Ice

7

They had promised only snow, but by morning the snow had changed to sleet and then to freezing rain, and the streets were dangerously slick. Carella almost slipped on his way to the subway, catching his balance a moment before he flew into the air. His mother had told him two atrocity stories when he was a child, and both of them had remained with him into his adult years. The first had to do with his Uncle Charlie, whom he’d never met, who had accidentally blinded himself in one eye with the point of a scissors while trying to trim his eyebrows. Carella occasionally had his eyebrows trimmed in a barber shop, but never did he attempt that dangerous task himself. His mother had also told him how his Uncle Salvatore had slipped on the ice outside his haberdashery in Calm’s Point, and landed on his back, which was why he was confined to a wheelchair. Whenever Carella spotted a patch of ice on a sidewalk or a road, he walked or drove over it very, very carefully.

Carella had known (and incidentally had loved) his Uncle Salvatore, and whenever his uncle asked him why he didn’t wear a hat, Carella felt a bit guilty. “You should wear a hat,” his uncle said. “If you don’t wear a hat, forty percent of your body heat escapes from your head, and you feel cold all over.” Carella did not like hats. He told his uncle he did not like hats. His uncle tapped his temple with his forefinger. “Pazzo,” he said, which meant “crazy” in Italian. It was Carella’s uncle who’d told him the only haberdashery joke he’d ever heard in his life. “A man walks into a haberdashery,” his uncle said. “The haberdasherer comes over to him and says, ‘Yes, sir, do you have anything in mind?’ The man says, ‘I have pussy in mind, but let me see a hat.’ ” Carella was sixteen years old when his uncle told him that story. They were in his uncle’s haberdashery, which he was still running from a wheelchair. He died three years later.

It took Carella two hours to get to work that morning. He spent the time on the subway trying to figure out what he would buy Teddy for Valentine’s Day — which was today, a Sunday, when most of the city’s shops would be closed. He had expected to pick up something yesterday, but that was before he’d inherited the Sally Anderson homicide. Teddy had told him at breakfast this morning, a secretive smile on her mouth, her hands flashing, that she would be getting him his gift sometime this afternoon, and would present it to him tonight when he got home from work. He told her there was no rush; despite the makeshift Presidents’ Day holiday tomorrow, many of the stores would be open, and besides, the roads would be cleared and sanded by then. Teddy told him she’d already made the appointment. An appointment for what? he wondered.

Meyer Meyer was wearing his Valentine’s Day present.

His Valentine’s Day present was a woolen watch cap that would have caused Carella’s Uncle Salvatore to beam with pride. Meyer’s wife Sarah had knitted the watch cap herself. It was a white cap with a border of linked red hearts. Meyer was marching around the squadroom with the hat pulled down over his ears, showing it off.

“You can hardly tell you’re bald with that hat,” Tack Fujiwara said, and noticed Carella coming through the gate in the railing. “Hello, cousin,” he said.

“Oh-hi-oh,” Carella said.

“What do you mean ‘hardly’?” Meyer said. “Do I look bald?” he asked Carella.

“You look hairy,” Carella said. “Where’d you get that hat?”

“Sarah made it. For Valentine’s Day.”

“Very nice,” Carella said. “Is the Loot in?”

“Ten minutes ago,” Fujiwara said. “What’d you get for Valentine’s Day?”

“A murder,” Carella said.

“Shake hands with Kling,” Fujiwara said, but Carella was already knocking on the lieutenant’s door, and he didn’t catch the words.

“Come!” Byrnes shouted.

Carella opened the door. The lieutenant was sitting behind his desk studying the open lid of a box of candy. “Hello, Steve,” he said. “This chart tells you what each piece of candy in the box is. Would you like a piece of candy?”

“Thanks, Pete, no,” Carella said.

Byrnes kept studying the chart, running his finger over it. He was a compact man with a head of thinning iron gray hair, flinty blue eyes, and a craggy nose that had been broken with a lead pipe when he was still a patrolman in Majesta, but that had miraculously knitted itself together without any trace of the injury save a faintly visible scar across the bridge. No one ever noticed the scar except when Byrnes touched it, as he sometimes did during a particularly knotty skull session in his office. He was touching it now as he studied the varied selection promised by the chart on the inside lid of the candy box.

“My Valentine’s present,” he said, fingering the scar on his nose, studying the list of goodies to be sampled.

“I’ll be getting mine tonight,” Carella said, feeling somehow defensive.

“So have some candy now,” Byrnes said, and plucked a square-shaped piece of chocolate from the box. “The square ones are always caramels,” he said. “I don’t need a chart to tell me this is a caramel.” He bit into it. “See?” he said, smiling and chewing. “Good, too. Have one,” he said, and shoved the box across his desk.

“Pete, we’ve got a hundred fourteen people to track down,” Carella said. “That’s how many people are in the Fatback company, and that’s how many people Meyer and I have got to question if we’re going to get any kind of a lead on this dead dancer.”

“What’s her connection with this Lopez character?” Byrnes asked, chewing.

“We don’t know yet.”

“Dope?” Byrnes asked.

“Not that we know. The lab’s checking.”

“Was he her boyfriend or something?”

“No, her boyfriend is a med student at Ramsey.”

“Where was he when the girl was cashing it in?”

“Home studying.”

“Who says?”

“He says.”

“Check it.”

“We will. Meanwhile, Pete—”

“Let me guess,” Byrnes said. “You sure you don’t want one of these?” he said, and took another chocolate from the box.

“Thanks,” Carella said, and shook his head.

