Lightning

10

On the night of Darcy Welles’s murder, three men had parked automobiles between the hours of eight and ten in the garage around the corner from Marino’s restaurant. Lieutenant Byrnes decided it would be best to hit all three tonight. If one of them was a murderer, tomorrow couldn’t come soon enough. But even if all three were clean, the chances of catching them at home tonight seemed better than waiting till morning. Tomorrow was Friday, a work day. If these men held jobs, a visit to their homes in the morning would net three zeroes. Questions would have to be asked of whoever opened the door, and further visits would have to be made to their places of work. Better to do it tonight; the early bird catches the worm, and besides he who hesitates is lost. So went the lieutenant’s reasoning.

Five of the detectives working the three teams would have preferred staying home in bed rather than chasing all over the city after a man who only maybe was the actual perpetrator. “Perpetrator” was the word Ollie Weeks used. He was the sixth detective making up the three teams of two men each, and he much preferred being out in the city on a hunt than staying home in an apartment even he admitted was seedy. Lieutenant Byrnes wasn’t too sure about the protocol of allowing Ollie to participate in a potential bust. Ollie argued that the third stiff had been found up in the Eighty-third, hadn’t she, and so he had every right to go along. “Besides,” he pointed out subtly, “I was the one got them fuckin’ tickets at the garage, without which nobody from MVB would’ve been able to come up with these names and addresses, so let’s cut the shit, okay, Loot?”

The men set off for different parts of the city at approximately 10:30. Carella got lucky; he was teamed with Ollie Weeks. He rolled his eyes heavenward as they went downstairs to check out an unmarked sedan. Ollie was dressed rather nattily for Ollie. He was wearing a plaid mackinaw and a deerstalker hat; the weather, so mild until now, had turned raw when the sun sank below the horizon; the October honeymoon seemed to be over. Carella, still wearing what he’d put on this morning, felt a little chilly, and he hoped the sedan was one with a working heater. It wasn’t.

The owner of the Mercedes-Benz with the 604J29 license plate number lived not ten minutes away from the station house. His name was Henry Lytell.

“That name sounds familiar,” Ollie said. He was driving. Carella was leaning over beside him, banging on the heater with the heel of his hand, trying to get it to work. “Don’t that sound familiar to you? Henry Lytell?”

“No, it doesn’t,” Carella said. “Okay, I give up, the hell with it!”

“You guys oughta get some new cars,” Ollie said.

Carella grunted, pulled up the collar on his sports jacket, and tried to hunch down into it.

“What I do,” Ollie said, “I always keep extra gear in the trunk of my car, case it turns cold, or starts rainin’ or somethin’, this city.”

“Um,” Carella said.

“What we shoulda done, we shoulda taken my car ’steada this beat-up shebang. Up in the Eight-Three, we got brand new cars — Mercurys and Fords. The lieutenant comes out back every time we bring one in, makes sure we didn’t put a scratch on it. We know how to live up in the Eight-Three. That name sounds very familiar, Henry Lytell. Ain’t he an actor or something?”

“It doesn’t ring a bell,” Carella said.

“Lytell, Lytell, I’m sure that’s somebody’s name,” Ollie said.

Carella did not mention that since Lytell was somebody’s name, then it had to be somebody’s name. Carella was thinking he should have worn his long johns to work this morning.

“It’s the Henry throws me,” Ollie said. “What’s the address again?”

“843 Holmes.”

“Like Sherlock?”

“The same.”

“We hit pay dirt, we share the collar, that clear?” Ollie said. “Credit goes to both precincts.”

“You bucking for Commissioner?” Carella said.

“I’m happy with what I am,” Ollie said. “But fair is fair.”

“Aren’t you cold in here?” Carella said.

“Me? No. You cold?”

“Yes.”

“It’s supposed to rain,” Ollie said.

“Will that make it warmer?”

“I’m only saying.”

They were silent for several moments.

“Did Meyer mention what I said about ‘Hill Street Blues’?” Ollie asked.

“No,” Carella said.

“About suing ‘Hill Street Blues’?”

“No, he didn’t. Who’s suing ‘Hill Street Blues’?”

“I think you and me should sue them.”

“Why?”

“Don’t you think Furillo sounds like Carella?”

“No,” Carella said.

“Don’t you think Charlie Weeks sounds like Ollie Weeks?”

“No.”

“You don’t?”

“No. Charlie Weeks sounds like Charlie Weeks.”

“To me, they sound almost like the same name.”

“The way Howard Hunter sounds like Evan Hunter.”

“That ain’t the same at all.”

“Or the way Arthur Hitler sounds like Adolf Hitler.”

“Now you’re making a joke of it,” Ollie said. “Anyway, I’ll bet there ain’t a single person in the whole world named Hitler nowadays. Not even in Germany is there a kraut named Hitler. Everybody named Hitler already changed his name to something else.”

“So why don’t you change your name to something else? If Charlie Weeks is bothering you, change your name to Ollie Jones or something.”

“Why don’t Charlie Weeks change his name to something else?” Ollie said. “Why don’t Furillo change his name to something else?”

“I don’t see any connection between Furillo and Carella,” Carella said.

“Why you so irritated tonight?”

“I’m not irritated, I’m cold.”

“We’re about to make a collar, and the man is irritated.”

“You don’t know we’re about to make a collar,” Carella said.

“I feel it in my bones,” Ollie said. “Here we are.”

He double-parked alongside a station wagon parked at the curb in front of Henry Lytell’s building. The building was a six-story brick, no doorman. They went into the small entrance alcove and checked out the mailboxes.

