Heat

5

The first call Carella made on Monday morning was to the telephone company’s Business Office. He identified himself as a detective working out of the Eight-Seven, and was beginning to tell the woman on the other end what he was looking for when she said, “What number are you calling from, sir?”

“377-8024,” he said. “But—”

“Is that a business or a residence?”

“Neither,” Carella said.

“Sir?”

“It’s a police station.”

“Well, that’s a business, I suppose,” she said.

He had never thought of criminal investigation as a business, but maybe the lady was right. “In any event,” he said, “I need—”

“Is this a billing matter, sir?”

“No, it’s a police matter.”

“What is it you wish, sir?” the woman said.

“I need a record of calls made from a number here in Isola...”

“What number is that, sir?”

“Just a moment,” Carella said, and consulted his notebook, his finger traveling down the page. “That’s 765-3811, the phone is listed to Jeremiah R. Newman, at 74 Silvermine Oval.”

“Yes, sir, and what was it you wished, sir?”

“A record of calls made from that number, starting on the first of August and continuing through the eighth.”

“Then this is a billing matter, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s a police matter.”

“The only reason we keep a record of calls is for billing purposes. And those are only long-distance calls. The local calls...”

“Well, fine, whatever. Can you get me a...?”

“You’d want a duplicate bill, isn’t that it?”

“No, all I want is whatever record you’ve got of the calls made...”

“That would be on the bill, sir. Let me pull that file, can you hold a moment, please?”

He held.

“Hello?” the woman said.

“Yes, I’m here.”

“Sir, we don’t bill to that number until the seventeenth of the month.”

“I don’t want a bill,” Carella said. “All I want is a record of the calls made from—”

“Yes, that would be on the bill, sir.”

“Are you looking at the bill now?”

“No, sir, the bill won’t be mailed till the seventeenth. It’ll be prepared on the fourteenth, and it’ll include all calls made up to and including that date.”

“Today’s the eleventh,” Carella said.

“That’s right, sir,”

“I can’t wait on this till the fourteenth,” Carella said. “I need—”

“The seventeenth, sir. The bill won’t be mailed to Mr. Newman till the seventeenth.”

“Mr. Newman—”

“Why don’t you simply check with him when he receives the bill?”

“He’s not going to receive the bill,” Carella said. “He’s dead.”

“In that case, sir, I don’t know how I can help you.”

“You can help me by putting on your supervisor,” Carella said.

“Yes, sir, just a moment, please.”

Carella waited.

“Good morning, Miss Schulz here,” a cheery voice said.

“Good morning, this is Detective Carella of the 87th Squad here in Isola. I’ve just had a less than satisfying conversation with—”

“Oh, I’m sorry, sir.”

“I need a record of calls made from 765-3811 between the first of August and the eighth of August, and I’ve just been told—”

“Yes, Miss Corning filled me in,” Miss Schulz said. “We bill to that number on the seventeenth.”

“I understand that. But this is a police matter, and time is of the essence, and I’d like a copy of that record as soon as possible.”

“Mm,” Miss Schulz said.

“So if you don’t mind, if someone can make a photocopy for me, I’ll have it picked up sometime later to—”

“I’m not sure we’re authorized to release a record of calls to anyone but the subscriber, sir.”

“I’m a policeman,” Carella said.

“Yes, I realize that. But you see, sir, an individual’s privacy—”

“The individual is dead,” Carella said. “Listen, what is this? I’m making a routine request, and I’m getting a runaround like I’ve never—”

“I’m sorry you think it’s a runaround, sir.”

“Yes, that’s just what I think it is,” Carella said. “When can I pick up that record? Or do I have to get a goddamn court order for it?”

“Don’t curse, sir,” Miss Schulz said.

“When can I pick it up?”

“Just a moment, please,” Miss Schulz said.

Carella waited. One of these days, he thought, the people of the United States are going to declare war on the telephone company. Tanks will go rolling up the avenue to the business off—

“Mr. Carella?”

“Yes?” he said.

“I can mail that to you sometime tomorrow.”

“No, I don’t want it mailed,” Carella said. “I want to send a messenger for it.”

“I was told it would be mailed, sir.”

“Who told you it would be mailed?”

“My superior, sir.”

“Well, you tell your superior it will not be mailed, you tell your superior I’ll be sending a patrolman to the business office — What’s your address there, give me your address.”

“Sir—”

“Give me your goddamn address!”

“Please don’t curse, sir.”

“What’s the address there?”

“384 Benedict.”

“384 Benedict, right,” Carella said. “A patrolman will be there at two p.m. sharp, Miss Schulz, and he’ll ask for you personally, and I suggest you let him have a record of those calls, for which he will properly sign a receipt, because if he doesn’t get it, the next step is to go before a magistrate to ask for a court order to—”

“Just a moment, please,” Miss Schulz said.

Carella waited again.

He kept waiting.

“Hello?” Miss Schulz said.

“Yes, I’m still here,” Carella said.

“We’ll need a written request,” Miss Schulz said.

