Lullaby

Lullaby

By Ed McBain

Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

* * * *

Introduction

In suggesting that we package Lullaby, Vespers, and Widows in one volume, I recall thinking that these three novels were of a piece, a seamless trilogy that marked a particularly dark time in the annals of the 87th Precinct. Whether or not this coincided with a somewhat bleak era inthe history of New York City is a matter for conjecture. Isola, of course, is not New York - regarding which a note of explanation may be necessary.

When Pocket Books, Inc. first approached me about doing a mystery series back in 1955, I told them I felt the only valid people to investigate crimes were cops. Not private eyes, not attorneys, not rabbis or priests, certainly not cats, or little old ladies who belonged to the garden club and solved murder mysteries in their spare time - but cops. C-O-P-S, cops. I told them I wanted to write realistically about cops in New York City. Cops with wives or husbands, boyfriends or girlfriends, families, flaws, even head colds. They gave me a contract for three books - 'to see how it goes' - and I started researching and writing the books. The only difference between what I'd discussed and what finally came out of the typewriter was the substitution of a mythical city for New York.

I did this for several very practical reasons, least of which was trying to keep up with the constantly changing rules and regulations of the NYPD. More important, cops needed to know names, addresses, and telephone numbers. If I used a real city, I was risking the possibility of innumerable lawsuits. Isola is fictitious. So are the people and places in it. (The phone numbers, too.) Happily, the mythical city turned out to be a creative plus. I could invent geographical locations that did not exist, and I could invent histories for those places. I could have fun. Anyway, whenever you read a novel set in, let's say Denver, Colorado, and the writer tells you there's a gigantic tower in the center of that city, how would you know whether that tower really exists if you'd never been there? I've never been to Iowa or Idaho; for me, either of those places is only as real as the writer makes it.

For me, Isola is very real.

Even so, New York was undeniably going through some bad times during 1989,1990, and 1991 when these three novels were written. It was a time of random crimes, perps killing victims they didn't even know. It was a time of enormous anger, otherwise polite individuals flaring up in outraged indignation if you happened to brush against them on the street or - God forbid! - snatched a taxicab they thought they'd hailed. It was a time when pedestrians constantly checked their perimeters to make certain they were not about to be ambushed. It was a time when citizens began to distrust, and law enforcement officers began to despair.

It is no accident that the crimes in this trilogy are particularly uncivilized. They seem to speak of a resurgence of, if not evil - which is, after all, a theological concept - then certainly mercilessness. You do not kill an infant. You do not kill a priest. But more than that, in these three novels even the men and women of the Eight-Seven seem to be in extraordinary peril. Civilization, you know, is premised on laws we've constructed and enforced over the centuries. When we break those laws, we threaten the very fabric of society itself. And when the people authorized to enforce those laws are themselves the ones being threatened, the danger is multiplied exponentially. It is as if the last bastions of civilization are under assault. It is as if, finally, we are facing anarchy.

However . . .

Doomsday ain't quite here yet, folks.

All is not lost.

Despite the dark tone of these novels, there is still decency and honor and dedication, and there is humor (I hope) and there is love (I most certainly hope) and there is a promise of better times ahead.

Enjoy.

Ed McBain Weston,

Connecticut

* * * *

1

Both detectives had children of their own.

The teenage baby-sitter was about as old as Meyer's daughter. The infant in the crib recalled for Carella those years long ago when his twins were themselves babies.

There was a chill in the apartment. It was three o'clock in the morning and in this city most building superintendents lowered the thermostats at midnight. The detectives, the technicians, the medical examiner, all went about their work wearing overcoats. The baby's parents were still dressed for the outdoors. The man was wearing a black cloth coat and a white silk scarf over a tuxedo. The woman was wearing a mink over a long green silk gown and high-heeled green satin pumps. The man and the woman both had stunned expressions on their faces. As if someone had punched them both very hard. Their eyes seemed glazed over, unable to focus.

This was the first day of a bright new year.

The dead sitter lay sprawled on the floor midway down the hallway that ran the rear length of the apartment. Baby's bedroom at the far end, off a fire escape. Tool marks on the window and sill, they figured this was where he'd come in. Mobile with a torn cord lying on the floor beside the crib. Monoghan and Monroe stood looking down at the dead girl, their hats settled low on their heads, their hands in the pockets of their overcoats. Of all the men in the room, they were the only two wearing hats. Someone in the department once said for publication that the only detectives who wore hats in this city were Homicide detectives. The person who'd said this was a Homicide detective himself, so perhaps there was some truth to the ancient bromide. In this city, Homicide detectives were supposed to supervise each and every murder investigation. Perhaps this was why they wore hats: to look supervisory. By department regulations, however, a murder case officially belonged to the precinct catching the squeal. Tonight's double murder would be investigated by detectives in the local precinct. The Eight-Seven. Detectives Meyer Meyer and Steve Carella. Lucky them.

The ME was crouched over the teenager's body. Monoghan guessed he would tell them any minute now that the girl was dead from the knife sticking out of her chest. Monoghan had been called out from a party. He was still just drunk enough to find all of this somehow comical. Dead girl on the floor here, blouse torn, skirt up around her ass, knife in her chest. A lapis pendant on a broken gold chain coiled like a blue-headed snake on the floor beside her. Monoghan looked down at the ME and smiled mysteriously. Monroe was cold sober, but he found all of this a little comical, too, perhaps because it was New Year's Day and in this rotten business if you didn't laugh and dance away all your troubles and cares-

'She's dead,' the ME said.

Which made it official.

'Shot, right?' Monoghan asked, and smiled mysteriously.

The ME didn't bother answering him. He snapped his satchel shut, got to his feet, and then walked into the living room, where Carella and Meyer were still trying to get some answers from the baby's dazed parents.

'We'll do the autopsies soon as we can,' he said, and then, in explanation, 'The holidays. Meanwhile you can say one was stabbed and the other was smothered.'

'Thanks,' Meyer said.

Carella nodded.

He was remembering that years and years ago, whenever he got up in the middle of the night to feed the twins, he would hold one in his arms and prop the other's bottle on the pillow. Alternated the routine at the next feeding. So that one of them would always be held.

There was a dead baby in the bedroom at the far end of the hall.

'Mrs Hodding,' Meyer said, 'can you tell me what time you got back here to the apartment?'

Gayle Hodding. Blonde and blue-eyed, twenty-eight years old, wearing eye shadow to match the green gown, no lipstick, the dazed expression still on her face and in her eyes. Looking at Meyer blankly.

'I'm sorry?'

'Two-thirty,' her husband said.

Peter Hodding. Thirty-two. Straight brown hair combed to fall casually on his forehead. Brown eyes. Black bow tie slightly askew. Face a pasty white, shell-shocked expression in his eyes. Both of them walking-wounded. Their baby daughter was dead.

'Was the door locked?' Meyer asked.

'Yes.'

'You had to use a key to get in?'

'Yes. I was drunk, I fumbled with the lock a lot. But I finally got the door open.'

'Were the lights on or off?'

'On.'

'When did you notice anything out of the ordinary?'

'Well, not until ... we ... Annie wasn't in the living room, you see. When we came in. So I called her name . . . and . . . and when I ... I got no answer, I went to look for her. I figured she might be in with the baby. And didn't want to answer because she might wake up the baby.'

'What happened then?'

'I started for the baby's room and . . . found Annie there in the hallway. Stabbed.'

'Could we have her last name, please?'

'Annie Flynn.'

This from the woman.

Coming alive a bit. Realizing that these men were detectives. Here to help. Had to give them what they needed. Carella wondered when she would start screaming. He wished he would not have to be here when she started screaming.

'You've used her before?' Meyer asked. 'This same sitter?'

'Yes.'

'Pretty reliable?'

'Oh, yes.'

'Ever any trouble with boyfriends or . . . ?'

'No.'

'Never came home and found anyone with her, did you?'

'No, no.'

'Because kids ...'

'No.'

'Nobody she was necking with or . . . ?'

'Never anything like that.'

All this from Hodding. Drunk as a lord when he'd walked in, sober enough the next minute to be able to dial 911 and report a murder. Carella wondered why he'd felt it necessary to tell them he'd been drunk.

'Excuse me, sir,' Meyer asked, 'but . . . when did you learn that your daughter . . . ?'

'I was the one who found her,' Mrs Hodding said.

There was a sudden silence.

Someone in the kitchen laughed. The Crime Scene technicians were in there. One of them had probably just told a joke.

'The pillow was on her face,' Mrs Hodding said.

Another silence.

'I look it off her face. Her face was blue.'

The silence lengthened.

Hodding put his arm around his wife's shoulders.

'I'm all right,' she said.

Harshly. Almost like 'Leave me alone, damn it!'

'You left the apartment at what time?' Meyer asked.

'Eight-thirty.'

'To go to a party, you said . . .'

'Yes.'

'Where was that?'

'Just a few blocks from here. On Twelfth and Grover.'

This from Hodding. The woman was silent again, that same numb look on her face. Reliving that second when she'd lifted the pillow off her baby's face. Playing that second over and over again on the movie screen of her mind. The pillow white. The baby's face blue. Reliving the revelation of that split second. Over and over again.

'Did you call home at any time tonight?' Meyer asked.

'Yes. At about twelve-thirty. To check.'

'Everything all right at that time?'

'Yes.'

'Was it the sitter who answered the phone?'

'Yes.'

'And she told you everything was all right?'

'Yes.'

'She was okay, the baby was okay?'

'Yes.'

'Did she sound natural?'

'Yes.'

'Nothing forced about her conversation?'

'No.'

'You didn't get the impression anyone was here with her, did you?'

'No.'

'Did you call again after that?'

'No. She knew where to reach us, there was no need to call again.'

'So the last time you spoke to her was at twelve-thirty.'

'Yes. Around then.'

'And nothing seemed out of the ordinary.'

'Nothing.'

'Mr Hodding, does anyone except you and your wife have a key to this apartment?'

'No. Well, yes. The super, I guess.'

'Aside from him.'

'No one.'

'Your sitter didn't have a key, did she?'

'No.'

'And you say the door was locked when you got home.'

'Yes.'

In the hallway, one of the technicians was telling Monoghan that the knife in the sitter's chest seemed to match the other knives on the rack in the kitchen.

'Well, well,' Monoghan said, and smiled mysteriously.

'All I'm saying,' the tech said, 'is that what you got here is a weapon of convenience. What I'm saying . . .'

'What he's saying,' Monroe explained to Monoghan, 'is that your killer didn't walk in with the knife, the knife was here, in the kitchen, with all the other knives.'

'Is what I'm saying,' the tech said. 'For what it's worth.'

'It is worth a great deal, my good man,' Monoghan said, and nodded gravely.

Monroe looked at him. This was the first time he had ever heard his partner sounding British. He turned to the technician. 'Michael was out partying when I called him,' he said.

'Which may perhaps explain why he seems a little drunk,' the tech said.

'Perhaps,' Monoghan said gravely.

'Which, by the way, I didn't know your name was Michael,' the tech said.

'Neither did I,' Monoghan said, and smiled mysteriously.

'So what it looks like we got here,' Monroe said, 'is an intruder finds a knife in the kitchen, he does the sitter, and then he does the baby.'

'Or vice versa,' the tech said.

'But not with the knife,' Monroe said.

'The baby, no,' the tech said.

'The baby he does with the pillow,' Monroe said.

Monoghan shook his head and clucked his tongue.

'What a terrible thing,' he said, and began weeping.

He was weeping because he had suddenly remembered a very beautiful, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman who'd been at the party tonight and the terrible thing was that he'd forgotten her name. He was also weeping because he'd had his hand up under her skirt when Monroe telephoned.

Lying on a lot of coats on the bed, his hand up under her skirt when the telephone rang. Scared him half to death. He took out his handkerchief and wiped at his eyes. Monroe patted him on the shoulder. The technician went back into the kitchen again.

A pair of ambulance attendants came into the apartment, took a look at the dead teenager, and asked Monroe if he wanted them to leave the knife in her chest that way. Monroe said they should check with the officers investigating the case. One of the ambulance attendants walked over to where Hodding still had his arm around his wife.

'Leave the knife in her or what?' he asked Carella.

Which was when Mrs Hodding began screaming.

* * * *

It was four o'clock in the morning when Carella knocked on the door to the Flynn apartment. Both detectives had the collars of their coats pulled up. Both detectives were wearing mufflers and gloves. Well, Carella wore only one glove, since he'd taken off the right glove before knocking on the door. Even inside the building, vapor plumed from their mouths. It was going to be a cold year.

Meyer looked colder than Carella, perhaps because he was entirely bald. Or perhaps because his eyes were blue. Carella's eyes were brown and they slanted downward, giving his face a slightly Oriental cast. Both men were tall, but Meyer looked cold and burly whereas Carella looked warm and slender. It was a mystery.

They had obtained the baby-sitter's address from Hodding, and now they were here to break the news to her parents. This would have been a difficult thing to do on any day of the year. Bad enough that a child had died; it was not in the natural order of things for parents to outlive their children. Bad enough that death had come as the result of a brutal murder. But this was the beginning of a new year. And on this day, two strangers dressed for the freezing cold outside would stand on the Flynn doorstep and tell them their sixteen-year-old daughter was dead. And forevermore, the first of every year would be for the Flynns an anniversary of death.

Meyer had handled the questioning of the Hoddings. Carella figured it was his turn. He knocked on the door again. Knocked long and hard this time.

'Who is it?'

A man's voice. Somewhat frightened. Four o'clock in the morning, somebody banging down his door.

'Police,' Carella said, and wondered if in that single word he had not already broken the news to Annie Flynn's parents.

'What do you want?'

'Mr Flynn?'

'Yes, what is it? Hold up your badge. Let me see your badge.'

Carella took out the small leather case containing his shield and his ID card. He held it up to the peephole in the door.

'Could you open the door, please, Mr Flynn?' he asked.

'Just a minute,' Flynn said.

The detectives waited. Sounds. A city dweller's security system coming undone. The bar of a Fox lock clattering to the floor. A chain rattling free. Oiled tumblers clicking, falling. The door opened wide.

'Yes?'

A man in his mid-forties was standing there in striped pajamas and tousled hair.

'Mr Flynn?'

'Yes?'

'Detective Carella, Eighty-Seventh Squad,' Carella said, and showed the shield and the ID card again. Blue enamel on gold. Detective/Second Grade etched into the metal. 714-5632 under that. Detective/Second Grade Stephen Louis Carella typed onto the card, and then the serial number again, and a picture of Carella when his hair was shorter. Flynn carefully studied the shield and the card. Playing for time, Carella thought. He knows this is going to be bad. It's four o'clock in the morning, his baby-sitting daughter isn't home yet, he knows this is about her. Or maybe not. Four a.m. wasn't so terribly late for New Year's Eve -which it still was for some people.

At last he looked up.

'Yes?' he said again.

And with that single word, identical to all the yesses he'd already said, Carella knew for certain that the man already knew, the man was bracing himself for the words he knew would come, using the 'Yes?' as a shield to protect himself from the horror of those words, to deflect those words, to render them harmless.

'Mr Flynn . . .'

'What is it, Harry?'

A woman appeared behind him in the small entryway. The detectives had not yet entered the apartment. They stood outside the door, the cold air of the hallway enveloping them. In that instant, the doorsill seemed to Carella a boundary between life and death, the two detectives bearing the chill news of bloody murder, the man and the woman warm from sleep awaiting whatever dread thing had come to them in the middle of the night. The woman had one hand to her mouth. A classic pose. A movie pose. 'What is it, Harry?' and the hand went up to her mouth. No lipstick on that mouth. Hair as red as her dead daughter's. Green eyes. Flynn, indeed. A Maggie or a Molly, the Flynn standing there behind her husband, long robe over long nightgown, hand to her mouth, wanting to know what it was. Carella had to tell them what it was.