“Lytell, H.,” Ollie said. “Apartment 6B. Top floor. I hope there’s an elevator. Don’t that name sound familiar to you? Lytell?”

“No,” Carella said. It was as cold in the entrance alcove as it had been in the car, the kind of damp, penetrating cold that surely promised rain.

Ollie rang the bell button in the panel set alongside the mailboxes. He kept leaning on the button. There was no answering buzz on the inner door.

“You suppose there’s a super in this dump?” he asked, checking the bell-button panel. “No such luck,” he said, and pressed the button opposite the name Nakura, for apartment 5A. An answering buzz sounded at the inner door. Ollie grabbed for the knob and pushed the door open.

“Thank God for small favors,” he said, walking toward the small elevator at the back of the hall. He pressed the call button. The detectives waited. “These old buildings,” Ollie said, “the elevators’re as slow as a nigger in August.”

“I have some advice for you,” Carella said.

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“Don’t ever get yourself partnered with Arthur Brown.”

“Why? Oh, you mean what I just said? That was a figure of speech.”

“Brown might not think so.”

“Sure, he would,” Ollie said, “he’s got a good sense of humor, Brown. What’s wrong with what I just said, anyway? It’s a figure of speech.”

“I don’t like your figures of speech,” Carella said.

“Come on, come on,” Ollie said, and patted him on the back. “Don’t be so irritated tonight, Steve-a-rino. We’re about to make a collar.”

“And please don’t call me Steve-a-rino.”

“What should I call you? Furillo? You want me to call you Furillo?”

“My name is Steve.”

“Furillo’s name is Frank. The sergeant there, he calls him ‘Francis’ all the time. Maybe I’ll call you Stephen. Would you like me to call you ‘Stephen,’ Stephen?”

“I would like to you call me Steve.”

“Okay, Steve. You like ‘Hill Street Blues,’ Steve?”

“I don’t like cop shows,” Carella said.

“Where the fuck’s the elevator?” Ollie said.

“You want to walk up?”

“Six flights? No way.”

The elevator finally got there. The men entered. Ollie pressed the button for the sixth floor. The doors closed.

“Speed this thing makes, we’ll be up there next Tuesday,” Ollie said.

On the sixth floor, they found apartment 6B on the wall opposite the elevator, two doors down.

“Better flank it,” Ollie said. “Lytell may be the one likes to break necks.”

His pistol was already in his right hand.

They flanked the door, Carella on the left, Ollie on the right. Ollie pressed the doorbell button. They heard chimes sounding inside. Nothing else. Ollie pressed the button again. More chimes. He put his ear to the wood, listening. Nothing.

“Quiet as a graveyard,” he said. “Back away, Steve.”

“What for?”

“I’m gonna kick it in.”

“You can’t do that, Ollie.”

“Who says?” Ollie said, and raised his right knee.

“Ollie...”

Ollie’s leg pistoned out in a flat-footed kick at the lock. The lock sprang, the door flew inward. The apartment beyond was dark.

“Anybody home?” Ollie said, and moved into the apartment in a policeman’s crouch, fanning the air ahead of him with his pistol. “Get the light,” he said to Carella.

Carella felt for a light switch on the wall inside the door. He found it, and snapped it upward.

“Police!” Ollie shouted, apparently to no one. “Cover me,” he said to Carella and moved deeper in the apartment. Carella kept his pistol leveled on the area in front of Ollie. What the hell am I doing? he thought. This is illegal. Ollie snapped on the living room light. The room was empty. On one wall there was an oversized oil painting of a male runner in jersey and shorts, the number ten on the front of the jersey, the man taking long strides, legs reaching, arms pumping. It looked like a knockoff of the paintings that guy did for Playboy magazine, Carella couldn’t remember his name. There were doors on either side of the living room, both of them closed. Without a word, the detectives fanned out, Ollie taking the door on the right, Carella the one on the left. Both rooms were bedrooms and nobody was in either of them.

“Let’s toss the joint,” Ollie said.

“No,” Carella said.

“Why not?”

“We shouldn’t even be in here,” he said, and thought at once of the patient who asked his psychiatrist to give him a farewell kiss on his final visit to the office. The psychiatrist said, “Kiss you? I shouldn’t even be lying here on the couch with you.”

“But we are in here,” Ollie said. “You can see we’re in here, can’t you?”

“Illegally,” Carella said.

“Steve, Steve,” Ollie said paternally, shaking his head. “Let me tell you a little fairy tale, do you like fairy tales, Steve?”

“Ollie, do you know you’re fooling around with the Poi...”

“Listen to my fairy tale, okay?” Ollie said. “Two honest, hardworking cops go out one night to check on a possible suspect. They get to the suspect’s apartment — which happens to be this very apartment we are now standing in — and guess what they find? They find that some burglar has already broken into the place and made a fuckin’ shambles of it. Like the good, honest, hardworking cops they are, they report the burglary to the local precinct — whatever the fuck precinct this is — and then they go on their merry way. How does that sound to you, Steve? Or don’t you like fairy tales?”

“I love fairy tales,” Carella said. “Here’s one for you, okay? It’s called the Poison Tree, and it...”

“Ah, yes, m’boy, the Poison Tree,” Ollie said, falling into his world-famous W. C. Fields imitation. “The Poison Tree, yes, yes, sounds vaguely familiar.”

