Ice

10

The superintendent of Sally Anderson’s building had been pestered by cops ever since her murder, and now there was a monk to contend with. The super was not a religious man, he did not give a damn about Heaven or Hell, and he did not feel like cooperating with a monk while he was sprinkling rock salt on the pavement outside the building, trying to melt the sheet of ice there.

“What’s she got to do with you?” he asked Brother Anthony.

“She ordered a Bible,” Brother Anthony said.

“A what?”

“A Bible. From the Order of Fraternal Pietists,” he said, figuring that sounded very holy.

“So?”

“I am of that order,” Brother Anthony said solemnly.

“So?”

“I would like to deliver her Bible. I’ve been upstairs to the apartment listed in her mailbox, and there’s no answer. I was wondering if you could tell me—”

“You bet there’s no answer,” the super said.

“That’s right,” Brother Anthony said.

“Ain’t never gonna be no answer up there,” the super said. “Not from her, anyway.”

“Oh?” Brother Anthony said. “Has Miss Anderson moved?”

“You mean you’re not in touch?”

“In touch?”

“With God?”

“With God?”

“You mean God doesn’t send down daily bulletins?”

“I’m not following you, sir,” Brother Anthony said.

“Doesn’t God have a list he sends down to you guys? Telling you who expired and where she was sent?” the super said, flinging rock salt onto the sidewalk with atheistic zeal. “Whether it was Heaven or Hell or in between?”

Brother Anthony looked at him.

“Sally Anderson is dead,” the super said.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Brother Anthony said. “Dominus vobiscum.”

“Et cum spiritu tuo,” the super said; he had been raised as a Catholic.

“May God have mercy on her eternal soul,” Brother Anthony said. “When did she die?”

“Last Friday night.”

“What was the cause of her death?”

“Three bullet holes was what was the cause of her death.”

Brother Anthony’s eyes opened wide.

“Right here on the sidewalk,” the super said.

“Do the police know who did it?” Brother Anthony asked.

“The police don’t know how to blow their noses,” the super said. “Don’t you read the papers? It’s been all over the papers.”

“I wasn’t aware,” Brother Anthony said.

“Too busy with your Latin, I suppose,” the super said, hurling rock salt. “Your kyrie eleisons.”

“Yes,” Brother Anthony said. He had never heard those words before. They sounded good. He decided to use them in the future. Toss in a few kyrie eleisions with his Dominus vobiscums. Et cum spiritu tuo. That was a good one, too. And then it occurred to him that this was a remarkable coincidence here, Paco Lopez buying a couple of slugs on Tuesday night, and his supplier taking three of them on Friday night.

Suddenly, this did not seem like such small potatoes anymore. All at once, the two murders seemed like the kind of action the big-time spic drug dealers in this city were into. He wondered if he wanted to get involved in such goings-on. He certainly did not want to wake up dead in the trunk of an automobile in the parking lot at Spindrift Airport. Still, he sensed he had stumbled onto something that might just possibly net him and Emma some really big bucks. Provided they played it right. Provided they did their sniffing around without getting their feet wet. At first, anyway. Plenty of time to move in once they knew what was going on.

“What did she do for a living?” he asked the super, figuring if this Anderson girl had been into something big with Lopez, then maybe one or more of her business associates were into the same thing. It was someplace to start. Such remarkable coincidences didn’t fall into his lap every day of the week.

“She was a dancer,” the super said.

A dancer, Brother Anthony thought, visualizing somebody teaching the tango up at Arthur Murray’s. Once, a long time ago, when he was married to a lady who ran a luncheonette upstate, she had convinced him to go with her to a dance studio. Not Arthur Murray’s. Not Fred Astaire’s, either. Something called — he couldn’t remember. To learn the cha-cha, she’d been crazy about the cha-cha. Brother Anthony got an erection the first time he was alone in the room with his instructor, a pretty little brunette wearing a slinky gown, looked more like a hooker than a person supposed to teach him the cha-cha. The girl told him he was very light on his feet, which he already knew. He had his hands spread on her satiny little ass when his wife walked in and decided maybe they should stop taking cha-cha lessons. Step Lively, that had been the name of the place. That was a long time ago, before his wife met with the untimely accident that had cost him a year in Castleview on a bum manslaughter rap. All water under the bridge, Brother Anthony thought, kyrie eleison.

“In that big musical downtown,” the super said.

“What do you mean?” Brother Anthony asked.

“Fatback,” the super said.

Brother Anthony still didn’t know what he meant.

“The show,” the super said. “Downtown.”

“Where downtown?” Brother Anthony asked.

“I don’t know the name of the theater. Buy yourself a newspaper. Maybe they got one printed in Latin.”

“God bless you,” Brother Anthony said.

The phone on Kling’s desk began ringing just as he and Brown were leaving the squadroom. He leaned over the slatted rail divider and picked up the receiver.

“Kling,” he said.

“Bert, it’s Eileen.”

“Oh, hi,” he said. “I was going to call you later today.”

“Did you find it?”

“Just where you said it was. Back seat of the car.”

“You know how many earrings I’ve lost in the back seats of cars?” Eileen said.

Kling said nothing.

“Years ago, of course,” she said.

Kling still said nothing.

“When I was a teenager,” she said.

The silence lengthened.

“Well,” she said, “I’m glad you found it.”

“What do you want me to do with it?” Kling asked.

“I don’t suppose you’ll be coming down this way for anything, will you?”

“Well—”

“Court? Or the lab? DA’s Office? Anything like that?”

“No, but...”

She waited.

“Actually, I live down near the bridge,” Kling said.

“The Calm’s Point Bridge?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, well, good! Do you know A View from the Bridge?”

“What?”

“It’s under the bridge, actually, right on the Dix. A little wine bar.”

“Oh.”

“It’s just... I don’t want to take you out of your way.”

“Well—”

“Does five sound okay?” Eileen asked.

“I was just leaving the office, I don’t know what time—”

“It’s just at the end of Lamb Street, under the bridge, right on the river, you can’t miss it. Five o’clock, okay? My treat, it’ll be a reward, sort of.”

“Well—”

“Or have you made other plans?” Eileen asked.

“No. No other plans.”

“Five o’clock then?”

“Okay,” he said.

“Good,” she said, and hung up.

Kling had a bewildered look on his face.

“What was that?” Brown asked.

“Eileen’s earring,” Kling said.

“What?” Brown said.

“Forget it,” Kling said.

By 3:00 that afternoon, they had been through Edelman’s small second-floor office a total of three times — four times, if you counted the extra half hour they’d spent going through his desk again. Brown wanted to call it quits. Kling pointed out that they hadn’t yet looked inside the safe. Brown mentioned that the safe was locked. Kling put in a call to the Safe, Loft & Truck Squad. A detective there told him they’d try to get somebody up there within the half hour. Brown lighted a cigarette, and they began going over the office yet another time.