“Meanwhile,” Byrnes said, “I’m trying to guess what you want from me.”

“Triple us,” Carella said.

“Who’d you have in mind?”

“Bert Kling.”

“Bert’s got headaches of his own just now.”

“What do you mean?”

“He caught a homicide last night.”

“Well, that takes care of that,” Carella said. “Who can you spare?”

“Who said I can spare anybody?”

“Pete, this girl is all over the newspapers.”

“So what?”

“She’ll be making news as long as that show runs... and that’ll be forever.”

“So what?”

“So how long do you think it’ll be before the Chief of Detectives picks up the telephone and gives you a little jingle? ‘Hello, Pete, about this dancer? In that big hit musical? Any leads yet, Pete? Lots of reporters calling here, Pete. What are your boys doing up there, Pete, besides sitting on their duffs while people go around shooting other people?’ ”

Byrnes looked at him.

“Never mind the Chief of Detectives,” he said. “The Chief of Detectives doesn’t have to come to work up here every day, the Chief of Detectives has a nice big corner office in the Headquarters Building downtown. And if the Chief of Detectives thinks we’re moving too slowly on this one, then maybe we ought to remind him it wasn’t even ours to begin with, the girl was shot and killed in Midtown East, if the Chief of Detectives would like to know, and not up here in the Eight-Seven. What we have as our very own up here is the murder of a crumby little gram dealer, if that would interest the Chief of Detectives, though I doubt he could care less. Now if you want to make your request to me on the basis of something sensible, Steve, like how talking to a hundred fourteen people — are there really that many people attached to that show?”

“A hundred fourteen, yes.”

“If you want to come to me and tell me it’ll take you and Meyer a week, ten days, two weeks, however long to question all hundred fourteen of those people while a murderer is running around out there with a gun in his hand, if you want to present your case sensibly and logically and not threaten me with what the Chief of Detectives is going to think—”

“Okay, Pete, how’s this?” Carella said, smiling. “It’s going to take Meyer and me at least ten days to question all those people while a murderer is running around out there with a gun in his hand. We can cut the working time to maybe five days, unless we hit pay dirt before then, so all I’m asking for is one other man on the case, triple us up, Pete, and turn us loose out there. Okay? Who can you spare?”

“Nobody,” Byrnes said.

She tried to remember how long ago it had been. Years and years, that was certain. And would he think her frivolous now? Would he accept what she had done (what she was about to do, actually, since she hadn’t yet done it, and could still change her mind about it) as the gift she intended it to be, or would he consider it the self-indulgent whim of a woman who was no longer the young girl he’d married years and years ago? Well, who is? Teddy thought. Even Jane Fonda is no longer the young girl she was years and years ago. But does Jane Fonda worry about such things? Probably, Teddy thought.

The section of the city through which she walked was thronged with people, but Teddy could not hear the drifting snatches of their conversations as they moved past her and around her. Their exhaled breaths pluming on the brittle air were, to her, only empty cartoon balloons floating past in a silent rush. She walked in an oddly hushed world, dangerous to her in that her ears could provide no timely warnings, curiously exquisite in that whatever she saw was unaccompanied by any sound that might have marred its beauty. The sight (and aroma) of a bluish-gray cloud of carbon monoxide, billowing onto the silvery air from an automobile exhaust pipe, assumed dreamlike proportions when it was not coupled with the harsh mechanical sound of an automobile engine. The uniformed cop on the corner, waving his arms this way and that, artfully dodging as he directed the cross-purposed stream of lumbering traffic, became an acrobat, a ballet dancer, a skilled mime the moment one did not have to hear his bellowed, “Move it, let’s keep it moving!” And yet—

She had never heard her husband’s voice.

She had never heard her children’s laughter.

She had never heard the pleasant wintry jingle of automobile skid chains on an icy street, the big-city cacophony of jackhammers and automobile horns, street vendors and hawkers, babies crying. As she passed a souvenir shop whose window brimmed with inexpensive jade, ivory (illegal to import), fans, dolls with Oriental eyes (like her husband’s), she did not hear drifting from a small window on the side wall of the shop the sound of a stringed instrument plucking a sad and delicate Chinese melody, the notes hovering on the air like ice crystals — she simply did not hear.

The tattoo parlor was vaguely anonymous, hidden as it was on a narrow Chinatown side street. The last time she’d been here, the place had been flanked by a bar and a Laundromat. Today, the bar was an offtrack betting parlor and the Laundromat was a fortune-telling shop run by someone named Sister Lucy. Progress. As she passed Sister Lucy’s emporium, Teddy looked over the curtain in the front window and saw a Gypsy woman sitting before a large phrenology poster hanging on the wall. Except for the poster and the woman, the shop was empty. The woman looked very lonely and a trifle cold, huddled in her shawl, looking straight ahead of her at the entrance door. For a moment, Teddy was tempted to walk into the empty store and have her fortune told. What was the joke? Her husband was very good at remembering jokes. What was it? Why couldn’t women remember jokes? Was that a sexist attitude? What the hell was the joke? Something about a Gypsy band buying a chain of empty stores?

The name on the plate glass window of the tattoo parlor was Charlie Chen. Beneath the name were the words Exotic Oriental Tattoo. She hesitated a moment, and then opened the door. There must have been a bell over the door, and it probably tinkled, signaling Mr. Chen from the back of his shop. She had not heard the bell, and at first she did not recognize the old Chinese man who came toward her. The last time she’d seen him, he had been a round fat man with a small mustache on his upper lip. He had laughed a lot, and each time he laughed, his fat little body quivered. He had thick fingers, she remembered, and there had been an oval jade ring on the forefinger of his left hand.