“Okay, forget it. I’ll go downtown myself, I’ll get a goddamn court order—”

“Please sir, I wish you wouldn’t curse,” Miss Schulz said. “If you can send someone down with a written request, I can have a transcript of those calls ready for pickup tomorrow morning. I’m sorry I can’t do it sooner than that, but we’re computerized, sir, and this would mean—”

“Tomorrow morning will be fine,” Carella said.

“But we’ll need your written request today.”

“A patrolman will hand-deliver it.”

“Thank you, sir,” Miss Schulz said. “Have a nice day.”

When the call from the Hack Bureau came not ten minutes later, Carella expected more trouble. Make a simple request in this damn city, you got involved with all kinds of bureaucratic bullshit that made your job impossible to do. But the woman he spoke to there told him they had run a routine check on their licensed taxi drivers’ call sheets for the first of August, when Anne Newman said she’d left for Los Angeles, and the eighth of August, when she’d returned. Sure enough, the records showed an August 1, 8:45 a.m. pickup at 74 Silvermine Oval for a passenger going to the city’s international airport, and an August 8, 7:30 a.m. pickup at the airport for a passenger the driver dropped off at 74 Silvermine Oval.

There was no way of ascertaining that the passenger had indeed been Anne Newman, but given the corroborating evidence Genero had garnered (after calling three of the airlines flying to Los Angeles, and finally learning from a fourth airline that their manifests for those dates showed an Anne Newman traveling to and from that city), it seemed certain she’d been in California at the time of her husband’s death. Despite the nagging air-conditioner problem — and maybe Kling was right, maybe Newman had been dead-drunk when he swallowed those capsules — Carella was about to close out the case as a suicide.

The radio on Genero’s desk was silent, but that was only because Lieutenant Byrnes was back at work and in his office. The squadroom was thronged besides on that Monday morning with four other members of the squad who were at the moment planning a raid on a Culver Avenue shooting gallery. Ever since January, and on direct orders from the Commissioner himself, the cops of the Eight-Seven (and indeed every other precinct in the city) had been putting the heat on narcotics dealers; the gallery on Culver had been under surveillance since late February. It was now a known fact that junkies of every persuasion marched in and out of that doorway at 1124 Culver; the cops had parked a van purporting to be a bakery truck just across the street from the building, and they had home movies of virtually every known addict in the precinct. A bust would have been a simple thing. Trot up there to the third floor, round up all the junkies and the small-time pusher doling out the daily fixes, take them all to court, and get the meager sentences for what the cops were certain would be only small quantities of dope.

But at least once a month, the stream of junkies stopped entirely, the gallery upstairs apparently closed for business on those days. Or so the cops believed until their movies revealed certain foreign individuals of French extraction coming and going on the days the junkie traffic trickled off. It was their guess that on those days huge quantities of heroin or cocaine were exchanged for similarly huge quantities of dollars. In effect, the shooting gallery was a cover for a much bigger operation, the bad guys hoping the cops wouldn’t be interested in any penny-ante shit, and hoping further that the big-time dealing would go unnoticed in the rush of daily hand-to-mouth trade. Lieutenant Byrnes found it impossible to believe that a shooting gallery operating virtually in the open could be a cover for a multimillion-dollar narcotics operation. But Detective Meyer Meyer — who was in charge of the surveillance and the impending raid — figured the bad guys had only taken their cue from the CIA. Meyer maintained that no professional intelligence agency could be as blunderingly stupid as the CIA. The CIA had to be a cover for America’s real intelligence agency.

In much the same way, the guys buying narcotics from their Gallic cousins, must have figured that a small-time mom-and-pop dope store would be allowed to flourish unmolested when the cops had bigger fish to fry. The bigger fish, the cops now firmly believed, could be hooked on the third floor of 1124 Culver Avenue once a month, every month of the year. The raid was set for this Wednesday night, the thirteenth of August. The detectives were working out their strategy when the woman came up the iron-runged steps leading to the second floor of the station house, and paused just outside the slatted-rail divider that separated the squadroom from the corridor outside.

“Yes?” Carella said. “May I help you?”

She was a woman in her late thirties, he guessed, dressed entirely and suitably in summertime white — a white dress and white high-heeled pumps, a white shoulder-slung leather bag, a white carnation in her jet-black hair. She was tall and superbly tanned, her eyes the color of anthracite in a sharp-nosed Mediterranean face that could have belonged to a Spaniard or an Italian, a generous mouth with a beauty spot near the tapered corner of her lips.

“I am looking for the policeman investigating the death of Jeremiah Newman,” she said. She spoke with a distinctive foreign accent Carella couldn’t quite place. She appeared calm and unruffled, as though walking into a police station did not have the same disquieting effect on her that it had on most citizens, innocent or guilty.

“I’m Detective Carella,” he said. “I’m handling that case.”

“May I come in?” she asked.

