'That's why I want to quit.'


'Because you killed a man in the line of duty.'


'Yes. I don't want to have to kill anyone else. Ever again.'


'Okay.'


'I think that's reasonable.'


'Uh-huh.'


Eileen looked at her.


'What are we supposed to do here?' she asked.


'What would you like to do?' Karin asked.


'Well, first off,' Eileen said, 'I'd like you to understand I'm a cop.'


'Uh-huh.'


'A Detective/Second Grade . . .'


'Uh-huh.'


'. . . who knows a little bit about interrogation.'


'Uh-huh.'


'As for example answering questions with questions to get a suspect talking.'


'Uh-huh,' Karin said, and smiled.


Eileen did not smile back.


'So when I ask you what we're supposed to do here, I don't like you asking me what I'd like to do here. You're the trained person, you're the one who's supposed to know how to proceed here.'


'Okay,' Karin said.


'And by the way I know the Uh-Huh-Okay routine, too,' Eileen said. 'You got yourself a suspect? Good. Just keep him talking, just okay and uh-huh him to death.'


'But you're not a suspect,' Karin said, and smiled.


'What I'm saying . . .'


'I understand what you're saying. You'd appreciate my treating you like the professional you are.'


'Yes.'


'Good. I will. If you'll extend the same courtesy to me.'


Eileen looked at her again.


'So,' Karin said. 'You want to quit the force.'


'Yes.'


'And that's why you're here.'


'Yes.'


'Why?' Karin asked.


'I just told you. I want to . . .'


'Yes, quit the force. But that doesn't tell me why you're here. If you want to quit the force, why did you come to see me?'


'Because I was talking to Sam Grossman at the lab . . .'


'Yes, Captain Grossman.'


'Yes, and I was telling him I forget what now, something about, I don't remember, I guess looking for a job in some other line of work, and we got to talking, and he asked me if I knew about Pizzaz, and I said I did, and he suggested that I give Dr Lefkowitz a call, she might be able to help me with this problem I seemed to have.'


'And what is this problem you seem to have?'


'I just told you. I want to quit the force.'


'So why don't you?'


'Well, that's the problem. Every time I'm about to hand in my resignation, well, I ... I can't seem to do it.'


'Uh-huh. Have you actually written a resignation letter?'


'No. Not yet.'


'Uh-huh. And this shooting occurrence took place when?'


'This killing occurrence, you mean. I killed a man, Dr. Lefko . . . what am I supposed to call you, anyway?'


'What would you like to call me?'


'You're doing it again,' Eileen said.


'Sorry, but it's habit.'


Eileen sighed.


'I'd still like to know what I should call you,' she said.


'Are you uncomfortable with Dr Lefkowitz?'


'Yes.'


'Why?'


'I don't know why. Do you plan to call me Detective Burke?'


'I don't know what I plan to call you. What would you like me to . . . ?'


'I don't think this is going to work,' Eileen said.


'Why not?'


'Because I realize you've got to ask a question every time I ask a question, but that's the same game we play with any cheap thief off the street.'


'Yes, but this isn't a game here,' Karin said.


Their eyes met.


'The same way questioning a thief isn't a game,' Karin said.


Eileen kept looking at her.


'So maybe you should concentrate less on my technique and more on our getting comfortable with each other.'


'Maybe.'


'That is, if you can overlook my clumsiness.'


Karin smiled.


Eileen smiled, too.


'So,' Karin said. 'What would you like me to call you?'


'Eileen.'


'And what would you like to call me?'


'What would you like me to call you?' Eileen said.


Karin burst out laughing.


'Karin, okay?' she said.


'Karin, okay,' Eileen said.


'Will you be comfortable with that?'


'Yes.'


'Good. Can we get to work now?'


'Yes.'


'All right, when did you kill this man?'


'On Halloween night.'


'This past Halloween?'


'Yes.'


'Less than three months ago.'


'Two months and nine days,' Eileen said.


'Where did it happen?'


'In a rented room in the Canal Zone.'


'On the docks?'


'Yes.'


'Over in Calm's Point?'


'Yes.'


'The Seven-Two?'


'That's the precinct, yes. But I was working with Annie Rawles out of Rape. It gets complicated. Homicide called her in, and she contacted me because they needed a decoy.' Eileen shrugged. 'I'm supposed to be a good decoy.'


'Are you?'


'No.'


'Then why'd Annie call you in?'


'I was then.'


'A good decoy.'


'Yes. But I'm not anymore.'


'Is that why you want to quit the force?'


'Well, if I can't do the job right, I might as well quit, no?' She shrugged again. 'That's the way I look at it, anyway.'


'Uh-huh. What was this man's name?'


'The one I killed?'


'Yes. Why? Who did you think I meant?'


'I thought you meant the one I killed. That's what we were talking about, wasn't it? Halloween night?'


'Yes.'


'His name was Robert Wilson. Well, Bobby. He called himself Bobby.'


'Why did you kill him, Eileen?'


'Because he was coming at me with a knife.'


'Uh-huh.'


'He'd already killed three hookers here in this city.'


'Nice person.'


'He was, actually. I mean . . . this sounds stupid, I know . . .'


'Go on.'


'Well, 1 had to keep reminding myself I was dealing with a killer. A man who'd killed three women. One of them only sixteen years old. They showed me pictures up the Seven-Two, he'd really done a job on them. I'm talking genital mutilation. So I knew this, I knew he was very dangerous but he seemed charming. I know that's crazy.'


'Uh huh.'


'Kept telling jokes.'


'Uh huh.'


'Very funny jokes. It was strange. I was sitting there with a killer, and I was laughing. It really was strange.'


'What did he look like?'


'Bobby? He was blond. Six-two, six-three, in there. Two hundred pounds or so, well, a bit over. Maybe two-ten, fifteen. A big man. With a tattoo near his right thumb. A blue heart outlined in red.'


'Anything in it?'


'What do you mean?'


'The heart. Any lettering in it?'


'Oh. No. Nothing. I thought that was strange, too.'


'At the time?'


'No. Later on. When I thought about it. A heart without a name in it. Usually there's a name, isn't there?' Eileen shrugged. 'All the thieves I've dealt with, if they've got a heart tattoo, there's always a name in it. But not him. Strange.'


'So let me understand this. He was telling jokes while you were in this rented room with him?'


'No, earlier. In the bar. They planted me in a bar. In hooker's threads. Because . . .'


'Because the previous three victims were hookers.'


'Yes. And he hit on me in the bar, and I had to get him out of there so he could make his move. So we went to this rented room.'


'Where he came at you with a knife and you had to shoot him.'


'Yes.'


'Where were your backups?'


'I lost them. But that's another story.'


'Let me hear it?'


'Well,' Eileen said, and sighed. 'My SO thought I needed a little help on the job. So he . . .'


'What's his name?'


'Kling. Bert Kling. He's a detective up in the Eight-Seven.'


'Do you think of him as that?'


'As what? A detective?'


'No, your Significant Other.'


'Yes. Well, I did.'


'Not any longer?'


'I told him I didn't want to see him for a while.'


'Why'd you do that?'


'I figured while I was trying to sort things out . . .'


'Uh-huh.'


'. . . it might be best if we didn't see each other.'


'When did this happen?'


'Well, I told him Friday night.'


'How'd he take it?'


'He didn't like it very much.'


'What'd he say?'


'First he said he didn't think it was such a good idea, and then he said it was a lousy idea. He also wanted to know whether you were the one who'd suggested it.'


'And what'd you tell him?'


'I said it was my own idea.' Eileen paused, and then said, 'Would you have suggested it?'


'I really couldn't say at this point.'


'But do you think it's a good idea? Until I get myself straightened out?'


'How long have you known him?' Karin asked.


'Quite a while now. I was doing a job for the Eight-Seven, and we met up there. A laundromat. This guy was holding up laundromats. They planted me like a lady with a basket full of dirty laundry.'


'Did you catch him?'


'Oh, yeah.'


'And this was when?'


'A long time ago. I sometimes feel I've known Bert forever.'


'Does he love you?'


'Oh, yes.'


'And do you love him?' Eileen thought about this.


'I guess so,' she said at last.


'I'm assuming you've been intimate . . .'