“Yes, lady?” he said.

It was Chen, of course. The mustache was gone, and so was the jade ring, and so were the acres of flesh, but it was surely Chen, wizened and wrinkled and shrunken, looking at her now out of puzzled brown eyes, trying to place her. She thought I’ve changed, too, he doesn’t recognize me, and suddenly felt foolish about what she was here to do. Maybe it was too late for things like garter belts and panties, ribbed stockings and high-heeled, patent leather pumps, merry widows and lacy teddies, too late for Teddy, too late for silly, sexy playfulness. Was it? Oh my God, was it?

She had asked Fanny to call yesterday, first to find out if the shop would be open today, and next to make an appointment for her. Fanny had left the name Teddy Carella. Had Chen forgotten her name as well? He was still staring at her.

“You Missa Carella?” he said.

She nodded.

“I know you?” he said, his head cocked, studying her.

She nodded again.

“You know me?”

She nodded.

“Charlie Chen,” he said, and laughed, but nothing about him shook, his laughter was an empty wind blowing through a frail old body. “Everybody call me Charlie Chan,” he explained. “Big detective Charlie Chan. But me Chen, Chen. You know Charlie Chan, detective?”

The same words he had spoken all those years ago.

Oddly, she felt like weeping.

“Big detective,” Chen said. “Got stupid sons.” He laughed again. “Me got stupid sons, too, but me no detec—” And suddenly he stopped, and his eyes opened wide, and he said, “Detective wife, you detective wife! I make butterfly for you! Black lacy butterfly!”

She nodded again, grinning now.

“You no can talk, right. You read my lips, right?”

She nodded.

“Good, everything hunky-dory. How you been, lady? You still so pretty, most beautiful lady ever come my shop. You still got butterfly on shoulder?”

She nodded.

“Best butterfly I ever make. Nice small butterfly. I want do big one, remember? You say no, small one. I make tiny delicate black butterfly, very good for lady. Very sexy in strapless gown. You husband think was sexy?”

Teddy nodded. She started to say something with her hands, caught herself — as she so often had to — and then pointed to a pencil and a sheet of paper on Chen’s counter.

“You wanna talk, right?” Chen said, smiling, and handed her the pencil and paper.

She took both, and wrote: How have you been, Mr. Chen?

“Ah, well, not so good,” Chen said.

She looked at him expectantly, quizzically.

“Old Charlie Chen gotta Big C, huh?” he said.

She did not understand him for a moment.

“Cancer,” he said, and saw the immediate shocked look on her face and said, “No, no, lady, don’t worry, old Charlie be hunky-dory, yessir.” He kept watching her face. She did not want to cry. She owed the old man the dignity of not having to watch her cry for him. She opened her hands. She tilted her head. She raised her eyebrows ever so slightly. She saw on his face and in his eyes that he knew she was telling him how sorry she was. “Thank you, lady,” he said, and impulsively took both her hands between his own, and, smiling, said, “So, why you come here see Charlie Chen? You write down what you like, yes?”

She picked up the pencil and began writing again.

“Ah,” he said, watching. “Ah. Very smart idea. Very smart. Okay, fine.”

He watched the moving pencil.

“Very good,” he said, “come, we go in back. Charlie Chen so happy you come see him. My sons all married now, I tell you? My oldest son a doctor Los Angeles. A head doctor!” he said, and burst out laughing. “A shrink! You believe it? My oldest son! My other two sons... come in back, lady... my other two sons...”

From where Captain Sam Grossman stood at the windows looking down at High Street, he could see out over almost all of the downtown section of the city. The new Headquarters Building was a structure made almost entirely of glass (or so it appeared from the outside) and Grossman sometimes wondered if anyone down there in the street was watching him as he went about his daily commonplace chores — like trying to get through to the Eight-Seven on the telephone, which was both commonplace and irritating. Actually, Grossman rarely thought of his work in the lab as being anything but important and exciting and very far from commonplace, but he would not have admitted that to anyone in the world, with the possible exception of his wife. The number was still busy. He momentarily pressed one of the receiver rest buttons, got a fresh dial tone, and dialed the number again. He got another busy signal. Sighing, Grossman cradled the receiver and looked at his watch. I shouldn’t even be here today, he thought. This is Sunday.

He was here today because someone thought it might be amusing to restage the Valentine’s Day Massacre right here in this city instead of in Chicago, where it had originally taken place in 1929. What had happened back then, if Grossman’s memory of history served, was that some nice fellows from Al Capone’s gang forced seven unarmed but equally nice fellows from the Bugs Moran gang to line up against a garage wall and then shot them down with machine guns. Oh boy, that was some massacre. It was also a pretty good joke since the guys from the Capone gang were all dressed as policemen. There were some wags in Chicago at the time who maintained that the hoods were only behaving like policemen, too, but that was mere conjecture. Nonetheless, at 9:00 this morning — which by Grossman’s watch was almost three hours ago — several uniformed “policemen” had broken into a garage housing not bootleggers but instead narcotics traffickers, and had asked them to line up against the wall, and had shot them down in cold blood. One of the surprise-shooters had spray-painted the outline of a big red heart on the wall. The killers hadn’t even bothered to take with them the estimated four kilos of heroin the traffickers had been processing when they’d broken in; perhaps they felt the red heart on the wall, and the red blood all over the floor, complemented the pristine white of the uncut heroin on the table. Either way, there were seven dead men on the Lower Platform, as the area closest to the city’s Old Quarter was called, and those men had bullets in them, and those bullets had been recovered from their respective cadavers and sent to the laboratory together with the empty spray can and a slew of fingerprints lifted from hither and yon, not to mention some paint scrapings taken from the lamppost opposite the garage, presumably left there when the getaway car backed into it, leaving as well a deposit of taillight glass splinters on the pavement, all in all a nice batch of material for the lab to ponder on a nice Sunday morning.