'May we come in?' he asked gently.

* * * *

The squadroom at a quarter past five on New Year's morning looked much as it did on any other day of the year. Dark green metal filing cabinets against apple green walls. The paint on the walls flaking and chipping. A water leak causing a small bulge in the ceiling. Cigarette-scarred wooden desks. A water cooler in one corner of the room. A sink with a mirror over it. Duty chart hanging on the wall just inside the wooden slatted rail divider that separated the squadroom from the long corridor outside. A sense of dimness in spite of the naked hanging light bulbs. An empty detention cage. Big, white-faced clock throwing minutes into the empty hours of the night. At one of the desks, Detective/Third Grade Hal Willis was typing furiously.

'Don't bother me,' he said the moment they came into the room and before anyone had said a word to him.

Willis was the shortest man on the squad. Curly black hair. Brown eyes.

Hunched over the machine like an organ grinder's monkey, he pounded at the keys as if he'd been taught a new and satisfying trick. Battering the machine into submission. Both fists flying. The reports Willis submitted were no masterpieces, but he didn't realize that. He would have made a good lawyer; his English composition qualified him for writing contracts no one could understand.

Neither Carella nor Meyer bothered him.

They had business of their own.

They had learned little of substance from either the Hoddings or the Flynns; they would question them again later, when the shock and subsequent numbness had worn off. But they had been able to garner from them some definite times that pinpointed Annie Flynn's whereabouts and activities while she was not being murdered. Starting with all the negatives, they hoped one day they might get lucky enough to fill in the positives that would lead to the killer. Cops sometimes got lucky, Harold.

Meyer sat behind the typewriter.

Carella sat on the edge of the desk.

'Quiet, you two,' Willis called from across the room.

Neither of them had yet said a word to him.

'Eight p.m.,' Carella said. 'Annie Flynn leaves her apartment at 1124 North Sykes…'

Meyer began typing.

'. . . arrives Hodding apartment, 967 Grover Avenue, at eight-fifteen P.M.'

He waited, watching as Meyer typed.

'Okay,' Meyer said.

'Eight-thirty p.m. Hoddings leave Annie alone with the baby . . .'

Meyer kept typing.

* * * *

A cold gray dawn was breaking to the east.

He had shared bacon and eggs with Eileen in an all-night diner on Leland and Pike and then had jokingly but hopefully asked, 'Your place or mine?' to which she had given him a look that said, 'Please, Bert, not while I'm eating,' which was the sort of look she always gave him these days whenever he suggested sex.

Ever since she'd blown away that lunatic last October, Eileen had sworn off sex and decoy work. Not necessarily in that order. She had also told Kling - who, she guessed, was still her Significant Other, more or less - that she planned to leave police work as soon as she could find another job that might make use of her many-splendored talents, like for example being able to disarm rapists in the wink of an eye or put away serial killers with a single shot. Or, to be more accurate, six shots, the capacity of her service revolver, the first one in his chest, the next one in his shoulder, the third one in his back, and the others along the length of his spine as he lay already dead on the bed. I gave you a chance, she'd said over and over again, I gave you a chance, blood erupting on either side of his spine, I gave you a chance.

'Now I want a chance,' she'd told Kling.

He hoped she didn't mean it. He could not imagine her as a private ticket, tailing wayward husbands in some imitation city, of which there were many in the US of A. He could not imagine her doing square-shield work in a department store somewhere in the boonies, collaring shoplifters and pickpockets. I'm quitting the force, she'd told him. Quitting this city, too. This fucking city.

Tonight, they'd left the diner and he'd gone up to her apartment for another cup of coffee, greet the new year. Kissed her demurely on the cheek. Happy New Year, Eileen. Happy New Year, Bert. A sadness in her eyes. For what had been. For the Eileen who'd been his lover. For the Eileen who'd been a fearless cop before the city and the system burned it out of her. Ah, Jesus, he'd thought and had to turn his head away so she wouldn't see the sudden tears flooding his eyes. Still dark outside when he'd left the apartment. But as he'd driven home through silent deserted streets, a thin line of light appeared in the sky in the towers to the east.

He turned the corner onto Concord.

Oh, shit, he thought, I don't need this.

There were four men on the street corner.

Three huge black men and a small Puerto Rican.

The streetlamp was still on over their heads. They struggled silently in the morngloam, natural light mingling with artificial, the three black men wielding baseball bats, the little Puerto Rican trying to defend himself with nothing but his hands. Blood spattered up onto the brick wall behind him. This was in earnest.

Kling yanked up the hand brake and came out of the car at a run, hand going for his gun, rules and regs racing through his mind, felony in progress, substantial reason to unholster the piece. 'Police officer,' he shouted, 'freeze!'

Nobody froze.

A bat came spinning out of the half-light, moving like a helicopter blade, horizontal on the air, twirling straight for his head. He threw himself flat to the pavement, a mistake. As he rolled over and brought the gun into firing position, one of the black men kicked him in the head. In the dizziness, he thought Hold on. In the dizziness, he thought Shoot. Blurred figures. Someone screaming. Shoot, he thought. And fired. One of them fell to the pavement. Someone else kicked him again. He fired again. Knew he was okay by the book, piece as a defensive weapon, tasted blood in his mouth, not a means of apprehension, lip bleeding, how the hell, almost choked on something, a tooth, Jesus, and fired again, blindly this time, angrily, and scrambled to his feet as one of the men swung a baseball bat for his head.

He took a step to the side, the thick end of the bat coming within an inch of his nose, and then he squeezed the trigger again, going for the money, catching the batter too high, five inches above the heart, spinning him around with a slug in the shoulder that sent him staggering back toward the blood-spattered brick wall of the building where the third black man was busily beating the shit out of the little Puerto Rican, swinging the bat at him again and again, long-ball practice here on the corner of Concord and Dow.

'Put it down!' Kling shouted, but his words this morning were having very little positive effect, because all the man seemed intent on doing was finishing off the little Puerto Rican who was already so bloody he looked like a sodden bundle of rags lying on the sidewalk. 'You dumb fuck!' Kling shouted. 'Put it down!'

The man turned.

Saw the gun. Saw the big blond guy with the gun. Saw the look in his eyes, knew the man and the gun were both on the thin edge of explosion. He dropped the bat.

'Hey, cool it, man,' he said.

'Cool shit!' Kling said, and threw him against the wall, and tossed him, and then handcuffed his hands behind his back.

He knelt to where the little Puerto Rican was lying on the sidewalk, bleeding from a dozen wounds.

'I'll get an ambulance,' he said.

'Gracias por nada,' the Puerto Rican said.

Which in Spanish meant, 'Thanks for nothing.'

* * * *

2

A reconstructed timetable can only be verified by the one person who cannot possibly verify it: the corpse.

It appeared, however, that Annie Flynn had left her home on North Sykes, seven and a half blocks from the Hodding apartment, at eight o'clock and had taken a Grover Avenue bus (she'd told this to the Hoddings) down to Twelfth Street, arriving there at eight-fifteen. The Hoddings had left for their party at eight-thirty sharp, taking a cab to their friends' apartment only four blocks downtown on Grover; Mrs Hodding said she hadn't wanted to walk even such a short distance because of the high heels and the long gown.

From eight-thirty p.m. until approximately twenty minutes past midnight neither the Hoddings nor the Flynns had talked to Annie. As was usual on New Year's Eve, all circuits were busy after midnight and it took Annie's father a while to get through to her. Both he and his wife wished her a happy new year and then chatted with her for five minutes or so. Hodding was trying to reach his home at about that same time. Kept getting a busy signal. It was around twelve-thirty when finally he got through. He ascertained that the baby was okay, wished Annie a happy new year, and then hung up. It was certain, then, that she was still alive at twelve-thirty in the morning. She was not alive at two thirty, when the Hoddings came back to the apartment. There was no way of knowing whether Annie Flynn - as was often the case with sitters - had made or received any other calls on the night of her murder. The telephone company did not keep records of local calls. Period.

It was now ten minutes past eight.

Meyer and Carella had been relieved officially at a quarter to, but this was a homicide and the first twenty-four hours were the most important. So once again they put on their overcoats, and their mufflers, and their gloves, and they went back to the Hodding building, this time to knock on doors. This was the tedious part. No cop liked this part. No cop liked getting shot at, either, but given the choice many cops would have preferred a good old-fashioned chase to the sort of legwork that required asking the same questions over and over again.

With only one exception, each and every resident of 967 Grover Avenue wanted to know whether it was necessary to be asking these questions so early in the morning. Didn't they know this was New Year's Day? Didn't they realize that a lot of people had been up late the night before? What was so important that it couldn't wait till later in the day? With only one exception, everyone in the building was shocked to learn that the Hodding baby and her sitter had been murdered last night. This was such a good neighborhood, they could understand if something like this had happened farther uptown, but here? With a doorman and everything? With only one exception, everyone the detectives interviewed had neither heard nor seen anything strange or unusual between the hours of twelve-thirty and two-thirty last night. Many of them hadn't even been home during those hours. Many of them had gone to sleep shortly after midnight. The one exception-

'You're a little late, aren't you?' the man said at once.

'What do you mean?' Meyer said.

'The big show was last night,' his wife said. 'We had the whole damn police department here.'

'Well, two uniformed cops and a detective,' the man said.

As opposed to all the other tenants in pajamas and robes, the Ungers - for such was the name on their doorbell - were fully dressed and ready to take their morning walk in the park, despite what had happened last night. What had happened last night . . .

'We were robbed last night is what happened,' the wife said.

Her name was Shirley Unger. She was a good-looking brunette in her late twenties, wearing a gray sweatshirt with a University of Michigan seal on it, gray sweat pants to match, red Reeboks. Hair springing from her head like a tangle of weeds. Red sweatband on her forehead. Luminous brown eyes. A Carly Simon mouth. She knew she was gorgeous. She played to the cops like a stripper on a runway.

'We got home at about one-thirty,' she said. 'The robber was just going out the window. In the TV room. Actually a second bedroom.'

She rolled her eyes when she said the word 'bedroom,' as though there'd been something licentious about a burglar going out the window. She seemed to be enjoying the thrill of all this criminal activity, although - like most honest citizens - she confused burglary with robbery. To your honest citizen, somebody stole something from you, it was robbery. Any cheap thief on the street knew the difference between burglary and robbery. Any garden-variety crook could reel off the penal-code numbers for each crime, the maximum prison terms. Just like a cop. In this business, you needed a scorecard to tell which player was which.

'We called the police right away,' Unger said.

'They were here in three minutes flat,' Shirley said. 'Two cops in uniform and a detective. A little short guy with curly hair.'

Willis, they both thought.

'Detective Willis?' Carella asked.

'Yes,' Shirley said. 'That's the one.'

'Must have picked it up on the car radio,' Meyer said.

Carella nodded.

A police department was a big organization. There were close to twenty-eight thousand cops in this city. Even in the same squadroom, you didn't always get a chance to cross-check one case against another. Willis had probably been making a routine run of the sector when he'd caught the 10-21. Burglary Past. Figured he'd run on over, save the responding blues the trouble of calling it back to the precinct. The report Willis had been typing so furiously when Meyer and Carella got back to the squadroom may have been on the Unger burglary. They hadn't told him they'd caught a double homicide at 967 Grover. He hadn't told them he'd caught a burglary at the same address. Nobody asked and nobody offered. Sometimes you had to go the long way around the mulberry bush.

'So what's this?' Shirley asked. 'The follow-up?'

They told her what this was.

She did not seem terribly impressed. She was more interested in whether the police were going to get back the emerald ring her husband Charlie had bought for her eight years ago on their honeymoon in Calle di Volpe, Italy, on the island of Sardinia. She was also interested in whether the police were going to get back the new VCR Charlie had bought her for Christmas this year. 'Well, last year already, am I right?' she said and smiled a radiant smile that said I would love to kiss your pectorals. She also wanted to know how long this was going to take because she wanted to go out for her walk and she was beginning to get hot here in the apartment, dressed for the outside as she was.

Carella told her that any questions regarding the burglary would have to be answered by Detective Willis, but that he and his partner wanted to know a little more about this man they'd seen going out the window . . .

'Yes, onto the fire escape,' Shirley said.

. . . because the burglary here in the Unger apartment on the sixth floor of the building might have been related somehow to the double homicide downstairs on the fourth floor.

'Oh,' Shirley said.

'Yes,' Meyer said.

'Then would you mind if I took off my sweatshirt?' she asked. 'Because, really, it is very warm in here.'

Without wailing for their permission, which she didn't need anyway, she pulled the U Mich sweatshirt over her head, revealing fat red suspenders and a flimsy white cotton T-shirt. She was not wearing a bra under the T-shirt. She smiled modestly.

'You say this was around one-thirty?' Carella said. 'When you came into the apartment?'

'Yes,' Shirley said shyly. Now that she was half-naked, she was playing a novitiate nun at a cloister in the mountains of Switzerland. Her husband was still wearing a ski parka. He had begun to perspire visibly, but he did not take off the parka. Perhaps he figured he could inspire the detectives to cut this short if he did not remove the parka. Let them know he wanted to get the hell out of here, go take his walk in the park. Subtly hint to them that he didn't give a flying fuck about the baby who'd got snuffed in the apartment downstairs. Or her babysitter, either. What were they going to do about getting back his camel hair coat that had been bought at Ralph Lauren for eleven hundred bucks was what he wanted to know.

'And you say the burglar was in the bedroom, going out the window…'

'Yes. The robber,' Shirley said. 'With my VCR under his arm.'

'What did he look like?' Meyer asked. 'Did you get a good look at him?'

'Oh, yes,' Shirley said. 'He turned to look back at us.'

'As we came into the bedroom,' Unger said.

Carella had already taken out his pad.

'Was he white?' he asked. 'Black? Hispanic? Orient . . . ?'

'White.'

'How old?'

'Eighteen, nineteen.'

'Color of his hair?'

'Blond.'

'Eyes?'

'I don't know.'

'Neither do I.'

'How tall was he?'

'That's difficult to say. He was all hunched over, you know, going out the window onto the fire escape.'

'Can you guess at his weight?'

'He was very thin.'

'Well, he was wearing black,' Shirley said. 'Black makes a person look thinner.'

'Even so, he was thin,' Unger said.

'Was he clean-shaven? Or did he have a beard, a mustache . . . ?'

'A mustache.'

'A small mustache.'

'Well, a scraggly mustache. He was just a kid, you know.'

'Like it was just growing in.'

'You know the kind of mustache a kid has? Like fuzzy?"

'That's the kind of mustache this was.'

'When you say he was wearing black . . .'

'A black leather jacket,' Unger said.

'Black slacks.'

'And sneakers.'

'White sneakers.'

'And my coat,' Unger said.

'Your what?'

'My camel hair coat Shirley bought for me at Ralph Lauren for eleven hundred bucks.'

Must be some coat, Meyer thought.

Carella was thinking the same thing. The first car he'd owned had cost eleven hundred bucks.

'What color was the coat?' Meyer asked.

'I told you. Camel hair. Tan.'

'And he was wearing this over the black leather jacket . . .'

'Yes.'

'And the black slacks . . .'

'Yes, and the white sneakers.'

'Any hat?' Meyer asked.

'No.'

'Did you say anything to him?'

'Yes, I yelled "Take off my coat, you fucking crook!"'

'Did he say anything to you?'

'Yes.'

'What did he say?'

'He said, "If you call the cops, I'll come back!"'