The office was the first in the hallway at the top of the stairs, which probably accounted for the fact that Andrew Fleet had chosen it for his stickup last July, a junkie robber being interested only in expediency and opportunity. A frosted-glass panel on the front door was lettered in gold leaf with the words EDELMAN BROS. and beneath that PRECIOUS GEMS. Mrs. Edelman had told them her husband worked alone, so both Brown and Kling figured the firm had been named when there was a brother-partner, and that either the brother was now dead, or else no longer active in the business. They each made a note, in their separate pads, to call Mrs. Edelman and check on this.

Just inside the entrance doorway, there was a space some four feet wide, leading to a chest-high counter behind which was a grille fashioned of the same steel mesh as that on the squadroom’s detention cage. A glass-paneled door covered with the same protective mesh was to the left of the counter. A button on the other side of the counter, when pressed, released the lock on the door to the inner office. But the mesh, somewhat like what you might find in a cyclone fence around a school playground, could not have prevented an intruder from sticking a gun through any one of its diamond-shaped openings and demanding that the release button for the door be pressed. Presumably, this was what had happened on that night last July. Andrew Fleet had barged into the office, pointed his gun at Edelman, and ordered him to unlock the door. The steel mesh grille had been as helpful as a bathing suit in a blizzard.

The office side of the dividing counter resembled an apothecary chest, with dozens of little drawers set into it, each of them labeled with the names of the gems they presumably contained. No one had been in this office since the night of Edelman’s murder, but the drawers were surprisingly empty, which led both Kling and Brown to assume that Edelman had locked his stuff in the safe before heading home that night. The men were both wearing cotton gloves as they went through the office. It was unlikely that the murderer had been here before heading uptown to ambush Edelman in the garage under his building, but the Crime Unit boys had not yet been through the place, and they weren’t taking any chances. If they found a residue of anything that even remotely resembled cocaine, they would place a call downtown at once. They were working this by the book. You didn’t summon the harried Crime Unit to a place that wasn’t the scene of the crime, unless you had damn good reason to suspect this other place was somehow linked to the crime. They had no reason to suspect that as yet.

The detective from Safe, Loft & Truck arrived forty minutes later, which wasn’t bad considering the condition of the roads. He was wearing a sheepskin car coat, a cap with earflaps, fleece-lined gloves, heavy woolen trousers, a turtleneck shirt, and black rubbers. He was also carrying a black satchel. He put the satchel down on the floor, took off his gloves, rubbed his hands briskly together, said, “Some weather, huh?” and extended his right hand. “Turbo,” he said, and shook hands first with Brown and then with Kling, who introduced themselves in turn.

Turbo reminded Brown of the pictures of Santa Claus in the illustrated version of “The Night before Christmas,” which he ritually read to his kid every Christmas Eve. Turbo didn’t have a beard, but he was a roly-poly little man with bright red cheeks, no taller than Hal Willis, but at least a yard wider. He had retrieved his right hand, and was again rubbing both hands briskly together. Brown figured he was going to try the combination, the way Jimmy Valentine might have.

“So where is it?” Turbo said.

“Right there in the corner,” Kling said.

Turbo looked.

“I was hoping it’d be an old one,” he said. “That box looks brand new.”

He walked over to the safe.

“I coulda punched an old box in three seconds flat. This one’s gonna take time.”

He studied the safe.

“You know what I’m gonna find here, most likely?” he said. “A lead spindle shaft with the locknuts away from the shaft so I won’t be able to pound it through the gut box and break the nuts that way.”

Brown and Kling looked at each other. Turbo sounded as if he were speaking a foreign language.

“Well, let’s see,” Turbo said. “You think he may have left it on day combination, no such luck, huh?” He was reaching for the dial when his hand stopped. “The Crime Unit been in here?” he asked.

“No,” Kling said.

“Is that why you’re wearing the Mickey Mouse gloves?”

Both men looked at their hands. Neither of them had removed the cotton gloves when shaking hands with Turbo, a lack of etiquette he seemed not to have minded.

“What is this case, anyway?” he asked.

“Homicide,” Kling said.

“And no Crime Unit?”

“He was killed uptown.”

“So what’s this, his place of business?”

“Right,” Brown said.

“Whose authority do I have to open this thing?”

“It’s our case,” Kling said.

“So what does that mean?” Turbo asked.

“That’s your authority,” Brown said.

“Yeah? You go tell that to my lieutenant, that I busted open a safe on the authority of two flatfoots from the boonies,” Turbo said, and went to the phone. Mindful of the fact that the Crime Unit hadn’t yet been here, he opened his satchel, took out his own pair of white cotton gloves, and pulled them on. The three detectives now looked like waiters in a fancy restaurant. Brown expected one of them to start passing around the finger bowls. Turbo lifted the phone receiver, dialed a number, and waited.

“Yeah,” he said, “Turbo here. Let me talk to the Loot.” He waited again. “Mike,” he said, “it’s Dom. I’m here on North Greenfield, there’s two guys from uptown want me to open a safe for them.” He looked at Kling and Brown. “What’s your names again?” he asked.

“Kling,” Kling said.

“Brown,” Brown said.

“Kling and Brown,” Turbo said into the phone, and listened again. “What precinct?” he asked them.

“The Eight-Seven,” Kling said.

“The Eight-Seven,” Turbo said into the phone. “A homicide. No, this is the guy’s place of business, the victim’s. So what should I do? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I just want my ass covered, you understand, Mike? ‘Cause next thing you know, I’ll be doing time on a Burglary Three rap.” He listened. “What release form, who’s got a release form? Well, no, I don’t. So what should it say? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. You want both of them to sign it, or what? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And that’ll do it, huh? Okay, Mike, you’re the boss. I’ll see you later,” he said, and hung up. “I need a release from you guys,” he said. “Authorizing me to open that thing. One signature’ll do it, whoever caught the squeal. I’ll give you the language.”

He dictated the words to Kling, who wrote them down in his pad, and then signed the page.

“Date it, please,” Turbo said.

Kling dated it.

“And you’d better let me have your rank and shield number, too.”

Kling scribbled his rank and shield number under his signature.

“I’m sorry to get so technical,” Turbo said, pocketing the sheet of paper Kling tore from his pad, “but if there’s anything of value in that safe, and it happens to disappear—”

“Right, you’re just covering your ass,” Brown said.

“Right,” Turbo said, and shot him a glare. “So let’s see if this guy left it on day comb.” He went to the safe again. “Lots of guys who are in and out of a box all day long, they’ll just give the dial a tiny little twist when they close it, you know? Then all they have to do is turn it back to the last number, saves a lot of time.” He turned the dial slowly, and yanked on the handle. “No such luck,” he said. “Let’s try the old five-ten.”

