Heat

2

The neighborhood had changed.

He hadn’t expected it to look the same, not after twelve years, but neither had he expected so overwhelming a transformation. He got off the elevated train at Cannon Road, and then came down the steps onto Dover Plains Avenue, called simply and familiarly “the Avenue” when he was still living here. The area then had been a peaceful mix of Italians, Jews, Irish, and blacks, but as he walked up toward Marien Street, he noticed with a fleeting pang that time had passed him by, all the familiar landmarks were gone.

What had once been an Italian latticini was now a Puerto Rican bodega. What had once been a kosher butcher shop was now a billiard parlor; through the open door of the place, he could see clusters of teenage Puerto Ricans holding pool cues. The pizzeria on the corner of Yardley was now a bar and grill, and Harry’s candy store — where he used to take the kids for ice-cream sundaes — was now a shoe store, a huge sign lettered Zapatería across the front of it, a plate-glass window replacing the open counter over which Harry used to pass his egg creams. All gone, he thought. My two youngest kids living in Chicago with Josie’s mother now, and my eldest, my daughter — ah, my daughter.

He was back here today to find his daughter.

He had last seen this neighborhood when he was twenty-seven years old. A young man. Twenty-seven. He would be forty in November, twelve years of his life blown in prison. Moira had been six when they sent him away, she’d just turned eighteen this past June, he hadn’t seen her in all that time. He wondered if she would recognize him. He was a tall man — they didn’t shrink you up there at Castleview, though they did just about everything else to you — and still muscularly built, thanks to workouts in the prison gym, never missed a day of lifting those weights, except that time he was in solitary for a month, that was after the stabbing that cost him a sure parole and an additional two years of time.

He’d been away for twenty-to-life on a Murder One conviction, which meant he’d have been eligible for parole in ten if it hadn’t been for D’Annunzio starting in about his nose, greeting him every morning with “Hey, Schnoz, how’s it going?” or “How’s the Schnozzola today?” Trapped up there where you can’t avoid somebody who’s bugging you, man keeps calling attention to the fact you got a big nose, there’s only so much of that shit you can take. Grabbed a fork off the mess hall table one night after D’Annunzio made some crack about guys with big noses having tiny little cocks — which was wrong, anyway, it was supposed to be the other way around, a big nose meant a big cock — and went at his face with it, tore D’Annunzio’s face to ribbons with the fork, would’ve blinded the son of a bitch if three of the pigs hadn’t clubbed him to the floor. Spent a month in solitary and then heard the good news that his parole request was being denied. Later, the state added two years to the obligatory ten he had to serve. The pigs were fond of saying “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.” He had done his time — twelve long years of it — and now he was out.

And now he wanted to see his daughter again.

This was Saturday, the neighborhood seemed drowsy and peaceful in the blistering midday sun. He walked up Marien to the house they used to live in, a two-family, clapboard-and-brick building with a low picket fence around it. The house and the fence used to be painted white; the new owner had painted them green. There were two mailboxes side by side at the curb, one with the name JOHNSON on it, the other with the name GARCÍA. A black man was in the big front yard, hunkered over an azalea bush, pulling weeds from around it. Halloran stood staring at the house for a moment, remembering, and then turned and walked back toward the Avenue again.

He had never been a drinking man, even before the trouble, and drinking was one habit you couldn’t pick up in stir. But his lawyer had told him that his daughter had come back from Chicago and was living someplace in the old neighborhood, and Halloran hadn’t been able to find a listing for her in the Riverhead directory, so he figured maybe the best place to start was one of the bars, ask if anybody knew where Moira Halloran was living these days. Puerto Rican and black neighborhood like it was now, an Irish girl had to stand out, right? Irish girl with blonde hair and blue eyes like her mother’s — Ah Jesus, Josie, I never meant to do it.

He went into the bar that used to be a pizzeria. Made good pizza back in the days before he got sent away, used to take Josie and the three kids there all the time. Used to think a lot about Josie up there at Castleview. In bed alone at night, he thought about Josie. Even later on, when he found himself a punk who’d do whatever he was told to do or else, it was Josie he thought about during the sex act. Always Josie. Josie he thought about, Josie he imagined. Josie who he’d killed with a hatchet.

