth had a ring like an ax hitting an oak. He felt intuitively — yes, felt, yes, intuitively — that both Louis Kern and Jessica Herzog had told him the complete and unblemished truth, and he thought it would be a waste of precious time to hassle them any further. Nonetheless, and because he wanted to make certain he’d touched all the bases, he made the obligatory call to Rollie Chabrier in the DA’s office.

Chabrier was used to all sorts of odd calls from the detectives of the Eight-Seven. Today, with the temperature outside stubbornly refusing to budge from the ninety-nine-degree mark, the air conditioning in the Criminal Courts Building had decided to quit, and Chabrier was sitting behind his desk in his shirtsleeves when the telephone rang. The moment Carella identified himself, he expected the worst. Bad things always came in threes: the heat, the busted air conditioning, and now a call from one of the dicks up there on Grover Park.

“What can I do for you, Steve?” he asked warily.

“I’m investigating a suspicious death,” Carella said, “and I’d like some information.”

“This is a homicide?” Chabrier asked.

“An apparent suicide.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But there’s a two-million-dollar will involved, and I want to know something about the laws of inheritance in this state.”

“Like what?”

“Like if I kill a guy because I’m going to inherit two million bucks from him, do I get the money anyway?”

“There are no statutes regarding such instances,” Chabrier said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means the law relies solely on judicial decision. Historically, anyone who slays a decedent has been barred from taking under the will or intestacy of the person slain.”

“Decedent means—”

“Dead man.”

“And taking under the will?”

“Inheriting. You know what intestacy means, don’t you?”

“Yes. Dying without a will.”

“Right. So to answer your question, if you decided to kill me because you know I’m leaving you a whole barrel of money, and if later it’s proved that you did indeed kill me, you wouldn’t stand a chance of inheriting.”

“Okay,” Carella said.

“Do you need chapter and verse on this? Try Riggs versus Palmer, Citation 115—”

“No, that’s okay,” Carella said. “Thanks a lot.”

He put the phone back on the cradle. It rang while his hand was still on the receiver, startling him. He picked it up again.

“Carella,” he said.

“This is Dorfsman, at Ballistics,” the voice said. “Is Kling there?”

“He’s out just now,” Carella said.

“Well, you can save me another call if you’ll take this down and pass it on to him,” Dorfsman said. “I promised I’d get back to him by noon.”

“What’s it on?” Carella asked.

“A bullet he brought down here this morning.”

“Fast turnaround.”

“Priorities,” Dorfsman said. “This is an attempted murder. You got a pencil?”

“Go,” Carella said.

“Nice easy one this time. Tell him it’s a Remington .44-caliber Magnum, soft point. I won’t bore you — that’s a pun, Carella — with all the sordid details regarding lands, twist, groove diameter, and so on, but it’s my learned opinion that the slug was fired from a Ruger .44-caliber Magnum Blackhawk. If you want to dress it up a little, you can tell Kling the average velocity of such a bullet is something like seventeen hundred feet, with a resulting paper energy of almost fourteen hundred foot-pounds. That’s enough to stop a grizzly dead in his tracks.”

“I’ll tell him. Listen, can you transfer me to Grossman’s office?”

“He’s still in court,” Dorfsman said.

“Then how about Owenby?”

“Just a second.”

There was a clicking on the line. As Carella waited for the call to be transferred, he tried to recall any recent attempted murder Kling was working. As far as he knew—

“Owenby.”

“Hello,” Carella said, “how’s my report coming along?”

“Should be on the captain’s desk by the end of the day.”

“So when will he get to it?”

“He’s in court, I don’t know when he’ll be back. He’s supposed to be finished over there today.”

“Will he see the report today?”

“If he gets to it.”

“Why don’t you send me a copy at the same time?”

“Against regs,” Owenby said.

“Then tell me what’s in it, will you?”

“I can’t do that. We’ve had too many foul-ups on verbal—”

“Okay, I’ll come down there to look at it.”

“It isn’t typed yet. I told you it’d be on his desk the end of the day. Why don’t you call him around four, four-thirty?”

“Thanks a lot,” Carella said, and hung up.

He had deliberately chosen Ah Wong’s downtown on Boone Street for three reasons: first, Augusta had told him she’d be working that morning at Tru-Vue, a photography studio close to the restaurant; second, it was here that she was supposed to have been last Saturday night, and when he baited his trap he wanted her to remember, if only unconsciously, that she was a woman involved in an affair, a woman searching for opportunities to deceive; and, lastly, the restaurant was close to the various courthouses downtown, where he hoped to go for his search warrant the moment he got Dorfsman’s promised quick report on the bullet.