“Yes, please,” he said, and rose from his desk, and came around the green filing cabinets to open the gate in the railing for her. Across the room, Genero looked up from where he was typing and scanned her head to toe, his eyes lingering on legs Carella now noticed were beautifully proportioned. She sat in the chair beside his desk, crossing her legs, and Genero could not resist a long low whistle. The woman seemed not to have heard it. At his own desk, surrounded by detectives listening to his game plan, Meyer looked up and glared at Genero, who shrugged and went back to his typing.

“I am Jessica Herzog,” the woman said. “I was once married to Jeremiah.”

“How do you do?” Carella said, and waited. Jessica looked around the squadroom, as though wanting to make certain of her surroundings before committing herself to anything further. Across the room, Genero looked up from his typing, studying her breasts this time, firm and full in the scoop-necked top of the white dress. A moment later, he picked up an eraser.

“I received a call from my brother on Saturday. He wanted to tell me about the funeral the next day,” Jessica said. “He thought I might want to attend. I could not, of course, attend. We have been divorced now for almost sixteen years it will be. I meant no disrespect, but clearly it would have been impossible.”

“Why do you say that, Miss Herzog?”

“Well, because of Anne, don’t you see?”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“It was for Anne that he left me all those years ago. I think it would have been an uncomfortable situation, don’t you think? To be there at his funeral? With his present wife, I mean?”

“Yes, I can see where—”

“So of course I said I could not go. I hope Martin understood.”

“Martin?” Carella said.

“Yes, my brother. He is the one who introduced me to Jeremiah when I first came here.”

“Excuse me, Miss Herzog, but where are you from originally?”

“Israel,” she said.

“Ah,” he said.

“I still have a terrible accent, I know.”

“No, no,” he said.

“Yes, I know, do not lie, please. I am here for nineteen years now and my English is still so bad. I came to sell bonds for my country, I was at the time a captain in the Israeli Army,” she said, and Carella remembered the way she had reconnoitered the squadroom just a few moments earlier, as though scouting for high ground. “Well, that was a long time ago, I was only twenty-two at the time. I have been living here since, but I go back every now and again to Tel Aviv. My mother still lives in Tel Aviv. All my friends are here now,” she said, “and of course my brother. It would be difficult to return there to live.”

“And you say you met Mr. Newman through your brother?”

“Yes, at a bond rally. And we fell in love and got married. Two years later, he met Anne, and he asked me for a divorce. Well, that is how it is sometimes, you know.”

“Yes,” Carella said, and wondered why she had come to the squadroom. He waited.

“My brother mentioned to me that Jeremiah had died of sleeping pills. He had taken too many sleeping pills.”

“Yes, that’s what the autopsy revealed.”

“Yes, but that is impossible, don’t you see?”

“Impossible? Why?”

“Well, I was only married to him for two years, you understand, but you come to know a person very well when you are living with him, and I can tell you Jeremiah would not have taken even one sleeping pill, never mind how many he is supposed to have taken.”

“Twenty-nine,” Carella said.

“Impossible,” she said. “Not Jeremiah.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“He had a terrible fear of drugs, do you see? He would not even take an aspirin if he had a headache. It was from when he was a teenager, and a doctor gave him penicillin tablets and he had a severe reaction and almost died. Believe me, Jeremiah would not have swallowed voluntarily any kind of pill. I know. I lived with him. Even an aspirin, believe me. He would rather have suffered through the night than take an aspirin. He told me it would make him throw up. So how can a man with such fear take so many pills to kill him?”

“It’s supposed to be a painless death, Miss Herzog. Barbiturate poisoning—”

“Not to Jeremiah. Not taking any kind of pill. That would not have been painless to him. He would have died of fright first.”

“I see,” Carella said.

“I was talking about this to Jonathan only last week,” she said, “about his brother’s fear of drugs. We used to laugh about it when we were still married, you know, the way Jeremiah would go pale if you even mentioned any kind of medication. Well, his brother, Jonathan, remembered, of course. In fact, I’m surprised he hasn’t been here to see you. Has he been here to see you?”

“No, he hasn’t.”

“I’m surprised.”

“Well, he lives in San Francisco, you know...”

“Yes, of course, but he is here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jonathan. He is here.”

“In the city, do you mean?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Did he fly in for the funeral, is that it?”

“From before the funeral. He has been here almost two weeks now.”

Carella looked at her.

“I thought you understood, when I said I had been talking to him—”

“I thought you meant on the telephone.”

“No, he is here. He called me when he arrived, we had lunch together one day. He is a nice man, Jonathan.”

“I’m surprised his mother didn’t mention—”

“Well, so many things on her mind. The funeral, you know.”

“Yes. Would you know where he’s staying?”

“At the Pierpont. Do you know this hotel?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Downtown, near Farley Square?”

“Yes, I know it.”

“You should go to see him,” Jessica said, “before he leaves. He will tell you how Jeremiah felt about drugs. He will tell you it would have been impossible for him to have taken those pills.” She nodded emphatically. “Impossible,” she said.

Kling should have realized his marriage was doomed the moment he began tailing his wife.