The jukebox was playing a Spanish song, whole damn world was going Hispanic, more of them up there in Castleview than you could flush out of a field of sugarcane. The spic behind the bar was humming along with the tune, polishing a glass, tossing his head in time to the Latin rhythms. The bar was empty otherwise. Halloran took a stool near the bartender and asked him for a beer. The bartender seemed annoyed that somebody was interrupting his little spic jam session. Scowling, he put down the glass he’d been polishing, and went to draw the beer.

“Thanks,” Halloran said.

“De nada,” the bartender said.

“You live in this neighborhood?”

“Why? You police?”

Halloran thought that was very funny. He smiled and shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’m not police.”

“You look like police,” the bartender said, and shrugged.

“My name’s Jack Halloran, I’m up here looking for my daughter.”

“Your daughter, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“Halloran, huh?” the bartender shook his head. “Nobody name Halloran come in here. Your daughter, huh?”

“My daughter. Blonde girl, eighteen years old. Moira Halloran.”

“I don’ know nobody by that name. You want to pay for the beer, please?”

“I’m not a cop, and she’s not in any trouble,” Halloran said, reaching for his wallet. “I’m just trying to find her, is all.”

“I don’ care if she’s in trouble or what she is,” the bartender said. “I don’ know her. Tha’s seventy-fi’ cents.”

Halloran paid for the beer without touching a drop of it, and then went out onto the Avenue again. The elevated tracks overhead cast a shadow on this side of the street, and he was grateful for the respite from the sun. Otherwise, there wasn’t a breeze, not a breath of fresh air in this damn suffocating heat. He went from bar to bar asking if anybody knew his daughter, Moira Halloran. He did not hit pay dirt until the fifth bar. The bartender there, like all the other bartenders, was a Puerto Rican with an accent you could slice with a machete.

“Moira Halloran?” he said. “No Moira Halloran. Only Moira Johnson.”

“Johnson?”

“Johnson, sí. Tall blon’ girl, dee age you say, eighteen, nineteen, like that.”

“Johnson, huh?”

“Johnson. She’s marry to Henry Johnson, they live on Marien Stree, you know Marien?”

“I’m familiar with it, yes.”

“So tha’s where,” the bartender said.

He remembered the mailboxes in front of the old house, the names Johnson and García on them. Had his daughter come back to live again in that house? His lawyer had told him the place was up for sale, but Jesus, had his daughter and her husband bought it? Were they maybe living in the same apartment the family had lived in twelve years ago, the downstairs apartment, renting the smaller upstairs one to the spic Garcia, the one he’d seen weeding in the front yard, some of these spics were blacker than African niggers.

Halloran paid for the beer and walked out. It was hotter in the street now, and suddenly he was sweating. Now that he was closer to finding her, now that it was proving easier than he’d ever dreamed it could be, he found himself sweating, and a little short of breath, his heart pounding in his chest as he made the familiar turn onto Marien, and walked past half a dozen little Puerto Rican girls skipping rope, and then stopped in front of the clapboard-and-brick house he’d once lived in with Josie and the kids before he’d had to kill her, the same house — his, daughter Moira was living here in the same house he’d shared with Josie for seven years. The black African spic, García, was still out front, weeding.

“Hey!” Halloran called.

The man looked up.

“You speak English?” Halloran asked.

“You talking to me?” the man said. He looked to be in his early twenties, a thin guy wearing a tank-top undershirt and cutoff blue jeans. He was holding a claw-shaped gardening tool in his right hand.

“Yes, I’m talking to you,” Halloran said. “I’m looking for Moira Johnson, do you know her?”

“I know her,” the man said. “What do you want with her?”

“She’s my daughter,” Halloran said.

“Well, well,” the man said.

“What’s that mean, ‘Well, well’?”

“They decided to let you out, huh?”

“Who the hell are you?” Halloran asked.

“Henry Johnson,” the man said. “Moira’s husband. Why don’t you get lost? Moira don’t want nothin’ to do with you, man.”