'Oh, sure. Ever since . . . well, I had another job shortly after the laundromat, some guy who was raping nurses in the park outside Worth Memorial. The Chinatown Precinct, you know?'


'Uh-huh. Did you catch him, too?'


'Oh, yeah.'


'Then you must have been very good.'


'Well, I was okay, I guess. But that was then.'


'But you were saying . . .'


'Only that when it was over, the thing in the park, I went up to Bert's place and we, you know.'


'And that was the start of it.'


'Yes.'


'And you've been intimate since.'


'Yes. Well, no.'


'No?'


'Not since . . .' Eileen shook her head.


'Not since when?'


'Halloween,' Eileen said. 'But that's another story, too.'


Maybe they're all the same story,' Karin said.


* * * *


Andrew Fields was waiting outside José Herrera's apartment building when he came downstairs at three o'clock that Tuesday afternoon. It was a cold gray shitty day like the ones you always got in January in this city. In Jamaica, you never got days like this. Never. It was always sunny and bright in Jamaica. Even when it rained it was a different kind of rain than you got here in this shitty city. There were times when Fields was sorry he'd ever left Jamaica except for the money. Here there was money. In Jamaica, you wiped your ass on last year's newspaper.


Herrera was wearing his overcoat like a cloak, thrown over his shoulders, unbuttoned to accommodate the cast on his left arm. Fields wondered what he had on under the coat. A sweater with only one sleeve? After he shot him, he would take a look under the coat, see what he was wearing. He would also steal the wristwatch he saw glinting on Herrera's left wrist, which looked like gold from this distance, but which may have been only junk. Lots of spics wore fake jewelry.


Fields planned to approach Herrera soon as he found an opportunity, fall into step beside him, tell him in English - if the fuckin' spic understood English - that this was a gun here in Fields's pocket and that he should walk very nice and quiet with him and keep walking till they came to 704 Crosley, which was an abandoned building in this lovely spic neighborhood Herrera lived in. Fields planned to walk him up to the third floor of that building and shoot him in the back of the head. Very clean, very simple. No fuss, no muss.


Herrera stood on the front stoop, looking up and down the street.


Playing it like a cool television gangster.


Only ten thousand blacks in his immediate vicinity, so the dumb spic was trying to pick his exterminator from the bunch.


Fields smiled.


On New Year's Day, when they'd gone after him with the baseball bats, they were wearing jeans and leather jackets, boots, red woolen watch caps, they'd looked like some kind of street gang. Today, Fields was dressed like a banker. Dark suit and overcoat, black shoes, pearl gray stetson, black muffler. Briefcase in his left hand. So his right hand could be on the piece in his coat pocket when he caught up with Herrera and advised him that they were about to take a healthful little morning walk.


Herrera, apparently satisfied that no one on the street was life-threatening, came down the steps in front of the building, and then stopped to talk to an old man standing near a fire in a sawed-off gasoline drum. It took Fields a minute to figure out what Herrera wanted. He was showing the old man the package of cigarettes he had just taken from his coat pocket. He was asking the old man to light a cigarette for him. The old man nodded in comprehension, took the matchbook Herrera handed him, struck several matches unsuccessfully against the wind, finally got one going, and held it to the tip of the cigarette dangling from Herrera's mouth.


Enjoy it, Fields thought.


It'll be your last one, man.


Herrera thanked the old man, retrieved his matchbook, and put it in the same pocket with his cigarettes. He looked up and down the street again. It'll be a terrible shame if nobody assassinates this dude, Fields thought, seeing as he's looking for it so bad.


Herrera was in motion now.


So was Fields.


Following behind him at a safe distance, waiting for a good time to make his approach, didn't want too many people around, wanted the street populated enough to provide cover, but not so crowded that anyone brushing by could hear what he was telling Herrera. They had come maybe five, six blocks when Fields saw up ahead a nice break in the sidewalk traffic. Two, three people in Herrera's immediate orbit, moving in the same direction, half a dozen more up ahead, walking toward him. Time to move on the man.


He stepped out smoothly and quickly, planning to come up fast on Herrera's left, the side with the bad arm and also the side closest to the gun in the right-hand pocket of his coat. He was half a dozen paces behind him when Herrera suddenly veered in toward a door on his right. Fields stopped dead. The little spic was going into a bar. The name of the bar was Las Palmas. Fields peeked in through the plate glass window.


The big blond cop who'd done all the shooting on New Year's Day was sitting at the bar.


Herrera took the stool alongside his.


* * * *


Felice Handler was standing against a zebra-striped wall. With her frizzied blonde hair and her amber eyes, she looked somewhat like a healthy lioness posing against the hides of a herd she had stalked, killed and eaten. The other walls in the apartment's den were black. As she had already mentioned, Mrs Handler was an interior decorator.


Workmen were still trotting through the apartment as Meyer and Mrs Handlertalked. It made their conversation difficult. He suspected she welcomed the interruptions; he was there, after all, to ask further questions about her son. For Mrs Handler, everything else took precedence over the business of bloody murder. Did the wallpaper with the tiny floral pattern go in the master bedroom or the second bedroom? Which wall in the master bedroom got the floor-to-ceiling mirror? (Meyer knew the answer to that one.) Where did the gold metallic paper with the purple flecks go? Would she like to see a dipstick sample of the red for the ceiling in the study? Did the rocket ship paper go in the nursery? What was this roll of yellow paper that wasn't indicated anywhere on the floor plan? Where should they put it? (Meyer had an answer to that one, too.)


'Mrs Handler,' he said at last, his patience virtually exhausted, 'I know it's important that you give all these people the answers they're . . .'


'Yes, it is,' she said.


'I realize that,' he said. 'But we have a lot of people waiting for answers, too.'


'Oh?'


One eyebrow raised. Her expression saying What in the world could possibly be more important than what I'm doing here?


'Yes,' he said. 'So, you know, I'd hate to have to get a subpoena just to talk to you, but . . .'


He let the sentence trail.


She looked at him.


Was he really about to subpoena her?


Amber eyes flashing with intelligence.


Considering whether to tell him to go ahead and get his goddamn subpoena if that's how he wanted to be.


Instead, the smile from Fatal Attraction.


'I do apologize,' she said, 'I know you must be getting a lot of pressure. The case is all over everything, isn't it?'


He wished he could have said that the pressure from upstairs had nothing to do with his eagerness to solve the case. But this wasn't entirely true. Television and the tabloids were having a holiday with this one. A six-month-old baby? Murdered in her crib? If a baby wasn't safe from the maniacs in this city, then who was?


The calls to Lieutenant Byrnes had started on the morning the story broke. First a captain from Headquarters Division downtown. Then the Chief of Detectives. Then Howard Brill, one of the Deputy Police Commissioners, and then the First Dep himself, and finally the Commissioner, all of them politely inquiring as to whether Byrnes felt the investigating detectives were making reasonable headway or did he think Homicide should enter the case in something more than an advisory capacity? Or perhaps Special Forces? Just checking, of course, please let them know if the squad needed any help. Meaning please let them know if his men were ready to admit to failure before they'd even done the preliminary legwork.


'Do you think we could step out into the hall?' Meyer said. 'For ten minutes, okay? Without your people bothering us? That's all I ask.'


'Certainly,' she said, and looked at her watch. 'It's time for a cigarette break, anyway.'


They went out into the corridor, and walked down to the end of it, where there was an emergency exit. Mrs. Handler shook a cigarette free from a package of Pall Malls, and offered the package to Meyer. He had smoked Pall Malls for years. The familiar red package filled him with craving. He shook his head. And watched as she lighted her cigarette. And inhaled. And exhaled in deep satisfaction. Chinese torture.


'Mrs Handler,' he said, 'you know, of course, that your son's not back at school yet.'


'No, I didn't know.'


'I called Prentiss this morning, shortly before I spoke to you.'


'I see. And now you want to know if I've heard from him.'


'Have you?'


'No.'


'When we spoke to you last Tuesday . . .'


'Yes.'


'You said your son had left for Maine early that morning . . .'


'Yes.'


'But of course he hadn't.'


'I didn't know that at the time.'


'He told you he was going back to school.'


'Yes.'


'Mrs Handler, do you have a school calendar?'


'What do you mean?'


'Didn't you know that classes would not resume until the ninth?'


'Yes, I knew that.'