Grossman dialed the number again.

Would miracles never? It was actually ringing!

“87th Squad, Genero,” a harried-sounding voice said.

“Detective Carella, please,” Grossman said.

“Can he call you back?” Genero said. “We’re very busy up here just now.”

“I’ve been trying to get through for the past ten minutes,” Grossman said.

“Yeah, that’s ’cause the lines’ve been busy,” Genero said. “All hell is busting loose up here. Give me your name and I’ll ask him to call back.”

“No, give him my name and tell him I’m on the line waiting,” Grossman said, annoyed.

“Well, what is your name, mister?” Genero said, somewhat snottily.

“Captain Grossman,” Grossman said. “What’s your name?”

“He’ll be right with you, sir,” Genero said, forgetting to tell Grossman his name. Grossman heard the receiver clattering onto a hard surface. There was a great deal of yelling and hollering in the background, but that was usual for the Eight-Seven, even on a Sunday.

“Detective Carella,” Carella said. “Can I help you, sir?”

“Steve, this is Sam Grossman.”

“Sam? He told me it was a Captain Holtzer.”

“No, it’s a Captain Grossman. What’s going on up there? It sounds like World War Three.”

“We have a delegation of angry citizens,” Carella said.

“Angry about what?”

“A person shitting in the hallways.”

“Don’t send me samples,” Grossman said at once.

“You may think it’s comical,” Carella said, lowering his voice, “and frankly, so do I. But the tenants of 5411 Ainsley do not find it amusing at all. They are here en masse, demanding police action.”

“What do they want you to do, Steve?”

“Apprehend the Mad Shitter,” Carella said, and Grossman burst out laughing. Carella started laughing, too. In the background, over Carella’s laughter, Grossman could hear someone yelling in Spanish. He thought he detected the word mierda.

“Steve,” he said, “I hate to take you away from matters of great moment—”

“Matters of great movement, you mean,” Carella said, and both men burst out laughing again; there was nothing a grown cop liked better than a scatological joke unless it was a joke about a cop on the take. Both cops laughed for what must have been a full two minutes while behind them everyone was shouting like the Bay of Pigs. At last, the laughter subsided. So did all the Spanish voices in the background.

“Where’d they all go, all of a sudden?” Grossman asked.

“Home!” Carella said, and burst out laughing again. “Genero told them he’d arrange a lineup for them! Can you picture eight cops and a possible perp throwing moons at twenty-six concerned Hispanic tenants?”

Grossman began laughing so hard he thought he would wet his pants. Another two minutes went by before either of the men could speak. It was not always like this when Carella and Grossman got on the phone together, but both men were grateful for those times when it was. Usually, Grossman presented a much soberer demeanor to the detectives with whom he worked. Tall and blue eyed, rather somber looking in his unrimmed spectacles, he resembled a New England farmer more than he did a scientist, and his clipped manner of speaking did little to belie the notion. Standing face to face with Sam Grossman in the sterile orderliness of his laboratory, you had the feeling that if you asked him directions to the next town, he’d say you couldn’t get there from here. But every so often, perhaps because he liked Carella so much, Grossman seemed to forget momentarily that his job was often inextricably linked with violent death.

“About this girl’s handbag,” he said, and Carella knew he was getting down to business.

“The Anderson girl?” he said.

“Sally Anderson, right,” Grossman said. “I’ll send you the full report later, right down to what brand of cigarettes she smoked. But for now... this was flagged for possible cocaine, wasn’t it?”

“Because the other victim was a—”

“That’s what the card says, anyway.”

“Did you find anything that might be cocaine?”

“A residue on the bottom of the bag. Not enough to run as many tests as I’d have liked.”

“How many did you run?”

“Four. Which in the process of elimination — you should pardon the expression — isn’t a hell of a lot. But I knew what you were looking for, so I deliberately chose my color tests for the most dramatic reactions. For example, cocaine shows colorless on both the Mercke and the Marquis, so I avoided those. Instead, I went with nitrosylsulfuric acid for my first color test. I got a pale yellow reaction, with no change when ammonia was added, and with a change to colorless when water was added. That’s a cocaine reaction. For the second color test — am I boring you?”

“No, no, go on,” Carella said. He considered himself a scientific nitwit and was in fact fascinated whenever Grossman began spewing formulas and such.

“For the second color test, I used tetranitromethane, which again — if we’re looking for cocaine — would give us a more dramatic reaction than some of the other tests. Sure enough, we initially got yellow with an orange cast to it, turning eventually to full yellow. Cocaine,” Grossman said.

“Cocaine,” Carella repeated.

“And when I ran my tests for precipitation and crystallization, I got virtually the same results. With platinum chloride as my reagent and normal acetic acid as my solvent, I got an immediate cocaine reaction — thousands of aggregate crystalline blade forms, arranged in bizarre fashion, moderate birefringence, predominantly—”

“You’re losing me, Sam,” Carella said.

“No matter. It was typically cocaine. When I used gold chloride with the acid, I got ruler-edged crystals forming from amorphous... again, no matter. It, too, was typically cocaine.”

“So... are you saying the substance you found at the bottom of her bag is cocaine?”