Carella could have told him that in any marriage there was a line either partner simply could not safely cross. Once you stepped over that line, once you said or did something that couldn’t possibly be taken back, the marriage was irretrievable. In any good marriage, there were arguments and even fights — but you fought fair if you wanted the marriage to survive. The minute you started hitting below the belt, it was time to call the divorce lawyers. That’s why Carella had asked him to discuss this thing with Augusta.

Instead, Kling decided he would find out for himself whether she was seeing another man. He made his decision after a hot, sleepless night. He made it on the steamy morning of August 11, while he and Augusta were eating breakfast. He made it ten minutes before she left for her first assignment of the week.

He was a cop. Tailing a suspect came easily and naturally to him. Standing together at the curb outside their building, Augusta looking frantically at her watch, Kling trying to get a taxi at the height of the morning rush hour, he told her there was something he wanted to check at the office, and would probably be gone all day. Even though this was his day off, she accepted the lie; all too often in the past, he had gone back to the station house on his day off. He finally managed to hail a taxi, and when it pulled in to the curb, he yanked open the rear door for her.

“Where are you going, honey?” he asked.

“Ranger Photography, 1201 Goedkoop.”

“Have you got that?” Kling asked the cabbie through the open window on the curbside.

“Got it,” the cabbie said.

Augusta blew a kiss at Kling, and the taxi pulled away from the curb and into the stream of traffic heading downtown. It took Kling ten minutes to find another cab. He was in no hurry. He had checked Augusta’s appointment calendar while she was bathing before bed last night, when he was still mulling his decision. It had showed two sittings for this morning: one at Ranger Photography for nine, the other at Coopersmith Creatives for eleven. Her next appointment was at two in the afternoon at Fashion Flair, and alongside this she had penned in the words Cutler if time. Cutler was the agency representing her.

Goedkoop Avenue was in the oldest section of town, its narrow streets and gabled waterfront houses dating back to when the Dutch were still governing. The area lay cheek by jowl with the courthouses and municipal buildings in the Chinatown Precinct, but whereas the illusion was one of overlap, the business here was neither legal nor administrative. Goedkoop was in the heart of the financial district, an area of twentieth-century skyscrapers softened by the old Dutch warehouses and wharves, the later British churches and graveyards. Here and there in lofts along the narrow side streets, the artists and photographers had taken up residence, spilling over from the Quarter and the more recently voguish “Hopscotch” area, so-called because the first gallery to open there was on Hopper Street, overlooking the Scotch Meadows Park. Standing across the street from 1201 Goedkoop, where he had asked the cabbie to let him out, Kling looked around for a pay phone, and then went into a cigar store on the corner of Goedkoop and Fields, where he looked up the phone number for Ranger Photography. From a phone booth near the magazine rack, he dialed the number and waited.

“Ranger,” a man’s voice said.

“May I speak to Augusta Blair, please?” he said. It rankled every time he had to use her maiden name, however damn professionally necessary it was.

“Minute,” the man said.

Kling waited.

When she came onto the line, he said, “Gussie, hi, I’m sorry to break in this way.”

“We haven’t started yet,” she said. “I just got here a few minutes ago. What is it, Bert?”

“I wanted to remind you, we’re having dinner with Meyer and Sarah tonight.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Oh, okay then.”

“We talked about it at breakfast,” she said. “Don’t you remember?”

“Right, right. Okay then. They’re coming by at seven for drinks.”

“Yes,” she said, “I have it in my book. Where are you now, Bert?”

“Just got here,” he said. “You want to try that new Italian joint on Trafalgar?”

“Yes, sure. Bert, I have to go. They’re waving frantically.”

“I’ll make a reservation,” he said. “Eight o’clock sound okay?”

“Yes, fine. ’Bye, darling, I’ll talk to you later.”

There was a click on the line. Okay, he thought, she’s where she’s supposed to be. He put the phone back on the hook, and then went out into the street again. It was blazing hot already, and his watch read only nine twenty-seven. He crossed the street to 1201 Goedkoop, and entered the building, checking to see if there was a side or a back entrance. Nothing. Just the big brass doors through which he’d entered, and through which Augusta would have to pass when she left. He looked at his watch again, and then went across the street to take up his position.

She did not come out of the building until a quarter to eleven.

He had hailed a taxi five minutes earlier, and flashed the tin, and had told the cabbie he was a policeman on assignment and would want him to follow a suspect vehicle in just a few minutes. That was when he was still allowing Augusta at least twenty minutes to get to her next sitting, crosstown and uptown. Her calendar had listed it for eleven sharp; she would be late, that was certain. The cabbie had thrown his flag five minutes ago; he now sat picking his teeth and reading the Racing Form. As Augusta came out of the building, another taxi pulled in some three feet ahead of her. She raised her arm, yelled “Taxi!” and then sprinted for the curb, her shoulder bag flying.

“There she is,” Kling said. “Just getting in that cab across the street.”

“Nice dish,” the cabbie said.

“Yeah,” Kling said.

“What’d she do?”

“Maybe nothing,” Kling said.