“The Poison Tree is about a cop who failed to follow legal guidelines before searching for an ice pick in a sewer. The cop searched around in the sewer muck, and he found this bloody ice pick, and a good suspect’s fingerprints were all over it, but the cop’s information about that ice pick had been obtained illegally, Ollie, and the DA told him it was the fruit of the poison tree, and the case got kicked out of court, and the murderer is probably using that same ice pick on a hundred other people right this minute. The Poison Tree Doctrine, Ollie. How long have you been a cop, Ollie?”

“Ah, yes, the Poison Tree Doctrine,” Ollie said, still being W. C. Fields.

“We are in here without a warrant,” Carella said, “we have broken down a citizen’s door, and we are in here illegally. Which means that any evidence we find in here...”

“I see your point, m’boy,” Ollie said. “Would it disturb you overly, however, if I snooped around a bit? Without touching anything?”

“Ollie...”

“Because that’s what I’m gonna do,” Ollie said in his own voice, “even if it disturbs the shit out of you. We’re here to see if this guy has any connection with the murders. If he does...”

“We’re here to find out if this guy parked his car...”

“We already know that! That ain’t why we’re here, Steve.”

“We’re here to talk to the man!”

“Well, the man ain’t here, is he? Do you see the man here? So who do we talk to? The four walls?”

“We talk to a magistrate about getting a search warrant. That’s the proper...”

“No, we talk to the man’s appointment calendar to see where he is tonight, and then we go find the man, and we talk to him personally.”

“And when a judge...”

“A judge ain’t gonna know we talked to the man’s appointment calendar, is he? I already told you, Steve, when we got here we walked in on a 10–21, and that’s what I’m gonna call in before we walk out of here. In the meantime, I’m gonna look through the man’s desk and see if he kept an appointment calendar.”

Carella watched as Ollie walked to the desk across the room and opened the top drawer.

“See?” Ollie said. “Easy. The man is making it easy for us.”

He turned from the desk, and showed Carella an appointment calendar.

Now what we do,” Ollie said, “is open the calendar to October... like this.”

He opened the calendar.

“And we look for October twentieth, which is today’s date... well, well, take a look at this, Steve. This is a very talkative calendar, the man has here.”

Carella looked.

For October sixth, the night Marcia Schaffer was killed, Lytell had written her name into his calendar, and beneath that the name of her school, Ramsey University. For October thirteenth, he had written in “Nancy Annunziato” and then “Marino’s.” For last night, he had put down Darcy Welles’s name and “Marino’s” again.

“You seeing all this?” Ollie asked.

“I’m seeing it.”

“You see what he’s got written down for tonight?”

For tonight, Lytell had written the name “Luella Scott” and—

“Six to five, she’s a nigger,” Ollie said.

— and the word “Folger” which could only stand for Folger University, up in Riverhead.

Ollie closed the appointment calendar.

“Should take us half an hour to get there, twenty minutes if we hit the hammer,” he said. “Let me call in this burglary we discovered, and then let’s get the fuck out of here — before he breaks her neck, too.”

It was always Arthur Brown’s luck to catch Diamondback.

Anytime he had to go anyplace outside the precinct, he seemed to catch Diamondback. He figured it was departmental policy. Send all your black cops up to black Diamondback whenever they had to leave the confines of the Eight-Seven.

It was difficult for a black cop up here in Diamondback. A lot of the black people up here, they weren’t exactly on the side of law and order, and when they saw a black cop coming around they figured he was a traitor to the cause. Brown didn’t know what cause. He guessed that all the honest cab drivers, clergymen, salesclerks, letter carriers, stenographers, secretaries and other hardworking people up here also wondered what cause the pimps, pushers, prostitutes, numbers runners, burglars, armed robbers, and petty thieves felt a cop like Arthur Brown was betraying. The only cause he respected was the one that told you to be the best possible person you could be in a world gone rotten. Diamondback was the world as rotten as it could ever get. He wouldn’t live up here in Diamondback even if he was some guy cleaning out toilets for a living — which was what he sometimes felt he actually did for a living.

He had noticed over the years that not too many black lawyers, doctors, engineers, or architects lived up here in Diamondback — not in this part of Diamondback, anyway. If any black who’d made it decided to live in Diamondback at all, it was in the fringe area known as Sweetloaf. If Arthur Brown had to live in Diamondback, he guessed he would want to live in Sweetloaf. The only trouble with Sweetloaf was that the population there was entirely black. Brown felt there was something very wrong about the population of anyplace being entirely anything. Except maybe the population of China. But even that troubled him a little. How did those people over there in China manage to get through a day without seeing anybody who had blond hair and blue eyes? Didn’t it get boring just seeing everybody walking around with black hair and brown eyes? Brown was glad he didn’t live in China. He was also glad he didn’t live in Diamondback. But here he was again, ten minutes to 11:00 and smack in the heart of Diamondback, talking to a man who owned a Cadillac Seville with the license plate WU3200.

Both he and Hawes had known the minute the MVB came back with an address in Diamondback that this probably wasn’t their man. The waiter at Marino’s had described the guy with Darcy Welles as white. There were some white people living up here, Brown guessed, but they were few and far between. So the odds were at least a hundred to one that the guy who answered the door for them would be black (which he was) and the odds on a black man up here driving a brand new Cadillac Seville were at least a thousand to one that he was either dealing dope or hustling broads.

Willy Bartlett was hustling broads.

They spent exactly five minutes with him while he told them he was downtown last night dropping off a “girlfriend” of his, and they knew they were wasting even those five minutes because he was the wrong color to begin with.

Then again, Brown thought, maybe every black man in this city is the wrong color to begin with.

Eileen Burke couldn’t sleep.