The detectives looked at him.

“Lots of guys, they have trouble remembering numbers, so when they order a safe, they’ll ask for the combination to be three numbers in a multiplication table. Like five, ten, fifteen. Or four, eight, twelve. Or six, twelve, eighteen, or whatever. Hardly ever the nine table, that’s a bitch, the nine table. What’s nine times three?” he asked Kling.

“Twenty-seven,” Kling said.

“Yeah, well, that’s the exception that proves the rule. So let’s give it a shot.”

As he began trying the multiplication-table combinations, he said, “Would you know this guy’s birthday?”

“No,” Brown said.

“ ‘Cause sometimes they use their birthdays, you know, anything to make it easy to remember. Like if he was born on October 15, 1926, the combination would be ten left, fifteen right, and then twenty-six left again. But you don’t know his birthday, huh?”

“No,” Brown said.

“Take a look at the phone there, what’s the number on it?”

“What?” Brown said.

“The phone. The phone I just used there. On the guy’s desk. What’s the first six digits? Sometimes they’ll use the first six digits of their phone number.”

“You want me to write this down, or what?” Brown asked.

“Yeah, write it down. I’m still only up to the six table. I usually only take it to eleven, because after that the tables get too tricky. Who the hell even knows what fourteen times three is?” he said.

“Forty-two,” Kling said, and Turbo gave him a sour look.

“Okay, give me that phone number,” he said.

Brown handed him the slip of paper on which he’d written down the first six digits of the number. Turbo tried them.

“No such luck,” he said. “Okay, let’s bring up the heavy artillery.” He opened his satchel, and took from it a small sledgehammer and a punch. “Best burglars in this city are on the Safe, Loft & Truck Squad,” he said, proudly, and with one swift blow knocked off the combination dial. “Looks like a lead spindle,” he said, “we’ll find out in a minute.” He began pounding on the exposed spindle. The spindle started mushrooming under the hammer blows. “Lead, sure as hell,” he said. “This here is what you call a money box here. That means it’s made of heavy steel layers, with a punch-resistant spindle, and sometimes a boltwork relock device, or even a copper sheet in the door so an acetylene torch on it don’t mean nothing. If I’da known what this was gonna be, I’da brought nitro.” He smiled suddenly. “I’m kidding. Your best burglars these days hardly ever use explosives. What I got to do here is I got to peel back the steel until I can get a big enough hole to force a jimmy in. Once I get to that lock, I can pry it loose and open the door. Make yourselves comfortable, this may take a while.”

Kling looked up at the clock. It was ten minutes past 4:00, and he had promised Eileen he’d meet her at 5:00. He debated calling her, decided not to.

“Can we get a little light in here?” Turbo asked. “Or were you partners with this dead guy?”

Brown flicked on the wall switch.

Turbo got to work.

He opened the box in twenty minutes. He was obviously very pleased with himself, and so both Brown and Kling congratulated him effusively before getting down on their hands and knees to see what was inside there.

There were not very many gems in the safe. Several pouches of rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, and one small pouch of diamonds. But on a shelf at the rear of the safe, stacked neatly there, the detectives found $300,000 in $100 bills.

“We’re in the wrong business,” Turbo told them.

Detective Richard Genero had been very leery about answering the telephone ever since he’d inadvertently yelled at a captain from downtown two days ago. You never knew who was going to be on the other end. That was the mystery of the telephone. There were other mysteries in life as well, which was why his mother constantly advised him to “mind his own business,” a warning that seemed absurd when directed to a policeman, whose business was minding other people’s business. When the telephone on Carella’s desk rang at 4:30 that Tuesday afternoon, Genero debated answering it. Carella was at the other end of the squadroom, putting on his coat, preparatory to leaving. Suppose this was that captain again? Carella and the captain seemed to be good friends. Carella had laughed a lot when he was talking to the captain on the telephone. Suppose the captain yelled at Genero again? The phone kept ringing.

“Will somebody please pick that up?” Carella shouted from across the room, where he was buttoning his coat.

Since Genero was the only other person in the room, he picked up the receiver, very gingerly, and held it a little distance from his ear, in case the captain started yelling again. “Hello?” he said, not wanting to give his name in case this was the captain again.

“Detective Carella, please,” the voice on the other end said.

“Who’s this, please?” Genero asked, very carefully.

“Tell him it’s Danny,” the voice said.

“Yes, sir,” Genero said, not knowing whether or not Danny was the same captain who’d called on Sunday, or perhaps even another captain. “Steve!” he yelled, “it’s Danny.”

Carella came across the room to his desk. “Why does it always ring when I’m on my way out?” he said.

“That’s the mystery of the telephone,” Genero said, and smiled like an angel. Carella took the receiver from him. Genero went back to his own desk, where he was working on a crossword puzzle, and having trouble with a three-letter word that meant feline.

“Hello, Danny,” Carella said.

“Steve? I hope this ain’t an inconvenient time.”

“No, no. What’ve you got?”

Meyer came up the corridor from the men’s room, zipping up his fly. He pushed his way through the gate in the slatted rail divider and went to the coatrack. The woolen hat his wife had knitted for him was in the right-hand pocket of his coat. He debated putting it on. Instead, he took his blue fedora from the rack, seated it on his bald head, shrugged into his coat, and walked to where Carella was on the phone.

“What do you mean, ‘interesting’?” Carella said.

“Well, I thought I might be able to talk to this chick who wouldn’t give you the right time, you know the one I mean?” Danny said.

“The Quadrado girl, yes.”

“Right. The one who used to live with Lopez. Give her a song and dance, tell her I was looking to buy some dope, whatever. Just to get her talking, you know what I mean?”

“So what was so interesting, Danny?”

“Well... you probably know this already, Steve, but maybe you don’t.”

“What is it, Danny?” Carella said, and looked at Meyer and shrugged. Meyer shrugged back.

“She was cut to ribbons Sunday night.”

“What?”

“Yeah. She died at Saint Juke’s yesterday morning, around eleven o’clock.”

“Who told you this?”

“The lady who lives next door to her.”

“Danny... are you sure?”

“I always check at the source, Steve. I called Saint Juke’s the minute I left the building. She’s dead, all right. They’re still waiting for somebody to come claim the body. Has she got any relatives?”

“A cousin,” Carella said blankly.

“Yeah,” Danny said, and paused. “Steve... you still want me to look for a .38? I mean... the lady was cut, Steve.”

“Yes, please keep looking, Danny,” Carella said. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

“See you,” Danny said, and hung up. Carella held the receiver a moment before replacing it on the cradle.