'Very scary,' Shirley said.

'Because he was pointing a gun at us,' Unger said.

'He had a gun?' Carella said.

'Yeah, he pulled a gun out of his pocket.'

'Very scary,' Shirley said again.

'So I called the police right away,' Unger said, and nodded for emphasis.

'Do you think he'll be back?' Shirley asked.

Carella didn't know what she was playing now.

Maybe the expectant rape victim.

'I don't think so,' he said.

'Did Detective Willis examine that fire escape?' Meyer asked.

'Yes, he did.'

'Would you know if he found anything out there?'

'Nothing belonging to us, that's for sure,' Shirley said.

* * * *

Detective Hal Willis was in bed with a former hooker when the telephone rang at ten minutes past twelve that afternoon. He was sleeping soundly, but the phone woke him up and he grabbed for the receiver at once. Every time the phone rang, Willis thought the call would be from some police inspector in Buenos Aires, telling him they had traced a murder to the city here and were planning to extradite a woman named Marilyn Hollis. Every time the phone rang, even if he was asleep, Willis began sweating. He began sweating now.

Not many cops on the squad knew that Marilyn Hollis had done marijuana time in a Mexican prison or that she'd been a hooker in B.A. Willis knew, of course. Lieutenant Byrnes knew. And Carella knew. The only cop who knew that Marilyn had murdered her Argentine pimp was Willis.

'Willis,' he said.

'Hal, it's Steve.'

'Yes, Steve,' he said, relieved.

'You got a minute?'

'Sure.'

'This burglary you caught last night . . .'

'Yeah.'

Beside him, Marilyn grunted and rolled over.

'We're working a double homicide in the same building.'

'Oh boy,' Willis said.

'Occurred sometime between twelve-thirty and two-thirty.'

'Mine was at one-thirty,' Willis said.

'So the Ungers told us.'

'How'd you like her tits?' Willis asked.

Beside him, Marilyn rammed her elbow into his ribs.

'I didn't notice,' Carella said.

'Ha!' Willis said.

'The Ungers told us you were poking around on . . .'

'Who's us?'

'Me and Meyer. Poking around on the fire escape.'

'Yeah.'

'Did you find anything?'

'A vial of crack.'

'So what else is new?'

'Plus there looked like a lot of grimy prints on the windowsill, where he was working with a jimmy to get in. I called in for the van, but nobody showed. This was only a two-bit burglary, Steve. On New Year's Eve, no less.'

'If it's linked to a homicide . . .'

'Oh, sure, they'll dust the whole damn city for you. Two homicides, no less.'

'You mind if I give them a call?'

'Please do. We bust the burglar, I'll have an excuse to go see Shirley again.'

Marilyn gave him another poke.

'Did you file your report yet?' Carella asked.

'It's probably still sitting on Pete's desk.'

'Mind if I have a look at it?'

'Go right ahead. Let me know what happens, okay? I bust a big burglary, I'll maybe make Second Grade.'

'Don't hold your breath,' Carella said.

'Talk to you,' Willis said, and hung up.

* * * *

In this city, if your apartment got burglarized, the police sometimes sent around a team of technicians to see what they could find by way of latent fingerprints. This was if the burglary involved big bucks. A dozen fur coats, negotiable securities, expensive jewelry, cash, like that. In smaller burglaries, which most of them were, the technicians never showed. This was not negligence. Close to a hundred and twenty-five thousand burglaries had been committed in this city during the preceding year, and there were only one lieutenant, six sergeants and sixty-three detectives in the Crime Scene Unit. Moreover, these people were more urgently needed in cases of homicide, arson, and rape.

So your average responding uniformed police officer would tell the burglary victim that a detective would be handling the case, and that they could expect a visit from him within the next day or so. Which was normally true unless the detective's case load was backed up clear to China, in which event the victim wouldn't be getting a visit from him until sometimes a week, ten days, even two weeks after the burglary. The detective would then take a list of what was stolen and he would tell the victim, quite honestly, that unless they caught the perpetrator in the act of committing another burglary or else trying to pawn the stuff he'd stolen here, there wasn't much chance they'd ever find him or their goods. And then the detective would sigh for the dear, dead days when cops used to have respect for burglars.

Ah, yes, there once was a time when burglars were considered the gentlemen of the crime profession. But that was then and this was now. Nowadays, most burglars were junkie burglars. Your more experienced junkie burglars usually jimmied open a window, the way the Unger burglar had done, because they knew that nothing woke up neighbors like the sound of breaking glass. Your beginning junkie burglars didn't give a shit. Whap, smash the window with a brick wrapped in a dish towel, knock out the shards of glass with a hammer, go in, get out, and then run to your friendly neighborhood fence (who was most often your dope dealer as well) and pick up your ten cents on the dollar for what you'd stolen. Only the most inexperienced burglar went to a pawnshop to get rid of his loot. Even a twelve-year-old kid just starting to do crack knew that cops sent out lists of stolen goods to every pawnshop in the city. To take your stuff to a pawnshop, you had to be either very dumb or else so strung out you couldn't wait another minute. Either that, or you were visiting from Mars.

So the chances of the Crime Scene Unit showing up at the Unger apartment were very slight, when one considered that the only items stolen were an emerald ring purchased in Italy for the sum of $2000, which gave you some idea of the quality of the emerald; a VCR that had cost $249 on sale at Sears; and an admittedly expensive cloth coat which was, nonetheless, merely a cloth coat. In a city crawling with addicts of every color and stripe, in a city that was the nation's drug capital, the dollar amount of your average burglary haul fell somewhat lower than what had been stolen from the Ungers, but this was still nothing to go shouting in the streets about and nobody down at the lab was about to dispatch the van for a garden-variety burglary, for Christ's sake, when people were getting killed all over the place, for Christ's sake!

Until Carella called in to say they had a double homicide and that one of the victims was a six-month-old baby.

* * * *

In the private sector, if a CEO asked for an immediate report on something which in his business would have been the equivalent of a homicide, that report would have been on his desk in the morning. All two hundred and twenty pages of it. Otherwise, heads would have rolled. But this was not the private sector. This was civil service work. Considering, then, that New Year's Day was a Sunday and that the holiday was officially celebrated on a Monday, Carella and Meyer were hoping that by the end of the week - maybe - they'd have some urgently needed information from the Latent Print Unit. If one of the forty-three examiners assigned to that unit could come up with a match on the prints the Crime Scene boys had lifted from the Unger windowsill; if they could further match the prints on the handle of the Flynn murder weapon with prints in the Identification Section's files, everybody could go to Lake Como for a vacation.

On Tuesday morning, the third day of the New Year, they had a long talk with Annie Flynn's parents. Harry Flynn worked as a stockbroker for a firm all the way downtown in the Old City; the walls of the Flynn apartment were covered with oils he painted in whatever spare time he managed to salvage from his rigorous routine. His wife - neither a Molly nor a Maggie but a Helen instead - was secretary to the president of a firm in the garment district; she mentioned the name of the clothing line, but neither of the detectives was familiar with it. This was now ten o'clock in the morning. The Flynns were dressed to go to the funeral home. He was wearing a dark suit, a white shirt, and a black tie. His wife was wearing a simple black dress, low-heeled black pumps, and dark glasses.

The detectives did not yet know where to hang their hats.

The Flynns came up with a possible peg.

'Scott Handler,' Flynn said.

'Her boyfriend,' Mrs Flynn said.

'Used to be, anyway.'

'Until Thanksgiving.'

'Broke off with him when he came down for the Thanksgiving weekend.'

'The long weekend they had in Thanksgiving.'

'Broke off with him then.'

'Came down from where?' Carella asked.

'Maine. He goes to a private school in Maine.'

'How old is he?' Meyer asked.

'Eighteen,' Mrs Flynn said. 'He's a senior at the Prentiss Academy in Caribou, Maine. Right up there near the Canadian border.'

'They'd been going together since she was fifteen,' Flynn said.

'And you say she broke off with him in November?'

'Yes. Told me she was going to do it,' Mrs Flynn said. 'Told me she'd outgrown him. Can you imagine that? Sixteen years old, she'd outgrown somebody.' Mrs Flynn shook her head. Her husband put his hand on her arm in, comforting her.

'Called the house day and night,' Mrs Flynn said. 'Used to burst into tears whenever I told him she didn't want to talk to him. Spent hours talking to me instead. This was long distance from Maine, mind you. Wanted to know what he'd done wrong. Kept asking me if he'd done something. I really felt sorry for him.'

'He came by again just before Christmas,' Flynn said. 'Home for the holidays.'

'Caught Annie here in the apartment, she was the one who answered the door.'

'We were in the back room, watching television.'

'Started begging her to tell him what he'd done wrong. Same thing he'd kept asking my wife on the phone. What'd I do wrong? What'd I do wrong? Over and over again.'

'Annie told him it was over and done with . . .'

'Said she didn't want him to come here ever again . . .'

'Said she wanted nothing further to do with him.'

'That's when he raised his voice.'

'Began hollering.'

'Wanted to know if some other guy was involved.'

'We were in the back room, listening to all this.'

'Couldn't hear what Annie said.'

'But he said . . .'

'Scott.'

'He said, "Who is it?"'

'And then Annie said something else . . .'

'Couldn't quite make it out, her back, must've been to us . . .'

'And he yelled, "Whoever it is, I'll kill him!"'

'Tell them what else he said, Harry.'

'He said, "I'll kill you both!"'

'Those exact words?' Carella asked.

'Those exact words.'

'Do you know his address?' Meyer asked.

* * * *

Scott Handler's mother was a woman in her late forties, elegantly dressed at eleven-thirty that Tuesday morning, ready to leave for a meeting with clients for whom she was decorating an apartment. She looked a lot like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Meyer thought that in this day and age, he would not like to be any woman who looked like the lady in that movie. If Meyer had been a woman with naturally curly blonde hair, he'd have paid a fortune to have it straightened and dyed black just so he wouldn't have to look like the woman in that movie. Luckily, he was bald and didn't look like her in the slightest. On the other hand, Mrs Handler had a problem. Right down to a somewhat chilling smile.

'My son left for Maine early this morning,' she said.

'Went back to school, did he?' Meyer asked.

'Yes,' Mrs Handler said, and smiled that slightly psychotic, hair-raising smile, although Meyer did not have any hair.

'The Prentiss Academy,' Carella said.

'Yes.'

'In Caribou, Maine.'

'Yes. Why do you want to see him? Does this have something to do with the little Irish girl?'

'Who do you mean?' Meyer asked innocently.

'The one who got killed on New Year's Eve. He broke off with her months ago, you know.'

'Yes, we know,' Carella said.

'If their relationship is why you came here.'

'We just wanted to ask him some questions.'

'About where he was on New Year's Eve, I'd imagine.'

The chilling smile again.

'Do you know where he was?' Carella asked.

'Here. We had a big party. Scott was here.'

'All night?'

'All night.'

'What time did the party start?'

'Nine.'

'And ended?'

She hesitated. Merely an instant's pause, but both detectives caught it. They guessed she was trying to remember if she'd read anything about the time of Annie Flynn's death. She hadn't because that was one of the little secrets the detectives were keeping to themselves. But the hesitation told them that her son had not been at the party all night long. If he'd been there at all. Finally, she chose what they figured she thought was a safe time to be saying goodbye to the old year.

'Four in the morning,' she said.

'A late one,' Meyer said, and smiled.

'Not very,' she said, and shrugged, and returned the smile.

'Well, thank you very much,' Carella said.

'Yes,' she said, and looked at her watch.

* * * *

On Wednesday morning, the fourth day of January, both murder victims were buried.

The detectives did not attend either of the funerals.

The detectives were on extension phones to the Prentiss Academy in Caribou, Maine, talking to an English professor named Tucker Lowery, who was Scott Handler's advisor. They would have preferred talking to Scott himself; that, after all, was why they had placed the long distance call. Both men were wearing sweaters under their jackets. It was very cold here in the city, but even colder in Caribou, Maine. Professor Lowery informed them at once that it was thirty degrees below zero up there. Fahrenheit. And still snowing hard. Carella imagined he could hear the wind blowing. He decided that if his son ever wanted to go to the Prentiss Academy, he would advise him to choose a school on the dark side of the moon. His daughter, too. If Prentiss ever began admitting females. Who, being the more sensible sex, probably would not want to go anyplace where it got to be thirty degrees below zero.

'I don't know where he is,' Lowery said. 'He's not due back until the ninth. Next Monday.'

'Let me understand this,' Carella said.

'Yes?' Lowery said.

Carella imagined a tweedy-looking man with a pleasant, bearded face and merry brown eyes. A man who was finding this somewhat amusing, two big-city detectives on extension telephones calling all the way up there to Maine.

'Are you saying that classes won't resume until next Monday?' Carella said.

'That's right,' Lowery said.

'His mother told us he'd gone back to school,' Meyer said.

'Scott's mother?'

'Yes. We saw her yesterday morning, she told us her son had already gone back to school.'

'She was mistaken,' Lowery said.

Or lying, Carella thought.

* * * *

The Puerto Rican's name was José Herrera.

There were tubes sticking out of his nose and mouth and bandages covering most of his face. One of his arms was in a cast. Kling was there at the hospital to try to learn when Herrera would be released. He had come here upon the advice of Arthur Brown, one of the black detectives on the squad.

Brown had said, 'Bert, you have shot two men, both of them black. Now every time a cop in this city shoots a black man, you got deep shit. A cop can shoot seventeen honest Chinese merchants sitting in the park minding their own business, no one will even raise an eyebrow. That same cop sees a black man coming out of a bank with a .357 Magnum in his fist, he just stole fifty thousand dollars in cash and he shot the teller and four other people besides, your cop better not shoot that man or there's going to be an outcry. All kinds of accusations, racial discrimination, police brutality, you name it. Now, Bert, I would love to see what would happen if one day I myself shot a black man, I would love to see how that particular dilemma would be resolved in this city. In the meantime, my friend, you had best get over to that hospital and talk to the man whose brains were getting beat out on that street corner. Get him to back up your word that you were following departmental guidelines for drawing and firing your pistol. That is my advice.'

'Go fuck yourself,' Herrera told Kling.

The words came out from under the bandages, somewhat muffled, but nonetheless distinct.

Kling blinked.

'I saved your life,' he said.

'Who asked you to save it?' Herrera said.

'Those men were . . .'

'Those men are gonna kill me anyways,' Herrera said. 'All you done . . .'

'I almost got killed myself!' Kling said, beginning to get angry. 'I lost a goddamn tooth?

'So next time don't butt in.'

Kling blinked again.

'That's what I get, huh?' he said. 'That's the thanks I get. I save a man's goddamn life . . .'

'You know how much pain I got here?' Herrera asked. 'If you'da let them kill me, I wouldn't have no pain now. It's all your fault.'

'My fault?'

'You, you, who you think? I get outta this hospital, they'll kill me the next minute. Only this time I hope you ain't there. This time I hope they finish the job.'

'Nobody's gonna kill you,' Kling said. 'Only one of them's out on bail . . .'

'How many does it take? You don't know these people,' Herrera said. 'You got no idea how they operate.'

'Tell me all about it.'

'Sure. Big fuckin' brave cop, knows everything there is to know. You don't know shit. These people are gonna kill me, you understand that?'

'Why?'

'Go ask them. You're the big hero, go talk to who you busted. They'll tell you.'

'Since I'm here, why don't you just save me the time?' Kling said.

'Go fuck yourself,' Herrera said again.