“So what’s all the hysteria?” the cabbie asked, and threw the taxi in gear and made a wide U-turn in an area posted with NO U-TURN signs, figuring, What the hell, he had a cop in the backseat.

“Not too close now,” Kling said. “Just don’t lose her.”

“You guys do this all the time?” the cabbie asked.

“Do what?”

“Ride taxis when you’re chasing people?”

“Sometimes.”

“So who pays for it?”

“We have a fund.”

“Yeah, I’ll just bet you have a fund. It’s the taxpayers are footing the bill, that’s who it is.”

“Don’t lose her, okay?” Kling said.

“I never lost nobody in my life,” the cabbie said. “You think you’re the first cop who ever jumped in my cab and told me to follow somebody? You know what I hate about cops who jump in my cab and tell me to follow somebody? What I hate is I get stiffed! They run out chasing the guy, and they forget to pay even the tab, never mind a tip.”

“I won’t stiff you, don’t worry about it.”

“Sure, it’s only the taxpayers’ money, right?”

“You’d better pick it up a little,” Kling said.

The melodramatic chase (Kling could not help thinking of it as such) might have been more meaningful if Augusta’s taxi hadn’t taken her to 21 Lincoln Street, where Coopersmith Creatives had its studios — as he’d learned from the Isola directory the night before, while Augusta was still in the tub. Kling wanted nothing more than to prove his wife was innocent of any wrong-doing. Innocent till proved guilty, he reminded himself; the basic tenet of American criminal law. Beyond a reasonable doubt, he reminded himself. But at the same time, something inside him longed perversely for a confrontation with her phantom lover. Had the taxi taken her anywhere else in the city, her elaborate lie would have been exposed. Write down an appointment at Coopersmith Creatives for 11:00 a.m., and then fly off to meet some tall, handsome bastard at his apartment in a more fashionable section of town. But no, here she was at 21 Lincoln Street, getting out of the taxi and handing a wad of bills through the open window, and then dashing across the sidewalk to a plate-glass door decorated with a pair of thick diagonal red and blue stripes, the huge numerals 21 worked into the slanting motif. He handed the cabbie the fare and a fifty-cent tip. The cabbie said, “Will wonders never?” and pocketed the money.

Kling walked past the building, and glanced through the plate-glass door. She was no longer in the small lobby. He yanked open the door and walked swiftly to the single elevator at the rear of the building. The needle of the floor indicator was still moving, five, six, seven — it stopped at eight. He found the directory for the building’s tenants on the wall just inside the entrance door. Coopersmith Creatives was on the eighth floor. No need to call her again with a trumped-up story reminding her of a dinner date. She was exactly where she was supposed to be.

The sitting was a short one. She came out of the building again at a little past noon, and walked directly to a plastic pay-phone shell on the corner. Watching from a doorway across the street, he saw her fishing in her bag for a coin, and dialing a number. He wondered if she was calling the squadroom. He kept watching. She was on the phone for what seemed a long time. When finally she hung up, she did not immediately step out of the shell. Puzzled, he kept watching, and then realized she had run out of coins and had asked the person on the other end to call her back. He did not hear the telephone when it rang, the street traffic was too noisy. But he saw her snatch the receiver from the hook and immediately begin talking again. She talked even longer this time. He saw her nodding. She nodded again, and then hung up. She was smiling. He expected her to hail another taxi, but instead she began walking uptown, and it took him another moment to realize she was heading for the subway kiosk on the next corner. He thought, protectively, Jesus, Gussie, don’t you know better than to ride the subways in this city? And then he quickened his pace and started down the steps after her, catching sight of her at the change booth. A train was pulling in. He flashed his shield at the attendant in the booth and pushed through the gate to the left of the stiles just as Augusta entered one of the cars.

Someone had once told Kling that one of America’s celebrity novelists considered graffiti an art form. Maybe the celebrity novelist never had to ride the subways in this city. The graffiti covered the cars inside and out, obscuring the panels that told you where the train was headed and where it had come from, obfuscating the subway maps that told you where the various station stops were, obliterating the advertising placards, the windows, the walls, and even many of the seats. The graffiti spelled out the names of the spray-can authors (maybe that’s why the celebrity novelist considered it an art form), the streets on which they lived, and sometimes the “clubs” to which they belonged. The graffiti were a reminder that the barbarians were waiting just outside the gates and that many of the barricades had already fallen and wild ponies were galloping in the streets. The graffiti were an insult and a warning: we do not like your city, it is not our city, we shit on your city. Trapped in a moving cage of violent steel walls shrieking color upon color, Kling stood at the far end of the car, his back to Augusta, and prayed she would not recognize him if she chanced to glance in his direction.

On a normal subway tail, there’d have been two of them, one in each of the cars flanking the suspect’s car, standing close to the glass panels on the doors separating the cars, a classic bookend tail. In recent years, you couldn’t see too easily through the glass panel because it had been spray-painted over, but the idea was to squint through the graffiti, and keep your eye on your man, one of you on either side of him, so that you were ready to move out when he came to his station stop. Today, and curiously, the spray paint worked for Kling. Facing the glass panel in the door at the end of the car, he noticed that it had been spray-painted only on the outside, with a dark-blue paint that made through-visibility impossible but that served to create a mirror effect. Even with his back to Augusta, he could clearly see her reflection.