“What?” Meyer said.

Carella took a deep breath. He shook his head. Still wearing his overcoat, he walked to the lieutenant’s door and knocked on it.

“Come!” Byrnes shouted.

Carella took another deep breath.

The ceiling of A View from the Bridge was adorned with wineglasses, the foot of each glass captured between narrow wooden slats, the stem and bowl hanging downward to create an overall impression of a vast, wall-to-wall chandelier glistening with reflected light from the fireplace on one wall of the room. The fireplace wall was made of brick, and the surrounding walls were wood-paneled except for the one facing the river, a wide expanse of glass through which Kling could see the water beyond and the tugboats moving slowly through the rapidly gathering dusk. It was 5:30 P.M. by the clock over the bar facing the entrance doorway. He had made it downtown as quickly as possible, leaving Brown to contact the lieutenant with the startling news that Edelman’s safe had contained three hundred thousand smackeroos.

The wine bar, at this hour, was crowded with men and women who, presumably, worked in the myriad courthouses, municipal buildings, law offices, and brokerage firms that housed the judicial, economic, legal, and governmental power structure in this oldest part of the city. There was a pleasant conversational hum in the place, punctuated by relaxed laughter, a coziness encouraged by the blazing fire and the flickering glow of candles in ruby red holders on each of the round tables. Kling had never been to England, but he suspected that a pub in London might have looked and sounded exactly like this at the end of a long working day. He recognized an assistant DA he knew, said hello to him, and then looked for Eileen.

She was sitting at a table by the window, staring out over the river. The candle in its ruby holder cast flickering highlights into her hair, red reflecting red. Her chin was resting on the cupped palm of her hand. She looked pensive and contained, and for a moment he debated intruding on whatever mood she was sharing with the dark waters of the river beyond. He took off his coat, hung it on a wall rack just inside the door, and then moved across the room to where she was sitting. She turned away from the river as he moved toward her, as though sensing his approach.

“Hi,” he said, “I’m sorry I’m late, we ran into something.”

“I just got here myself,” she said.

He pulled out the chair opposite her.

“So,” she said. “You found it.”

“Right where you said it’d be.” He reached into his jacket pocket. “Let me give it to you before it gets lost again,” he said, and placed the shining circle of gold on the table between them. He noticed all at once that she was wearing the mate to it on her right ear. He watched as she lifted the earring from the table, reached up with her left hand to pull down the lobe of her left ear, and crossed her right hand over her body to fasten the earring. The gesture reminded him suddenly and painfully of the numberless times he had watched Augusta putting on or taking off earrings, the peculiarly female tilt of her head, her hair falling in an auburn cascade. Augusta had pierced ears; Eileen’s earrings were clip-ons.

“So,” she said, and smiled, and then suddenly looked at him with something like embarrassment on her face, as though she’d been caught in an intimate act when she thought she’d been unobserved. The smile faltered for an instant. She looked quickly across the room to where the waiter was taking an order at another table. “What do you prefer?” she asked. “White or red?”

“White’ll be fine,” he said. “But listen, I want to pay for this. There’s no need—”

“Absolutely out of the question,” she said. “After all the trouble I put you to?”

“It was no trouble at—”

“No way,” she said, and signaled to the waiter.

Kling fell silent. She looked across at him, studying his face, a policewoman suddenly alerted to something odd.

“This really does bother you, doesn’t it?” she said.

“No, no.”

“My paying, I mean.”

“Well... no,” he said, but he meant yes. One of the things that had been most troubling about his marriage was the fact that Augusta’s exorbitant salary had paid for most of the luxuries they’d enjoyed.

The waiter was standing by the table now, the wine list in his hand. Clued by the fact that she was the one who’d signaled him, and no longer surprised by women who did the ordering and picked up the tab, he extended the leather-covered folder to her. “Yes, miss?” he said.

“I believe the gentleman would like to do the ordering,” Eileen said. Kling looked at her. “He’ll want the check, too,” she added.

“Whatever turns you on,” the waiter said, and handed the list to Kling.

“I’m not so good at this,” he said.

“Neither am I,” she said.

“Were you thinking of a white or a red?” the waiter asked.

“A white,” Kling said.

“A dry white?”

“Well... sure.”

“May I suggest the Pouilly Fumé, sir? It’s a nice dry white with a somewhat smoky taste.”

“Eileen?”

“Yes, that sounds fine,” she said.

“Yes, the... uh... Pooey Foo May, please,” Kling said, and handed the wine list back as if it had caught fire in his hands. “Sounds like a Chinese dish,” he said to Eileen as the waiter walked off.

“Did you see the French movie, it’s a classic,” she said. “I forget the title. With Gerard Philippe and... Michelle Morgan, I think. She’s an older woman and he’s a very young man, and he takes her to a fancy French restaurant—”

“No, I don’t think so,” Kling said.

“Anyway, he’s trying to impress her, you know, and when the wine steward brings the wine he ordered, and pours a little into his glass to taste it, he takes a little sip — she’s watching him all the while, and the steward is watching him, too — and he rolls it around on his tongue, and says, ‘This wine tastes of cork.’ The wine steward looks at him — they’re all supposed to be such bastards, you know, French waiters — and he pours a little of the wine into his little silver tasting cup, whatever they call it, and he takes a sip, and rolls it around in his mouth, and everybody in the place is watching them because they know they’re lovers, and there’s nothing in the world a Frenchman likes better than a lover. And finally, the steward nods very solemnly, and says, ‘Monsieur is correct, this wine does taste of cork,’ and he goes away to get a fresh bottle, and Gerard Philippe smiles, and Michelle Morgan smiles, and everybody in the entire place smiles.”

Eileen was smiling now.

“It was a very lovely scene,” she said.

“I don’t much care for foreign movies,” Kling said. “I mean, the ones with subtitles.”

“This one had subtitles,” Eileen said. “But it was beautiful.”

“That scene did sound very good,” Kling said.

“Le Diable au Corps, that was it.”

Kling looked at her, puzzled.

“The title,” she said. “It means ‘Devil in the Flesh.’ ”

“That’s a good title,” Kling said.

“Yes,” Eileen said.

“The Pouilly Fumé,” the waiter said, and pulled the cork. He wiped the lip of the bottle with his towel, and then poured a little wine into Kling’s glass. Kling looked at Eileen, lifted the glass, brought it to his lips, sipped at the wine, rolled the wine around in his mouth, raised his eyebrows and said, “This wine tastes of cork.”

Eileen burst out laughing.

“Cork?” the waiter said.

“I’m joking,” Kling said, “it’s really fine.”

“Because, really, if it’s—”

“No, no, it’s fine, really.”