They met at a little after noon.

She looked so radiantly beautiful that he almost forgot his resolve.

She complained about having to work all morning under the hot lights, and he told her all about what a hard day it had been in court all morning, where’d he’d been testifying on a burglary arrest he’d made two months back; he did not mention that he had gone to the lab first, to drop off the bullet that had been fired at him the night before. Gingerly, he approached the trap he had carefully constructed.

“Damn thing is,” he said, “I’ve got Night Watch again tonight.”

Every cop on the squad drew Night Watch once a month, for two nights running, the first night from 1600 to 0100, the second from 0100 to 0900, followed by two days off. Augusta knew this. She also knew that he’d drawn the duty not two weeks ago.

“How come?” she asked.

“Parker’s sick,” he said.

He had deliberately chosen Parker because he was one of the few cops they did not see socially; he did not want to risk using Meyer or Brown or any of the other cops Augusta knew; a call from a wife or a girlfriend could blow the whole scheme.

“He had the sixteen-hundred yesterday,” Kling said, “and came down with a cold. I think he’s faking, but who can tell with Parker? Anyway, Pete asked me to sub for him tonight.”

“So what does that mean?”

“One to nine in the morning.”

Augusta said nothing. He thought he noticed her chopsticks hesitating on the way to her mouth. Her eyes were lowered, she kept looking at her plate.

“A dozen guys from squads all over town,” Kling said. “You know how it works.”

“So where will you be?” she asked.

“At Headquarters. The office they let us use there, up on the third floor, in case you need to reach me,” he said, and was immediately sorry. He did not want her calling Headquarters to check on him. “But we’ll be out on the street most of the time,” he added.

“I thought we were going to a movie tonight,” Augusta said.

“Yeah, well. What can you do?”

“Actually, we could still go, couldn’t we? If you don’t have to be downtown till one?”

“I’ll be in the squadroom till then, hon,” he said. “Paperwork on this suicide we’re working.”

“The Seconal case,” she said, and nodded.

“That’s the one. Only nice thing about pulling Parker’s duty is it’s air-conditioned downtown.”

“Well, that’s a plus, I suppose,” Augusta said, and hesitated. “Maybe I’ll go to the movies alone, would you mind that?”

“Why would I?” he said.

“Well, after what that twerp Monica told you...”

“I’ve forgotten all about that,” Kling said.

“She’ll be wearing a wig next time we meet,” Augusta said. “Pull out all her hair, that bitch.”

“Don’t do anything I’d have to arrest you for,” Kling said, and forced a smile.

“I still can’t get over her, I mean it.”

“She was drunk,” Kling said.

“Even so...”

“Why don’t you put it out of your mind?” he said, and covered her hand with his own. “I have.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Well, good,” she said, and smiled.

“What time do you have to be back up there?” he asked.

Augusta looked at her watch. “I still have a few minutes,” she said. “So will we be going out to dinner tonight, or what?”

“I planned on catching a sandwich in the squadroom.”

Augusta pulled a face. “Great,” she said. “That means I won’t be seeing you till nine tomorrow morning.”

“Nine-thirty, by the time I get uptown.”

“Terrific. My first sitting’s at nine-thirty.”

“Honey, I didn’t ask Parker to get sick. If he really is sick.”

“It’s because you’re the youngest guy on the squad...”

“No, Tack Fujiwara is.”

“...that you get all the shit jobs.”

“Honey, that’s not the way it works.”

She looked at her watch again. “I’ve got to run,” she said. “Before they start screaming up there.” She pushed back her chair, came around to where he was sitting, kissed him on the cheek, and said, “Be careful tonight, okay?”

“You, too,” he said.

“I’ll be home with the door locked,” she said “you won’t have to worry.”

“I mean, on the way home from the movies.”

“I might not even go. I’ll see what’s on television. Call me when you get home tomorrow morning, okay?” she said. “I’ll be at Tru-Vue again, the number’s in our book.”

“I will.”

“I’ll be there at nine-thirty sharp.”

“Okay.”

“’Bye, darling,” she said, and kissed him again on the cheek, and then walked swiftly to the front door, her shoulder bag swinging, and turned at the door to throw a kiss to him before she went out. He sat at the table for several moments longer, and then paid the check and went to the telephone booth near the doors to the kitchen. He dialed the squadroom number directly, bypassing the muster desk. Carella picked up on the third ring.

“I was just going down to lunch,” he said. “Where are you?”

“Downtown here,” Kling said. “I just got out of court. Did I get a call from Dorfsman at Ballistics?”