'But you didn't think it odd that your son was going back on the third. Almost a full week before he was due back.'


'Scott is a very good student. He was working on a difficult science project and he wanted to get back early.'


'Then you saw nothing odd about . . .'


'Nothing. He's a graduating senior. The top colleges look favorably on student initiative.'


'So when he said he was going back . . .'


'I had no reason to believe he did not go back.'


She inhaled and exhaled smoke every two or three sentences. Meyer was getting a nicotine fix just standing beside her.


'And do you find it odd that he isn't there at the school now? The day after classes started again?'


'Yes, I find it odd.'


'But you don't seem very concerned,' Meyer said.


'I'm not. He's a big boy now. He knows how to take care of himself.'


'Where do you think he might be, Mrs Handler?'


'I have no idea.'


'He hasn't called you . . .'


'No.'


'Or written to you.'


'No.'


'But you're not concerned.'


'As I told you . . .'


'Yes, he's a big boy now. Mrs Handler, let's talk about New Year's Eve.'


'Why?'


'Because your son had a relationship with one of the victims, Mrs Handler, and now we can't find him. So I'd like to know what he was doing on New Year's Eve.'


'I already told you . . .'


'Yes, you had a party that started at nine o'clock . . .'


'Yes.'


'. . . and ended at four in the morning.'


'That's an approximate time.'


'And your son was there all night long.'


'Yes.'


'Are you sure about that?'


'I'm positive.'


'I suppose the other guests at the party would be willing to corroborate . . .'


'I have no idea whether anyone else noticed Scott's comings or goings. He's my son, I'm the one who . . .'


'Were there comings and goings?'


'What do you mean?'


She dropped her cigarette to the floor and ground it out under her sole. Then she opened her handbag, reached for the package of Pall Malls again, shook one free, and lighted it. A delaying tactic, Meyer figured. She'd already made her first mistake, and she knew it. But so did he.


'You said he was there all night long, Mrs Handler.'


'Yes, he was.'


'Well, when he's home, he lives with you, doesn't he?'


'Yes?'


Cautious now. The lioness sniffing the air.


'So he didn't have to come to the party, did he? He was already there, wasn't he?'


'Yes?'


'And he didn't have to go anywhere after the party, did he? Since, again, he was already where he lived. So what did you mean by his comings and goings?'


'That was merely a figure of speech,' she said.


'Oh? Which one? Simile? Meta . . . ?'


'Listen, you,' she said, and hurled the cigarette down like a gauntlet.


'Yes, Mrs Handler?'


Her eyes were blazing again.


'Don't get smart with me, okay?'


She stepped on the cigarette, ground it out.


And looked challengingly into his eyes.


Taxpayer to civil servant.


Meyer figured it was time to take off the gloves.


'I'll need a guest list,' he said.


'Why?'


'Because I want to know if everyone at that party will swear that your son was there all night long. While a six-month-old baby and her sixteen-year-old sitter were getting killed, Mrs Handler. If you want me to go get a court order, I will. We can make it easier by you just giving me, right here and now, the names, addresses and telephone numbers of everyone who was there. What do you say? You want to save us both a lot of time? Or do you want to protect your son right into becoming the prime suspect in this thing?'


'I don't know where he is,' Mrs Handler said.


'That wasn't my question,' Meyer said.


'And I don't know where he went that night.'


Meyer pounced.


'Then he did leave the party.'


'Yes.'


What time?'


'About . . .'


She hesitated. Trying to remember when the murders had taken place. Covering her son's tracks again. Counting on the faulty and perhaps drunken memories of whoever had seen him putting on his coat and hat and-


'Okay, forget it,' Meyer said. 'I'll go get my subpoena while you work up that guest list. I just want you to know you're not helping your son one damn bit, Mrs Handler. I'll see you later.'


He was starting for the elevator when she said, 'Just a minute, please.'


* * * *


7


They found Colby Strothers at two o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, the eleventh day of January. He was sitting on a stone bench in the Matisse Wing of the Jarrett Museum of Modern Art on Jefferson Avenue, making a pencil sketch of the huge Matisse painting that hung on the white wall in front of him. For several moments, so intent was he on what he was drawing, he didn't even know the detectives were standing there. When finally he looked up, it was with a surprised look on his face.


'Mr Strothers?' Meyer asked.


He looked pretty much the way Felice Handler had described him. Nineteen years old, with startlingly blue eyes, a cleft chin, a shock of dark brown hair falling over his forehead. He had the strapping build of a football player but apparently the soul of an artist, too: Strothers was a freshman at the Granger Institute, one of the city's more prestigious art schools.


'Detective Meyer, 87th Squad,' Meyer said, and showed his shield and ID card. 'My partner, Detective Carella.'


Strothers blinked.


Mrs Handler had directed Meyer to the Granger Institute. He had gone there this morning and spoken to someone in the Registrar's Office, who had passed him on to the head of the Art Department, who had told him that Strothers would be at the Jarrett that afternoon. Now Meyer and Carella stood with a Matisse at their backs and a puzzled art student directly in front of them, looking up at them from a stone bench and probably wondering if it was against the law to sketch in a privately owned museum.


'Want to come someplace where we can talk?' Meyer asked.


'Why? What'd I do?' Strothers said.


'Nothing. We want to ask you some questions,' Carella said.


'About what?'


'About Scott Handler.'


'What'd he do?'


'Can we go outside in the garden?'


'In this weather?'


'Or the cafeteria. Take your choice.'


'Or we can sit right here,' Meyer said. 'It's up to you.'


Strothers kept looking at them.


'What do you say?' Carella asked.


'Let's go to the cafeteria,' Strothers said.


They walked like three old buddies through corridors lined with Picassos and Van Goghs and Chagalls and Gauguins. They followed the signs past the glass wall overlooking a sculpture garden dominated by a magnificent Chamberlain, and then up the escalator to the second floor and the newly installed Syd Solomon exhibition, and on up to the third floor where the signs led them past the museum's movie theater (which was currently running a Hitchcock retrospective that included The Birds) and finally into the cafeteria itself, only mildly busy at ten minutes past two in the afternoon.


'Would you like some coffee?' Carella asked.


'Sure,' Strothers said tentatively. He looked as if he was wondering whether they would dare use a rubber hose on him in a public place.


'What do you take in it?'


'Sugar and a little cream.'


'Meyer?'


'Black.'


Carella went to the counter. Meyer and Strothers sat at the table. Meyer smiled at him, trying to put him at ease. Strothers did not smile back. Carella returned, transferred the coffee cups and spoons from the tray to the table, and then sat with them.


'So,' Meyer said, and smiled again.


'Tell us where you were on New Year's Eve,' Carella said.


'I thought this was about Scott.'


'It is. Were you with him?'


'Yes.'


'Where?'


'At his house. His folks gave a party. Scott invited me.'


'What time did you get there?' What'd Scott do?'


'Nothing. Have you talked to him lately?'


'No.'


'What time did you get to the party?'


'About nine-thirty, ten o'clock.'


'Alone.'


'No, I had a girl with me.'


'What's her name?'


'Why?'


'Mr Strothers, this is a routine questioning, all we . . .'


'Well, thank you, but I'd like to know why you're . . .'


'We're trying to pinpoint Scott Handler's whereabouts on New Year's Eve,' Meyer said.


'So why do you need my girlfriend's name? If this is about Scott, why . . . ?'


'Only because she would have been another witness,' Carella said.


'A witness to what?'


'To where Scott Handler was at what time.'


'What time are you trying to pinpoint?' Strothers asked.


Carella noticed that he still hadn't given them his girlfriend's name. He guessed he admired that. He wondered now if he should level with the kid. Tell him they were interested in knowing where Handler was between twelve-thirty, when Annie Flynn received her last phone call, and two-thirty that same morning - when the Hoddings came into their apartment to find her dead. His eyes met Meyer's briefly. Meyer nodded with his eyelids. A blink. Go ahead, risk it.


'We're investigating a double homicide,' Carella said. 'One of the victims is a girl Scott Handler knew. We're trying to establish his whereabouts between twelve-thirty and two-thirty in the morning.'


'On New Year's Eve,' Strothers said.


'Yes. Well, New Year's Day, actually.'


'Right. So this is pretty serious, huh?'