Eileen was still laughing. The waiter frowned at her as he poured the wine into her glass, and then filled Kling’s. He was still frowning when he walked away from the table. They raised their glasses.

“Here’s to golden days and purple nights,” Eileen said, and clinked her glass against his.

“Cheers,” he said.

“My Uncle Matt always used to say that,” Eileen said. “He drank like a fish.” She brought the glass to her lips. “Be funny if it really tasted of cork, wouldn’t it?” she said, and then sipped at the wine.

“Does it?” Kling asked.

“No, no, it’s very good. Try it,” she said. “For real this time.”

He drank.

“Good?” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Actually, it was Micheline Presle, I think,” she said. “The heroine.”

They sat silently for several moments. Out on the river, a tugboat hooted into the night.

“So,” she said, “what are you working on?”

“That homicide we caught when you were up there Saturday night.”

“How does it look?”

“Puzzling,” Kling said.

“That’s what makes them interesting,” Eileen said.

“I suppose.”

“My stuff is hardly ever puzzling. I’m always the bait for some lunatic out there, hoping he’ll take the hook.”

“I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes,” Kling said.

“It does get scary every now and then.”

“I’ll bet.”

“So listen, who asked me to become a cop, right?”

“How’d you happen to get into it?”

“Uncle Matt. He of the golden days and purple nights, the big drinker. He was a cop. I loved him to death, so I figured I’d become a cop, too. He worked out of the old 110th in Riverhead. That is, till he caught it one night in a bar brawl. He wasn’t even on duty. Just sitting there drinking his sour mash bourbon when some guy came in with a sawed-off shotgun and a red plaid kerchief over his face. Uncle Matt went for his service revolver and the guy shot him dead.” Eileen paused. “The guy got fifty-two dollars and thirty-six cents from the cash register. He also got away clean. I keep hoping I’ll run into him one day. Sawed-off shotgun and red plaid kerchief. I’ll blow him away without batting an eyelash.”

She batted both eyelashes now.

“Tough talk on the lady, huh?” she said, and smiled. “So how about you?” she said. “How’d you get into it?”

“Seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” he said, and shrugged.

“How about now? Does it still seem like the right thing?”

“I guess so.” He shrugged again. “You get sort of... it wears you down, you know.”

“Mm,” she said.

“Everything out there,” he said, and fell silent.

They sipped some more wine.

“What are you working on?” he asked.

“Thursday,” she said. “I won’t start till Thursday night.”

“And what’s that?”

“Some guy’s been raping nurses outside Worth Memorial. On their way to the subway, when they’re crossing that park outside the hospital, do you know the park? In Chinatown?”

“Yes,” Kling said, and nodded.

“Pretty big park for that part of the city. He hits the ones coming off the four-to-midnight, three of them in the past three months, always when there’s no moon.”

“I gather there’ll be no moon this Thursday night.”

“No moon at all,” she said. “Don’t you just love that song?”

“What song?”

“ ‘No Moon at All.’ ”

“I don’t know it,” Kling said. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, this certainly isn’t the ‘We-Both-Like-the-Same-Things’ scene, is it?”

“I don’t know what scene that is,” Kling said.

“In the movies. What’s your favorite color? Yellow. Mine, too! What’s your favorite flower? Geraniums. Mine, too! Gee, we both like the same things!” She laughed again.

“Well, at least we both like the wine,” Kling said, and smiled, and poured her glass full again. “Will you be dressed like a nurse?” he asked.

“Oh, sure. Do you think that’s sexy?”

“What?”

“Nurses. Their uniforms, I mean.”

“I’ve never thought about it.”

“Lots of men have things for nurses, you know. I guess it’s because they figure they’ve seen it all, nurses. Guys lying around naked on operating tables and so forth. They figure nurses are experienced.”

“Mm,” Kling said.

“Somebody once told me — this man I used to date, he was an editor at a paperback house — he told me if you put the word nurse in a title, you’re guaranteed a million-copy sale.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s what he told me.”

“I guess he would know.”

“But nurses don’t turn you on, huh?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I’ll have to show you what I look like,” Eileen said. Her eyes met his. “In my nurse’s outfit.”

Kling said nothing.

“It must have something to do with white, too,” Eileen said. “The fact that a nurse’s uniform is white. Like a bride’s gown, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” Kling said.

“The conflicting image, do you know? The experienced virgin. Not that too many brides today are virgins,” she said, and shrugged. “Nobody would even expect that today, would they? A man, I mean. That his bride’s going to be a virgin?”

“I guess not,” Kling said.

“You’ve never been married, have you?” she said.

“I’ve been married,” he said.

“I didn’t know that.”

“Yes,” he said.

“And?”

Kling hesitated.

“I was recently divorced,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Well,” he said, and lifted his wineglass, avoiding her steady gaze. “How about you?” he said. He was looking out over the river now.

“Still hoping for Mr. Right,” she said. “I keep having this fantasy... well, I really shouldn’t tell you this.”

“No, go ahead,” he said, turning back to her.

“Well... really, it’s silly,” she said, and he could swear that she was blushing, but perhaps it was only the red glow of the candle in its holder. “I keep fantasizing that one of those rapists out there will succeed one night, do you know? I won’t be able to get my gun on him in time, he’ll do whatever he wants and — surprise — he’ll turn out to be Prince Charming! I’ll fall madly in love with him, and we’ll live happily ever after. Whatever you do, don’t tell that to Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem. I’ll get drummed out of the women’s movement.”

“The old rape fantasy,” Kling said.

“Except that I happen to deal with real rape,” Eileen said. “And I know it isn’t fun and games.”

“Mm,” Kling said.

“So why should I fantasize about it? I mean, I’ve come within a hairsbreadth so many times—”

“Maybe that’s what accounts for the fantasy,” Kling said. “The fantasy makes it seem less frightening. Your work. What you have to do. Maybe,” he said, and shrugged.

“We’ve just had our ‘I-Don’t-Know-Why-I’m-Telling-You-All-This’ scene, haven’t we?”

“I suppose so,” he said, and smiled.

“Somebody ought to write a book about all the different kinds of clichéd scenes,” she said. “The one I like best, I think, is when the killer has a gun on the guy who’s been chasing him, and he says something like, ‘It’s safe to tell you this now because in three seconds flat you’ll be dead,’ and then proceeds to brag about all the people he killed and how and why he killed them.”

“I wish it was that easy,” Kling said, still smiling.

“Or what I call the ‘Uh-Oh!’ scene. Where we see a wife in bed with her lover, and then we cut away to the husband putting his key in the door latch, and we’re all supposed to go, ‘Uh-oh, here it comes!’ Don’t you just love that scene?”

The smile dropped from his face.