* * * *

3

The Latent Print Unit reported back on Thursday morning. That very same morning, Meyer and Carella received reports from both the police lab and the Medical Examiner's Office. This had to be some kind of record. The Hat Trick, for sure. Every other detective on the squad was astonished and envious. Cotton Hawes, who was himself working a burglary, asked if he could use the Hodding-Flynn murders as an excuse to get the lab to do some work for him. Hawes looked furiously angry when he asked this question, perhaps because he was a huge man with fiery red hair except for a white streak over his left temple where once he'd been knifed. The streak made him look even more furious, like a vengeful bride of Frankenstein. Unintimidated, Willis told him to go find his own double murder.

The lab reported that the tool marks found on the fire-escape window and sill in the sixth-floor Unger apartment did not match the tool marks found on the fire-escape window and sill in the fourth-floor Hodding apartment.

The lab reported that the cord attached to the mobile discovered on the floor in the baby's bedroom matched a cord fastened to a hook in the ceiling over the baby's crib. This suggested that the mobile had been torn loose from the ceiling. The mobile was made of tubular metal painted red and blue. It emitted a chime-like sound when one section of it struck any other section. There were no fingerprints on any section of the mobile.

The lab reported that the hairs vacuumed from Annie Flynn's body and clothes were foreign pubic hairs.

The Medical Examiner's Office reported finding fresh seminal fluid in Annie Flynn's vaginal contents.

Had she been resisting rape?

They had not, until this moment and despite the girl's torn blouse, considered the possibility that this might be a rape-murder.

But ...

The ME's report went on to note that within a few minutes after female orgasm, spermatozoa normally was spread throughout the somewhat alkaline cavities in the uterus and fallopian tubes. The spermatozoic spread at the time of the Flynn autopsy - begun half an hour after the body reached the morgue - had been well-advanced, indicated not only penetration but orgasm as well. Absent orgasm, as was normal in most rape cases, the spread often took as long as six hours. The ME was not conclusively ruling out rape. He was merely pointing out that the girl had apparently achieved orgasm. The report further noted that semen samples had been sent to the laboratory for identification and group-typing in the event of later comparison with isoagglutination groups in the blood of the accused - God willing, Meyer thought.

The Latent Print Unit reported that Annie Flynn's fingerprints were the only good ones found on the handle of the knife that had killed her. There were foreign prints as well, but these were too smudged to be useful in a search. Regarding the burglary in the Unger apartment, the unit had done what was called a cold search. No suspect's prints against which to compare. No names to check. Nothing but the latents lifted from the Unger window and sill. Find out who had left them there. A cold search on the local level could sometimes take weeks. On the state level, it often took months. Carella had once asked the FBI to do a cold search for him, and they had not come back to him until a year later, after the case had already gone to trial. But on this fifth day of January, the LPU reported that the latents on the Unger window and sill had been left there by a man named Martin Proctor - alias Snake Proctor, alias Mr Sniff, alias Doctor Proctor - who had a record going back to when he was twelve years old and first arrested for breaking into a candy store in Calm's Point. His B-sheet, as supplied by the Identification Section, filled in the rest.

At the time of his first arrest, Proctor belonged to a street gang called The Red Onions, comprised of daring young bandits between the ages of eleven and fourteen, all of them with an apparent craving for chocolate. Snake (as Proctor was then known) had been elected to break into the candy store and steal a carton containing a full gross of Hershey bars - with almonds, the president of The Red Onions SAC had specified. The SAC stood for Social and Athletic Club, a euphemism most street gangs affected.

The cop on the beat had caught him coming out of the back of the store. Snake had grinned and said, 'Hi, want a Hershey bar?' The arresting officer had not found this comical. The judge, however, thought Snake's casual remark indicated a good sense of humor, which he felt was the prime requisite for making a worthwhile contribution to society. He let Snake off with a warning.

First mistake.

Six months later, Snake . . .

Me was called Snake, by the way, because there was a python tattooed on his left biceps, beneath which, lettered in blue, were the words LIVE FREE OR DIE, the motto for the state of New Hampshire, though by all indications he had never been there.

Six months later, Snake was arrested for a jewelry store smash-and-grab and this time the judge was a lady who frowned upon such activities even if they netted only a pair of eighteen-karat-gold wedding bands and a digital wristwatch selling for $42.95. Snake, a juvenile offender, was sent to a juvenile detention facility upstate, from which he was released at the age of fourteen. By then, he had learned how to do cocaine, which for a price was readily available at the facility, and had acquired the name 'Mr Sniff,' which was a nickname as opposed to the earlier 'Snake,' which had been a street name. The new name was apparently premised on Mr Sniff's insatiable need for sucking up into his nostrils however much cocaine he could purchase or steal.

Drugs and stealing go together like bagels and lox.

Your white collar drug users may not necessarily be thieves, but down in the streets, baby, your user is a hundred times out of a hundred stealing to support his habit.

Over the years, Proctor managed to avoid imprisonment again until he was nineteen years old and got caught red-handed inside somebody's house in the nighttime. Burglary One, for sure, in that the dwelling was also occupied and Proctor threatened the person with a gun, little knowing the house was wired with a silent alarm, and all of a sudden two cops were on him with guns bigger than his own, so goodbye, Charlie. A Class B felony this time. State penitentiary this time. Big time this time. The DA flatly refused to let Proctor cop a plea - well, why the hell should he? They had the man cold. But the court sentenced him to only half the max, and he'd been paroled from Castleview two years ago, after having served a third of his term.

The name 'Doctor Proctor' had been acquired in prison.

Proctor had a habit as long as the Pacific Coast Highway. Every thief in the world knew that Castleview was as tight as a virgin's asshole. You wanted to cure a dope habit, you got yourself sent to Castleview because, man, there was no way of getting even a shred of grass inside there. Unless you were Doctor Proctor.

No one knew how he did it.

It had to be some kind of miracle.

But if you were hurting, baby, Doctor Proctor could fix you. If you needed what you needed, Doctor Proctor could get it for you. Always ready to help a friend in need, that was Doctor Proctor. A confirmed junkie, and a prison dope dealer. But none of that mattered. He had a title now, which was better than either a nickname or a street name. Doctor Proctor. Who for the past two years had been on the streets again. Apparently doing burglaries again. Or perhaps worse.

His mug shot showed a round clean-shaven face, dark eyes, short blond hair.

The Ungers had described him as thin and blond and growing a mustache.

The date of birth on his records made him twenty-four last October.

The Ungers had said he was eighteen, nineteen.

The last address his parole officer had for him was 1146 Park Street, in Calm's Point. But he had long ago violated parole, probably figuring if he was going to go back to work at his old trade it certainly didn't pay to waste time with parole-officer appointments. If a man was going to break parole by stealing, then why check in with the PO? If he got caught stealing, he'd go back to prison anyway. Besides, he wasn't going to get caught.

No criminal ever thinks he's going to get caught. Only the other guy gets caught. Even criminals who've already been caught and sent to person believe they won't get caught the next time. The reason they got caught the first time was they made a little mistake. The next time, they wouldn't make any mistakes. They would never get caught again. They would never do time again.

It never occurred to a criminal that a sure way to avoid doing time was to find an honest job. But why should a man take a job paying $3.95 an hour when he could go into a grocery store with a gun and steal four thousand dollars from the cash register! Four fucking thousand dollars! forten minutes' work! Unless he got caught. If he got caught, he'd be sent up for thirty years, and when you divided the four grand by thirty, you got two hundred a year. And when you broke that down to a forty-hourweek for every week in the year, you saw that the man had earned a bit more than six cents an hour for his big holdup.

Terrific.

He marches in there with a big macho gun in his big macho fist, and he scares the shit out of Mom and Pop behind the counter, and he never once thinks, not for a minute, that what he's doing is betting thirty years against that money in the cash register - which, by the way, might turn out to be four dollars instead of four thousand.

Smart.

But who says criminals have to be brilliant?

And, anyway, he's not going to get caught.

But even if he does get caught, even if he does make another teeny-weeny little tiny mistake the second time around, and even if the judge throws the book at him because now he's a habitual criminal, he can do the time standing on his head, right? The Castleview Penitentiary SAC. Lots ofold buddies from the street in there. Hey, Jase! How ya doin', Blood? But a lot of weights in there. Shoot the shit in the Yard. Get some fish in the gym to suck your cock, your buddies standing watch and then taking their turns. Send away for correspondence courses can make you a lawyer or a judge. Shit, man, you can do the time with one hand tied behind your back.

The signs tacked up in every police precinct in this city read:

If you can't do the

TIME -

Don't do the

CRIME!

Criminals laughed at those signs.

Those signs were for amateurs.

Martin Proctor had been to prison and enjoyed it very much, thanks, and he was out again, and had at least burglarized one apartment on New Year's Eve and perhaps done something more serious than that. But the cops had an address for him. And when you had an address, that was where you started. And sometimes you got lucky.

1146 Park was in a section of Calm's Point that had once been middle-class Jewish, had gone from there to middle-class Hispanic, and was now an area of mostly abandoned tenements sparsely populated by junkies of every persuasion and color. Nobody in the building had ever heard of anyone named Proctor - Martin, Snake, Mr Sniff or even Doctor.

Sometimes you got lucky, but not too often.

* * * *

'I should be in Florida right this minute,' Fats Donner said.

He was talking to Hal Willis.

Willis had dealt with him on many a previous occasion. Willis did not like him at all. Neither did any of the cops on the Eight-Seven. That was because Donner had a penchant for young girls. In the ten- or eleven-year-old age bracket; for Donner these days, twelve was a little long in the tooth. Willis was here only because he'd worked with Donner more often than had any other cop on the squad. Donner, being such an expert ear, might have heard something about Proctor's recent whereabouts, no?

'No,' Donner said.

'Think,' Willis said.

'I already thought. I don't know anybody named Martin Proctor.'

Donner was a giant of a man, fat in the plural, fat in the extreme, Fats for sure, an obese hulk who sat in a faded blue bathrobe, his complexion as pale as the January sky outside, his fat hairless legs resting on a hassock, one obscenely plump hand plucking dates from a basket on the end table beside his easy chair, the hand moving to his mouth, his thick lips sucking the meat off the pit. Standing beside him, Willis - who was short by any standards - looked almost tiny.

'Doctor Proctor,' he said.

'No,' Donner said.

'Mr Sniff

'Four hundred people named Mr Sniff in this city, you kidding?'

'Snake.'

'Eight hundred Snakes. Give me something easy like Rambo.'

He smiled. He was making a joke. Rambo was another popular name. A piece of date clung to his front upper teeth, making it look as if one of them was missing. Willis really hated being in his presence.

'It's your burglary,' Carella had told him.

'You've worked with him before,' Meyer had said.

And was working with him again now.

Or trying to.

'You think you can listen around?' he asked.

'No,' Donner said. 'I think I can go to Florida. It's too fucking cold here now.'

'It's cold in Florida, too,' Willis said. 'But it can get hot both places.'

'Oh, look, Maude,' Donner said to the air, 'here comes the rubber hose.'

They both knew that the only reason an informer cooperated with the police was that the police had something on him that they were willing to forget temporarily. In Donner's case, the something wasn't child abuse. No cop in this city was willing to forget child abuse, even temporarily. Dope, yes. Murder, sometimes. But child abuse, never. There was a criminal adage to the effect that the only thing you couldn't fix in this city was a short-eyes rap.

The main thing the police had on Donner was the long-ago murder of a pimp. The way the police looked at it, the city was better off without pimps in general, but this did not mean that they could condone murder. Oh, no. They had the goods on Donner and could have sent him to person for a good long time. Where there were no girls, by the way. Young or otherwise. But the cops chose to work this one six ways from the middle. They didn't give a damn that the city had lost another pimp. And they wouldn't have minded sending Donner up for the crime. But they figured there were other ways to make him pay for what he'd done.

A tacit deal was struck, no handshakes sealing the bargain - you did not shake hands with murderers and especially not with child abusers - not asingle word spoken, but from that day forward Donner knew he was in the vest pocket of any cop who wanted him, and the cops knew that Donner for all his bullshit would deliver or else.

Willis merely looked at him.

'You got a picture of him?' Donner asked.

* * * *

This is the way it worked.

A hearing impaired person like Teddy Carella - who'd been deaf since birth and who had never uttered a single word in her entire life - had finally and reluctantly been convinced by her husband to purchase and have installed one of these newfangled gadgets that had only been on the market for the past God knew how long. The gadget she'd resisted all this time-

Listen, I'm an old-fashioned girl, she'd signed with her hands and mimed with her face.

-was called a Telecommunication Device for the Deaf and was known in the trade as a TDD.

It looked like a typewriter that had married a telephone and given birth to a character display and an adding machine. When the TDD was in use, a telephone rested at the very top of the unit, where two soft, molded cups were shaped to fit the handset. Between these was a roll of paper some two and a quarter inches wide, upon which printed messages appeared in uppercase type. Beneath this, and running horizontally across the face of the unit, was the display line. Twenty-character display. Blue-green vacuum fluorescent illumination. Half-inch character height. Angled so it could be read from above. Just under the display screen was a forty-five key, four-row keyboard with almost the same lettering layout as on a typewriter.

State of the art was not yet able to translate voice to type or vice versa. This would have made things simple indeed for any hearing - or speech-impaired person in the world. But, listen, it was simple enough the way it was. In the Carella house, there was a TDD on the kitchen counter under the wall phone. On Carella's desk at the office, there was an identical TDD alongside his phone. Either of the telephones could be used for normal use, but when Teddy - or any other hearing-impaired person, for that matter - wished to make a call, she first turned the TDD power switch on, placed the handset of her phone onto the acoustic cups, waited for the steady red light that told her she had a dial tone, and then dialed the number she wanted. A slow-flashing red light on the unit told her the phone was ringing. A fast-flashing red light told her the line was busy.

Whenever the phone on Carella's desk rang, he picked up and said 'Eighty-seventh Squad, Carella.' If the call was from a hearing, speaking person, the conversation continued as it normally would. But if this was Teddy calling - as it was at three o'clock that afternoon, while Willis was mildly intimidating Fats Donner - Carella would hear beeping that sounded like a very rapid diddle-ee-dee. This was caused by Teddy repeatedly hitting the space bar on her machine to let the person on the other end know this was a hearing-impaired caller.

If Carella had been calling her, a master ring-signal jacketed to the telephone line and linked to remote receivers throughout the house would flash lamps in several different rooms, letting Teddy know the phone was ringing. A similar device told her when someone was ringing the doorbell. But meanwhile, back at the Eight-Seven Corral, when Carella heard that rapid beeping - as he did now - he immediately knew it was Teddy calling, and he cradled the handset of his phone onto the TDD, and switched on the power, and by golly Moses, what you got was two people talking!

Or, to be more exact, two people typing.

HI HON, he typed, GA.

The words appeared on both his display line and the one Teddy was watching at her kitchen counter all the way up in Riverhead. It was magic. Moreover, a printer on each machine simultaneously printed out the message on the roll of paper. GA was the abbreviation for Go Ahead. On many TDD units - as was the case with theirs - a separate GA key was on the right-hand side of the keyboard. To save time, TDD users often abbreviated commonly used words or expressions.

Teddy typed HI SWEETIE HV U GOT A MIN GA.

Carella typed FOR U I HV HRS GA.

RMBR BERT/EILEEN TONITE, Teddy typed, GA.

Carella typed YES 8 O'CLOCK GA.

PLS WEAR TIES, Teddy typed, GA.

They continued talking for the next several moments. When Carella pulled the printout from the machine later, the twenty-character lines looked like this:

HI HON GA HI SWEETIE

HV U GOT A MIN GA FO

R U I HV HRS GA RMBR

BERT/EILEEN TONITE G

A YES 8 O'CLOCK GA PL

S WEAR TIES GA I'LL

TELL BERT HV TO GO N

OW SEE YOU LTR LUV Y

OU SK LUV YOU TOO SK

SK

The letters SK were also on a separate key. SK meant Signing Off.