'Yes, it's pretty serious.'


'But if those times are critical . . .'


'They are.'


'Then Scott isn't your man.'


'Why do you say that, Mr Strothers?'


'Because I know where he was during those hours, and it wasn't out killing anybody.'


'Where was he?'


'With me. And my girl. And his girl.'


'Do you want to tell us their names?'


'Isn't my word good enough?'


'Sure,' Carella said. 'But if two other people can swear to it, your friend would…'


'Who says he's my friend?'


'I thought . . .'


'I hardly know him. I met him at a gallery opening around Thanksgiving. He was down from Maine, he goes to a private school up there.'


'Uh-huh.'


'He'd just broken up with some girl, he was really . . .'


He stopped dead.


There was sudden understanding in his eyes.


'Yes?' Meyer said.


'Is that who got killed?'


The detectives waited.


'The girl who dumped him?'


'What'd he tell you about her?'


'Only that she'd shown him the door. It couldn't have been too serious a thing, he seemed to be over it by New Year's Eve.'


'Had you seen him at any time between Thanksgiving and . . .'


'No. I told you. We met at this opening, and then him and me and my girl went to a party afterward. At this loft an artist friend of mine has down in the Quarter. Scott seemed very down, so we asked him to come along. Then he called me just before New Year's Eve, told me there was going to be a party at his house, could I come and bring Doro . . .'


He cut himself short.


'Is that your girlfriend's name?' Carella asked. 'Dorothy?'


'Yes.'


'Dorothy what?'


'I'd like to leave her out of this, if that's okay with you,' Strothers said.


'Sure,' Carella said. 'So you got to this party at about nine-thirty, ten o'clock . . .'


'The pits,' Strothers said. 'If he'd told me we were gonna be the only young people there ... I mean, everybody there was thirty, forty years old!'


Meyer's expression said nothing.


'How long did you stay there?' Carella asked.


'We left a little after midnight.'


'You and Dorothy, and Scott and his girlfriend.'


'No, his girl wasn't there. That's where we went. To her place.'


'She wasn't at the Handler party?'


'No.'


'Any idea why not?'


'Well, she's older than Scott, maybe he wasn't too keen on having his mothermeet her.'


'How much older?' Meyer said.


'Well, she's pretty old,' Strothers said.


'Like what?' Meyer asked. 'Thirty? Forty?'


His expression still said nothing.


'Close to it, that's for sure. She's got to be at least twenty-seven, twenty-eight.'


'What's her name?' Carella asked.


'Lorraine.'


'Lorraine what?'


'Greer.'


'Her address?'


'I don't know. Someplace down in the Quarter. We went by taxi from Scott's apartment.'


'But you don't remember the address?'


'No, I'm sorry.'


'What does she do, do you know?'


'She's a waitress. Wants to be a rock star.'


Strothers shrugged elaborately, rolled his eyes, and then grimaced, making it abundantly clear what he thought her chances were.


'What time did you get to her place?' Meyer asked.


'Maybe a quarter to one? Something like that.'


'You left Scott's apartment at a little past midnight . . .'


'Around twenty after.'


'And you got downtown at about a quarter to one.'


'Yes.'


'And what time did you leave Miss Greer's apartment?'


'A little after five. Some of the people were already having breakfast.'


Meyer asked the big one.


'Was Scott Handler with you all that time?'


'Yes.'


'You're positive about that?'


'Well . . .'


'What is it, Mr Strothers?'


'Well ... we were together when we left his apartment, of course . . .'


'Of course.'


'And we were together when we got to Lorraine's place . . .'


'Yes?'


'But it was sort of a big party there, you know . . .'


'Did you lose track of him, is that it?'


'Well, Dorothy and I sort of drifted off, you know . . .'


'Uh-huh.'


'So we were sort of... well . . . out of it, you know, for maybe . . . well, an hour or so.'


'By out of it . . .'


'In the bedroom, actually.'


'Uh-huh. From when to when?'


'Well, I'd say maybe from around one o'clock to maybe two-thirty or so.'


'So then you don't really know for sure that Scott Handler was there all that time.'


'Well, he was there when we went in the bedroom and he was there when we came out, so I've got to assume . . .'


'There at one o'clock, and there at two-thirty.'


'Well, a little later than that, maybe.'


'Like what?'


'Like maybe three.'


'Uh-huh.'


'Or even three-thirty. I guess.'


'So, actually, you were out ofit for two and a half hours.'


'Well, yeah. I guess.'


Which would have given Handler plenty of time to have run back uptown.


'You said she's a waitress,' Meyer said.


'Scott's girlfriend? Yeah.'


'Did she mention where she works?'


* * * *


Lewis Randolph Hamilton was pacing the floor.


'You hear this?' he asked Isaac.


Isaac had heard it. Fields had just told them both.


'You're sure it's the same cop?' Hamilton asked.


'The same,' Fields said. 'The one shot Herbert and James and was ready to shoot me, too, I hadn't lain down the bat.'


'Together in this bar, huh?'


'Las Palmas. On Walker.'


'Sitting together in this bar, talking like old friends.'


'Like brothers,' Fields said.


'Now what do you suppose little Joey was telling the man?' Hamilton and.


Isaac looked at him meaningfully.


Hamilton walked to Fields and threw his arm around his shoulder.


'Thank you, Andrew,' he said. 'You were wise to back off when you did. Forget little Joey for a while, okay? Forget little José for now.'


Fields looked at him, puzzled.


'You don't want him done?' he asked.


'Well, now, Andrew, how can you get near him, man? With fuzz growing on him? No less fuzz that has looked you in the eye and knows you?'


Fields was suddenly concerned. Was Hamilton blaming him somehow? Was Hamilton saying he had fucked up? The way James had with the ball bats?


'They didn't see me, Lewis,' he said. 'Neither one of them. Not the spic not the cop neither.'


'Good,' Hamilton said.


'So if you still want me to dust him . . .'


'But what has he already told the cop?' Hamilton asked.


* * * *


A fairy tale.


Kling was almost embarrassed to report it to the lieutenant.


This was the story according to Herrera:


A ship was coming in on the twenty-third of January. A Monday night. Scandinavian registry, but she was coming up from Colombia. There would be a hundred kilos of cocaine aboard that ship. Normal purchase price would have been fifteen to twenty-five thousand a key, but since the posse was taking delivery on the full shipment, the price was a mere ten grand per. A kilo was two point two pounds, ask any kid on the block. A million dollars in cash would be exchanged for two hundred twenty pounds of cocaine. That was a lot of coke, friend. That was a great big mountain of nose dust. On the street, that huge pile of flake would be worth twelve and a half million bucks.


So far it sounded within the realm of reason. The normal return on a drug investment was five to one. The return here would be twelve and a half to one. So, okay, the stuff was being discounted.


But this was where the brothers Grimm came in.


According to Herrera, the posse had made arrangements for the cocaine to be delivered to an address right here in the city, which address he didn't know as yet, but which he would find out for Kling if Kling made sure the posse didn't kill him in the next few days. The million dollars was supposed to be turned over at that time, after the customary testing and tasting. That was where Kling and his raiders would come in, busting up the joint and confiscating the haul - as soon as Herrera found out where delivery would take place, of course.


'Of course,' Kling said.


He was wondering what was in this for Herrera.


He didn't ask him as yet.


He asked him instead what the name of this posse was.


Herrera said again that it was bigger than Shower or Spangler, bigger even than the Tel Aviv posse, which was a strange name for a gang run by Jakies, but it happened to be real nonetheless. As a side excursion, Herrera told Kling that the way the Jakies decided to call their gangs 'posses' was from watching spaghetti Westerns down there in the Caribbean, which were a very popular form of entertainment down there, the Westerns. Kling thought that was very interesting, if true. He still wanted to know the name of the posse.


'I don't know the name of this posse,' Herrera said.


'You don't.'


'I do not,' Herrera said.


'These guys want to kill you, but you don't know who they are.'


'I know the people you arrested were trying to kill me.'


'Did you know those people before they tried killing you?'


'Yes,' Herrera said. 'But not who they were.'


And here the fairy tale began to grow and grow like Jack's beanstalk.


Or Pinocchio's nose.