She looked into his eyes, trying to read them, knowing she’d somehow made a dreadful mistake, and trying to understand what she’d said that had been so terribly wrong. Until that moment, they’d seemed—

“I’d better get the check,” he said.

She knew better than to press it. If there was one thing she’d learned as a decoy, it was patience.

“Sure,” she said, “I’ve got to run, too. Hey, thanks for bringing the earring back, really. I appreciate it.”

“No problem,” Kling said, but he wasn’t looking at her, he was signaling to the waiter instead.

They sat in silence while they waited for the check. When they left the place, they shook hands politely on the sidewalk outside and walked off in opposite directions.

“I hate scenes that are played offstage,” Meyer said.

“So why didn’t you come in there with me?” Carella said.

“It was bad enough listening to him yell from outside,” Meyer said. “You want to tell me what it was all about?”

They were sitting side by side in the front seat of one of the precinct’s newest sedans. Each time they checked out the car, Sergeant Murchison came out back to list any scratches or dents on it. That way he would know who was responsible for any new scratches or dents. The car was cozy and warm. The rear tires were snow tires with studs. Hawes and Willis, who had last used the car, said that it actually ran on ice. Carella and Meyer — heading downtown for Timothy Moore’s apartment — were having no difficulties on the city’s frozen tundra.

“So let me hear it,” Meyer said.

“Very simple,” Carella said. “Paco Lopez’s girlfriend was stabbed Sunday night.”

“What!”

“Died yesterday morning at Saint Jude’s.”

“Where’d this happen?” Meyer asked.

“That’s just it. Charlie Car found her outside her building on Ainsley Avenue. It’s all on the Activity Report spindle, Meyer. A Ten-Twenty-four described as a cutting, victim taken to Saint Jude’s.”

“Who was catching Sunday night?”

“That’s not the point. The blues didn’t find her till Monday morning. The graveyard shift had already been relieved, this was the eight-to-four.”

“That’s when we were catching!” Meyer said.

“You’re beginning to get the message.”

“So why the hell didn’t the blues call it in?”

“They did.”

“Then why didn’t we get it?”

“Officer’s discretion,” Carella said. “Charlie Car called for a meat wagon, and then accompanied it to the hospital. The girl was still alive when they delivered her. That’s the way it appears on the activity report they wrote up at the end of their tour.”

“At four o’clock, you mean? What time did the girl die?”

“Around eleven.”

“Is that on an activity report, too?”

“How could it be? I found out from Danny Gimp.”

“Great! A snitch pulling together the pieces!”

“Exactly Pete’s words.”

“So what now?”

“Now we ask Timothy Moore about the ‘extra’ cash his girlfriend was making.”

“I mean, what about the Quadrado girl?”

“She was cut, Meyer. Does that sound like the same m.o. to you?”

“Maybe the guy’s running out of bullets.”

“Maybe. Or maybe this was just another one of the hundred cuttings we get every day of the week. I want to talk to her cousin later, the kid who first put us onto her when we caught the Lopez murder. Maybe he’ll know something.”

“If this is related to cocaine—”

“It might be.”

“Then it’s starting to look like gang shit,” Meyer said. “And gang shit, I can do without.”

“Let’s talk to Moore,” Carella said.

Well, they knew it was a big city. And in a big city, mistakes were bound to occur. Chances were that even if they’d known of Judite Quadrado’s condition before she’d died, the girl might not have been able to tell them anything of value in cracking their case — or cases as the case happened to be. Knowing about her in time to have questioned her, and perhaps to have elicited a deathbed statement, might have proved a pointless exercise, anyway. Even in a big city, though, it was nice to know things.

Carella was very happy, for example, to have learned from Lieutenant Byrnes (between his readings of the Riot Act) that Brown and Kling had found $300,000 in $100 bills in the safe of Marvin Edelman, the last — or at least the most recent; they hoped he’d prove to be the last — of the murder victims killed with the same .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. The presence of such a large bundle might have been attributed, of course, to the very nature of the man’s business: a precious-gems merchant did not normally accept subway tokens in exchange for his commodity. But why such an awesome amount of money had been kept in his office safe, instead of in a bank account, or even a bank’s safety deposit box, was something that troubled the detectives. It might not have troubled them so much if Edelman’s fellow victims hadn’t been involved, in one way or another, with cocaine. When cocaine was on the scene, big bucks were mandatory. And the bucks in Edelman’s safe were very big indeed.

In street parlance over the years, cocaine had been known under various names: C, coke, snow, happy dust, sleigh ride, gold dust, Bernice, Corrine, girl, flake, star dust, blow, white lady, and — of course — nose candy. When combined with heroin, it was called a speedball, although the street jargon for this combination had recently changed to “Belushi Cocktail.” Whatever you chose to call it, cocaine was a headache. Up in the Eight-Seven, the heroin dealers had taken to giving their wares “brand” names. You bought your little glassine bag, and it came with a label pasted on it, and the label read Coolie High or Murder One or Rush or Jusey Whales or Quick Silver or Rope of Dope or Cousin Eddie or Bunny or Stay High or Crazy Eddie Shit or Good Pussy, hardly names that would ever be considered by General Foods. But since the people selling dope were criminals, and since there truly was no honor among thieves, within hours after a reputable dealer’s terrific stuff hit the street with a brand name like “Devil,” for example, or “Prophecy” or “New Admissions,” some slimy little pusher at the bottom of the ladder would be selling you a bag with the same brand name on it, but with the heroin cut almost to nothing — a “beat bag,” as it was known to addicts and dealers alike. But that was heroin.

Cocaine was something else.

The most recent federal report handed around the squadroom estimated that an approximate sixty metric tons of cocaine had been smuggled into the United States in the past year, at a wholesale value of $50 billion.

Cocaine was fashionable.

That was the biggest problem with cocaine. You didn’t have to be a raggedy-pantsed slum kid to snort a line. You could be running a big Hollywood studio, making multimillion-dollar decisions about the next movie you’d be foisting on an unsuspecting public, and that night you could sit around your Malibu beach house listening to the pounding of the surf and the pounding of your own head as you inhaled coke from the little gold spoon you wore on a slender gold chain under your custom-tailored silk shirt. In fact, if you wanted to start doing cocaine, it helped to be among the nation’s biggest wage earners. Every working cop knew the mathematics of cocaine. Every working cop was also an expert on the metric system of weights and measures. To understand the economy, you had to know that an ounce of cocaine was the same thing as 28.3 grams, and a kilo was the equivalent of 35.2 ounces, or 2.2 pounds by avoirdupois measure. Your average Colombian coca farmer sold his leaves to a trafficker for about $1 a pound — $2 a kilo, give or take a penny. By the time this raw material was transformed into cocaine hydrochloride, and then diluted again and again — “stepped on” or “whacked” or “hit” — and then sold in little packets about the size of the one you might find in a sugar bowl, a gram could cost you anywhere between $100 and $125, depending on the quality. The astronomical bucks to be realized in the cocaine trade were attributable to the extraordinary number of middlemen between the source and the consumer, and the ruthless dilution — all the way down the line — from a high of 90 to 98 percent pure in South America to a low of 12 percent pure on the city’s streets.