“I’m saying there’s a very strong likelihood it’s cocaine. I can’t say positively, Steve, without having run a great many more tests, but I simply ran out of available substance before I could. If it makes you any happier... you are looking for a drug connection here, I assume.”

“I am.”

“Well, we found shreds of marijuana, as well as marijuana seeds at the bottom of the bag. Ladies’ handbags are wonderful receptacles for all kinds of crap.”

“Okay, thanks, Sam.”

“Would it help further to know that the girl chewed sugarless gum?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“In that case, I won’t mention that she chewed sugarless gum. Good luck, Steve, I have bullets here from seven people who were shot by cops today.”

“What?” Carella said, but Grossman had hung up.

Smiling, Grossman stood with his hand on the cradled receiver for a moment, and then looked up when he heard the door opening. He was surprised to see Bert Kling coming into the room, not because Kling never visited the lab, but only because Grossman had not ten seconds earlier been talking to another cop from the Eight-Seven. Considering the laws of probability, Grossman would have guessed... well, no matter.

“Come in, Bert,” he said. “How’s it going?”

He knew how it was going. Everyone in the department knew how it was going. Bert Kling had found his wife in bed with another man last August, that’s how it was going. He knew that Kling and his wife were now divorced. He knew that Carella was concerned about him because Carella had expressed that concern to Grossman, who had suggested that he talk to one of the department psychologists, who in turn had advised Carella to try to get Kling to come in personally, which Carella had not been able to convince Kling to do. Grossman liked Kling. There were not many cops in the Eight-Seven he disliked, as a matter of fact — well, yes, Parker, he guessed. Parker very definitely. Parker was mean-spirited and lazy and altogether a person to dislike passionately. Grossman liked Kling and he hated seeing him looking this way, like a man who’d just been released from the state penitentiary at Castleview and was still wearing the ill-fitting civilian threads the state gave him gratis with his parole papers and his minimum-wage check. Like a man who needed a shave, even though the blond stubble on Kling’s cheeks and jaws was less noticeable than it might have been on a man with a heavier beard. Like a man carrying an enormous weight on his shoulders. Like a man whose eyes appeared a trifle too moist, a bit too precariously poised on the edge of tears. Grossman looked into those eyes as the men shook hands. Was Carella’s concern a legitimate one? Did Kling look like a man who might one day decide to chew on the barrel of his gun?

“So,” Grossman said, smiling, “what brings you down here?”

“Some bullets,” Kling said.

“More bullets? We had the Valentine’s Day Massacre all over again this morning,” Grossman said. “Seven guys killed in a garage down on the Lower Platform. Guys who did it were dressed like cops. I have to admit it took style, but I don’t like the extra work it’s given us on a weekend. What bullets?”

“We caught a homicide last night on Silvermine Road,” Kling said. “Man named Marvin Edelman, gunshot victim. I asked the morgue to send whatever they recover over to you. I thought I might mention it.”

“You came all the way down here to tell me some bullets are on the way?” Grossman said.

“No, no, I was in the area, anyway.”

Grossman knew that the Criminal Court Building was right next door, and at first he figured Kling might be down here on court business. There was only one court open on Sunday, though, and that strictly for the arraignment of anyone arrested the day before. And then Grossman remembered that the Psychological Counseling Unit had recently moved into new quarters on the third floor of the building. Had Carella finally convinced Kling to see someone about his obvious depression?

“So what did bring you down here on a Sunday?” Grossman asked in what he hoped was a casual way.

“I had a lady in yesterday, her husband... well, it’s a long story,” Kling said.

“Let me hear it,” Grossman said.

“No, you’ve got bullets to worry about,” Kling said. “Anyway, keep an eye out for whatever comes from the morgue, will you? The guy’s name is Edelman.”

“A landsman,” Grossman said, smiling, but Kling did not return the smile.

“See you,” Kling said, and walked out of the lab and into the marble corridor outside. The story he’d been about to tell was about this woman who’d come to see him yesterday because her husband’s former girlfriend had accosted him on the street and slashed his arm from the shoulder to the wrist with a bread knife she’d pulled from her handbag. In describing the former girlfriend, the woman used the words “black as that telephone there” and then went on to describe her further as an extremely thin woman whose name was Annie — she didn’t know Annie what, and neither did her husband. Her husband, according to the woman’s story, was a Dutch seaman who came into this city’s port every other month or so and who, until they’d met and married, used to spend his wages on various prostitutes either uptown on La Vía de Putas or else downtown on the stretch of hooker-packed turf known as Slit City. The wife had been witness to the knifing, and had heard the girl Annie say, “I’m goan juke you good,” and it was perhaps the use of the word juke that rang a bell for Kling.

A working cop doesn’t always know how he remembers the myriad little details of the numberless criminal transgressions that cross his desk and his path every day of the week. To remember them is enough. The fact that the knife wielder had been black had not been enough to trigger recall. Neither had the name Annie, or the knowledge that the girl was extremely thin and a working prostitute. But the first time Kling had ever heard the word juke in his life was on Mason Avenue, when an anorectic black whore who’d slashed a customer’s face later claimed, “I di’n juke that dumb trick.” Cotton Hawes, who had answered the squeal with him, informed Kling that he himself had first heard the expression in New Orleans, and that it meant, of course, “to stab.” The hooker’s name had been Annie Holmes. The moment the victim’s wife repeated what Annie had said as she carved up her former playmate’s arm, Kling snapped his fingers.