“Look, punk,” Halloran said, and opened the gate in the picket fence, and hesitated when he saw Johnson’s hand tighten on the claw tool.

Locked up in prison, you learned to sense when it was wise to shout a man down, and when it was best to leave him alone. You saw it in the eyes. D’Annunzio should’ve seen it in his eyes the night he started in about a big nose, he should’ve seen Halloran’s eyes narrowing and should’ve known right then that his face was going to be hamburger. There was something in this nigger’s eyes now (Moira married to a nigger, his daughter married to a nigger!) that told Halloran he could be dangerous. He hesitated just inside the gate, and then tried a tentative smile, and then said, “I’ve come a long way to see her, son.”

“Don’t give me no ‘son’ bullshit,” Johnson said. “I’m no more your son than she’s your daughter anymore.”

“I’d like to see her,” Halloran said quietly.

“She ain’t home. Take off, before I call the cops.”

“She’s my daughter, and I want to see her,” Halloran said in a steady monotone. “I want to see what my daughter looks like now that she’s grown up, I’m not leaving here till I see her, I’ve waited twelve years to see her, and I’m going to see her, have you got that, I’m going to see her, son.”

There must have been in his eyes the same look D’Annunzio should have seen there an instant before the fork plunged into his face, the same look Halloran thought he’d detected in young Johnson’s eyes just a few minutes ago. He saw the grip on the gardening tool loosen, saw Johnson taking his measure, a veteran street fighter the way all the niggers up at Castleview were, a badass cat who could recognize trouble when it was coming down the pike, and who wanted no part of it when the man’s eyes were signaling mayhem.

“She still ain’t home,” Johnson said, but all the bluster had gone out of his voice.

“When will she be home?” Halloran asked.

“She’s out marketing,” Johnson said.

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“What is it, Hank?” a woman’s voice behind him said.

He turned.

She was standing just outside the picket fence, a tall slender blonde wearing sandals, white slacks, and a tomato-red tube top, clutching a brown paper bag in each arm, holding them close to her breasts. Even from this distance, he could see the startlingly blue eyes, and for a moment he thought he was looking at Josie, thought he was looking at his dead wife, and told himself that this beautiful woman was his daughter, his—

“Moira?” he said.

She must have recognized him, she remembered him, Jesus, she remembered him! She kept staring at him over the low picket fence, and then she said, “What do you want here?”

“I came to see you.”

“Okay, you’ve seen me.”

“Moira—”

“Hank, tell him to get out of here.”

“Moira, I just want to say hello, that’s all.”

“Then say it. And leave.”

“I never did anything to you,” he said plaintively, and spread his arms wide in supplication, the fingers on both hands widespread.

“You didn’t, huh? You killed my mother, you son of a bitch! Get out of here!” she said, screaming now. “Get out of here, leave me alone, get out, get out!”

He looked at her a moment longer, and then lowered his arms and walked silently through the open gate, and past her where she stood shaking with rage on the sidewalk. Their eyes met for only an instant before he turned away from the hatred in them and began walking swiftly toward the Avenue.

At a little past three that Saturday afternoon, Kling called the Medical Examiner’s Office to ask what was delaying the autopsy report. The man he spoke to was the one who’d been at the scene the morning before. His name was Joshua Wright, and the first thing he said was, “Hot enough for you?”

Kling grimaced, moved a pad into place, and prepared to write. At his desk near the filing cabinets, Carella was on the telephone with someone at Ambrose Pharmacy. He had earlier called the number listed for Bonnie Anderson, the Newmans’ cleaning lady, and had learned from her brother that she had indeed been in Georgia since the twelfth of July; he was now touching second base. The squadroom windows were wide open, but no breeze filtered through the wire-mesh grilles that covered them. A standing electric fan was going in one corner of the room, but all it did was rearrange the heat. Both men were in their shirtsleeves, their collars open, their ties pulled down, their sleeves rolled up. Across the room, Hal Willis, who liked to think of himself as dapper, was wearing a tan tropical suit with a gold-and-brown silk-rep tie neatly tacked to his shirt. He was sitting at his desk, talking to a man whose jewelry store on the Stem has been held up three times in the past month.