It was eleven o’clock, and she had already set Mary’s alarm for 9:00 a.m., which meant that if she could manage to get to sleep without thinking of all sorts of things, she would get ten hours sleep before the alarm went off. That was a lot of sleep. Whenever she was in Bert’s bed, or vice versa, she averaged six hours a night — if she was lucky. Tonight, she was in Mary’s bed, and she couldn’t sleep, and she guessed it was because she had so many things to think about. One of those things was Bert out there knocking on a door that maybe had a killer behind it. Another thing was the possibility that the rapist would come knocking on her door — Mary’s door — tomorrow night sometime. Neither of the thoughts were conducive to sleep.

It was too bad Bert had to go out tonight. Whatever he’d planned for them to do on the telephone, Eileen was positive it would have put her in a good mood for sleeping afterward. If tomorrow night really came down the way Annie expected it would, then Eileen would need a good night’s sleep tonight. The trouble was, thinking about tomorrow night made it very difficult to fall asleep tonight. Eileen kept wondering if Annie had got those dates right. Or if any of that four-week, three-week, and so-on jazz made any sense at all. What I should do, she thought, is get up and look at the calendar again. Instead of lying here worrying about whether tomorrow night’s really going to be the night at all.

She snapped on the light beside the bed, threw the covers back, and swung her legs down to the floor. It was very cold in the apartment — that was October for you. Nice one day, freeze your ass off the next. She put on her robe and then worked her way around the piles of dirty laundry on the floor (I’ll wash all these on Saturday morning, she thought), went to the bedroom door and reached beyond it for the living room light switch.

At the desk, she turned on the small lamp, and opened the top drawer, hoping to find a calendar that was larger and easier to read than the one at the front of Mary’s checkbook — the big one, as Mary had called it. She found nothing but a little plastic calendar with a dry cleaner’s name and phone number on it, the kind you tuck into a wallet. Besides, it was last year’s calendar. She opened the bottom drawer on the right-hand side of the desk, fished out the checkbook again, and turned to the front of it.

The notes she had made while talking to Annie were still on the desk. She began ticking off the dates on the calendar, counting off the weeks. Well, Annie seemed to be right. Even allowing for the summer hiatus (how come no rapes in July and August, she wondered?) the pattern seemed clear. Tomorrow was Friday the twenty-first, and if their man acted as they expected he would, Mary Hollings was due for another visit. Out of curiosity, Eileen began leafing through the checkbook, locating the stubs for the checks Mary had written on the days she’d been raped.

June 10. Heavy activity, lots of bills to pay, all those shopping excursions Mary makes every day. Department stores all over the city, telephone company, electric company — Eileen counted ten checks written on that day alone. She flipped forward to September 16.

Equally heavy there, this lady sure ran up bills, those alimony checks had to be pretty hefty. A check made out to Reynolds Realty, Inc. (little late last month, huh, Mary? Your rent’s due on the fifteenth), another to a play subscription series at a theater down in the Quarter, another to an organization called A.I.M. (marked contribution), a stub for a check written to Albert Cleaners (the people who’d provided her with last year’s pocketsize calendar), another stub for a check made out to Citizens Savings Bank (marked renewal — SAFETY DEPOSIT BOX), a check to American Express, another to Visa, and that was it.

What the hell is A.I.M.? Eileen wondered. Sounds like an organization supporting a citizen’s right to bear arms. Ready, aim, fire. Was Mary a gun nut? Terrific. Support your local gun group and make life easier for all the cheap thieves in the world. A.I.M. Association of International Murderers? Allied Independent Maniacs? Am I Macho?

Eileen shrugged.

On October 7, Mary had written only six checks, two of them to department stores in the city (naturally), one to the Bowler Art Museum (again marked contribution), another to Raucher TV-Radio Repair, one for $5.75 made payable to Lombino’s Best Pizza (had she sent out for a pizza that night? And paid the delivery boy with a check?), and the last for a whopping $1,650 made payable to someone named Howard Moscowitz. The stub was marked legal fees.

So what’s A.I.M.? Eileen thought.

She hated mysteries.

She flipped back to the beginning of the checkbook. Maybe Mary had made a previous donation to A.I.M. And maybe she had written on the stub its full and doubtlessly honorable name. Amalgamated Indolent Masochists perhaps? Or Academy of Islamic Mosques? Or how about Avoid Intolerant Males? Or Are Iguanas Mammals?

Mary had made three contributions to A.I.M. during the past year. A hundred dollars in January. Fifty dollars in March. And a final fifty dollars on September 16, the second time she’d been raped. Undoubtedly in response to quarterly solicitations. There was no clue on the stubs as to what the acronym (if indeed it was one) stood for. Each was marked simply A.I.M. — CONTRIBUTION.

Eileen yawned.

This was better than counting sheep.

The Isola telephone directory was resting on the desk alongside the phone. She pulled it to her, flipped it open to the A listings, and began running her finger down the page:

There it is, she thought, and copied the information on a sheet of paper:

Right here in the city, she thought. Maybe I ought to ask Annie to check on it. Three contributions to the same outfit. Might be important.

She yawned again.

She turned off the desk lamp, turned off the living room light, and went back into the bedroom. She put her robe at the foot of the bed, got under the covers, and lay thinking for a moment. A.I.M. Sleep, she thought. Go to sleep. Come on, Morpheus, where are you? A.I.M. Anyone Inviting Morpheus? The ayes have it. She reached up to turn off the bedside lamp.

The clock read ten minutes past eleven.