He was down here today — even though it was his day off — because: (a) he lived only six blocks away, in a small apartment in the shadow of the Calm’s Point Bridge, and (b) he could not question Marvin Edelman’s widow until tomorrow because she was on her way home from the Caribbean after receiving a call from her daughter informing her that Edelman had been shot and killed last night, and (c) there was not much more he could do on the homicide until Grossman’s people came up with some information on the gun used in the slaying, and (d) he knew the Identification Section was open seven days a week (although the Mayor had been threatening cutbacks) and he hoped he might be able to pick up a picture of Annie Holmes, which he could then show to the man she’d stabbed and his wife, who’d witnessed the stabbing, hoping for a positive ID that would be good enough for an arrest.

That was why he was here.

He had not told Grossman why he was here, even though he’d started to, because somehow the triangle of Dutch Seaman-Present Wife-Former Bedmate recalled vividly and blindingly the scene in the bedroom of the apartment Kling had shared with Augusta as man and wife, the triangular scene in that room, Augusta naked in their bed, absurdly clutching the sheet to her breasts, hiding her shame, protecting her nakedness from the prying eyes of her own husband, her green eyes wide, her hair tousled, a fine sheen of perspiration on the marvelous cheekbones that were her fortune, her lip trembling the way the gun in Kling’s hand was trembling. And the man with Augusta, the third side of the triangle, was in his undershorts and reaching for his trousers folded over a bedside chair, the man was short and wiry, he looked like Genero, for Christ’s sake, with curly black hair and brown eyes wide in terror, but he was not Genero, he was Augusta’s lover, and as he turned from the chair where his trousers were draped, he said only, “Don’t shoot,” and Kling leveled the gun at him.

I should have shot him, he thought now. If I’d shot him, I wouldn’t still be living with the shame. I wouldn’t have to stop telling a story about a Dutch seaman and his hooker girlfriend for fear that even a decent man like Sam Grossman will remember, will think, Ah yes, Kling and his cheating wife, Ah yes, Kling did nothing, Ah yes, Kling did not kill the man who was—

“Hey, hi!” the voice said.

He was approaching the elevators, his head bent, his eyes on the marble floor. He did not recognize the voice, nor did he even realize at first that it was he who was being addressed. But he looked up because someone had stepped into his path. The someone was Eileen Burke.

She was wearing a simple brown suit with a green blouse that was sort of ruffly at the throat, the green the color of her eyes, her long red hair swept efficiently back from her face, standing tall in high-heeled brown pumps a shade darker than the suit. She was carrying a shoulder bag, and he could see into the bag to where the barrel of a revolver seemed planted in a bed of crumpled Kleenexes. The picture on her plastic ID card, clipped to the lapel of her suit, showed a younger Eileen Burke, her red hair done in the frizzies. She was smiling — in the picture, and in person.

“What are you doing down here?” she asked. “Nobody comes here on a Sunday.”

“I need a picture from the IS,” he said. She seemed waiting for him to say more. “How about you?” he added.

“I work here. Special Forces is here. Right on this floor, in fact. Come on in for a cup of coffee,” she said, and her smile widened.

“No, thanks, I’m sort of in a hurry,” Kling said, even though he was in no hurry at all.

“Okay,” Eileen said, and shrugged. “Actually, I’m glad I ran into you. I was going to call later in the day, anyway.”

“Oh?” Kling said.

“I think I lost an earring up there. Either there or in the Laundromat with the panty perpetrator. If it was the Laundromat, good-bye, Charlie. But if it was the squadroom, or maybe the car — when you were dropping me off last night, you know—”

“Yeah,” Kling said.

“It was just a simple gold hoop earring, about the size of a quarter. Nothing ostentatious when you’re doing dirty laundry, right?”

“Which ear was it?” he asked.

“The right,” she said. “Huh? What difference does it make? I mean, it was the right ear, but earnings are interchangeable, so—”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Kling said. He was looking at her right ear, or at the space beyond her right ear, or wherever. He was certainly not looking at her face, certainly not allowing his eyes to meet her eyes. What the hell is wrong with him? she wondered.

“Well, take a look up there, okay?” she said. “If you find it, give me a call. I’m with Special Forces — well, you know that — but I’m in and out all the time, so just leave a message. That is, if you happen to find the earring.” She hesitated, and then said, “The right one, that is. If you find the left one, it’s the wrong one.” She smiled. He did not return the smile. “Well, see you around the pool hall,” she said, and spread her hand in a farewell fan, and turned on her heel, and walked away from him.

Kling pressed the button for the elevator.

Tina Wong had been jogging in the snow, and she was surprised to find the detectives waiting in the lobby of her building when she came out of the park. She was wearing a gray sweat suit and a woolen hat that was less colorful than the one Meyer had received as a present. Her track shoes were wet, as were the legs of the sweat suit pants. She said, “Oh,” and then inexplicably looked over her shoulder, as though her car were illegally parked at the curb or something.

“Sorry to bother you, Miss Wong,” Meyer said. He was not wearing his Valentine’s Day gift. Instead, he had on a blue snap-brim fedora that he felt made him look more stylish if a trifle more bald than the watch cap did.

“Just a few questions we’d like to ask,” Carella said. They had been standing in the lobby for close to forty minutes, after having been advised by Tina’s doorman that Miss Wong was “out for her run.”

“Sure,” Tina said, and gestured toward an array of furniture clustered around an imitation fireplace. The lobby was very hot. Tina’s face was flushed red from the cold outside and the energetic jogging she had done. She yanked off the woolen hat and shook out her hair. All three sat in chairs around the fake fireplace. At the switchboard across the room, the doorman looked bored as he read the headline on the morning paper. There was a mechanical hum in the room; the detectives could not locate its source. The lobby had the feel and smell of slightly damp clothes in a cloistered alcove. Outside the glass entrance doors, the wind blew fiercely, its rising and falling keen counterpointing the steady hum.