According to Herrera, he'd been sitting in this very same bar, Las Palmas, where he and Kling were sitting at the time of the tale, in one of the booths there across the room, when he overheard a discussion among three black men sitting in the adjoining booth.


'Uh-huh,' Kling said.


'These three men were talking about the shipment I just told you about.'


'Talking all the figures and everything.'


'Yes.'


'The hundred kilos . . .'


'Yes.'


'The discounted price . . .'


'Yes, all of that.'


'And the date of delivery. All the details.'


'Yes. Except where. I don't know where yet.'


'You overheard all this.'


'Yes.'


'They were talking about a shipment of cocaine, and they were talking loud enough for you to hear them.'


'Yes.'


'Uh-huh,' Kling said.


But, according to Herrera, they must have seen him when he was leaving the bar, and they must have figured he'd been listening to everything they'd said, so they probably asked the bartender later who he was, and that was how come they'd tried to kill him on New Year's Eve.


'Because you knew about the shipment.'


'Yes.'


'And, of course, you could identify these men.'


'Of course.'


'Whose names you didn't know.'


'That's true, I didn't know their names.'


'James Marshall, and Andrew Fields and . . .'


'Well, yes, I know the names now. But then, I didn't know the names.'


'You didn't.'


'I did not.'


'So why were they worried about you? You didn't know who they were, you didn't know where delivery would be made, why should they be worried about you?'


'Ah-ha,' Herrera said.


'Yeah, ah-ha, tell me,' Kling said.


'I knew the delivery date.'


'Uh-huh.'


'And how much cocaine would be on the ship.'


'Uh-huh. What's the name of the ship?'


'I don't know. Swedish registry. Or Danish.'


'Or maybe Finnish.'


'Maybe.'


'So they got very worried, these three guys in this posse - they did mention a posse, huh? When you were listening to them?'


'Oh, yes. The posse this, the posse that.'


'But not the name of the posse.'


'No, not the name.'


'Too bad, huh?'


'Well, that I can find out.'


'The way you can find out where delivery's gonna take place, huh?'


'Exactly.'


'How?' Kling asked. 'These guys are trying to kill you, how do you plan to find out where they're gonna take delivery of this shit?'


'Ah-ha,' Herrera said.


This was some fairy tale.


According to Herrera, he had a cousin who was a house painter in Bethtown, and this man's wife cleaned house for a Jamaican whose brother was prominent in posse circles, who in fact reputedly belonged to the Reema posse, which wasn't the posse in question here. Herrera knew that if his cousin's wife, who was his cousin-in-law, asked a few discreet questions about the person - Herrera himself - who'd almost got killed on New Year's Eve, she could find out in three minutes flat the name of the posse the three assassins belonged to. And once she told Herrera the name, the rest would be easy.


'How do you know this isn't the Reema posse?' Kling asked.


'What?' Herrera said.


'You said the Reema posse was not the posse in question.'


'Oh. I know that because my cousin's wife already asked some questions, and it wasn't this posse that tried to do me.'


'So once you learn the name of the posse in question, why is the rest going to be easy?'


'Because I have connections,' Herrera said.


'Uh-huh,' Kling said.


'Who know such things.'


'What things?'


'Posse business.'


'Uh-huh.'


Kling looked at him.


Herrera ordered another Corona and lime.


Kling said, 'So what's in this for you, José?'


'Satisfaction,' Herrera said.


'Ahhh,' Kling said, 'satisfaction.'


'And, of course . . . protection. You owe it to me.'


Here we go with the owing again, Kling thought.


'You saved my life,' Herrera said.


Kling was wondering if there was even the tiniest shred of truth in anything Herrera had told him.


* * * *


The Steamboat Cafe was in a newly created mall-like complex directly on the River Dix. South and west of the midtown area, Portside had been designed with an adult trade in mind. Three restaurants ranging from medium-priced to expensive to very expensive. A dozen better shops. But, alas, the teenagers who discovered the area weren't interested in eating at good restaurants or buying anything in up-scale shops. They were interested only in meeting other teenagers. Portside was a good place to do that. Day and night, teenagers began flocking there from all over the city. In no time at all, thousands of them were wandering through the beautifully landscaped area, congregating on the benches, holding hands on the walks, necking under the trees on the cantilevered riverside platforms.


In this city, adults did not like teenagers.


So the adults stopped going to Portside.


And all the boutiques, and the bookshop, and the florist, and the jewelry stores were replaced by shops selling T-shirts, and earrings, and blue jeans and records and sneakers. The very expensive restaurant closed in six months' time, to be replaced by a disco called Spike. The merely expensive restaurant also closed; it was now a thriving McDonald's. The Steamboat Cafe, the medium-priced restaurant, had managed to survive only because it actually was a transformed steamboat floating there on the river and docked alongside one of the platforms. Teenagers loved novelty.


According to Colby Strothers, Lorraine Greer worked as a waitress at the Steamboat Cafe.


The detectives got there at twenty minutes past four.


The manager told them the girls on the day shift would be leaving as soon as they set the tables, filled the sugar bowls and salt and pepper shakers, made sure there was enough ketchup out, generally got things ready for the next shift. That was part of the job, he explained. Getting everything ready for the next shift. He pointed out a tall young woman standing al the silverware tray.


'That's Lorraine Greer,' he said.


Long black hair, pale complexion, bluish-gray eyes that opened wide when the detectives identified themselves.


'Miss Greer,' Carella said, 'we're trying to locate someone we think you know.'


'Who's that?' she asked. She was scooping up knives, forks and spoons from the silverware tray. Dropping them into a basket that had a napkin spread inside it. 'Don't make me lose count,' she said. Meyer figured she was multiplying the number of her tables by the place settings for each table, counting out how many of each utensil she would need.


'Scott Handler,' Carella said.


'Don't know him,' she said. 'Sorry.'


She swung the basket off the stand bearing the silverware tray, and began walking across the restaurant. The detectives followed her. The floor - the deck - rolled with the motion of the river. Carella was trying to figure why Strothers might have lied to them. He couldn't think of a single reason.


'Miss Greer,' he said, 'we feel reasonably certain you know Mr Handler.'


'Oh? And what gives you that impression?'


Fork on the folded napkin to the left of the plate. On the right, she placed a knife, a tablespoon, a teaspoon, in that order. Working her way around the table. Six place settings. Eyes on what she was doing.


'We talked to a young man named Colby Strothers . . .'


'Don't know him, either. Sorry.'


River traffic moving past the steamboat's windows. A tugboat. A pleasure craft. A fireboat. Lorraine's eyes sideswiped the entrance door amidships. Both detectives caught the glance.


'Mr Strothers told us . . .'


'I'm sorry, but I don't know either of those people.'


Eyes checking out the door again.


But this time . . .


Something flashing in those eyes.


Both detectives turned immediately.


The young man standing in the doorway was perhaps six feet two inches tall, with blond hair, broad shoulders, and a narrow waist. He was wearing a red team jacket with ribbed cuffs and waistband, brown leather gloves, brown trousers, brown loafers. He took one look at them standing there with Lorraine, and immediately turned and went out again.


'Handler!' Carella shouted, and both detectives started for the door. Handler - if that's who he was - had already crossed the gangplank and was on the dock when they came out running. 'Police!' Carella shouted, but that didn't stop him. He almost knocked over a teenybopper eating a hamburger, kept running for the streetside entrance to the area, and reached the sidewalk as Carella and Meyer came pounding up some twenty yards behind him. Handler - if that's who he was - then made a left turn and headed downtown, paralleling the river.


The streetlights were already on, it was that time of day when the city hovered between dusk and true darkness. A tugboat hooted on the river, an ambulance siren raced through the city somewhere blocks away, and then there was a sudden hush into which Carella again shouted, 'Police!' and the word shattered the brief stillness, the city noises all came back again, the sounds of voices and machines, the sound of Handler's shoes slapping against the pavement ahead - if that's who he was.