The owner of the Chevy Citation with the license plate number 38L4721 lived in Majesta. It took Meyer and Kling forty minutes to get there from the squadroom. Kling looked at his watch as they were parking the car outside the housing development in which Frederick Sagel lived. Twelve minutes past eleven. It was seventeen minutes past eleven by the time they knocked on his third-floor apartment. A woman’s voice yelled, “Who’s there?” She sounded alarmed. In this city, a knock on the door at anytime past ten — when you were supposed to know where your children were — could be considered ominous.

“Police,” Meyer said. He was weary; it had been a long day. He did not want to be out here knocking on anybody’s door, especially if a murderer happened to be behind it.

“Who?” the woman asked incredulously.

“Police,” Meyer repeated.

“Well... just a minute, okay?” she said. Kling put his ear to the door. He heard the woman say, in a sort of stage whisper, “Freddie, it’s the cops,” and then a man — presumably Freddie, who was also presumably Frederick Sagel — said, “What?”

“The cops, the cops,” the woman said impatiently.

“Well, Jesus, let me put something on,” Sagel said.

“He’s getting dressed,” Kling said to Meyer.

“Um,” Meyer said.

Sagel — if this was Sagel — was wearing a robe over pajamas when he opened the door. He was about twenty-five years old, Meyer guessed, a plump little man standing some five-feet-seven or eight inches tall, with a bald head and dark brown eyes. Meyer pitied him the bald head; he himself was wearing his toupee. But one look at him — Sagel or not — told both detectives that he was not the man who’d been described by the waiter at Marino’s. The man who’d been with Darcy Welles on the night of her murder was — according to the waiter — in his forties, about five-feet-ten-inches tall, with brown hair and brown eyes. Nonetheless, on the off chance that the waiter had been mistaken, they went through the routine.

“Frederick Sagel?” Meyer asked.

“Yes?”

“All right to come in a minute?” Kling said.

“What for?” Sagel asked.

In the apartment behind him, they could see a woman — presumably the one who’d answered their knock at the door, and presumably Sagel’s wife — wearing a robe and turning the dial on a television set that had the volume down very low. She had curlers in her hair. That’s why Meyer figured she was Sagel’s wife and not his girlfriend.

“We’d like to ask you a few questions,” Kling said, “if that’s all right with you.”

“What about?” Sagel said. He was standing in the doorway, looking either like a fire hydrant or an outraged Englishman defending the entrance to his sacrosanct castle.

“About where you were last night,” Meyer said.

“What?” Sagel said.

“We’d all be a lot more comfortable if we could come in,” Kling said.

“Well... I guess so,” Sagel said, and stepped aside.

The moment the detectives were in the apartment, Sagel’s wife turned on her heel, went through a door opening off the living room, and closed the door behind her. Modesty, Meyer thought.

“Well... uh... why don’t you sit down?” Sagel said.

The detectives sat side by side on a sofa facing the television screen. On the screen, two people were negotiating a drug deal. Kling guessed one of them was an undercover narc. On television, if you saw any two people exchanging money for cocaine, one of them had to be an undercover narc. He wondered suddenly if Eileen had been serious about asking for transfer to the Narcotics Squad. He also wondered what she was doing right this minute. What he’d planned for tonight, what he’d planned to ask her to do when he phoned her—

“...you park it at a garage on South Columbia?” Meyer was saying. “Between Garden and Jefferson — closer to Jefferson, actually?”

“Yeah, sure,” Sagel said, looking puzzled.

“That’s where you parked your car last night?” Meyer said. “A Chevy Citation with the license plate — what’s the number, Bert?”

Kling looked at his notebook.

“38L4721,” he said.

“That’s the number... I guess,” Sagel said. “I mean, who the hell can remember his license plate number? That sounds like it, though. I guess.”

“And you parked your car at this garage at eight o’clock, is that right?” Meyer said.

“Around eight, yes.”

“Where’d you go after you parked the car, Mr. Sagel?”

“To my office.”

“You went to your office at eight o’clock at night?” Kling asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Why’d you do that?” Meyer asked.

“’Cause I forgot my work.”

“Your work?”

“I’m an accountant. I left my work at the office — by accident. The stuff I was supposed to work on last night. I do a lot of work at home. We have a computer at the office, but I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t trust it. So what I usually do is I take the printouts home and I check them against my own figures, the figures I made by hand, you know what I mean? That way, I’m sure.”

“So... as I understand this,” Meyer said, “you parked the car at eight o’clock...”

“That’s right.”

“And went up to your office to get the work you’d left behind...”

“That’s right.”

“Mr. Sagel, did you go back to the garage at ten o’clock? To reclaim your car?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Mr. Sagel, why did it take you two hours to pick up your work?”

“It didn’t. I stopped for a drink. There’s a restaurant near my building, the building where my office is, and it’s got a nice bar. So I stopped in there for a drink before I went to get the car.”

“What restaurant was that?” Kling asked.

“A place called Marino’s,” Sagel said.

“You were in Marino’s last night?” Meyer asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“How long were you there?”

“I musta got there around eight-fifteen, and I guess I stayed an hour or so. Had a few drinks, you know? Sitting at the bar. Bullshitting with the bartender. You know how it is when you’re sitting at a bar.”

“What time did you leave Marino’s, Mr. Sagel?”

“I told you. Nine-fifteen, nine-thirty, in there.”

“And you got to the garage at ten.”

“Yeah, about ten o’clock, it must’ve been.”

“What took you so long to get to the garage?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I was walking around, looking in the store windows. I walked up to Jefferson and looked in the store windows. It was such a nice night, you know.”