She had taken a seat facing the station stops, and she craned for a look through the spray-painted squiggles and scrawls each time the train slowed. He counted nine stops before she rose suddenly at the Hopper Street station and moved toward the opening doors. He stepped out onto the platform the instant she did. She turned left and began walking swiftly toward the exit steps, her high heels clicking; his wife was in a goddamn hurry. He followed at a safe distance behind her, reached the end of the platform, pushed through the gate, and saw her as she reached the top of the stairs leading to the street, her long legs flashing, the shoulder bag swinging.

He took the steps up two at a time. The sunlight was blinding after the gloom of the subterranean tunnel. He looked swiftly toward the corner, turned to look in the opposite direction, and saw her standing and waiting for the traffic light to change. He stayed right where he was, crossing the street when she did, keeping a block’s distance between them. A sidewalk clock outside a savings and loan association told him it was already twenty-thirty. Augusta’s next appointment was uptown, at 2:00 p.m. He guessed she planned to skip lunch. He hoped against hope that he was wrong. He’d have given his right arm if only she walked into any one of the delicatessens or restaurants that lined the streets in this part of the city. But she continued walking, swiftly, not checking any of the addresses on the buildings, seeming to know exactly where she was going. The area was a mélange of art galleries, boutiques, shops selling antiques, drug paraphernalia, sandals, jewelry, and unpainted furniture. She was heading toward the Scotch Meadows Park in the heart of the Hopscotch artists’ quarter. He’s an artist, Kling thought. The son of a bitch is an artist.

He followed her for two blocks, to the corner of Hopper and Matthews. Then suddenly, without breaking her stride for an instant, without looking up at the numerals over the door — she was surely familiar with the address — she walked into one of the old buildings that had earlier been factories but which now housed tenants paying astronomical rents. He gave her a minute or two, checked out the hallway to make sure it was empty, and then entered the lobby. The walls were painted a dark green. There was no elevator in the building, only a set of iron-runged steps at the end of the lobby, reminiscent of the steps that climbed to the squadroom at the station house uptown. He listened, the way a good cop was taught to do, and heard the faint clatter of her heels somewhere on the iron rungs above. There was a directory of tenants in the lobby. He scanned it briefly, afraid Augusta might suddenly decide to reverse her direction and come down to discover him in the lobby.

He went outside again, and stood on the sidewalk. In addition to the street-level floor of the building, there were five floors above it. Four windows fronted the street on each of these upper stories, but he supposed most of the loft space was divided, and he couldn’t even guess how many apartments there might be. He jotted the address into his notebook — 641 Hopper Street — and then went into a luncheonette on the corner across the street, and sat eating a soggy hamburger and drinking a lukewarm egg cream while he watched the building. The clock on the grease-spattered wall read 12:40 p.m. He checked the time against his own watch.

It was one o’clock when he ordered another egg cream. It was one-thirty when he asked the counterman for an iced coffee. Augusta did not come out of the building until a quarter to two. She walked immediately to the curb and signaled to a cruising taxi. Kling finished his coffee, and then went into the building again and copied down all the names on the lobby directory. Six of them in all. Six suspects. There was no rush now; he suspected the damage had already been done. He took the subway uptown to Jefferson and Wyatt, where his wife had a two o’clock appointment at Fashion Flair. He waited outside on the sidewalk across the street from the building till she emerged at a little past five, and then followed her on foot crosstown to her agency on Carrington Street. He watched as she climbed the steps to the first floor of the narrow building.

Then he took the subway again, and went home.

Jonathan Newman was wearing only slacks when he admitted Carella and Genero to his penthouse suite at the Pierpont Hotel. He told them he had just taken a cold shower, and was still suffocating from the damn heat in this city. The air conditioner seemed to be set very low; the apartment was actually chilly. But Newman was sweating nonetheless, and Carella thought he understood why. He had never seen such a hairy man in his life. Newman was slightly taller than Carella himself, perhaps six-one or six-two, with a head of unruly red hair, a shaggy red beard covering his upper lip, jowls, and chin, and a mat of thick red hair on his chest, back, and arms. He rather resembled an orangutan, with the same dense fur and the same coloration. He shambled across the room to where a drink was in a glass of melting ice cubes, and then asked the detectives if they’d care to have anything. Both declined.

“When’s this heat supposed to break?” he asked.

“Next week sometime,” Carella said. “Maybe.”

“It was beautiful when I left San Fran,” he said. “We call it the air-conditioned city, you know. Good reason for that. Beautiful breezes all the time. How can anybody stand it here in the summer?”

“Well, you used to live here, didn’t you?” Carella said.

“Only till I got old enough to know better,” Newman said. “Actually, I got my Navy discharge out on the Coast, decided to stay there. Best decision I ever made in my life. You know what business I’m in out there?”