Carella did not like chasing people. Neither did Meyer. That was for the movies. In the movies, they filmed a chase in forty takes that were later edited to look like one unbroken take where the hero cop is running like an Olympics gold-medal track star and the thief is running like the guy who won only the bronze. In real life, you did it all in one take. You went pounding along the sidewalk after a guy who was fifteen to twenty years younger than you were, and in far better physical condition, and you hoped that his red team jacket wasn't for track or basketball. In real life, the calves of your legs began to ache and your chest caught fire as you chased after someone you knew you'd possibly never catch, watching the back of that disappearing red jacket, barely able to make out the white lettering on it, The Prentiss Academy, which in the gloom and with your thirty-something-eyes you couldn't have deciphered at all if you weren't already familiar with it. In real life, you watched the beacon of that red jacket moving further and further-


'We're losing him!' Carella shouted.


But then suddenly, Harold, in this city of miracle and coincidence, a police car came cruising up the street from the opposite direction, and Handler - if that's who he was - spotted the car, and made an immediate hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and began running diagonally across the traffic. Toward them. On the other side of the street. Running for the corner, where he undoubtedly planned to turn north. They anticipated his route, though, and came racing for the same corner, Carella getting there an instant before he did, Meyer getting there an instant later, so that they had him boxed between them. He saw the guns in their hands. He slopped dead. Everyone was out of breath. White puffs of vapor blossomed on the air.


'Scott Handler?' Carella said.


That's who he was.


* * * *


The two women were white hookers of a better grade than those Hamilton's people placed on the street every day of the week. Hamilton had in fact ordered these two from a lady named Rosalie Purchase, which happened to be her real name. Rosalie was a dame in her sixties whose call-girl operation had survived the inroads of the Mafia, the Chinese, and now the Jamaican and 'other exotic punks,' as she defiantly called them. Rosalie dealt in quality flesh. Which might have accounted for her survival. In a day and age when two buck whores were turning vague tricks for holier-than-thou ministers in cheap roadside motels, it was nice to know that if a real sinner wanted a racehorse, Rosalie Purchase was there to provide one.


Rosalie wore hats as a trademark.


On the street, in the house, in restaurants, even in church.


The cops called her Rosalie the Hat.


Or alternately Rosalie the Hot, despite the fact that she had never personally performed even the slightest sexual service for any one of her clients. If, in fact, she had any clients. For a lady who'd been openly running a whore house for a good many years now, it was amazing how little the police had on her. For all the police could prove, Rosalie might just as easily have been a milliner. Nobody could understand why she had never been busted. Nobody could understand why a wire had never been installed on her telephone. There were rumors, of course. Hey, listen, there are rumors in any business.


Some people in the department knew for a fact that Rosalie had grown up in East Riverhead at the same time Michael Fallon was coming along, and that as teenagers they'd been madly in love with each other. It was also true that Rosalie later moved to San Antonio, Texas, after Fallon ditched her to marry a girl named Peggy Shea. The rest, however, was all surmise.


Was it true, for example, that poor, brokenhearted Rosalie had learned how to run a cathouse out there in the Wild West? Was it true that the reason she'd never been busted in this city was that she'd become Fallon's mistress the moment she came back here to make her fortune and buy a lot of hats? Was it true that she was still Fallon's mistress? In which case, this might have explained why she'd never been busted, since Michael Fallon happened to be Chief of Detectives.


All this was whispered around the water coolers down at Headquarters.


The two girls were named Cassie and Lane.


These were not their real names. They were both from West Germany, and their real names were Klara Schildkraut and Lottchen Schmidt, but here in the land of opportunity they were Cassie Cole and Lane Thomas. They were both in their early twenties, both blond, both wearing ankle-strapped spike-heeled slippers and teddies - Cassie's was red and Lane's was black - and both stoned out of their minds on cocaine and champagne. So were Hamilton and Isaac.


This was a nice little sundown party here in the penthouse Hamilton owned on Grover Park North. This was also a little business meeting here on the twenty-first floor, but there was nothing Hamilton liked better than mixing business with pleasure. The two girls had been trained by Rosalie Purchase to dispense pleasure by the cartload. Isaac was dispensing a little pleasure himself, by way of refilling the girls' glasses and heaping fresh mounds of very good coke onto their mirrors. The girls sniffed with their legs widespread, the better to see you, my dear. In the west, the sun was almost completely gone, its dying stain visible only peripherally through the apartment's south-facing windows.


The two girls spoke with heavy German accents.


'This is very good shit here,' Cassie said.


It sounded like, 'Das ist vehr gut schidt hier.'


'We have connections,' Hamilton said, and winked at Isaac.


Both of them were all silked out for the girls. Hamilton was wearing green silk pajamas and a yellow silk robe and black velvet slippers with what looked like the crest of the king of the Belgians on the instep. He looked like Eddie Murphy playing Hugh Hefner. Isaac was wearing a red silk, V-necked, short-sleeved top over what looked like red silk Bermuda shorts. He was barefooted. He was wearing eyeglasses. He looked like a trained monkey with an enormous hard-on.


'Come do me here, sweetheart,' he said to Lane.


Lane was busy snorting a mountain of coke. With her free hand, she reached down to unsnap the crotch of her black teddy. Snorting, she began stroking herself. Isaac watched her working her own lips.


'But why do you feel the cop takes precedence?' he asked.


'For what Herrera may have told him,' Hamilton said.


'But what does the little spic know?


'Naughty, naughty,' Cassie said, at last raising her head from the mirror. Rosalie had taught her that calling Hispanics spics was a no-no in this business where so many of her customers were Colombian dealers up from Miami.


'You finished with that shit?' Hamilton asked,


'For now,' Cassie said, grinning.


Oh my, she was stoned. Oh my, these two niggers had glorious shit here.


'Then come do me,' Hamilton said.


'Oh, yeah,' she said.


It sounded like, 'Ach, ja.'


She went to him, and settled down on the carpet between his knees, making herself comfortable. The strap of the teddy fell off her right shoulder. She was about to put it back when Hamilton said, 'Leave it.'


'Okay,' she said, and lowered the strap completely, pulling the front of the teddy down over her right breast. Hamilton cupped her breast in his hand. He began kneading it, almost absentmindedly. The nipple actually stiffened, she was that stoned.


'He likes tits,' she said to Lane.


Lane was on Isaac's lap now, facing him, straddling him. Both her breasts were in his hands.


'He does, too,' she said.


They were talking German now, which Rosalie had warned them against ever doing in the presence of customers. Customers didn't like to think they were being discussed in a foreign language. But in this case it was okay because now Hamilton and Isaac fell into a Jamaican Creole patois neither of the girls could understand. So Cassie and Lane chitchatted back and forth in German like hausfraus gossiping over the back fence except that one had Hamilton in her mouth and the other was riding Isaac hell-bent for leather. Hamilton looked down at Cassie's bobbing blonde head and sipped at his champagne and sang out the riffs of the patois to Isaac who sipped his champagne and then told Lane in perfectly understandable English to turn around the other way, which she did at once, commenting to Cassie in German that if he tried any backdoor stuff all bets were off, this was getting to be a dirty party.


Dirty in more ways than one.


Isaac and Hamilton were discussing murder.


Hamilton was saying that if José Herrera, in gratitude or for whatever reason imaginable, had told the blond cop anything at all about their operation, why then they were both dangerous, the cop more so than Herrera. In which case, the cop had to be dusted very quickly. To silence him if he hadn't yet discussed the posse with anyone else in the department. Or, if he had already shared the information, to dust him as a warning to the others.


'We have to make a statement, man,' Hamilton said in the patois.


Let the police know that where millions of dollars were at stake, no one could be allowed to interfere.


'Especially not with all the money we're paying them,' Isaac said in the patois.


'Was his name in the newspaper?' Hamilton asked.


'I'll find it.'


Lane was standing in front of him, her legs widespread, bent over, hands on her thighs, looking straight at Hamilton while Isaac pumped her from behind. There was a blank expression on her face. Hamilton suddenly desired her fiercely.


'Come here,' he said.


'Me?'


'No, Adolf Hitler,' he said, making a joke.


Lane was twenty-two years old. She had only vaguely heard of Adolf Hitler. But she knew who the boss was here. She eased Isaac out of her, giving him a promising backward glance, head turned over her shoulder. Smiling, then, she licked her lips the way Rosalie had taught her and walked the way Rosalie had taught her to where Hamilton was on the couch with Cassie.


Isaac knew better than to complain.


He poured himself another glass of champagne and watched as the two girls began working Hamilton.


In the patois, Hamilton said, 'I'll take the cop out myself.'