“When you were at the garage picking up your car...”

“Yeah?”

“Did you happen to notice a girl wearing a red dress?”

“No, I didn’t see any girl in a red dress.”

“Tall girl in a red dress. Five-eight or-nine...”

“Five-eight ain’t tall,” Sagel said. “I’m five-eight, and that ain’t tall.”

“Black hair and blue eyes?”

“No, I didn’t see nobody like that at the garage.”

“Or in the restaurant. Did you happen to see her in the restaurant?”

“I didn’t look in the restaurant. I told you, I was sitting at the bar.”

“Mr. Sagel,” Meyer said, “do you know anyone named Darcy Welles?”

“Oh, I get it,” Sagel said.

“What do you get, Mr. Sagel?”

“That’s what this is about. Okay, I get it. The girl somebody hung from a lamppost last night, okay, I get it.”

“How do you know about that?” Meyer said.

“Are you kidding? It’s in all the papers. Also, it was on television tonight, just now as a matter of fact, the Eleven O’Clock News. I was in my pajamas watching the news when you guys knocked on the door. It was all about this Darcy Welles girl hanging from a lamppost like the other two. You got to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to know about those girls hanging from lampposts. Helen!” he shouted suddenly. “Come in here a minute, will you? This is rich, you guys thinking I had something to do with it.”

They did not, in fact, think he had anything to do with it.

There is a ring to the truth, and it shatters the night like a hammer striking a gong.

But they listened nonetheless while Helen Sagel told them that her husband had left the apartment at about twenty after seven last night, just after they’d finished dinner, because he’d forgotten his work at the office and he wanted to do some checking of the figures on the computer printouts, and he’d got back at about ten-thirty, a quarter to eleven, something like that, and he smelled as if he’d had a few drinks. He had worked on his figures until midnight and then he’d come to bed where she was already asleep, but he woke her up when he turned on the light.

“Okay?” Helen said. “Is that it? Can I go back to bed now?”

“Yes, ma’am, thank you,” Meyer said.

“Knocking on people’s doors in the middle of the night,” Helen muttered and left the living room again.

“Sorry about this,” Meyer said to Sagel. “But we have to check these things out, you know.”

“Oh, sure,” Sagel said. “I hope you catch him.”

“We’re trying, sir, thank you,” Meyer said.

“May I ask you a question?” Sagel said.

“Certainly.”

“Is that a wig you’re wearing?”

“Well... yes, it is,” Meyer said.

“I’ve been thinking of getting one,” Sagel said. “Not like that one, I mean a good one. A wig nobody can tell you’re wearing, you know what I mean?”

“Uh... yes,” Meyer said.

“Well, good night,” Kling said. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Sagel.”

“Good night,” Meyer mumbled.

He was silent all the way down to the street. It was windier outside than it had been when they entered the building. It looked as if it might begin raining anytime now.

“I look pretty shitty in this thing, huh?” Meyer asked.

Kling didn’t answer for a moment.

“Bert?” Meyer said.

“Well... yeah, Meyer, I guess you do,” Kling said.

“Yeah,” Meyer said.

He took the wig off his head, walked to the row of garbage cans outside the building, lifted the lid off one of them, and tossed the wig inside.

“Easy come, easy go,” he said, and sighed.

But his head felt colder without all that hair on it.

He sure hoped it wouldn’t start raining.

Folger Road had taken its name from Folger University, which sat at the bottom end of a wide boulevard that climbed upward to skewer one of the city’s larger business areas. Carella once tried explaining to an out-of-towner who only thought he lived in a real city that you could take someplace like downtown San Diego, for example, and easily lose it in any one of the separate areas that conglomerately formed this city — which was, of course, the only city in the world. Well, Carella had to take that back. He’d never been to London or Paris or Rome or Tokyo or any of those other bustling places that he supposed were real cities, too. But trying to explain to this guy from Muddy Boots, Iowa, that his entire city could disappear overnight in an area like the Quarter, or the Lower Platform, or even Ashley Heights — well, that had been impossible. You had to understand cities. You had to understand that a section like Folger Road, with its bright lights and its stores and its blaring traffic and its teeming humanity was the equivalent of eighteen cities like Mildew, Florida, or Broken Back, Arizona.

The university itself was probably the size of a city like Lost Souls, Montana. Founded by the Catholic Church back in 1892 — a bad year for Lizzie Borden — it then consisted of several massive stone buildings in an area still surrounded by open farmland. The name “Riverhead” was a bastardization of “Ryerhert,” in itself an abbreviation of “Ryerhert’s Farms.” Once upon a time, when the world was young and the Dutch were snugly settled in the city, the land adjacent to Isola was owned by a patroon named Pieter Ryerhert. Ryerhert was a farmer who at the age of sixty-eight grew tired of rising with the chickens and going to bed with the cows. As the metropolis grew, and the need for housing beyond Isola’s limited boundaries increased, Ryerhert sold or donated most of his land to the expanding city, and then moved down to Isola, where he lived the gay life of a fat, rich burgher. Ryerhert’s Farms became simply Ryerhert, but this was not a particularly easy name to pronounce. By the time World War I rolled around, and despite the fact that Ryerhert was Dutch and not German, the name really began to rankle, and petitions were circulated to change it because it sounded too Teutonic, and therefore probably had Huns running around up there cutting off the hands of Belgian babies. It became Riverhead in 1919. It was still Riverhead — but not the Riverhead it had been back then in 1892 when the Catholic Church decided it would be a good idea to start educating the people up here in the hinterlands.