There were six detectives working the Day Tour that Saturday, but three of them were out of the office. Artie Brown was downtown at the Criminal Courts Building, trying to get a search warrant that would allow him to enter the premises of a man suspected of dealing in stolen goods. Meyer Meyer and Cotton Hawes were at the moment on Ainsley Avenue, talking — once again — to the night clerk of a hotel where, four days ago, a young prostitute had been found dead in a bathtub, her throat slit. In this precinct, seventy-five homicides had been committed since January and through the month of July, up sixteen percent from the same period the year before. Of those seventy-five, forty had already been closed out, there were good leads on another eleven, and the remaining two dozen were as cold as last night’s leftovers. If statistics held, the precinct detectives would solve only eighty percent of the murders they investigated this year. This meant that by the end of December, twenty out of a hundred killers would still be out there roaming the streets. If the homicide rate kept rising — well, no one at the Eight-Seven liked to think about that.

“It’s a little difficult to determine the postmortem interval on this one,” Wright said, and then — assuming Kling was as dumb as half the detectives he dealt with — immediately translated the medical terminology for him. “The time of death, that is.”

“Yeah,” Kling said. “What was the cause, can we start with that?”

“Barbiturate poisoning,” Wright said. “Congestion of the viscera and brain, edema of the lungs, fluid blood in the heart cavities. Stomach contents revealed a substantial residue of a barbiturate we were able to isolate as Seconal.”

“Seconal,” Kling said, writing.

“Which is a short-acting barbiturate that’s absorbed very rapidly.”

“How rapidly?”

“Within minutes after ingestion. The medicinal dose is zero point two grams.”

“And the fatal dose?”

“Anywhere from five to ten grams.”

“How many would you say the victim had ingested?” Kling asked, figuring he’d impress Wright with a little medical terminology of his own.

“Impossible to tell. But certainly five grams at least. That would be twenty-five capsules.”

“How about when he ingested them?”

“That’s what I meant earlier,” Wright said. “About the postmortem interval. As I told you, Seconal is absorbed within minutes, and an overdose would have brought on rapid coma and death. Was the man a heavy drinker?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Our alcohol findings were positive, with values well into the intoxicated range. Since ingested alcohol will decrease in value during putrefaction, it’s safe to say that at the time of death our man was in an intoxicated state possibly greater than that indicated by the percent of alcohol recovered.”

“His wife told us he was an alcoholic,” Kling said.

“That certainly would be in keeping with our findings. You’ve got to remember, too, that alcohol is a depressant, and that its ingestion would have worked on the central nervous system in sympathy with the toxic action of the Seconal.”

“So when did he die?”

“Well, considering the intense heat in the apartment — are you familiar with how we determine the postmortem interval?”

“Not entirely,” Kling said. He had stopped writing, and was listening intently.

“The loss of body heat is one of the determining factors. But in a circumstance such as this one, where the temperature in the apartment was a hundred and two degrees, the temperature of the flesh had in fact risen rather than dropped, even though rigor mortis was complete. Do you know what rigor mortis is?”

“Well, yes,” Kling said uncertainly.

“It’s a muscle stiffness that occurs after death,” Wright said.

“Well, sure,” Kling said.

“To make it simple, before death the muscle protoplasm is alkaline, and after death it becomes acid, usually within six hours, at which time the muscles of the face, jaw, neck, arms, legs, and trunk — in that order — begin to stiffen. The process is reversed when the muscle protoplasm changes to alkaline again — usually anywhere between twelve and forty-eight hours — causing the rigor to disappear. Which brings us back to the temperature in that apartment.”

“What do you mean?” Kling asked.

“Heat speeds up the rigor mortis process as well as its reversal.”

“So you’re saying—”

“I’m saying rigor is of no help to us here. Neither is the postmortem decomposition. The bacterial agents we isolated were Clostridium welchii, which can invade the body very soon after death, and also Escherichia coli and Proteus vulgaris... are you writing this down?”