Both Meyer and Carella had mixed feelings about a possible cocaine connection to the murders. On the one hand, they were eager to close out the Lopez/Anderson/Edelman (and possibly Quadrado) file. On the other hand, if the murders had anything to do with the South American gangsters who operated out of Majesta across the river, in a neighborhood dubbed Baby Bogotá by the police — well, they just weren’t sure that was a can of peas they particularly cared to open. Organized crime wasn’t their bag, and the Colombian underworld was perhaps something more than a pair of flatfoots from an undernourished precinct could cope with effectively. As they knocked on the door to Timothy Moore’s second-floor apartment on Chelsea Place, they were hoping he would be able to tell them Sally Anderson was into some big-time drug dealing that was netting her the “extra” cash the black dancer Lonnie had hinted at — but they were also hoping the lead was a false one; better a bona fide crazy than a Colombian hit man.

There was music playing behind the door. Classical music. Lots of strings. Both of the detectives were musical ignoramuses; neither of them could identify it. The music was very loud. It flooded out past the wooden door and into the corridor. They knocked again.

“Hello!” a voice yelled.

“Police!” Carella yelled back.

“Okay, hold on!”

They held on. The music was all-pervasive, strings giving way to brasses and then to what Carella guessed was an oboe. Beneath the melodious din, he heard a lock being turned. The door opened. The music swelled more loudly into the hallway.

“Hey, hi,” Timothy Moore said.

He was wearing a gray sweat shirt imprinted in purple with the name and seal of Ramsey University. He was also wearing brown corduroy trousers and frayed house slippers.

“Come on in,” he said. “I just got home a few minutes ago.”

Home appeared to be a three-room apartment, living room, bedroom, and kitchen; in this section of town, so close to the school, it was probably costing him something like $600 a month. The entrance door opened onto the small living room, furnished with a thrift-shop sofa, chairs, and lamp, and unpainted bookcases brimming with thick tomes Carella assumed were medical texts. A human skeleton hung on a rack in one corner of the room. On an end table near the battered sofa, a telephone rested alongside the portable radio that was blaring the symphony or concerto or sonata or whatever it was. The radio was one of those little Japanese jobs like Genero’s, similar in every respect except one: Genero’s was usually tuned to a rock station. Beyond the sofa, a door opened into a bedroom with an unmade bed. On the opposite wall, another door opened into the kitchen.

“Let me turn this down,” Moore said, and went immediately to the radio. As he lowered the volume, Carella wondered why he simply didn’t turn it off. He said nothing.

“There,” Moore said.

The volume was still loud enough to make it annoying. Carella wondered if Moore was a little hard of hearing, and then wondered if he wasn’t overreacting. All Teddy had to learn was that he’d been annoyed by the listening habits of someone who might be a bit deaf.

“We didn’t want to bother you at the school,” he said over the sound coming from the radio. Clarinets now, he guessed. Or maybe flutes.

“I wonder if you could lower that a bit more,” Meyer said, apparently unburdened by any guilt over hurting the feelings of the possibly handicapped.

“Oh, sorry,” Moore said, and went immediately to the radio again. “I have it on all the time, I sometimes forget how loud it is.”

“There’ve been studies,” Meyer said.

“Studies?”

“About the rock-and-roll generation growing up deaf.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Meyer said. “From all the decibels.”

“Well, I’m not deaf yet,” Moore said, and smiled. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? A drink?”

“Nothing, thanks,” Carella said.

“Well, sit down, won’t you? You said you tried me at the school—”

“No, we didn’t want to bother you at the school.”

“Well, thanks, I appreciate that. The way I’m falling behind these days, all I’d have needed was to be yanked out of class.” He looked first at Carella and then at Meyer. “What is it? Is there some good news?”

“Well, no,” Carella said. “That’s not why we’re here.”

“Oh. I thought for a moment—”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Do you think... is there still a chance you may get him?”

“We’re working on it,” Carella said.

“Mr. Moore,” Meyer said, “we had a long talk with a girl named Lonnie Cooper yesterday, she’s one of the dancers in Fatback.”

“Yes, I know her,” Moore said.

“She told us all about the party that took place in her apartment a week ago Sunday — the party you missed.”

“Yes?” Moore said, looking puzzled.

“She confirmed that there was cocaine at the party.”

“Confirmed?”

“We had previously heard it from three separate sources.”

“Yes?” Moore said. He still looked puzzled.

“Mr. Moore,” Carella said, “the last time we spoke to you, we asked if Sally Anderson was involved with drugs. You told us—”

“Well, I really don’t remember exactly what—”

“We asked you, specifically, ‘Was she involved with drugs?’ and you answered, specifically, no. We also asked if she was involved in any other illegal activity, and you answered no to that one, too.”

“As far as I know, Sally was not involved in drugs or any other illegal activity, that’s correct.”

“You still maintain that?”

“I do.”

“Mr. Moore, four different people so far have told us that Sally Anderson was sniffing coke at that party.”

“Sally?” He was already shaking his head. “No, I’m sorry, I can’t believe that.”

“You knew nothing about her habit, huh?”

“Well, you know, of course, that cocaine isn’t habit-forming. I’m speaking from a strictly physiological standpoint. There’s absolutely no evidence of any dependence potential for methylester of benzoylecgonine. None whatever.”

“How about a psychological dependence?”

“Well, yes, but when you ask me whether or not Sally had a habit—”

“We asked whether you knew about her habit, Mr. Moore.”

“I take exception to the word habit, that’s all. But in any event, to answer your question, I do not believe Sally Anderson was using cocaine. Or any other drug, for that matter.”

“How about marijuana?”

“Well, I don’t consider that a drug.”

“We found marijuana fibers and seeds in her handbag, Mr. Moore.”

“That’s entirely likely. But, as I just said, I do not consider marijuana a drug, per se.”

“We also found a residue of cocaine.”

“That surprises me.”

“Even after what we told you about that party?”

“I don’t know who told you Sally was sniffing cocaine—”

“Do you want their names?”

“Yes, please.”

“Tina Wong, Tony Asensio, Mike Roldan, and Lonnie Cooper.”

Moore sighed heavily, and then shook his head. “I don’t understand that,” he said. “I have no reason to doubt you, but—”

“She never used cocaine in your presence, is that it?”

“Never.”

“And this all comes as a total surprise to you.”