The university now occupied some twelve square acres of valuable land that, if sold at going real estate prices, would have caused the Pope to perform a ceremonial mass and a little dance through the streets of Warsaw. The entire campus was surrounded by a high stone wall that had undoubtedly kept the largely Italian-American masons in Riverhead busy for the better part of a century. Fifteen years ago, the university had begun admitting women — something the Pope had not yet seen fit to do with his clergy. At the administration building, Carella and Ollie spoke to a bleary-eyed clerk manning the Student Directory phone and learned that Luella Scott was indeed one of the women students here, and that she lived on campus in a freshman dorm named Hunnicut.

In the car, driving toward the dorm on the campus’s wide, tree-lined roads, Ollie said, “That sounds dirty, don’t it? For a Catholic school, I mean? Hunnicut? That sounds dirty to me.”

The dorms at Folger University were not coeducational. A freshman with her nose buried in a textbook looked up from a desk in the lobby when the detectives knocked on the locked, glass-paneled entrance door. A sign on the desk read RECEPTION. Ollie indicated that she should unlock the door. The girl shook her head. Ollie took out his wallet and opened it to his blue-and-gold detective’s shield. He held the shield up to one of the glass panels. The girl shook her head again.

“They got better security here than we got at Police Headquarters,” he said to Carella. Then, at the top of his voice, he bellowed, “Police! Open the door!”

The girl got up from behind the desk, and walked to the door.

“What?” she said.

“Police, police!” Ollie shouted. “You see the badge? Open the goddamn door!”

“I’m not allowed to open the door,” the girl said. “And don’t curse.”

They could barely hear her through the glass panels that separated them from the inside.

“You see this?” Ollie shouted, and rapped the shield against the glass. “We’re cops! Open the door! Cops!” he shouted. “Police!”

The girl leaned in close to the glass and studied the shield.

“I’m gonna shoot that little bitch,” Ollie said to Carella. “Open the door!” he yelled.

The girl unlocked the door.

“Only students are allowed in,” she said primly. “We lock the doors at ten o’clock, you have to have your own key to get in after ten.”

“Then why’re you sitting behind a desk says Reception, you’re not letting anybody in?” Ollie asked.

“Reception ends at ten o’clock,” the girl said.

“What is this?” Ollie said. “Saturday Night Live?”

“Saturday nights, we lock the doors at midnight,” the girl said.

“So what’re you doing sitting down here if you ain’t recepting anybody?” Ollie said.

“I was on Reception,” the girl said, “but I went off at ten. I was doing my homework. My roommate keeps the radio on all the time.”

“Pretend for a minute you’re still on Reception,” Ollie said. “You know a girl named Luella Scott?”

“Yes?” the girl said.

“Where is she?”

“Third floor, room sixty-two,” the girl said. “But she isn’t here just now.”

“Where is she?” Carella asked.

“She went to the library.”

“When?”

“She left here at about nine.”

“Where’s the library? On campus here?”

“Yes, of course on campus,” the girl said.

“Where?”

“Two dorms down, past Baxter, cross the quadrangle, two more dorms till you come to a small sort of cloister and the library’s just past that.”

“Was she alone?” Ollie asked.

“What?”

“When she left here. Was she alone?”

“Yes.”

“Come on,” Ollie said.

“Me?” the girl said, but the detectives were already outside and running up the path.

She’d been easy to identify. One of the three black girls on the team. The other two were seniors, he knew what they looked like from newspaper stories he’d researched in the public library. Luella Scott was the new one. Skinny little kid, looked as if she’d be gasping for breath after only a few steps, but oh she was fast, ran like the wind, fast, fast. Smart, too. Entered college this fall when she was only seventeen. He liked that, her being seventeen. The newspapers would really go to town on a seventeen-year-old girl.

All that coverage today.

He was almost home free.

This one should do it.

Luella Scott should do it.

From where he stood beneath the old maple tree, its yellowing leaves rattling in the fresh wind, he could see the lighted windows of the library building, but he could not spot Luella anyplace inside. There was only one entrance to the library, and she’d gone in there at a little after nine o’clock, he’d followed her over from her dorm, not much security on this campus except for the high stone walls, you’d think they’d be more careful with such a large female student body and rapists running loose all over the city. Went in at a little past nine, couldn’t have come out anyplace else because there wasn’t anyplace else to come out of. Had to come out right here, where he was waiting.

He looked at his watch.

Almost eleven-thirty.

What was taking her so long?

Well, she probably studied a lot. You don’t get into college at seventeen unless you’re a hard worker. You could be smart as hell, but if you didn’t crack those books, it didn’t matter. Smart girl, Luella Scott, but he wished she’d hurry it up in there. He also wished she would be the last one. He hoped this time would do the trick. He didn’t want to walk in and give himself up, they’d think he was crazy or something. Sure, mister, you killed four girls, terrific, mister, go watch some more television, okay?

Break this one in half, he wasn’t careful. Skinny little thing.

Hoist her up over the lamppost arm, should be easy. Couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, this one. Where’d she find the stamina to run the way she did? God, she was fast!

He looked up at the sky.

He hoped it wouldn’t start raining.