They were both smiling.

* * * *

Peter Hodding hadn't gone back to work yet.

'I don't think I could stand looking into people's eyes,' he told Carella. Knowing they know what happened. I had a hard enough time at the funeral.'

Carella listened.

The sky outside was darkening rapidly, but the Hoddings had not yet turned on the lights. The room was succumbing to shadows. They sat on the living room couch opposite Carella. Hodding was wearing jeans, a white button-down shirt, a cardigan sweater. His wife Gayle was wearing a wide skirt, a bulky sweater, brown boots.

'He'll go back on Monday,' she said.

'Maybe,' Hodding said.

'We have to go on,' she said, as if to herself.

'I wonder if you can tell me,' Carella said, 'whether Annie Flynn ever mentioned a boy named Scott Handler.'

'Gayle?' Hodding said.

'No, she never mentioned anyone by that name.'

'Not to me, either,' Hodding said.

Carella nodded.

He and Meyer were eager to talk to the Handler boy - if they could find him. But where the hell was he? And why had he fled? Carella did not tell the Hoddings that they'd been looking for the boy for the past two days. There was no sense in building false hopes and even less sense in implicating someone before they'd even talked to him.

Gayle Hodding was telling him how strange life was.

'You make plans, you . . .'

She shook her head.

Carella waited. He was very good at waiting. He sometimes felt that ninety percent of detective work was waiting and listening. The other ten percent was luck or coincidence.

'I quit college in my junior year,' she said, 'oh, this was seven, eight years ago, I went into modeling.'

'She was a very good model,' Hodding said.

Carella was thinking she still had the good cheekbones, the slender figure. He wondered if she knew Augusta Kling, Bert's former wife. He did not ask her if she did.

'Anyway,' she said, 'about a year and a half ago, I decided to go back to school. Last September a year ago. How long is that, Peter?'

'Sixteen months.'

'Yes,' she said, 'sixteen months. And I was about to enroll for the new semester in September when the agency called and my whole life changed again.'

'The modeling agency?' Carella said.

'No, no, the adoption agency.'

He looked at her.

'Susan was adopted,' she said.

'I'd better put some lights on in here,' Hodding said.

* * * *

He'd had to come down from the roof.

Security in the building, he knew this, twenty-four-hour doorman, elevator operator, no way to get in unobserved through the front door.

You had to do gymnastics. Go up on the roof of the connecting building, no security there after midnight, go right on up in the elevator, break the lock on the roof door, cross the roof and climb over the parapet to the building you wanted, 967 Grover.

Down the fire escapes.

Past windows where you could see people still partying, having a good time. He'd ducked low on each landing, sidling past the lighted windows. Counting the floors. Eighteen floors in the building, he knew which window he wanted, a long way down.

Fourth-floor rear.

He'd eased the window open.

The baby's bedroom.

He knew this.

Dark except for a shaft of light spilling through the open doorway from somewhere else in the apartment. The living room. Silence. He could hear the baby's soft, gentle breathing. Two o'clock in the morning. The baby asleep.

The master bedroom was at the other end of the apartment.

He knew this.

In the middle, separating the sleeping wings, were the kitchen, the dining room, and the living room.

He leaned in over the crib.

Everything changed in the next several seconds.

In the next several seconds, the baby was screaming.

And a voice came from the living room.

'Who is it?'

Silence.

'Who's there?'

More silence.

And suddenly there she was. Standing there. Standing in the door to the baby's room, a knife in her hand.

He had to go for the knife.

* * * *

4

Ostensibly, Kling was eating and enjoying the cannelloni on his plate while listening to Carella tell him about the several approaches he and Meyer were taking to the Hodding-Flynn murders. But he caught only snatches of what Carella was telling him. His mind and his ears were on what Eileen was saying to Teddy.

He had never heard her so bitter.

They sat on opposite sides of the round table.

Eileen with her red hair and her green eyes, blazing now, her hands flying all over the place as the words tumbled from her mouth.

Teddy listening, her head cocked to one side, dark hair falling over one cheek, brown eyes open wide and intently watching Eileen's mouth.

'. . . find this Handler kid,' Carella was saying, 'then maybe we can . . .'

'And your cop comes home at last,' Eileen said, 'and he's watching television after a long, hard day of dealing with a wide variety of victimizers, and he sees a news broadcast about the rioting in this or that prison wherever in the United States, and the convicts are saying the food's terrible and there aren't enough television sets and the equipment in the gymnasium is obsolete, and the cells are overcrowded, and you know what that cop thinks, Teddy?'

From the corner of his eye, Kling saw Teddy shake her head.

'. . . cause why would he have run if he hasn't got something to hide?' Carella asked. 'On the other hand . . .'

'That cop sits there shaking his head,' Eileen said, 'because he knows how to rid the streets of crime, man, he knows how to make sure the guy he arrested two years ago isn't out there again right this minute doing the same damn thing all over again, he knows exactly how to get kids thinking that serving up burgers at a drive-in is more attractive than a life of criminal adventure - and, by the way, the answer isn't Just Say No. That's bullshit, Teddy, Just Say No. That lays the guilt trip on the victim, don't you see? If only you'd have said No, why then you wouldn't have got addicted to heroin, and you wouldn't have been molested by some weirdo in the street . . .

Here it comes, Kling thought.

'. . . and you wouldn't have been raped or murdered, either. All you have to do is just say no. Have a little willpower and nobody'll hurt you. Where the hell does Mrs Reagan live? On the moon? Did she think the streets of America were in Disneyland? Did she think all it ever came to was politely saying No, thank you, I've already had some, thank you? I'm telling you, Teddy, someone should have just curtsied and said no to her, told her that cute little slogan of hers sucked, lady, that just isn't the way it is.'

Teddy Carella sat there listening, wide-eyed.

Knowing.

Realizing that Eileen was talking about her own rape. The time she'd got cut. The time she'd said Yes. Because if she'd have said No, he'd have cut her again. Just say no, my ass.

'Every cop in this city knows how to keep criminals off the street,' Eileen said. 'You want to know the answer?'

And now she had Carella's attention, too.

He turned to her, fork in mid-air.

'Make the time impossible to do,' Eileen said. 'Make all time hard time. Make it back-breaking time and mind-numbing time. Make it senseless, wasted time. Make it the kind of time where you carry a two-hundred-pound boulder from point A to point B and then back to point A again, over and over again, all day long, day in and day out, with no parole, Charlie.'

'No parole?' Carella said, and raised his eyebrows.

'Ever,' Eileen said flatly. 'You catch the time, you do the time. And it's hard, mean time. You want to be hard and mean? Good. Do your hard, mean time. We're not here to teach you an honest job. There are plenty of honest jobs, you should've found one before you got busted. We're here to tell you it doesn't pay to do what you did, whatever you did. You wouldn't be here if you hadn't done something uncivilized, and so we're going to treat you like the barbarian you are.'

'I'm not sure that would . . .'

But Eileen was just gathering steam, and she cut Carella off mid-sentence.

'You want to go out and do another crime after you've served your time? Good, go do it. But don't let us catch you. Because if we catch you for the same crime again, or a different crime, whatever crime you do, why, the next time you're going to do even harder time. You are going to come out of that prison and you are going to tell all your pals on the street that it doesn't pay to do whatever illegal thing they're thinking of doing. Because there's nothing funny or easy about the kind of time you've going to do in any slammer in the country, you are going to do hard, hard time, mister. You are going to carry this ten-thousand-pound rock back and forth all day long, and then you are going to eat food you wouldn't give a dog to eat, and there'll be no television, and no radio, and no gym to work out in, and you can't have visitors and you're not allowed to write letters or make phone calls, all you can do is carry that goddamn rock back and forth and eat that rotten food and sleep in a cell on a bed without a mattress and a toilet bowl without a seat. And then maybe you'll learn. Maybe once and for all you'll learn.'

She nodded for emphasis.

Her eyes were shooting green laser beams.

Carella knew better than to say anything.

'There isn't a cop in this city who wouldn't make prison something to dread,' she said.

Carella said nothing.

'Mention the word prison, criminals all over this city would start shaking. Mention the word prison, every criminal in the United States would just say no, Mrs Reagan! No! Not me! Please! Do it to Julia! Please!'

She looked at Carella and Kling.

Daring either of them to say a word.

And then she turned to Teddy, and her voice lowered almost to a whisper.

'If cops had their way,' she said.

There were tears in her eyes.

* * * *

On her doorstep Eileen said, 'I'm sorry.'

'That's okay,' Kling said.

'I spoiled it for everyone,' she said.

'The food was lousy anyway,' he said.

Somewhere in the building, a baby began crying.

'I think we ought to stop seeing each other,' she said.

'I don't think that's such a good idea.'

The baby kept crying. Kling wished someone would go pick it up. Or change its diaper. Or feed it. Or do whatever the hell needed to be done to it.

'I went to see somebody at Pizzaz,' Eileen said.

He looked at her, surprised. Pizzaz was the way the cops in this city pronounced PSAS, which initials stood for the department's Psychological Services and Aid Section. Calling it Pizzaz gave it a trendy sound. Made it sound like the In thing to do. Took the curse off psychiatric assistance, which no cop liked to admit he needed. Psychiatric assistance often led to a cop losing his gun, something he dreaded. Take away a cop's gun, you were putting him out to pasture. The Tom-Tom Squad. Indians with bows and arrows, no guns.

'Uh-huh,' Kling said.

'Saw a woman named Karin Lefkowitz.'

'Uh-huh.'

'She's a psychologist. There's a pecking order, you know.'

'Yes.'

'I'll be seeing her twice a week. Whenever she can fit me in.'

'Okay.'

'Which is why I thought you and I . . .'

'No.'

'Just until I get my act together again.'

'Did she suggest this?'

He was already beginning to hate Karin Lefkowitz.

'No. It's entirely my idea.'

'Well, it's a lousy idea.'

'I don't think so.'

'I do.'

Eileen sighed.

'I wish somebody would pick up that fucking baby,' Kling said.

'So,' Eileen said, and reached into her bag for her key. He could see the butt of her revolver in the bag. Still a cop. But she didn't think so.

'So what I'd like to do,' she said, 'if it's okay with you . . .'

'No, it's not okay with me.'

'Well, I'm really sorry about that, Bert, but this is my life we're talking about here.'

'It's my life, too.'

'You're not drowning,' she said.

She put her key into the latch.

'So ... let me call you when I'm ready, okay?' she said.

'Eileen . . .'

She turned the key.

'Good night, Bert,' she said, and went into the apartment. And closed the door behind her. He heard the lock being turned, the tumblers falling with a small oiled click. He stood in the hallway for several moments, looking at the closed door and the numerals 304 on it. A screw in the 4 was loose. It hung slightly askew.

He went downstairs.

The night was very cold.

He looked at his watch. Ten minutes to ten. He wasn't due at the squadroom until a quarter to twelve.

* * * *

"What I think you should do,' Lorraine said, 'is go to the police.'

'No,' he said.

'Before they come to you.'

'No.'

'Because, Scott, it looks very bad this way. It really does.'

Lorraine Greer was twenty seven years old. She had long black hair and a complexion as pale as moonstone. She claimed she had violet-colored eyes like Elizabeth Taylor's, but she knew they were really only a sort of bluish-gray. She affected very dark lipstick that looked like dried blood on her lips. She had good breasts and good legs, and she wore funky clothes that revealed them to good advantage. The colors she favored were red and yellow and green. She dressed like a tree just starting to turn in the fall. She figured this leggy, busty, somewhat tatterdemalion look would immediately identify her once she became a rock star.

Her father, who was an accountant, told her there were thousands of busty, leggy girls in this country. Millions of them all over the world. All of them dressed in rags. All of them thinking they could be rock stars if only they got a break. Her father told her to become a legal secretary. Legal secretaries made good money, he said. Lorraine told him she was going to be a rock star. She'd never had any formal musical training, that was true, but he had to admit she had a good singing voice and besides she'd written hundreds of songs. The lyrics to them, anyway. Usually she worked with a partner who put music to her words. She was writing songs all the time, with this or that partner. She knew the songs were good. Even her father thought some of the songs were pretty good, maybe.

Years ago, she'd been Scott Handler's baby-sitter.

She'd been fifteen, he'd been six. That was the age difference between them. Nine years. She used to sing him to sleep with lullabies she herself wrote. The lyrics, anyway. At that time her partner used to be a girl she knew from high school. Sylvia Antonelli, who when she was nineteen years old married a man who owned a plumbing supply house. Sylvia now had three children and two fur coats and she lived in a big Tudor-style house. She never wrote songs anymore.

Lorraine's partner nowadays was a woman who'd been in Chorus Line. On Broadway, not one of the road companies. She'd played the Puerto Rican girl, whatever her name was, the one who sang about the teacher at Music and Art. Be a snowflake, remember? Gonzalez? Something like that. She wrote beautiful music. She wasn't Puerto Rican, she was in fact Jewish. Very dark. Black hair, brown eyes, she could pass easily for Puerto Rican, Lorraine could visualize her in the part. She had also played one of Tevye's daughters in a dinner-theater production of Fiddler. In Florida someplace. But her heart was in writing songs, not in singing or dancing. She was the one who'd told Lorraine she was robbing the cradle here. Starting up with a kid nine years younger than she was. Lorraine had merely shrugged. This was only last week.

He'd come to her a few days after Christmas.

She was living in an apartment downtown in the Quarter. Her father paid the rent, but he kept warning her that pretty soon he'd turn off the money tap. She knew he didn't mean it; she was the apple of his eye. She'd once written a song, in fact, called 'Apple of My Eye,' which she'd dedicated to her father. Rebecca - that was her new partner's name, Rebecca Simms, nee Saperstein - had written a beautiful tune to go with Lorraine's lyrics.

Apple of my eye . . .

Lovely child of yesterday . . .

Little sleepy eye.

Hear my lullaby . . .

Sleepy girl as bright as May . . .

Little lullaby.

And so on.

The song brought tears to Lorraine's eyes whenever she sang it. Rebecca thought it was one of their better efforts, though her personal favorite was a feminist song they'd written called 'Burn,' in which Joan of Arc was the central metaphor. Rebecca wore her dark hair in a whiffle cut. Sometimes, Lorraine wondered if she was gay. She'd seemed inordinately angry about Scott moving in.

Lorraine hadn't expected to go to bed with Scott.

He'd just shown up on her doorstep, his eyes all red, his face white, she'd thought at first it was from the cold outside. He told her he'd got her address from her father, who'd remembered when she used to babysit for him, and she'd said Oh sure, that's okay, come on in, how are you? She hadn't seen him now in it must have been three, four years. Since he'd gone off to school in Maine. He'd looked like a kid then. Pimply-head, lanky, you know. Now he looked like . . . well ... a man. She was really surprised by how handsome he'd turned out. But of course he was still a kid.

He told her he remembered how he used to tell her everything when she used to sit for him, how he used to trust her more than he had his own parents.

She said, 'Well, that's very nice of you, Scott.'

'I mean it,' he said.

'Thank you, that's very nice of you.'

She was wearing a short red skirt with red tights and yellow leg warmers. Short, soft, black leather boots. She was wearing a green blouse, no bra. She was sitting on the couch, long legs tucked under her. She had offered him a drink, which he'd accepted. Apple brandy. Which was all she had in the house. He was on his third snifterful. The snifters were a birthday gift from Rebecca. This was the twenty-eighth day of December. It was very cold outside. Wind rattled the windows in the small apartment. She was remembering how she used to take him to the toilet in his Dr Denton's. Hold his little penis while he peed. Sometimes he had a little hard-on. Six years old, he'd have a little hard-on, he'd piss all over the toilet tank, sometimes the wall. She was remembering this fondly.