“Yes, it does. In fact, I’m flabbergasted.”

“Mr. Moore, in your relationship with Miss Anderson, did you ever see her on Sundays?”

“Sundays?” he said, and the telephone rang. “Excuse me,” he said and lifted the receiver. “Hello?” he said. “Oh, hi, Mom, how are you?” he said. He listened and then said, “No, nothing new. In fact, I have the two detectives with me right this minute. The ones working on the case. No, not yet.” He listened again. “Still very cold,” he said, “how is it down there? Well, Mom, sixty-eight isn’t what I’d consider cold.” He listened, rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, and then said, “I’m really not sure. Right now, I’m in the middle of exams. Maybe during the spring break, I’ll see. I know I haven’t been down there in a while, Mom, but... well, August wasn’t all that long ago, really. No, it hasn’t been eight months, Mom, it’s only been six months. Less than six months, in fact. Are you feeling okay? How’s your arm? Oh? I’m sorry to hear that. You did, huh? Well, what did he say it was? Well, he’s probably right. Mom, he’s an orthopedist, he’d certainly know better than I what... Well, not yet, Mom. Well, thank you, but I’m not a doctor yet. Not for a while yet. An opinion from me wouldn’t be worth much, Mom. Well... uh-huh... uh-huh... well, if you want to think I saved that boy’s life, fine. But that doesn’t make me a doctor yet. And besides, anyone could have done what I did. The Heimlich Maneuver. Heimlich. What difference does it make how you spell it, Mom?” He rolled his eyes again. “Mom, I really have to go now, I have these detectives... what? Yes, I’ll tell them. I’m sure they’re doing their best, anyway, but I’ll tell them. Yes, Mom. I’ll talk to you soon. Good-bye, Mom.”

He put the phone back on the cradle, sighed in relief, turned to the detectives, and said, unnecessarily, “My mother.”

“Is she Jewish?” Meyer asked.

“Mother? No, no.”

“She sounded Jewish,” Meyer said, and shrugged. “Maybe all mothers are Jewish, who knows?”

“She gets lonely down there,” Moore said. “Ever since my father died—”

“I’m sorry,” Carella said.

“Well, it was a while ago. Last June, in fact. But they say it takes at least a year to get over either a death or a divorce, and she’s still taking it pretty hard. Sally was a tonic for her, but now...” He shook his head. “It’s just that she misses him so terribly much, you see. He was a wonderful man, my father. A doctor, you know. A surgeon, which is what I plan to be. Took care of us as if we were royalty. Even after he died. Made sure my mother wouldn’t have to worry for the rest of her life, even left me enough money to see me through medical school and set up a practice afterward. A wonderful man.” He shook his head again. “I’m sorry for the interruption,” he said. “You were asking me—”

“What was that about the Heimlich Manuever?” Carella asked.

Moore smiled. “When I was down there last August, a kid began turning purple in a restaurant. Twelve-year-old Cuban kid, all dressed up for the big Sunday dinner with his family. I realized he was choking, and I jumped up and did the Heimlich on him. My mother thought I’d lost my mind, grabbing the kid from behind and — well, I’m sure you know the maneuver.”

“Yes,” Meyer said.

“Anyway, it helped him,” Moore said modestly. “His parents were very grateful. You’d have thought I liberated Cuba single-handedly. And, of course, I’ve been a hero to my mother ever since.”

“Her son the doctor,” Meyer said.

“Yeah,” Moore said. He was still smiling.

“So,” Carella said.

“So, yeah, what were we talking about?”

“Sundays and Sally.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you ever see her on Sundays?”

“Occasionally. She was usually pretty busy on Sundays. Her day off, you know, no show that night.”

“Busy doing what?”

“Oh, getting her errands done, mostly. Running here and there. We saw each other, of course, but only rarely. Did a little window-shopping together, went to the zoo every now and then, or the museum, like that. For the most part, Sally liked her privacy on Sundays. During the daytime, anyway.”

“Mr. Moore, did you ever go uptown with her? On the times you saw her, those Sundays you saw her, did you ever go uptown?”

“Well, sure. Uptown?”

“All the way uptown,” Carella said. “Culver and Eighteenth.”

“No,” Moore said. “Never.”

“Do you know where that is?”

“Sure.”

“But you never went up there with Sally?”

“Why would I? That’s one of the worst neighborhoods in the city.”

“Did Sally ever go up there alone? On a Sunday?”

“She may have. Why? I don’t under—”

“Because Lonnie Cooper told us that Sally went uptown every Sunday to pick up cocaine for herself and several other people in the show.”

“Well, now we’re back to cocaine again, aren’t we? I’ve already told you that as far as I know, Sally wasn’t involved with cocaine or any other drug.”

“Except marijuana.”

“Which I don’t consider a drug,” Moore said.

“But definitely not cocaine. Which you don’t consider habit-forming.”

“That’s not my opinion, Mr. Carella, it happens to be... look, what is this, can you please tell me?”

“Did you know that Sally was supplying the cast with cocaine?”

“I did not.”

“She kept this from you, did she?”

“I didn’t think there were any secrets between us, but if she was engaged in... in this... illicit traffic or whatever you want to call it—”

“That’s what we call it,” Carella said.

“Then, yes, she kept it from me. I had no idea.”

“How big a spender was she, Mr. Moore?”

“Pardon?”

“Did she ever seem to spend beyond her means?”

“Her means?”

“What she was earning as a dancer.”

“Not that I noticed. She always dressed well, and I don’t think she denied herself much... Mr. Carella, if you can tell me what you’re looking for, perhaps—”

“Someone we talked to hinted at Sally earning extra cash. We’re certain she was supplying cocaine in at least a limited way. We’d like to know if her activities in the drug market extended beyond that.”

“I’m sorry. I wish I could help you with that, but I really didn’t know until just now that she was in any way involved with drugs.”

“Except marijuana,” Carella said again.

“Well, yes.”

“Can you think of any other way she might have been earning extra cash?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

“She wasn’t hooking, was she?” Meyer asked.

“Of course not!”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Positive. We were very close, we spent virtually every day together. I’d certainly know—”

“But you didn’t know about the coke.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Did she ever mention any kind of outside activity to you? Anything that might have been bringing in this extra cash?”

“I’m trying to remember,” Moore said.

“Please,” Carella said.

Moore was silent for what seemed like a very long time, thinking, his head bent. Then, suddenly, as if the idea had just occurred to him, he nodded and looked up at the detectives.

“Of course,” he said. “I didn’t realize what she was saying at the time, but of course, that has to be it.”

“Has to be what?”

“How she was getting the extra cash you’re talking about.”

“How was she getting it?”

Meyer said.

“What was she into?” Carella said.

“Ice,” Moore said.