“Yeah, he said it was a Remington .44 Magnum. Which case...?”

“Did he say what kind of gun?”

“A Ruger Blackhawk.”

“Okay, thanks,” Kling said, “I’ll see you later,” and hung up before Carella could ask him anything more.

For the first time in his capacity as a police officer sworn to uphold the laws of the city, state, and nation, Kling lied on an official application. Moreover, he lied both in writing and later orally to a supreme court magistrate. Kling’s affidavit read:

The judge to whom Kling presented his signed affidavit read it over carefully, and then looked up over the rims of his eyeglasses.

“What were you doing all the way down there, son?” he asked.

“Your Honor?”

“Long way from the 87th, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes, Your Honor. I was off-duty. Just coming from a restaurant when I heard the shooting.”

“Did you see the perpetrator?”

“No, Your Honor.”

“Then you only have the victim’s word that a murder attempt was made.”

“I heard the shots, Your Honor, and I recovered a spent bullet from the pavement, which would seem conclusive evidence that a pistol had been fired.”

“But not necessarily in a murder attempt.”

“No, Your Honor, not necessarily. The victim, however, has described it as such.”

“As a murder attempt?”

“Yes, Your Honor. The gun was fired at him point-blank.”

“And you believe the gun used in that attempted murder might be in this apartment you want to search?”

“Yes, Your Honor, that’s my firm belief.”

“Where’d you get this information?”

“From the super of the building, a man named Henry Watkins. He’s seen the pistol, Your Honor.”

“When did you plan to conduct this search?”

“Tonight, Your Honor, as soon as I can ascertain that Mr. Douglas is at home.”

“Mm,” the judge said.

“Your Honor, I would also like a No-Knock provision.”

“On what basis?”

“Information and belief that there is a lethal weapon in that apartment, Your Honor. A .44-caliber Magnum is a high-powered—”

“Yes, yes,” the judge said. “All right,” he said, “I’ll grant the warrant. And the No-Knock.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Kling said, and took his handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped his brow.

The lie, as he rationalized it, was only a partial falsehood. An attempted murder had taken place, and the weapon he’d described was the one used last night. But neither Henry Watkins nor anyone else had told him Bradford Douglas was in possession of such a gun; if indeed he found it in Douglas’s apartment tonight, that would be strictly a bonus. He would be going there tonight looking for Augusta. The No-Knock provision gave him the right to kick in the door, no hiding in a closet or a bathroom, catch her there dead to rights.

As he came down the broad white steps of the courthouse, the heat enveloping him like a shroud, he felt a gloomy certainty that tonight would be the end of it. And he longed for it to be the beginning instead, when he and Augusta were both fresh and new and shining with hope.

Hope is the thing with feathers.

Halloran watched him as he came down the courthouse steps.

He wondered what he’d been doing up there. Went to court this morning, met the redhead for lunch at twelve, then went back to the courthouse again. Busy with his little cases, the bastard. The redhead had to be his wife, or else some cheap cunt he was living with. She’d be living with a corpse tomorrow morning.

He had missed last night, but he wouldn’t miss again.

Tonight, he wouldn’t miss.

Tonight, he’d shove the gun in that bastard’s face and do the job right, make that bastard eat the barrel and chew on the slug before it ripped off the back of his head.

Tonight.

At four that afternoon, Carella called Grossman’s office. A woman answered the phone. She identified herself as Mrs. Di Marco, one of the lab assistants.

“The captain’s not here,” she said. “Who’s this?”

“Detective Carella, 87th Squad. When will he be back, do you know?”

“He just left. He’s been in court all week, a man’s entitled to go home when he’s been in court all week.”

“Then he’s gone for the day, is that it?”

“He’s gone for the day, yes.”

“Would you know if he had a chance to look over any papers on his desk?”

“He looked at some papers, yes. He even took some papers home with him.”

“Thanks,” Carella said, “I’ll call him at home then.”

“He didn’t go home.”

“You just said—”

“That was figurative. He was taking his wife to dinner.”

“All right, I’ll call him later tonight then.”

“Why don’t you call him tomorrow morning instead? People don’t like to be disturbed at home.”

“Good-bye, Mrs. Di Marco,” Carella said, and hung up.

It would have to wait, after all.

The city succumbed to the night with a sigh of gratitude.

It was not that the temperature dropped all that much. Neither did the humidity. But the night brought with it a semblance of relief, the false impression that darkness could be equated with coolness. At least the sun was gone from the sky, its blistering assault only an unmourned memory.

Now there was the night.