He told her this girl he'd been going with had suddenly ended their relationship. She thought this was cute, his using a very grown-up word like relationship. But, of course, he was eighteen. Eighteen was a man. At eighteen, you could vote. When he was home for Thanksgiving, he said. Some Thanksgiving present, huh? She wondered if people exchanged gifts for Thanksgiving. Maybe the Indians and the Pilgrims had. She wondered if there was an idea for a song in that. He was telling her the girl had made it final last week. He'd gone over to see her the minute he'd got home for the Christmas break. She'd told him she never wanted to see him again. He'd been crying for the past week, well, actually nine days now. She hoped he didn't think he was a baby, coming here like this. And then he started crying again.

She'd held him in her arms.

The way she'd done when he was six and she was fifteen and he woke up crying in the middle of the night.

She'd kissed the top of his head.

Comforting him.

And next thing she knew . . .

Well, one thing just sort of led to another.

His hands were all over her.

Under the short red skirt, down the front of the green silk blouse.

Christmas colors.

Falling away under his rough, manly hands.

That was on the twenty-eighth.

He'd been living here since. Today was the sixth of January. Not five minutes ago, he'd told her what he'd said to Annie the last time he'd seen her. Annie Flynn, that was the girl's name. About killing them both. Annie and her new boyfriend, whoever he was. And now someone had really killed Annie and he was afraid the police might think it was him.

'Which is why you have to go to them,' she said.

'No,' he said.

Nibbling at his lower lip. Handsome as the devil. She got damp just looking at him. Wanted him desperately, just looking at him. She wondered if he knew what effect he had on her.

'Unless, of course, you did kill her,' she said.

'No, no,' he said.

He wasn't looking at her.

'Did you?' she asked again.

'I told you no.'

But he still wasn't looking at her.

She went to him.

Twisted her hand in his hair. Pulled his head back.

'Tell me the truth,' she said.

'I didn't kill her,' he said.

She brought her mouth down to his. God, such sweet lips. She kissed him fiercely.

And wondered if he was telling the truth. Somehow, the idea was exciting. That maybe he had killed that girl.

* * * *

José Herrera was sitting on a bench in the second-floor corridor when Kling came in that night. Head still bandaged, face still puffy and bruised, right arm in a cast.

'Buenas noches, he said, and grinned like one of the Mexican bandits in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Kling wanted to go hide the silver.

'You waiting for me?' Kling asked.

'Who else?' Herrera said. Still grinning. Kling wanted to punch him right in the mouth - for the way he was grinning, for the way he'd behaved at the hospital the other day. Finish off what those black guys had started. He went to the railing, opened the gate, and walked into the squadroom. Herrera came in behind him.

Kling went to his desk and sat.

Herrera came over and took a chair alongside the desk.

'My head still hurts,' he said.

'Good,' Kling said.

Herrera clucked his tongue.

'What do you want here?' Kling asked.

'They let me out this afternoon,' Herrera said. 'I think they let me out too soon, I may sue them.'

'Good, go sue them.'

'I think I may have a good case. My head still hurts.'

Kling glanced at a Ballistics report he had requested on a shooting that had taken place during the four-to-midnight on Christmas Eve. A family dispute. Man shot his own brother on Christmas Eve.

'I decided to help you,' Herrera said.

'Thanks, I don't need your help,' Kling said.

'You told me at the hospital . . .'

'That was then, this is now.'

'I can get you a big drug bust,' Herrera said, lowering his voice conspiratorially, glancing over to where Andy Parker was on the telephone at his own desk.

'I don't want a big drug bust,' Kling said.

'These guys who were trying to dust me? I'll bet you thought they were just regular niggers, am I right? Wrong. They were Jamaicans.'

'So?'

'You familiar with Jamaican posses?'

'Yes,' Kling said.

'You are?'

'Yes.'

The Jamaican gangs called themselves posses, God knew why, since traditionally a posse was a group of people deputized by a sheriff to assist in preserving the public peace. Kling figured a little bit of Orwellian doublethink was in play here. If War was Peace, then surely Bad Guys could be Good Guys and a Gang could be a Posse, no? The Jamaicans couldn't even pronounce the word correctly. Rhyming it with Lassie, they called it passee. Then again, when they wanted to say 'man,' they said 'mon.' Either way, mon, they would break your head as soon as look at you. Which they had successfully but not fatally done to Herrera.

And now he was ready to blow the whistle.

Or so it seemed.

'We're talking here a posse that's maybe the biggest one in America,' he said.

'Right here in our own little precinct, huh?' Kling said.

'Bigger than Spangler.'

'Uh-huh.'

'Bigger than Waterhouse.'

'Uh-huh.'

'You know Shower?'

'I know Shower.'

'Bigger even than Shower,' Herrera said. 'I'm talking about dope, white slavery, and gun-running. Which this posse is muscling in on all over the city.'

'Uh-huh,' Kling said.

'I'm talking about a big dope deal about to go down.'

'Really? Where?'

'Right here in this precinct.'

'So what's this big posse called?'

'Not so fast,' Herrera said.

'If you've got something to tell me, tell me,' Kling said. 'You're the one who came here, I didn't come knocking on your door.'

'You're the one who wanted me to back your story about . . .'

'That's a thing of the past. They're convinced downtown that I acted within the . . .'

'Anyway, it don't matter. You owe me.'

Kling looked at him.

'I owe you? he said.

'Correct.'

'For what?'

'For saving my life.'

'I owe you for saving your life?'

'Is what I said.'

'I think those baseball bats scrambled your brains, Herrera. If I'm hearing you correctly . . .'

'You're hearing me. You owe me.'

'What do I owe you?'

'Protection. And I'm not gonna let you forget it.'

'Why don't you take a walk?' Kling said, and picked up the Ballistics report.

'I ain't even talking cultures,' Herrera said.

'That's good, 'cause I'm not even listening.'

'Where if you save a person's life, you are responsible for that person's life forever.'

'And which cultures might those be?' Kling asked.

'Certain Asian cultures.'

'Like which?'

'Or North American Indian, I'm not sure.'

'Uh-huh,' Kling said. 'But not Hispanic'

'No, not Hispanic'

'You're just muscling in on these cultures, correct? The way this Jamaican posse is muscling in on dope and prosti . . .'

'I told you I ain't talking cultures here.'

'Then what the fuck are you talking, Herrera? You're wasting my time here.'

'I'm talking human decency and responsibility,' Herrera said.

'Oh, dear God, spare me,' Kling said, and rolled his eyes heavenward.

'Because if you hadn't stopped them Jakies . . .'

'Jakies?'

"Them Jamaicans.'

Kling had never heard this expression before. He had the feeling Herrera had just made it up. The way he'd made up his cockamamie Asian or North American Indian cultures that held a man responsible for saving another man's life.

'If you'd have let them Jakies kill me,' Herrera said, 'then I wouldn't have to be worrying they would kill me now.'

'Makes perfect sense,' Kling said, shaking his head.

'Of course it makes sense.'

'Of course.'

'This way I'll probably have a nervous breakdown. Waiting for them to kill me all over again. You want me to have a nervous breakdown?'

'I think you already had one,' Kling said.

'You want them Jakies to kill me?' Herrera asked.

'No,' Kling said honestly. If he'd wanted them to kill Herrera, he'd have let them do it the first time around. Instead of getting a tooth knocked out of his mouth. Which he still hadn't gone to the dentist to see about.

'Good, I'm glad you realize you owe me,' Herrera said.

Kling was neither a Buddhist monk nor a Hindu priest nor an Indian shaman; he didn't think he owed Herrera a goddamn thing.

But if a strong Jamaican posse really was about to do a big dope deal right here in the precinct . . .

'Let's say I do offer you protection,' he said.

* * * *

5

The oriental gangs in this city had difficulty pronouncing his name, which was Lewis Randolph Hamilton. Too many L's and too many R's. The Hispanic gangs called him Luis El Martillo. Which meant Louie the Hammer. This did not mean that his weapon was a hammer. Hamilton was strapped with a .357 Magnum, which he used liberally and indiscriminately. It was said that he had personally committed twenty-three murders during his several years in the States. The Italian gangs called him Il Camaleonte, which meant The Chameleon. That was because hardly anyone knew what he looked like. Or at least what he looked like now.

There were Miami PD mug shots of Hamilton wearing his hair in an exaggerated Afro, mustache on his upper lip. There were Houston PD pictures of Hamilton wearing his hair in Rastafarian style, so that he looked like a male Medusa. There were NYPD pictures of him with his hair cut extremely short, hugging his skull like a woolly black cap. There were LAPD pictures of him with a thick beard. But here in this city, there were no police photographs of Lewis Randolph Hamilton. That was because he'd never been arrested here. He'd killed eight people here, and the underworld knew this, and the police suspected it, but Hamilton was like smoke. In Jamaica, as a matter of fact, he had for a number of years been called Smoke, a name premised on his ability to drift away and vanish without a trace.

Hamilton's posse was into everything.

Prostitution. Exclusively Mafia in the recent dead past, increasingly Chineseever since a pair of lovely sisters named Tina and Toni Pao moved from Hong Kong to San Francisco and began smuggling in girls from Taiwan via Guatemala and Mexico, their operation expanding eastward across the United States until it was now fully entrenched and because of its local-tong and overseas-triad connections - virtually untouchable here in this city. Hamilton had discovered the enormous profits to be made in peddling ass on carefully selected, police-protected street corners. Nothing high-class here. No Mayflower Madam shit. Just a horde of young, drug-addicted girls standing out in the cold wearing nothing but Penthouse lingerie.

Gun-running. The Hispanics were very big on this. Maybe because, like cab drivers coming back from the airport, they didn't like to ride deadhead. Bring up a load of Colombian coke, you didn't want that ship going back empty. So you filled it with guns - high-powered handguns, automatic rifles, machine guns - which you then sold at an enormous profit in the Caribbean. Hamilton already knew how to bring up the dope. He was now learning - way too damn fast to suit the Hispanics - how to send down stolen guns.

And, of course, drugs.

Unless a gang - any gang, any nationality, any color - dealt drugs, then it wasn't a gang, it was a ladies' sewing circle. Hamilton's posse was heavily into dope. With enough weaponry to invade Beirut.

All of this was why the slants, the spics and the wops wanted him dusted.

Which amused Hamilton. All those contracts out on him. If they didn't know what he looked like, how could they reach him? Unless one of his own people turned, there wasn't no way anybody could be out there squatting for him. All highly amusing. Their dumb gang shit. Contracts. What was he, a kid playing in the mud outside a shack? The concept of a Hollywood hood with a broken nose looking high and low for him made him laugh.

But not today.

Today he wasn't laughing.

Today he was annoyed by the way three of his people had mishandled the José Herrera thing.

'Why baseball bats?' he asked.

The word 'bats' sounded like 'bots.'

Very melodious. Heavy bass voice rumbling up out of his chest. Bots. Why baseball bots?

A reasonable question.

Only one of the three was standing there in front of him. The other two were in the hospital. But even if the cop hadn't jammed them, they'd have been denied bail. Assaulting a police officer? Terrific. The one who'd been sprung looked shamefaced. Six feet three inches tall, weighing in at two hundred and twelve pounds, big hands hanging at his sides, he looked like a schoolboy about to be birched. Like back in Kingston when he'd been a kid.

Hamilton sat there patiently and expectantly.

At an even six feet, he was smaller than the man he was addressing. But he emanated even in his reasonableness a sense of terrible menace.

He turned to the man sitting beside him on the couch.

'Isaac?' he said. 'Why baseball bats?'

The other man shrugged. Isaac Walker, his confidant and bodyguard - not that he needed one. A confidant, yes. It could get lonely at the top. But a bodyguard? Wasn't anyone ever going to take out Lewis Randolph Hamilton. Ever.

Isaac shook his head. He was agreeing that baseball bats were ridiculous. Baseball bats were for spics out to break a man's legs. For chasing after a man's woman. Very big thing with the spics, their women. There were women attached to the posse, of course. Camp followers. There when you needed them. But nobody was going to get into a shootout over a mere cunt. Big macho thing with the spic gangs, though. Even the Colombians, who you thought would have more sense, all the fuckin' green involved in their operation. Mess with a spic's woman, it wasn't maybe as serious as messin' with his shit, but it was serious enough. Break the man's legs so he couldn't chase no more. But who had given these three the order to use baseball bats on Herrera?

'Who told you baseball bats, man?' Hamilton asked.

It came out 'Who tole you baseball bots, mon?'

'James.'

Like a kid telling on his best friend.

James. Who was now at Buenavista Hospital where they had dug the cop's bullet out of his shoulder. At the hospital, James had whispered to Isaac that he'd knocked out one of the cop's teeth. He'd sounded proud of it. Isaac had thought he was a fucking dope, messing with a cop to begin with. A cop showed, they should have split, saved Herrera for another day. Which they were having to do anyway. Jump up and down on a cop? Had to be fucking crazy. James. Who, it now turned out, had told them to go after Herrera with baseball bats.

'James told you this?'

Hamilton speaking.

'Yes, Lewis. It was James for certain.'

The Jamaican lilt of his words.

Andrew Fields was his name. Giant of a man. He could have broken Hamilton in half with his bare hands, torn him limb from limb, the way he'd done other people without batting an eyelash. But there was deference in his voice. When he said 'Lewis,' it somehow sounded like 'sir.'

'Told you to use baseball bats on the man?' Hamilton asked.

'Yes, Lewis.'

'When I specifically said I wanted the man put to sleep?'

'That message did come down, Lewis.'

'But you used baseball bats anyway,' Hamilton said.

Andrew was hoping he believed him. He didn't want Hamilton thinking that he himself, or even Herbert, had been acting on their own initiative. Had somehow taken it in their heads that the way to do the little spic was with ball bats. Herbert had been the third man on the hunting party. The one who'd thrown his bat at the cop. The first one the cop had shot. He'd had nothing at all to do with deciding on the ball bats, James had made that decision. Maybe because the person they were about to do was a spic and spics understood baseball bats. But if the whole idea was to put the man to sleep, then what difference did it make how they did it? Was he later going to remember in his grave that it was a gun or a knife or three ball bats had done him? James's reasoning on this had eluded Andrew. But in a posse, as in any kind of business, there were levels of command. The man had said ball bats, so ball bats it had been.

'Was it James's notion to merely harm the man?' Hamilton asked.

'I think to box him,' Andrew said.

'Not just to break a few bones, eh?'

'He told us you wanted the man boxed, Lewis.'

'Then why baseball bats?' Hamilton asked reasonably, and spread his hands before him, and lifted his shoulders and his eyebrows questioningly. 'If we are looking to put this man in a box in a hole in the ground, why take the long way home, Andrew, why take the dusty road by the sea, do you understand what I'm asking? Why not short and sweet, adios, amigo, you fuck with us, you kiss your sister goodbye? Am I making my point?'

'Yes, Lewis.'

'Did James have an explanation? Did he say I want to use bats for this or that reason?'

'He didn't offer no reason, Lewis.'

'Oh my my my,' Hamilton said, and sighed, and shook his head, and looked to Isaac for possible guidance.

'Shall I go to the hospital and ask him?' Isaac said.

'No, no. The man's been denied bail, there's a policeman outside his door. No, no. Time enough to talk to him later, Isaac'

Hamilton smiled.

The smile was chilling.