'Why?'


'Because none of them knows what I look like,' Hamilton said, and smiled. In English, he said to the girls, 'Yeah, good, I like that.'


'He likes it,' Lane said in German.


'I'll bet he likes it,' Cassie said in German.


'And then we take out the spic,' Hamilton said in the patois. 'For what he stole from us.'


'You finish him off,' Lane said in German.


'Ick,' Cassie said in English.


* * * *


Carella talked to Lorraine in the Interrogation Room.


Meyer talked to Scott in the squadroom.


Lorraine thought she was playing to a packed house at the London Palladium. A star at last. All this attention focused on her. There were probably a hundred other cops in the next room, behind that fake mirror on the wall. She had seen a lot of movies and she knew all about two-way mirrors. Actually, no one was watching her and Carella through the admittedly two-way mirror, but Lorraine didn't know this, and she was doing a star turn, anyway. Big performance here at the old station house, Give the cops the show of their lives. Cop, as the case actually happened to be.


On the other hand, Scott thought he was talking to his priest.


He guessed Meyer was Jewish, but this was a confessional scene anyway.


All contrite and weepy.


Waiting for Meyer to dispense penance.


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


'Did someone accuse you?' Meyer asked.


He almost said, 'Did someone accuse you, my son?'


With his bald head, and in Scott's abject presence, he felt like a tonsured monk. He felt like making the sign of the cross on the air and saying 'Dominus vobiscum.'


Instead, he said, 'Why'd you run?'


'I was scared.'


'Why?'


'Because I knew exactly what you'd be thinking.'


'And what was that?'


Slopping himself before he added, 'My son?'


'That I'd done it,' Scott said. 'Because she bounced me.'


'Do you want to tell me where you were on New Year's Eve?'


* * * *


'He was with me,' Lorraine said.


She was on her feet, facing both Carella and the mirror behind which the Police Commissioner and the Chief of Detectives and all the high-ranking departmental brass were undoubtedly standing, watching her performance. She had changed out of the waitressing costume and into her street clothes before leaving the Steamboat Cafe. Short denim skirt, red sweater, red tights, short black boots with a cuff turned down above the ankle. She was strutting for Carella and everybody behind the mirror. Carella knew that she knew she possessed long and spectacularly beautiful legs.


'From what time to what time?' he asked.


He was sitting on the opposite side of the long table that ran the vertical length of the room. The mirror was behind him.


'He got to the party at around twelve-thirty,' Lorraine said.


Strothers had said a quarter to one.


'Was he there all night?' Carella asked.


* * * *


'All night, yes,' Scott said.


'Until when?'


'Well, I spent the night there. I mean, I slept over. With Lorraine.'


That'll be another fifty Hail Marys, Meyer thought.


'I've been staying there,' Scott said. 'With Lorraine. When I found out about the murder . . .'


'How'd you find out?'


'On television.'


Nobody reads the newspapers anymore, Meyer thought.


'I figured I'd ... I knew you'd think I did it. Because her parents would've mentioned the argument we had. And what I said. And I knew . . .'


'What was it you said?'


* * * *


'That he was going to kill her,' Lorraine said.


'Uh-huh,' Carella said.


'Her and her new boyfriend both.'


'Uh-huh. And this is what he told you that day he came to your apartment?'


'No, no. This was later. When he came to the apartment, she'd just broken up with him. A few days earlier.'


'This was ...?'


'Three days after Christmas. When he came to me. Because I used to be his baby-sitter. And he could tell me anything.'


'And he told you Annie Flynn had broken up with him.'


'Yes.'


'But he didn't mention the death threats.'


'Well, I wouldn't call them death threats.'


'What would you call them, Miss Greer?'


'Well, would you call them death threats?' she said, looking directly into the mirror behind Carella and above his head.


'Yes, I would call them death threats,' Carella said. 'When a person threatens to kill someone, we call that a death threat.'


'Well, he didn't mean he'd actually kill them.'


* * * *


'That was just an expression,' Scott said.


'That you'd kill her and her new boyfriend.'


'Yes. I was angry, I just ... I was just saying anything that came to my mind. Because I was angry, and hurt and ... do you understand what I'm telling you?'


Yes, my son.


'Yes, I understand,' Meyer said. 'What I don't understand is why you thought it was better to hide instead of . . .'


* * * *


'He was scared,' Lorraine said. 'He figured her parents would tell you what he'd said, and you'd get him up here and wring a confession out of him. I don't mean beat a confession out of him. I mean outsmart him, get him to say things he didn't really want to say. Don't you go to the movies?'


'Sometimes,' Carella said. 'When did he tell you all this?'


'Last Friday. I advised him to turn himself in.'


'Uh-huh.'


'Otherwise you'd think he killed her.'


'And what'd he say?'


'He said he didn't kill her.'


'Then why wouldn't he come in?'


'I told you. He was scared.'


'I don't see why. He had a perfect alibi.'


'Sure, alibis,' she said to the mirror, dismissing the possibility of an innocent man being able to protect himself from a roomful of clever, aggressive cops. Like the ones behind the mirror.


'Well, he does have an alibi, doesn't he?' Carella said.


She looked at him. Was he starting to get clever?


'You said he was with you all night . . .'


'That's right.'


Flatly. Challengingly. You don't like the idea of my sleeping with a nineteen-year-old kid? Tough. Rock stars can do whatever they want to do.


'Didn't leave the apartment at any time, is that right?'


'He was there all night long. We had breakfast around five, five-thirty. Then everyone left, and we went to bed.'


'So there you are,' Carella said.


* * * *


'. . . scrambled eggs and bacon, coffee, hot rolls. I guess everybody cleared out by seven, seven-thirty. Then Lorraine and I went to bed.'


Meyer nodded.


"Tell me about this new boyfriend,' he said.


'Huh?'


'Annie's new boyfriend. The one you said you were going to kill'


'I told you, that was just an ex . . .'


'Yes, I know. But did she say who he was?'


'She said I was crazy.'


'Meaning what?'


'I guess . . . well, meaning there wasn't anyone else.'


'And did you believe that?'


'No.'


His eyes met Meyer's.


'I think she dropped me because of another guy.'


* * * *


New apartment building and all, he'd had to present himself in the sales office as somebody looking to buy. So he could get floor plans. He knew which apartment the Hoddings were in, he'd got that from the directory in the lobby the first time he'd gone to the building. Doorman said Yes, sir, can I help you? Told him he was looking for the sales office, which it turned out was on the third floor in an apartment that had been furnished as a model. One of the bigger apartments, the salesperson said it was going for $850,000, because of the parkside view. Same apartment higher up in the building - there were eighteen stories in all - went for a million-six. There were less expensive apartments without a view of the park, all of them facing the side street, and these started at five and a quarter, it wasn't cheap living in this part of the city, the salesperson told him.


He'd asked for floor plans of the different apartments being sold. Each apartment had a name. Like ordering from a menu. There was the Cosmopolitan and the Urbanite and the Excel and the Luxor and the most expensive of them all, the Tower Suite, which shared the entire eighteenth floor of the building with an identical apartment flipflopped. The building on the right was also only eighteen stories high, and there were height restrictions built into the zoning, so there was no question of ever being overshadowed. And, of course, on the left there was the side street.


He'd gathered up the floor plans for all the different apartments and then asked for a plan showing the location of the apartments on each floor. He knew the Hoddings were in apartment 4A. All of the A apartments were Urbanites.


So he had the floor plan right there in his hand.


Knew exactly where the fire escapes were.


Knew exactly how to get in.


Exactly how to get to her.


The salesperson thought she had a live one.


* * * *


8


Danny Gimp was offended.


'How come you went to Donner?' he asked.


The two men were sitting on a bench facing the ice-skating rink that had been named after Louis Weiss, the noted mountain climber. In this city, it was common knowledge that no mountain in the world was too high for Weiss to assail. With the help of his faithful shleppers - faithful sherpas - and with a god-given sense of humor and a ready smile, Weiss continued climbing to ever loftier heights, suffering frostbite of the nose only once. It was perhaps in memory of this single mishap in the Himalayas that an ice-skating rather than a roller-skating rink had been named after him. On occasional Saturdays, Weiss himself could be seen gliding over the ice, cheerfully asking children not to scatter candy bar wrappers on his rink. He was not there this Saturday.