“Miss Wong,” Carella said, “when we spoke to you yesterday, do you remember our asking whether or not Sally was doing anything like cocaine?”

“Uh-huh,” Tina said.

“And you remember you told us—”

“I said that to my knowledge she wasn’t.”

“Does that mean you never saw her using cocaine?”

“Never.”

“Does that also mean she never mentioned it to you?”

“Never.”

“Would she have mentioned something like that?”

“We were close friends. There’s nothing so terrible about snorting a few lines every now and then. I suppose if she’d been using it, she might have mentioned it.”

“But she didn’t.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“Miss Wong, according to Timothy Moore, there was a party Sally Anderson went to last Sunday night. Someone named Lonnie. One of the black dancers in the show.”

“Yes?” Tina said.

“Were you at that party?”

“Yes, I was.”

“But Mr. Moore wasn’t.”

“No, he wasn’t. He had to study. He made this New Year’s Eve resolution—”

“Yes, he told us. At any time that night, did you notice Miss Anderson sniffing coke?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“How about anyone else?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Were there any other cast members there?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Do you remember when we talked yesterday, you mentioned that some people in the cast were doing coke.”

“Yes, I may have said that.”

“Well, you said that some of them were doing a little coke, here and there, now and then.”

“I suppose that’s what I said.”

“Were any of them doing coke last Sunday night? That you may have noticed?”

“I’m not sure I ought to answer that,” Tina said.

“Why not?” Meyer said.

“Anyway, why do you think Sally was into cocaine?”

“Was she?” Carella asked at once.

“I told you, not to my knowledge. But all these questions you’re asking... what difference does it make if she was or she wasn’t? She’s dead, she was shot to death. What does cocaine have to do with anything?”

“Miss Wong, we have good reason to believe she was a user.”

“How? What reason?”

“We tested a residue of powder from her handbag.”

“And it was cocaine?”

“We’re reasonably certain it was.”

“What does that mean? Was it or wasn’t it?”

“The tests weren’t exhaustive, but from what—”

“Then it could have been anything, right? Face powder or—”

“No, it wasn’t face powder, Miss Wong.”

“Why are you so anxious to prove she was doing coke?”

“We’re not. We simply want to know who else was.”

“How am I supposed to know who else was?”

“When we talked to you yesterday—”

“Yesterday, I didn’t know this would turn into a third degree.”

“This isn’t a third degree, Miss Wong. When we talked to you yesterday, you said — and I think I’m quoting you exactly — ‘Usually, you can get a pretty good idea of who’s doing what when you’re working in a show.’ Isn’t that what you said?”

“I don’t remember my exact words.”

“But that’s what you meant, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

“Okay. If you have a pretty good idea of who’s doing what, we’d like you to share it with us.”

“What for? So I can get decent people in trouble for no reason at all?”

“Which decent people?” Carella asked.

“I don’t know anybody who was involved with drugs, okay?”

“That’s not what you said yesterday.”

“It’s what I’m saying today.” She looked at them steadily, and then added, “I think I’d better call my lawyer.”

“We’re not looking for a drug bust here,” Meyer said.

“I don’t know what you’re looking for, but you’re not going to get it from me.”

“Your best friend was murdered,” Carella said softly.

She looked at him.

“We’re trying to find the person who did it,” Carella said.

“Nobody in the show did it.”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t know it. I just know...” She fell silent. She folded her arms across her chest. She lifted her chin stubbornly. Carella looked at Meyer. Meyer nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Miss Wong,” Carella said, “on the basis of what you told us yesterday, we have good cause to believe you know who, if anyone, in the cast was using cocaine. This is a murder we’re investigating. We can subpoena you before a grand jury, who’ll ask you the same questions we’ve been asking you—”

“No, you can’t,” she said.

“Yes, we can,” Carella said, “and we will if you continue refusing to—”

“What is this, Russia?” Tina asked.

“This is the United States,” Carella said. “You’ve got your rights, but we’ve also got ours. If you refuse to answer a grand jury, you’ll be held in contempt of court. Take your choice.”

“I can’t believe this,” she said.

“Believe it. If you know who’s doing coke—”

“I hate strong-arm macho shit,” Tina said.

Neither of the detectives said anything.

“Mafia tactics,” Tina said.

Still, they said nothing.

“As if it has anything at all to do with who killed her,” Tina said.

“Let’s go, Meyer,” Carella said, and stood up.

“Just a minute,” Tina said.

He did not sit down again.

“There were maybe half a dozen people snorting at that party.”

“Anyone in the cast?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Sally, of course.”

“Who else?”

“Mike.”

“Mike who?”

“Roldan. Miguel Roldan.”

“Thank you,” Carella said.

“If you cause him any trouble—”

“We’re not looking to cause him trouble,” Meyer said. “How well did Sally Anderson know your producer?”

The question took her totally by surprise. Her eyes opened wide. She hesitated a moment before answering. “Allan?” she said.

“Allan Carter,” Carella said, nodding.

“Why?”

“Did Sally ever mention him in anything but a professional way?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“I think you know what it means, Miss Wong.”

“Are you asking if she was involved in some way with him? Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Why do you think that’s ridiculous, Miss Wong?”

“Because... well, she had a boyfriend. You know that, I told you that yesterday.”

“Why would that exclude an involvement with Mr. Carter?”

“I just know there was nothing going on between them.”