“Well... no,” Kling admitted.

“Good, because you don’t need to. All these bacteria can be found in the earliest postmortem stages, but we also found Micrococcus albus and Bacillus mesentericus, which normally will not invade until several days after death. In other words, because the heat in the apartment caused such advanced putrefaction, it would be impossible to estimate a time of death on the basis of decomposition alone.”

“So then... are you saying you can’t tell me when he died?”

“I’m saying we’re unwilling to hazard such an estimate. I’m sorry. It’s the goddamn heat, you see.”

“But it was an overdose of Seconal?” Kling said.

“Definitely. Something in excess of five grams.”

“About twenty-five capsules.”

“Or more,” Wright said.

“Well, thank you,” Kling said. “Will you send the written report to us, please?”

“Will do,” Wright said, and hung up.

Kling put the receiver back on its cradle and looked at his notes. He underlined the word “Seconal,” and then picked up his pad and walked to where Carella was just ending his telephone conversation.

“What’ve you got?” Carella asked.

“It was Seconal. Something more than five grams.”

“How many capsules would that have been?” Carella asked at once.

“Twenty-five.”

“Figures.”

“How so?”

“I was just talking to Mr. Ralph Ambrose, who runs the Ambrose Pharmacy on Jackson Circle. Asked him how many Seconal capsules were in that prescription he filled for Mrs. Newman on July twenty-ninth. He checked his files, and said the prescription called for a month’s supply, thirty capsules.”

“Must’ve stocked up for her trip to California, huh?” Kling said.

“Then why’d she leave the bottle home?” Carella asked.

“Good point, we’ll have to ask her.”

“Yeah,” Carella said, and nodded.

“Only one left in that bottle,” Kling said.

“Only one. So let’s say she took one every night from July twenty-ninth to August first, when she left for California. That’d be three capsules right? Thirty-one days in July, right?”

“Three capsules, right.” Kling said.

“Plus one left in the bottle makes it four.”

“That puts twenty-six inside of him.”

“One more than he needed to kill him.”

Both men were silent for several moments.

“She said he sounded depressed when she talked to him,” Kling said.

“Yeah, but no suicide note,” Carella said.

“They don’t all leave notes.”

“No, not all of them. How’d the M.E. make out with a time of death?”

“No help there, Steve. The heat is working against us.”

“Why would a guy turn off the air conditioner during the hottest summer in ten years?” Carella asked.

“Guy about to kill himself doesn’t care how cool the room is,” Kling said.

“So let’s say he went in the bathroom, and found his wife’s pills, and swallowed twenty-six of them, and then went out to the living room to die, okay? Would he have first turned off the air conditioner?”

“Well... no, that doesn’t seem likely.”

“Then who turned off the air conditioner?” Carella asked.

“The M.E. says he was drunk,” Kling said. “Maybe he didn’t even realize the air conditioner wasn’t running.”

“The heat wave started Friday morning, the day his wife left for California,” Carella said. “She spoke to him the following Tuesday. Are you telling me he was drunk all that time, with the windows closed and the air conditioner off?”

“No, maybe just that night. The night he decided to kill himself.”

“Went to turn off the air conditioner first, huh?”

“No.”

“No,” Carella said.

“No,” Kling said again. “But maybe it was broken or something. Maybe he didn’t realize—”

“I turned it on the minute the techs were through with it yesterday. It was working fine.”

“Yeah,” Kling said.

“With this heat, the air conditioner should have been running, damn it.”

Both men were silent again. Across the room, Willis began typing. On the street outside, an ambulance went by, its siren blaring.

“I think we ought to talk to Anne Newman again,” Carella said, and looked up at the wall clock. It was almost three-thirty, a half hour before the Evening Tour would relieve. “Want to hit her now, or have you made other plans?”

“No,” Kling said. “No other plans.”

“Have you talked to Augusta yet?”

“Not yet.”

“You promised...”

“Tonight,” Kling said. “When I get home tonight.”

“Then maybe you want to go straight home now. I can see the Newman woman alone, be no problem.”

“No, it’ll wait,” Kling said.