“No,” Genero said. “What?” He actually had an intelligent look on his face; Carella assumed he was fascinated by his first talking ape.

“Coffins,” Newman said.

“Coffins?” Genero said.

“Coffins,” Newman repeated. “I was in advertising when I joined the Navy, enlisted to get out of sleeping in the mud someplace, knew damn well I’d be drafted anyway if I didn’t make my move. Went in as an ensign, well, I was a graduate of Ramsey U here — do you know Ramsey U?”

“Yes,” Carella said.

“Yes,” Genero said, but he sounded doubtful.

“Got out of the Navy, and the first decision I made was to stay out there on the Coast. Then I asked myself what kind of business I wanted to go into. Advertising again? If I wanted to go back into advertising, I should’ve come back East, right? This is where advertising is. So I said No, not for me, not advertising again. So then I asked myself what it was that everybody sooner or later needed. You know what it was?”

“What was it?” Genero asked, even though he already knew the answer.

“Coffins,” Newman said. “Sooner or later, we all go to that great big ad agency in the sky, am I right? And we all need a coffin to ride when we make the big trip. That’s what I’m in out there. Coffins. I manufacture coffins.”

Carella said nothing.

“So here I am on business — well, part pleasure, I have to admit, you won’t tell Internal Revenue, will you? — and my damn-fool brother kills himself and ends up in a coffin I didn’t even make. Well, what’re you gonna do?” Newman said, and drained his glass and went to the wall bar for a refill. “Are you guys sure?” he asked.

“We’re on duty,” Genero said.

“So what?” Newman said.

Genero seemed tempted.

“No, thanks, we can’t,” Carella said. “When did you get here, Mr. Newman?”

“Twentieth of July. It was nice then, do you remember? Damn heat didn’t start till later. I can’t stand this heat. I really can’t stand it,” he said, and plopped four ice cubes into his glass.

“Been here since?”

“Yeah,” Newman said. He lifted a bottle of tonic water and splashed some of it over the gin and the cubes.

“Did you see your brother before his death?”

“Nope.”

“How come?”

“Didn’t like him very much.”

“Lots of people don’t like their brothers,” Genero said. He looked at Carella, and then shrugged.

“Not since he became a lush anyway,” Newman said.

“After your father died,” Carella said.

“Two years ago, right. Used to be a fairly decent guy before then, I mean if you can excuse what he did to Jessica.”

“What was that?”

“Well, you know. Married to her for such a short time, and then ditched her for Annie. Listen, Annie’s a better-looking broad, I’ll admit it. But you should never lose your head over a piece of tail, am I right? Jessica had it all over her, six ways from the middle. Have you met Jessica? She is some kind of woman, believe me. Captain in the Israeli Army — I think she’s got a kill record of seventeen Arabs. Great tits besides.”

“Yes,” Genero said.

Carella looked at him.

“So my brother ditches the only good thing that ever happened to him and settles for the Great American Snow Queen instead. You probably met Annie. I’m sure you had to talk to her about my brother, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Genero said, and quickly looked at Carella to see if he’d said the wrong thing again. “Well, Detective Carella did,” he added.

“Coolest cucumber in the Western Hemisphere,” Newman said. “Ice in her veins. She may be great in bed — or so my brother told me when he first fell head over heels — but you’d never know it just looking at her. Anyway, let’s say she’s the greatest lay in the world, so what? My brother was a fool to give up what he had for two inches of real estate slit vertically up the middle.”

Genero looked as though he were trying to dope out the metaphor.

“Anyway, all water under the bridge. He’s dead now, God rest him merry,” Newman said, and raised his glass in a toast.

“I understand you saw Miss Herzog last week,” Carella said.

“Yeah, last Wednesday. We had lunch together.”

“And you were reminiscing about your brother’s aversion to pills.”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t like to take pills of any kind, is that it?”

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“What do you make of his having swallowed twenty-nine of them?”

“Bullshit is what I make of it.”

“You don’t think he could’ve done it, huh?”

“No way.”

“When did you learn about his death, Mr. Newman?”

“Mom called me. Friday, it must’ve been. There was a message when I got back to the hotel — call Susan Newman, urgent. I knew right off it was my brother. It had to be dumb fucking Jerry falling out the window or something, dead-drunk. What else could be urgent in my mother’s life?”

“So what happened when you called her back?” Carella asked.

“She told me my brother was dead.”

“Did she mention that he’d died of an overdose of Seconal?”

“No, she didn’t learn that till the next day. I guess they hadn’t done the autopsy yet.”

“What was your reaction?”

“When I found out he was dead? You want the truth?”

“Please.”

“I thought good riddance.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He’d been nothing but a pain in the ass to all of us for the past two years. Me, my mother, Annie, all of us. Lorded it over all of us because he was the one who inherited that big chunk of money when my father died, thought he was better than—”

“What chunk of money?” Carella asked at once.