Andrew suddenly did not want to be James. It seemed to Andrew that the best thing that could happen to James was to be sent away for a long, long time. Where Hamilton could not get to him. Although Andrew couldn't think of a single prison in the United States that Hamilton could not reach into. Andrew didn't know why Hamilton had wanted the little spic killed, nobody had told him that. But he knew James had fucked up badly and the spic was still out there walking around.

'Andrew?'

'Yes, Lewis.'

'I'm very troubled by this.'

'Yes, Lewis.'

'I send three men to do one little spic . . .'

'Yes, Lewis.'

'. . . a man who could have been blown away with a fucking twenty-two ...'

Those eyes.

Blazing.

'But instead the three of you decide to use . . .'

'It was James who . . .'

'I don't give a fuck who! The job wasn't done!'

Silence.

Andrew lowered his eyes.

'Do I have to go do this myself?' Hamilton asked.

'No, Lewis. You still want the job done, I can do it.'

'I want the job done.'

'Fine then.'

'No mistakes this time.'

'No mistakes.'

'We are not trying to win the World Series, Andrew.' A smile.

'I know, Lewis.'

'Go sing the man his lullaby,' Hamilton said.

* * * *

The social worker who had handled the adoption for the Hoddings was a woman named Martha Henley. She had been working for the Cooper-Anderson Agency, a private adoption agency, for the past fourteen years now. In her late sixties, a trifle stout, wearing a dark brown suit, low-heeled walking shoes, and gold-rimmed eyeglasses that demanded to be called spectacles, she warmly greeted the detectives at ten o'clock that Monday morning, and offered them seats on easy chairs facing her desk. A bleak wintry sky edged with skyscrapers filled the corner windows of her office. She told them at once that she loved children. She told them that nothing brought her greater happiness than to find the right home for a child needing adoption. They believed her. They had told her on the telephone why they wanted to see her. Now she wanted to know why they felt information about the adoption of Susan Hodding was important to their case.

'Only in that it's another possible avenue,' Meyer said.

'In what way?'

'We're investigating two possibilities at the moment,' Carella said. 'The first is that the murders may have been felony murders - murders that occurred during the commission of another crime. In this case, a burglary. Or a rape. Or both.'

'And the second possibility?'

She was making notes on a lined yellow pad, using an old-fashioned fountain pen with a gold nib. She was left-handed, Meyer noticed. Wrote with her hand twisted around peculiarly. Meyer figured she'd been growing up when schoolteachers were still trying to change all lefthanders into right-handers. He imagined this had something to do with Good vs. Evil, the right hand of God vs. the sinister left hand of the Devil. All bullshit, he thought. Those exercises at changing a person's handedness had in many cases led to stuttering and a whole carload of learning disabilities. Carella was still talking. Mrs Henley was still writing.

'. . . who wanted the sitter dead, the Flynn girl. In which case, the murder of the infant was a side-effect, if you will, an offshoot of the other murder. That's the second possibility.'

'Yes,' she said.

'But there's a third possibility as well,' Carella said.

'Which is?'

'That the murderer wanted the baby dead.'

'A six-month-old child? That's difficult to . . .'

'Admittedly, but . . .'

'Yes, I know. In this city . . .'

She let the sentence trail.

'So,' Carella said, 'the reason we're here . . .'

'You're here because if the baby was the primary target . . .'

'Yes . . .'

'. . . you'll need to know as much about the adoption as possible.'

'Yes.'

'Where shall I begin?' she asked.

The Hoddings had first come to her a bit more than a year ago, on the recommendation of their lawyer. They'd been trying to conceive ever since Mrs Hodding . . .

'She used to be a model, you know,' Mrs Henley said.

'Yes.'

. . . quit modeling some three or four years back. But although they'd assiduously followed their physician's directions, their efforts merely proved fruitless and bitterly disappointing, and they had ultimately decided to seek legal assistance in finding a reputable adoption agency.

Those were Mrs Henley's exact words. She had a rather flowery way of speaking, Carella noticed, as old-fashioned as her gold-nibbed fountain pen and her gold-rimmed spectacles.

'Their lawyer recommended us,' she said, and nodded as if in agreement with the lawyer's good taste. 'Mortimer Kaplan,' she said, 'of Greenfield, Gelfman, Kaplan, Schuster and Holt. A very good firm. We did all the home studies, obtained all the necessary references, prepared the Hoddings in advance for the sort of baby that might realistically turn up . . .'

'What do you mean?' Carella asked.

'Well, many of them want what we call a Gerber Baby, do you know? Blue eyes and blonde hair, cute little smile, chubby little hands. But not all babies look like that. We get all sorts of babies put up for adoption. We place all of them.'

'All of them?' Meyer said.

'All of them. We've placed babies born with handicaps. We've even placed babies born with AIDS. There are a great many decent, caring people out there, I'm happy to say.'

Carella nodded.

'Anyway,' she said, 'to cut a long story short, in July of last year I telephoned the Hoddings to say we had a newborn infant for them to look at. Well, not quite newborn. The baby at that time was two weeks old. That's the initial grace period we give the birth parents. Two weeks. Agency policy is to place the infant in a foster home, give the birth parents an opportunity to change their minds about adoption, if that's what they wish. At the end of the two weeks, they can either reclaim the baby or else sign a legal surrender that transfers custody to the agency. In this case, I had little doubt that the mother - this was the only birth parent involved - would allow the adoption to proceed. In any event, I called the Hoddings and asked them to come see the baby. A little girl. They were - as I'd expected - thoroughly enchanted with her. A beautiful baby, truly. A storybook child, a little princess. Well, a Gerber Baby. I gave them all the facts about her . . .'

'What facts would those be, Mrs Henley?'

'Background information about the birth mother and birth father - in this case, not much was known about him - medical, religious, educational, all that. Hospital record on the infant. Hospital record on the birth mother. And so on. Everything they needed to know. The foster mother and I spent about twenty minutes with the Hoddings and little Susan . . . that was the name we'd given her here at the agency, Susan; the mother hadn't cared to name her. The Hoddings, as I'm sure they told you, still don't know the birth mother's name. It's here on record at the agency, of course, but the court records of the adoption are sealed and so is the original birth certificate. At any rate, as I say, the Hoddings loved the child on sight and agreed to take her home for the ninety-day trial period.'

'This was when, Mrs Henley?'

'Early in August. That's when they took Susan home with them. Little Susan.'

Mrs Henley shook her head.

'And now this,' she said.

Now this, Carella thought.

'When did the actual adoption take place?' he asked.

'Early in December.'

'Who was the child's natural mother?' he asked.

'I'll have the records sent in,' Mrs Henley said, and pressed a button on her telephone console. 'Debbie,' she said, 'would you bring in the Hodding file, please? Mr and Mrs Peter Hodding. Thank you,' she said, and released the button. 'This won't take a moment,' she said, looking up at the detectives again.

A knock sounded on the door five minutes later.

'Yes, come in,' Mrs Henley said.

A dark-haired girl wearing a long skirt and a ruffled white blouse came in carrying a manila folder. She put the folder on Mrs Henley's desk . . .

'Ah, thank you, Debbie.'

. . .turned, smiled at Carella, and then walked out again. Mrs Henley was already riffling through the papers in the folder.

'Yes, here we are,' she said. 'But you know, gentlemen, I really can't release this information without . . .'

'Of course,' Carella said. 'You've been very kind, Mrs Henley, and we don't want to place you or the agency in jeopardy. We'll be back in a little while with a court order.'

* * * *

The birth mother's name was Joyce Chapman.

Last June, when she'd first gone to the agency, she'd given her address as 748 North Orange, apartment 41.

'The Three-Two,' Meyer said. 'Down near Hopscotch.'

Carella nodded.

On the Cooper-Anderson background information form, she had listed her age as nineteen, her height as five feet ten inches, her weight as one hundred and fifty-two pounds . . .

color of hair: Blonde.

color of eyes: Green.

complexion: Fair.

best feature: Pretty eyes.

personality: Cheerful.

nationality: American.

ethnic origin: Scotch-Irish.

religion: Catholic.

education: High-school degree. One year college.

work experience & occupation: None.

talents or hobbies: Tennis, scuba diving.

health history illnesses: Measles, whooping cough, etc.

allergies: None.

operations: None.

No, she had never been confined to any mental institution . . . No, she was not addicted to any controlled substance . . .

No, she was not an alcoholic . . .

And No, she had never been arrested for a felony or sentenced to imprisonment in a state penal institution.

Among the papers released by the court order was an agreement Joyce had signed shortly after the baby was born. It read:

AGREEMENT WITH

THE COOPER-ANDERSON AGENCY

I, Joyce Chapman, do hereby consent to the release of my child, Female Baby C, to a representative of the Cooper-Anderson Agency and do hereby direct the proper officers of the St Agnes Hospital to permit the removal of said child by a representative of the Cooper-Anderson Agency.

I hereby authorize the Cooper-Anderson Agency to consent on my behalf to any medical, surgical or dental services which in the opinion of the doctor or doctors selected by the Cooper-Anderson Agency are deemed necessary for the well-being of said child. I further agree to the testing of said child for exposure to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) which can cause AIDS, and any other necessary and related tests. The Cooper-Anderson Agency will inform me of the test results.

I hereby agree to plan for my child with the Cooper-Anderson Agency and to keep the Agency informed at all times of my address and whereabouts until such time as final plans have been completed with the Agency for adoption, or until (or unless) I should decide to take said child back into my care and custody.

Dated this . . .

And so on.

Joyce had also sworn and subscribed to - before a notary public - a document that read:

AFFIDAVIT OF NATURAL MOTHER

CONCERNING

INTEREST OF ALLEGED NATURAL FATHER

Before me, the undersigned authority, personally appeared Joyce Chapman, who, being first duly sworn, deposes and says:

1. That she is the natural mother of: Female Baby C.

2. That the natural father of said child is: unknown. Residence: unknown

3. That the natural father has never contributed to or provided said child with support in a repetitive and customary manner, nor has he shown any other tangible sign of interest in said child.

4. Due to the aforesaid statements, it is affiant's belief that the natural father has no interest in said child and would not have any objection to the adoption of said child.

Signature: Joyce Chapman

Affiant

And yet another document that read:

The Cooper-Anderson Agency wishes to advise each parent who releases a child for adoption that at some time in the future your child may wish to know your name and whereabouts. The Agency will not release this information without your consent, unless required by law to do so.

To help your child in the future, the Agency asks you to keep us advised of any health problems which may develop with you or your family which could later affect your child.

I would __ I would not _X_ want to be notified if my child wishes to contact me at a later date.

I do not __ wish at this time to make a decision on this matter.

I understand that my decision may be changed at any time in the future by writing to the Agency.

Signed: Joyce Chapman

'Let's go see her,' Carella said.

* * * *

748 North Orange was in the area of the city that sounded like a Chamber of Commerce promo for a small Florida town. Narrow, twisting little streets with names like Lime, Hibiscus, Pelican, Manatee and Heron lay cheek by jowl with similarly narrow streets like Goed-koop, Keulen, Sprenkels and Visser, which had been named by the Dutch when you and I were young, Maggie.

The center of the Three-Two was in Scotch Meadows Park, which opened at its westernmost end onto Hopper Street, hence the ellipsis 'Hopscotch' for the now-voguish area where many of the city's artists and photographers had taken up residence. Orange Street itself was hardly voguish. Too far uptown to be Lower Platform, too far downtown to be Hopscotch, it meandered almost to the Straits of Napoli and Chinatown on its eastern end and then veered sharply north to run into the warehouses hugging the River Harb. 748 North was in a building that used to be a shoe factory, was later a warehouse for the storage of heavy machinery, and was now divided into lofts occupied not by artists - as were those in the Quarter and in Hopscotch - but by people who called themselves actors, playwrights, musicians and dancers. Most of these people were students. The real actors, playwrights, musicians and dancers lived farther uptown in a recently renovated neighborhood near the theater district, but don't get confused, Harold.

The young woman who answered the door to apartment 41 was named Angela Quist.

The detectives told her they were investigating a homicide and asked if they could talk to Joyce Chapman.

She told them Joyce didn't live there anymore, and then said that she herself was on the way out. She was wearing a loden coat, blue jeans, boots, and a red wool cap pulled down over her ears. She told them she was really in a hurry, class started at one, and she didn't want to be late. But she took off her coat and hat and said she could give them a few minutes if they really made it fast. They sat in a small living room hung with framed Picasso prints.

Angela Quist was an actress.

Who lived in a loft.

But Angela Quist was in reality a waitress who took an acting course once a week on her day off, and her loft was a twelve-by-twenty space sectioned off with plasterboard partitions from a dozen similar small spaces on the floor.

It did, however, have a high ceiling.

And Angela did, in fact, have a beautifully sculpted face with high cheekbones, an aristocratic nose, a generous mouth and eyes like star sapphires. And her hair was the color of honey and her voice sounded silken and soft, and who said Cinderella couldn't go to the ball and live in a palace?

She had known Joyce Chapman in Seattle, Washington, where they'd both grown up.

Went to high school with her.

They'd both come to this city after graduation, Angela to seek a career in the theater, Joyce to study writing at Ramsey U.

'With Parker Harrison,' Angela said.

Carella said nothing.

'The poet,' Angela said. 'And novelist.'

Carella felt he was supposed to say, 'Oh, yes, of course! Parker Harrison!'

Instead, he cleared his throat.

'He's quite famous,' Angela said.

Meyer cleared his throat, too.

'It's very difficult to get accepted for his course,' Angela said.

'But apparently he accepted Joyce,' Carella said.

'Oh, yes. Well, she's marvelously talented, you know.'

'And is she still studying with him?' Meyer asked.

'Joyce? Well, no.'

'What's she doing now?' Carella asked.

'I really don't know,' Angela said.

'Do you know where she's living?'

'Yes.'

'Can you give us her address?'

'Well, sure. But ... I mean, if this has to do with something that happened here . . .'

'Yes, it . . .'

'. . . in this city, I don't see how my giving you Joyce's address is going to help you.'

'What do you mean, Miss Quist?'

'Well, she's in Seattle. So . . .'

The detectives looked at each other.

'I mean, she went back there shortly after the baby was born. Well, actually, as soon as the baby was placed.'

'Uh-huh. That would've been in August sometime.'

'Around the fifteenth, I think it was. Well, the baby was born in July . . .'

'Yes.'

'And I think arrangements were made right away for . . .'

'Yes.'

'So as soon as she was clear . . .'

'Clear?'

'Well, she didn't want to be saddled with a baby, you know. I mean, she's only nineteen. We talked about it a lot. She's Catholic, so abortion was out of the question, but she certainly didn't want to keep the baby. I mean, Joyce is enormously talented. She's got a tremendous future ahead of her, she never even once considered keeping the baby.'

'Did she consider marriage?' Meyer asked.

'Well, I don't think this was that kind of relationship.'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean, she picked him up in a bar. A merchant seaman. He was on his way to the Persian Gulf. He doesn't even know he's a father.'

'What's his name?'

'I don't know.'

'Does Joyce know?'

'I guess so. I mean, this was an extremely casual encounter, believe me.'

'Uh-huh,' Meyer said.

'I think she was stoned, in fact. I mean, I was here asleep when she came in with him. Usually we, well, we made arrangements if we planned to be with someone, you know.'

'Uh-huh.'

'Asked the other person to spend the night someplace else, you know.'

'Uh-huh.'

'So there'd be some privacy.'

'Uh-huh. But she just came home with this sailor . . .'

'Yeah. Well.' Angela shrugged. 'She's a little impetuous sometimes, Joyce. But she's very talented so, you know.' She shrugged again.