Still, rain had its benefits. Not too many people out on the street when it was raining, get the job done without any interference. That guy last night when he was carrying Darcy out of the park. He’d thought that would do it, the old fart seeing him. Hoped he’d go to the police when he read about it in this morning’s paper — Hey, guess what, I saw this guy carrying a dead girl out of Bridge Street Park last night, I’ll bet he was the guy who hung that girl from a lamppost! Cops probably wouldn’t have believed him even if he did go in to report what he’d seen. Sure, mister, go back to the park and sleep it off, okay? Or maybe he had gone in, told them what he’d seen, and the cops were playing it cool, telling the newspapers they had no leads when all the while they were closing in on him. He hoped so. He hoped they’d finally get off their asses and catch him. He couldn’t wait to read the newspapers when they finally caught him. Oh, wow!

The Road Runner Killer.

Change that name soon enough, you could bet on that.

Lightning.

Lightning all over the newspapers again.

A fierce gust of wind shook the branches overhead, sent leaves tumbling down in a golden shower. The leaves, driven by the wind, rasped over the path winding past the library steps. Where the hell are you? he thought. He planned to follow her only a little way back to the dorm, get her on that dark stretch of path before it opened into the quadrangle again. Dark there, perfect there. Couldn’t risk Corey McIntyre again, make it too easy for them, they’d think he was crazy. Couldn’t have the papers saying he was crazy. That was the one thing—

One of the library doors was opening.

Luella came out onto the wide, flat top step, her arms full of books. She looked too skinny to be carrying all those books. He felt like going up to her, asking her if she’d like some help with the books. She was adjusting a long woolen muffler around her neck now, pulling up the collar of her peacoat, skinny little girl in a big peacoat probably belonged to her brother or somebody, somebody in the family who was a sailor, you got a lot of black kids enlisting in the service these days. He tried to remember whether his research had turned up anything about her brother being a sailor? Nothing in the stories he’d read, nothing he could remember. Easy to forget things, though. Look at how easily they’d forgotten him.

She was coming down the steps now.

She coughed. Probably had a cold. Bad for a runner, she should be taking better care of herself, skinny little thing like that.

She walked past the tree.

The wind came up again.

She hadn’t seen him.

He waited until she was a good fifty yards ahead of him, and then he fell into step behind her. He was grateful for the rasping of the wind-driven leaves on the path; they covered any sound his track shoes made.

“What’d she say the name of that dorm was?” Ollie asked.

“Baxter,” Carella said.

“So where are the names? How you supposed to know one dorm from another?”

“She said the second dorm down.”

“So how can you tell the difference between a dorm and any of these other buildings?”

“I think this one is Baxter,” Carella said.

“So where’s the quadrangle? Everything looks the same here. Fuckin’ college looks like a monastery.”

“There it is,” Carella said. “Up ahead.”

She was through the cloister now, unaware of his presence behind her, the leaves swirling on the path, rising on the air again in tainted tatters. Ahead of her was a section of path lighted at its eastern end by a single lamppost, dark until it opened onto the quadrangle where another lamppost stood. He knew she was fast, he would have to get to her before she bolted, he didn’t want her to get away. She was fast, yes — but he was faster. He waited until she passed beneath the lamppost, and then he broke from a standing start, his shoes pounding on the pavement, the leaves scattering as if in sudden panic. She heard him, but she was too late. As she started to turn, he pounced on her.

The surprise was total, her eyes opening wide in shock, her jaw dropping, a scream starting somewhere in her throat — he clamped his hand over her mouth.

She bit him.

He pulled his hand back.

The scream erupted, shattering the night.

They had come through the quadrangle and were entering the path at its western end, dark beyond the lamppost, when they heard the scream. Ollie’s gun was in his hand an instant before Carella reached for his holster. Both men began running.

Up ahead, they saw the figures struggling in the dark, the man towering over the girl, the girl kicking and punching at him as he tried to turn her back to him. The wind was stronger now, rattling the branches of the trees lining the path, blasting leaves onto the air like demons trailing fire.

“Police!” Ollie shouted and fired over his head.

The man turned.

They could not see his face in the dark, they could see only the motion of his turning. Carella thought for a moment he would use the girl as a shield, holding her from behind — one of his arms was looped under hers now, his right hand clamped over the back of her neck — but instead he released her suddenly and began running.

“The girl!” Carella said urgently, and began running after him.

He had wanted to say, “See if the girl’s all right,” or “Take care of the girl,” but the man was off like the wind unleashing leaves everywhere on the night, and as Carella ran past the girl lying on the path now, he did not even turn to see if Ollie had understood him.

He had not run this hard since he was a kid in high school. Track wasn’t his sport; he’d played right field on the school’s baseball team, and his serious running had been confined to chasing high flies or rounding third base on a locomotive dash for home. That had been a long time ago; only on television and in movies did cops chase all over the city trying to nail a runaway suspect.

The man ahead of him was too fast.

Carella fired his pistol into the darkness, and the muzzle flash and ensuing explosion — like lightning and thunder on the night — coincided with a rain as sudden as it was fierce, almost as if his squeezing the trigger had served as a release mechanism, the lever action opening a hopper somewhere above. The rain was all-consuming. It pelted the path and the trees arching overhead, combining with the wind to create a multicolored shower of water and withering leaves. He pounded through the rain and the falling leaves, gasping for breath, his heart lurching in his chest, certain he would lose Lytell — if this was Lytell — knowing the man was simply too fast for him.

And then suddenly, up ahead, he saw Lytell lose purchase on the wet leaves underfoot, his arms flailing out for balance as his feet went out from under him. He fell to the sodden path sideways, his left shoulder hitting the asphalt, the blow of the impact softened somewhat by the covering of leaves. He was getting to his feet again when Carella ran up to him.

“Police,” Carella said breathlessly. “Don’t move.”

Lytell smiled.

“What took you so long?” he said.