“Well, not money as such, not immediately after his death. But all those paintings, you know. He left all of them to Jerry. My father was one of the best abstract expressionists around. There had to be at least two hundred paintings stored in that big studio he used to work in. Jerry got all of them. That’s why he could afford to piss away his life.”

“What did he leave to your mother?”

“A farewell note,” Newman said, and smiled grimly.

“And you?”

“Zilch. I was the black sheep. I was the son who left home to manufacture coffins. My dear brother, Jerry, was the artiste, you know, following in our father’s footsteps. Churning out utter crap, as it was, but that didn’t disturb my father, oh no. Jerry was carrying on the great family tradition.”

“When you say a large chunk of money—”

“Millions,” Newman said.

“Who gets that now, would you know?”

“What do you mean?”

“All that money. Now that your brother’s dead.”

“I have no idea.”

“Did he leave a will?”

“I don’t know, you’d have to ask Annie.”

“I will. Thank you, Mr. Newman, you’ve been very helpful. When will you be going back to California?”

“In a day or so, few things here I’ve still got to wrap up.”

“Here’s my card, in case you need to get in touch with me,” Carella said.

“Why would I need to get in touch with you?” Newman asked, but he accepted the card.

In the street outside, as they walked toward where Carella had parked the unmarked sedan, he wished this wasn’t Kling’s day off. The way the squadroom schedule broke down, a man often found himself partnered with different detectives at any given time of the month. Carella would have settled for any one of them today. Even Parker, who was not Carella’s notion of an ideal cop, had years of experience, and could bring to any case the kind of street smarts often necessary to break it.

Police lore held that a good partner was a man you could count on in a shootout. That was why so many uniformed motor-patrol cops objected to having a woman officer riding with them; they figured she couldn’t be depended on if it came to going up against a heavy with a shotgun in his hands. But Carella had seen women on the range who could dot an i with a .38-caliber pistol. Sheer brute strength didn’t amount to a hill of beans in a shootout. Jessica Herzog had been a captain in the Israeli Army and, according to her brother-in-law, had killed seventeen men in combat. Would any cop on the force have objected to Jessica as a partner? He doubted it. But a partner was more than that, much more.

Genero — whose value in a shootout was debatable anyway; the man had once accidentally put a bullet in his own foot — simply did not provide the necessary “bounce” essential to an investigatory give-and-take. The bounce, Carella thought. That’s what I miss. The bounce.

“He noticed, too,” Genero said.

“What’s that?” Carella said.

“Her tits,” Genero said.

“Yeah,” Carella said.

He was thinking about the millions of dollars Jeremiah Newman had realized when he’d sold the paintings he’d inherited from his father. He was wondering whether a will had been filed with Probate, and was wondering further what the directives of that will might be. He was thinking a partner was somebody off whom you could bounce the facts, back and forth, mulling them, gnawing at them till they yielded a meaningful picture of what might have happened. He was thinking a partner was someone you could trust not only with your life but also with your wildest speculation. He was thinking a partner was someone who could risk telling you he suspected his wife was playing around. He was thinking a partner was someone who could openly sob in your presence, without fear you would laugh at him. He was wishing Kling was with him on this third day after the body of Jeremiah Newman had been found by his wife in an apartment as hot and as stinking as the corridors of Hell.

At dinner that night with Meyer and his wife, Kling and Augusta listened to Meyer telling two jokes, both of them about immigrants to this city. The first one was about a Russian immigrant who changed his name almost immediately after he arrived here. One day, he ran into a friend from his old village, and the man was surprised to learn that his former countryman was no longer Boris Rybinski but was now C. R. Stampler. “So from vhere did you gat this new name?” he asked. The newly arrived immigrant shrugged and said, “Tzimple. I am liffink now on Stampler Stritt, so dot’s from vhere I got the name.” His friend thought about this for a moment, and then said, “So vot does it stend for the C. R.?” The immigrant smiled broadly and said, “Corner Robertson.”

The second joke was perhaps the definitive story about this city, which had never been celebrated for its friendliness or warmth, and which in fact had a reputation for abruptness bordering on rudeness. It was a very short story, a one-liner. An immigrant stops a stranger on the street and says, “Excuse me, can you tell me where the Municipal Life Building is, or should I go fuck myself?”

Augusta laughed louder than anyone else.

Kling remembered that between the hours of twelve-thirty and one forty-five, she had been inside a building on Hopper Street, corner Matthews. When they left the restaurant at ten, Meyer offered to give them a lift, but they were only a few blocks from where they lived, and so they all said good night on the sidewalk outside.

As they moved past the restaurant, a man stepped out of a doorway across the way, and began walking parallel to them on the other side of the street.

He was a huge man with the broad, powerful shoulders of a weight lifter. His dark eyes were shadowed by the brim of a hat pulled low on his forehead and covering his black hair. He followed Kling and Augusta all the way home, and after they went inside he stood on the sidewalk across the street and watched the lighted windows on the second floor of the brownstone. He did not leave until the lights went out at a little past eleven.

Then he went uptown to look for a gun.