'She can be forgiven her little oddities,' Meyer said.

Angela looked at him as if suspecting sarcasm.

'What'd he look like?' Carella asked.

'I have no idea. I told you. I was asleep when they got here, and still asleep when he left the next morning.'

'And you say she was enrolled in this man's course . . .'

'Yes. Parker Harrison.'

'Then why'd she go back to Seattle?'

'Her father's sick.'

'Uh-huh.'

'Dying, in fact. He owns a big lumber company out there. Chapman Lumber.'

'Uh-huh.'

'Cancer of the liver. I've been meaning to call her, see how he's coming along.'

'When's the last time you spoke to her?' Meyer asked.

'She called from Seattle on New Year's Eve.'

The detectives looked at each other.

'She was in Seattle at that time?' Carella asked.

'Yes. That's where she called from. Seattle. To wish me a happy new year.'

'Could we have the number there, please?' Meyer asked.

'Sure, let me get it,' Angela said. 'But what's this homicide got to do with Joyce?'

'Her baby got killed,' Carella said.

* * * *

The two men were in a diner on Longacre and Dale.

This was now one-thirty in the afternoon, but they were just having breakfast. One of the men was eating buttered French toast over which he'd poured syrup. The other man was eating eggs over easy with sausage and home fries. Both men were drinking coffee.

This was a little early for either one of them to be up and around. One-thirty? Very early when you had a night job. Usually, their separate days didn'tstart till two, three in the afternoon. Roll out of bed, have a cup of coffee in the apartment, make a few calls, see who wanted to meet you for a bite, take your time showering and getting silked up, have your first meat of the day maybe around four, four-thirty.

'You sure got enough syrup on that,' the one eating the eggs said.

'I like it wet.'

'Tell me about it.'

The man eating the French toast looked at the other man's plate. 'What you're eating there is enough cholesterol to give you six heart attacks,' he said. 'The eggs. There's more cholesterol in a single egg than there is in a whole steak.'

'Who told you that?'

'It's true.'

'So who cares?'

'So it could kill you, cholesterol.'

'So what do you think they make French toast with?'

'What do you mean?'

'French toast, French toast, what you're eating there all covered with syrup. French toast. What do you think they make it with?'

'They make it with bread.'

'And what else?'

'They fry the bread.'

'Before they fry the bread.'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean what do they dip it in?'

'I don't know. What do they dip it in?'

'Eggs.'

'No, they don't.'

'Yes, they do.'

'Are you trying to tell me there's eggs in this?'

'What do you think that stuff is?'

'What stuff?'

'All over the toast. Both sides of the toast.'

'I thought it was what they fried it in.'

'No, that's the eggs, is what it is. I'm surprised you don't know that.'

'How'm I supposed to know that? I never cooked French toast in my life.'

'So now you're gonna have a heart attack. All that cholesterol.'

'No, I'm not.'

'Sure you are. There's more cholesterol in a single egg . . .'

'Yeah, yeah . . .'

'. . . than there is in a whole steak, isn't that what you said?'

'Let me eat in peace, okay?'

They ate in silence for several moments.

'What'd you do last night?' the one eating the eggs asked. He had lowered his voice. They were sitting in a booth at the far end of the diner, with only one other person in the place, a man in a booth near the, door, but he had lowered his voice nonetheless. The man sitting across from him soaked up some syrup with a piece of the toast and brought it dripping to his mouth. He chewed for a while, licked his lips, and said, 'A supermarket.' He had lowered his voice, too.

'Where?'

'In Riverhead. A lay-in job. I worked it with Sammy Pedicini, you remember him?'

'Sure, how is he?'

'He's fine. It was his job, he called me up on it.'

'What'd you get?'

'There was only two grand in the safe. I figure this was like to put in the cash registers in the morning, get them started, you know. I'll tell you the truth, I wouldn'ta took the job if I knew Sammy was talkin' a grand apiece. I wasted the whole fuckin' night in there. First I had to knock out the alarm so I could let him in, and then we spent I don't know how long on the safe, it was one of those old boxes with a lead spindle shaft, a real pain in the ass. With the locknuts away from the shaft, you know the kind? For two lousy grand! We got through it had to be four in the morning. I told Sammy he ever calls me again with a dog like that one, I'll piss on his leg. How about you?'

'I done a private house in Calm's Point. I was watching it the past week, I figured the family was away on a trip.'

'You go in alone or what?'

'How long you know me to ask a question like that? Of course I went in alone.'

'What'd you come away with?'

'A couple of nice coats.'

'The one you're wearing?'

'No, no, I got this one New Year's Eve. This is a Ralph Lauren coat, it's worth eleven hundred bucks.'

'Itdon't look like eleven bills, Doc, I gotta tell you the truth.'

'That's what it costs, go check it out. It's camel hair.'

'I believeyou. I'm just saying it don't look the money.'

'There's a Ralph Lauren on Jefferson, go in and price the coat.'

'I told you I believe you, Doc. It's just that a cloth coat . . .'

'These two I got last night are furs.'

'What kind?'

'A raccoon . . .'

'Which ain't worth shit. I don't waste time with raccoons no more. What was the other one?'

'A red fox.'

'That's a nice fur, red fox.'

'Yeah.'

'You said Calm's Point, huh? Where you got the coats?'

'Yeah, the furs. Not the one I'm wearing.'

'You oughta be careful, Calm's Point.'

'What do you mean?'

'According to Sammy, anyway.'

'Why? What's the matter with Calm's Point?'

'There were cops came around your old building.'

His voice lower now.

'What are you talkin' about?'

His voice lowering, too.

'According to Sammy. Park Street, am I right?'

'Yeah?'

'His girlfriend lives on Park. She told him some cops came around lookin' for you.'

'What the fuck are you saying?'

'This is according to Sammy.'

'He said some cops were looking for me?'

Both men virtually whispering now.

'Yeah, is what his girlfriend told him. She lives in an apartment with two other hookers, she said some detectives . . .'

'When was this?'

'Last night. While Sammy was workin' the spindle, it took forever with that fuckin' . . .'

'I mean when did they come around looking for me?'

'Coupla days ago? You gotta ask Sammy. I think he said Friday. Give him a call, he'll tell you.'

'Did his girlfriend say why they were looking for me?'

'This is all secondhand, Doc. The cops weren't questioning her, they were talking to people in your old building.'

'On Park?'

'Yeah.'

'1146 Park?'

'Whatever. But when the cops were gone, she wandered over, you know . . .'

'Yeah?'

'And asked what the fuck was happening. So this guy in the building says they were lookin' for you.'

'For me.'

'Yeah.'

'Why?'

'To ask you some questions.'

'About what?'

'I don't know, Doc,' he said, and smiled. 'You done something bad lately?'

* * * *

6

Carella placed the call at two o'clock his time.

The receptionist who answered the phone at Chapman Lumber in Seattle was surprised to be receiving a call from a detective in the east. Carella told her that he was trying to locate Joyce Chapman, and the receptionist asked him to hold, please. Another woman came onto the line.

'Yes, may I help you?' she asked.

Carella explained all over again who he was and why he was calling. He had tried the number he'd been given for Miss Chapman . . .

'What did you wish to talk to Miss Chapman about?' the woman asked.

'Who am I talking to, please?' Carella said.

'Mr Chapman's secretary. He's been in the hospital . . .'

'Yes, I know.'

'So if you can tell me what . . .'

'I don't want to talk to Mr Chapman,' Carella said. 'I have some business with his daughter. But the number I have for her doesn't seem to be aworking number . . .'

'Yes, what sort of business?'

'What did you say your name was, ma'am?'

'Miss. Ogilvy. Miss Pearl Ogilvy.'

Figures, Carella thought.

'Miss Ogilvy,' he said, 'I'm investigating a double homicide here, and I'd like very much to talk to Joyce Chapman. If you have any knowledge of her whereabouts, you'd save me the trouble of calling the Seattle police, who, I'm sure . . .'

'Miss Chapman has been staying at the Pines.'

'Is that a hotel there in Seattle?'

'No, it's Mr Chapman's home. The Pines.'

'I see. Do I have the correct number there?' he asked, and read off the number Angela Quist had given him.

'No, the Last digit is a nine,' Miss Ogilvy said, 'not a five.'

'Thank you very much,' Carella said.

'Not at all,' Miss Ogilvy said, and hung up.

Carella pressed the receiver rest on his phone, got a fresh dial tone, dialed the 206 area code again, and then the number, with a nine this time. The phone on the other end kept ringing.

And ringing.

He was about to give up when-

'Hello?'

A muffled, sleep-raveled voice.

'Miss Chapman?'

'Mmmm.'

'Hello?'

'Mmmm.'

'This is Detective Carella of the 87th Precinct, I'm calling from . . .'

'Who?'

'I'm sorry if I'm waking you up,' he said, 'is this Joyce Chapman?'

'Yes, what time is it?'

'A little after eleven your time.'

'Who did you say this was?'

'Detective Carella, I'm calling from Isola, Miss Chapman, we're investigating a double homicide here, I wonder if ...'

'A what?'

'A double homicide.'

'Jesus.'

'We spoke earlier today to a woman named Angela Quist . . .'

'Angie? Is she involved in a murder?'

'No, Miss Chapman. We talked to her because she was the person we found at the last address we had for you.'

'For me?'

'Yes.'

'The last address you had for me?'

'Yes.'

'What've I got to do with a homicide? And where'd you get my last address?'

'From the Cooper-Anderson Agency,' Carella said.

There was a long silence on the line.

'Who got killed?' Joyce finally said. 'Mike?'

'Who do you mean?' Carella asked.

'Mike. The baby's father. Did somebody kill him?'

'Mike who?' Carella said.

There was another silence. Then:

'Is he dead or isn't he?'

'He may be, for all I know,' Carella said. 'But he's not one of the victims in the case we're investigating.'

'Then what is he? A suspect?'

'Not if he was on a ship in the Persian Gulf on New Year's Eve. May I have his last name, please?'

'How'd you know he was a sailor?'

'A merchant seaman,' Carella said.

'Same thing.'

'Not quite. Miss Quist mentioned it.'

'Is she the one who told you I'd put the baby up for adoption?'

'No.'

'Then how'd you know about Cooper-Anderson?'

'The baby's adoptive parents told us.'

'And Cooper-Anderson gave you my name? That's a fucking violation of. . .'

'Miss Chapman, it was your baby who got killed.'

He thought he heard a small sharp gasp on the other end of the line. He waited.

'She is not my baby,' Joyce said at last.

'Not legally perhaps…'

'Not emotionally, either. I gave birth to her, Mr Carella, is that your name?'

'Yes, Carella.'

'That was the extent of my involvement with her.'

'I see. But she is nonetheless dead.'

'I'm sorry to hear that. Why are you calling me, Mr Carella?'

'Miss Chapman, we know you were in Seattle on New Year's Eve . . .'

'Is that when she was killed?'

'Yes.'

'Who else was killed? You said a double . . .'

'Her baby-sitter. A young girl named Annie Flynn. Does the name mean anything to you?'

'No'

Miss Chapman, can you tell me the father's full name?'

'Why do you want to know? If you think he's the one who . . .'

'We don't think anything yet. We're merely trying to . . .'

'He didn't even know I was pregnant. I was with him on a Saturday night, and he sailed the next day.'

'Where'd you meet him, Miss Chapman?'

'At a disco called Lang's. Down in the Quarter.'

'Yes, I know the place. And you took him back to the Orange Street

'Yes.'

'And spent the night with him?'

'Yes.'

'Did you see him again after that?'

'No. I told you. He sailed the next day.'

'For the Persian Gulf.'

'To pick up Kuwaiti oil. At least, that's what he told me. It may have been bullshit. Some guys try to impress girls by saying they do dangerous work.'

'Do you know if he's still in the Persian Gulf?'

'The last time I saw him was at eight o'clock on the morning of October eighteenth, fifteen months ago.'

'You keep track of time nicely,' Carella said.

'So would you if you gave birth nine months after you kissed somebody goodbye.'

'Then Susan was conceived that . . .'

'Is that what they named her?'

'Susan, yes.'

'Susan,' she repeated.

'Yes.'

'Susan,' she said again.

He waited.

Nothing more came.

'That weekend,' Carella concluded.

'Yes,' she said.

'What's his last name?' Carella asked. 'The father.'

'I don't know,' Joyce said.

Carella raised his eyebrows.

'You don't know his last name,' he repeated.

'I do not know his last name.'

'He didn't tell you his . . .'

'Sue me,' she said.

Carella nodded to the squadroom wall.

'What'd he look like?' he asked.

'Tall, dark hair, blue eyes, who knows?'

'Uh-huh,' he said.

'I'm not promiscuous,' she said.

'Okay,' he said.

'I was stoned.'

'Okay.'

'We were having a good time, I asked him to come home with me.'

'Okay. Was he white, black, Hispanic . . . ?'

'White.'

'And he never mentioned his last name?'

'Never.'

'And you never asked.'

'Who cared?'

'Okay. Did he tell you what ship he was on?'

Silence.

'Miss Chapman?'

'Yes, I'm thinking.'

He waited.

'A tanker.'

'Yes?'

'Do they name them after generals?'

'I guess they can.'

'The General Something?'

'Maybe.'

'Putnam? Or Putney? The General Putney? Could that be a tanker?'

'I can check it out.'

'But how could he have killed her?' Joyce asked. 'He didn't even know she existed.'

'Well, we would like to talk to him, if we can find him,' Carella said. Miss Chapman, does the name Scott Handler mean anything to you?'

'No.'

'He isn't anyone you might have known?'

'No.'

'Or might have met somewhere even casually?'

'Like at a disco? she said, her voice turning suddenly hard and mean. 'I told you, Mr Carella, I'm not promiscuous.'

'No one said you were, Miss Chapman.'

'You stressed the word "casually" . . .'

'I didn't intend to.'

'But you did! How the hell am I supposed to know who this Scott…'

'Handler.'

'Whoever the fuck, how am I supposed to know him?'

'I was only asking if his name sounded . . .'

'No, you wanted to know if I'd met him casually . . .'

'Yes, but I . . .'

'The way I'd met Mike?'

Carella sighed.

'I don't know him,' Joyce said.

'Okay,' he said.

There was a long awkward silence. 'Listen,' she said.

'Yes?'

'If you . . . if you find who . . . who . . . who killed . . .'

It was hard for her to say it. It seemed as if she would never say it. But at last the name formed on her lips and came over the telephone wires like a whisper.

'Susan,' she said. 'If you find who killed Susan . . .'

Her voice caught.

'Let me know, okay?' she said, and hung up.

* * * *

Eileen was taking her measure.

This was only the second time she'd seen the woman, and she wasn't sure she'd be seeing her again. Like a cop studying a suspect, she scrutinized Karin Lefkowitz.

Big-city Jewish-girl looks. Barbra Streisand, but prettier. Brown hair cut in a flying wedge. A sharp intelligence in her blue eyes. Good legs, she probably looked terrific in heels, but she was wearing Reeboks. A dark blue business suit - and Reeboks. Eileen liked what she saw.

'So,' Karin said. 'Shall we begin with the rape?'

Straight for the jugular.

Eileen liked that, too - she guessed.

'It's not the rape I want to talk about,' she said.

'Okay.'

'I mean, that's not why I'm here. The rape.'

'Okay.'

'The rape was a long time ago. I've learned to live with it.'

'Good. So what did you want to discuss?'

'As I told you last week ... I want to quit the force.'

'But not because you were raped.'

'The rape has nothing to do with it.' Eileen crossed her legs. Uncrossed them again. 'I killed a man.'

'So you told me.'