“How do you know that?”

“There are some things you just know.”

“Did you ever see them together?”

“Of course.”

“Outside of the theater, I mean.”

“Occasionally.”

“When’s the last time you saw them together?”

“Last Sunday night.”

“Under what circumstances?”

“He was at Lonnie’s party.”

“Is that usual? For the producer of a show to attend a party given by one of the dancers?”

“You’re not going to stop till you get everybody in trouble, are you?”

“Who are we getting in trouble now?” Meyer asked.

“Allan was with me,” Tina said, “okay? I asked him to the party.”

The detectives looked at each other, puzzled.

“He’s married, okay?” Tina said.

At this point, they only wanted to talk to two people connected with the show.

The first was Miguel Roldan, who, coincidentally, was both Hispanic and a cocaine user. Sally Anderson had been a cocaine user, and Paco Lopez had been Hispanic. They wanted to ask Roldan where he got his stuff and whether Sally got it from the same place and whether that place happened to be Paco Lopez’s little candy stand. The second was Allan Carter, married producer of Fatback, who — according to Tina Wong — had been enjoying a little backstage romance with the Chinese dancer ever since September, when they’d discovered each other at the show’s opening-night party. They wanted to ask Carter why he had thought Sally Anderson was “a little redheaded thing.” Had Carter been involved in an extra extramarital fling with the blonde dancer as well? If not, why had he gone to such lengths to indicate he’d scarcely known her? They had not asked Tina anything at all about Carter’s seeming confusion. If there had existed any sort of relationship between him and the dead girl, it was entirely possible that Tina knew nothing about it, in which case they did not want her to alert him. They knew intuitively that he’d been lying when he denied remembering Sally Anderson. Now they wanted to find out why he’d been lying.

They did not find out that late Sunday afternoon.

The doorman at Carter’s building on Grover Park West told the detectives that both he and Mrs. Carter had left at close to 4:00 P.M. He did not know where they’d gone or when they’d be back. He suggested that perhaps Mr. Carter had gone down to Philadelphia again, but that didn’t seem to tie in with the fact that a chauffeured limousine had picked up the couple; Mr. Carter usually took the train to Philadelphia, and besides, he always went down alone. The Philadelphia possibility seemed unlikely to Carella as well. Carter had mentioned on the phone yesterday that he would not be going back to Philadelphia until late Wednesday. The detectives drove uptown and crosstown to the brownstone Miguel Roldan shared with Tony Asensio, the other Hispanic dancer in the show. No one was home there, either, and there was no doorman to offer suggestions or possibilities.

Carella said good night to Meyer at ten minutes past 6:00, and only then remembered he had not yet bought Teddy a present. He shopped the Stem until he found an open lingerie shop, only to discover that it featured panties of the open-crotch variety and some that could be eaten like candy, decided this was not quite what he had in mind, thank you, and then shopped fruitlessly for another hour before settling on a heart-shaped box of chocolates in an open drugstore. He felt he was letting Teddy down.

Her eyes and her face showed no disappointment when he presented the gift to her. He explained that it was only a temporary solution, and that he’d shop for her real present once the pressure of the case let up a little. He had no idea when that might be, but he promised himself that he would buy her something absolutely mind-boggling tomorrow, come hell or high water. He did not yet know that the case had already taken a peculiar turn or that he would learn about it tomorrow, when once again it would postpone his grandiose plans.

At the dinner table, ten-year-old April complained that she had received only one Valentine’s card, and that one from a doofus. She pronounced the word with a grimace her mother might have used more suitably, managing to look very much like Teddy in that moment — the dark eyes and darker hair, the beautiful mouth twisted in an expression of total distaste. Her ten-year-old brother Mark, who resembled Carella more than he did either his mother or his twin sister, offered the opinion that anyone who would send a card to April had to be a doofus, at which point April seized her half-finished pork chop by its rib, and threatened to use it on him like a hatchet. Carella calmed them down. Fanny came in from the kitchen and casually mentioned that these were the same pork chops she’d taken out of the freezer the night before and she hoped they tasted okay and wouldn’t give the whole family trichinosis. Mark wanted to know what trichinosis was. Fanny told him it was related to a cassoulet and winked at Carella.

They put the children to bed at 9:00.

They watched television for a while, and then they went into the bedroom. Teddy was in the bathroom for what seemed an inordinately long time. Carella guessed she was angry. When she came into the bedroom again, she was wearing a robe over her nightgown. Normally, she wasn’t quite so modest in their own bedroom. He began to think more and more that his gift of chocolates without even a selection chart under the lid had truly irritated her. So deep was his own guilt (“Italians and Jews,” Meyer was fond of saying, “are the guiltiest people on the face of the earth”) that he did not remember until she pulled back the covers in the dark and got into bed beside him that she hadn’t given him anything at all.

He snapped on the bedside lamp.

“Honey,” he said, “I’m really sorry. I know I should have done it earlier, it was stupid of me to leave it for the last minute. I promise you tomorrow I’ll—”

She put her fingers to his lips, silencing him.

She sat up.

She lowered the strap of her nightgown.

In the glow of the lamplight, he saw her shoulder. Where previously there had been only a single black butterfly tattoo, put there so long ago he could hardly remember when, he now saw two butterflies, the new one slightly larger than the other, its wings a bright yellow laced with black. The new butterfly seemed to hover over the original, as though kissing it with its outstretched wings.

His eyes suddenly flooded with tears.

He pulled her to him and kissed her fiercely and felt his tears mingling with hers as surely as did the butterflies on her shoulder.