It was already the fourteenth day of January.


Exactly two weeks since the murders were committed.


Eight days since Hal Willis had first contacted Fats Donner.


Now Danny Gimp wanted to know why.


Carella said, 'How do you know we went to Donner?'


'My job is listening,' Danny said, even more offended. 'I really am upset, Steve. Truly.'


'He has a short-eyes history,' Carella said.


'That is no reason to have gone to him.'


'If a baby and a sixteen-year-old are the victims, it's a very good reason.'


'This is a very big case, Steve, it's all over the papers, you can't turn on your TV without seeing something about it.'


'I know,' Carella said wearily.


'So instead of giving me a shot at a whammer, you give it to Donner. I can't understand that, Steve, I really can't.'


'Also,' Carella said lamely, 'it may be linked to a burglary Willis is working. So he went to Donner. Because he's worked with him before. Willis.'


Danny looked at him.


'Okay,' Carella said.


'I mean, you know, Steve . . .'


'I said okay.'


Both men fell silent. On the rink, children of all ages flashed by in a rainbow of color. A young girl who thought she was Katarina Witt leaped into the air, did a triple jump, beamed happily in mid-air, and fell on her ass. Without embarrassment, she got up, skated off, and tried another jump - a double this time.


'Does it hurt when it's cold like this?' Danny asked.


Carella knew instantly what he was talking about.


''Cause the leg does,' Danny said. 'From when I got shot.'


This was a lie. Danny had never been shot. He limped because he'd had polio as a child. But pretending he'd been wounded in a big gang shootout gave him a certain cachet he considered essential to the business of informing. Carella was willing to forgive the lie. The first time he himself got shot, Danny came to the hospital to see him. This was unusual for an informer. Carella guessed he actually liked Danny. Gray and grizzled and looking chubbier than he actually was because of the layers of clothing he was wearing, Danny sat on the bench and watched the skaters. He and Carella might have been old friends sitting in the park on a wintry day, remembering good times they had shared, complaining about small physical ailments like a leg that hurt when the temperature dropped.


''Cause I heard you got shot again,' Danny said.


'Yeah,' Carella said.


'On Halloween, I heard.'


'That's right.'


'So I was wondering if it hurts when it gets cold like this.'


'A little.'


'You got to stop getting shot,' Danny said.


'I know.'


'That can be a bad failing for a cop.'


'I know.'


'So be more careful.'


'I will.'


'And give me a call every now and then when you got a whammer. Instead of I have to call you and beg for a meeting here in the park where I'm freezing my ass off.'


'The park was your idea,' Carella said.


'Sure, all I need is to get spotted in a bar someplace, talking to a cop. Especially one who gets himself shot every other weekend. You're starting to be like that other guy you got up there, what's his name?'


'O'Brien.'


'O'Brien, right. He's got a reputation for that, ain't he? Getting himself hot every time he gets out of bed in the morning.'


'He's been shot a fair amount of times,' Carella said drily.


'So what're you trying to do? Break his record?'


Carella suddenly realized that Danny was truly concerned.


'I'll be careful,' he said gently.


'Please do,' Danny said. 'Now tell me who you're looking for.'


'A man named Proctor.'


'The Doctor?'


'You know him?'


'I know the name. He ain't into murder, Steve. He's a two-bit burglar and a sometime-dealer.'


'We're thinking maybe a felony murder.'


'Well, maybe,' Danny said dubiously.


'Because we know he did a burglary in the same building on the night of the murders. If he was doing another one, and the sitter surprised him . . .'


'Well, sure, then you got your felony murder.'


'Because he used a knife.'


'Yeah, I saw that on television.'


'A weapon of convenience.'


'Yeah.'


'Which could happen if a person is surprised. He grabs a knife from the rack . . .'


'He don't have to be surprised to do that.'


'Well, nobody goes in planning to use what he finds on the spot.'


'I suppose,' Danny said, and shrugged. 'Proctor, Proctor, where did I hear something about him lately? Did he just get out?'


'Two years ago.'


'Did he break parole or something?'


'Yes. Where'd you hear that?'


'Shmuck breaks parole it's all over the street. Captain Invincible, right? Nobody can touch him. But that's not it. I mean, this was something new. Where the hell did I hear it?'


The men fell silent again.


Danny was thinking furiously.


Carella was waiting.


There were two figure skaters out on the ice now. They floated like sugar plum fairies among the children churning furiously around them. An ice hockey game, strictly against the rules, was in its formative stages, two rosy-cheeked boys choosing up sides while half a dozen others circled them.


'They always picked me last,' Danny said.


He never misses a trick, Carella thought.


'Because of the leg.'


'They picked me last, too,' Carella said.


This was a lie. He'd always been a fairly good athlete.


'Who you think has the better legs? The one in blue or the one in red?'


Carella looked out over the ice.


'The one in red,' he said.


'Really. You know what I call those kind of legs? I call them Chinese legs.'


'Why?'


'I don't know why. It's the kind of legs Chinese girls have. Did you ever make it with a Chinese girl?'


'Never.'


'That's the kind of legs they got. My money's on the one in blue.'


'Okay,' Carella said.


'Salzeech his own, huh?' Danny said, and smiled.


Carella smiled, too.


'That's a pun,' Danny explained.


'I know.'


'You know the expression "To each his own"?'


'Yes.'


'That's the pun,' Danny explained. 'The Italians say salsiccia, which means sausage. Salzeech for short. I ain't Italian, but you ought to know that.'


'I do know it.'


'So that's the pun. Salzeech his own.'


'I got it already, Danny.'


'So how come you didn't bust out laughing?' he said, and smiled again.


Carella smiled with him.


They fell silent again.


Danny was still thinking.


'It'll come to me,' he said at last.


* * * *


The man sitting at Kling's desk was obviously Jamaican.


One of the Jakies, as Herrera had labeled them. As if this city needed more ethnic labels than it already had.


His speech rolled from his tongue like the sea nudging the shores of his native island.


He was telling Kling that his wife had threatened to kill him.


He was asking Kling to come back to the apartment with him, to warn his wife - whose name was Imogene - not to say such things to him anymore. And especially not to do such things, if that was what she really planned to do. Which he strongly believed was her plan since she had recently purchased from a street vendor a .22-caliber pistol for sixteen dollars and change.


The man talking to Kling said his name was Dudley Archibald.


He was, Kling supposed, in his early thirties, with a very dark complexion, soulful brown eyes, and a thin-lipped mouth. He wore his hair in a modified Afro. He was dressed conservatively in a tan suit that appeared a bit tropical for the frigid temperatures outside. You told somebody in the Caribbean that it was cold up here, he nodded knowingly, figured all he had to do was pack a sweater. Like for when it got a bit chilly at night in the islands. Just like that. Sure. Came up here, immediately froze to death. Tan tropical suit with the temperature outside at twenty-one degrees Fahrenheit and the squadroom windows rimed with ice.


Archibald told Kling he was a postal worker. This was his day off. Saturday. He'd come up here on his day off because he was truly worried that his wife Imogene would take it in her mind to use that pistol one of these days.


'I would appreciate it, sir,' he said, 'if you came home with me and told her that wouldn't be such a good idea, sir.'


'You know,' Kling said, 'people sometimes say things they don't really . . .'


'Yes, sir, but she bought a pistol, sir.'


'Even so.'


'I don't think you would want my murder on your head, sir.'


Kling looked at him.


What the hell was this?


First Herrera, now Archibald. Telling Kling if he didn't take care of them, their murders would be on his head.


'How'd you happen to come to me?' he asked.


He really wanted to say Of all the detectives on this squad, why the fuck did you pick me?


'You did a burglary in the neighborhood,' Archibald said.


Kling realized he wasn't suggesting that Kling had committed a burglary. He was merely saying that Kling had investigated one. Of several hundred, Kling imagined. In this precinct, burglaries were as common as jaywalking.


'Which one?' he asked.


'I forget her name,' Archibald said. 'A fat lady.'


'Uh-huh.'


'She said you were very good.'


'Uh-huh.'


'So I asked the sergeant downstairs for you. Gloria Something?'


'Well,' Kling said, and shrugged.


'Gloria, I think.'


'Well, in any event, Mr Archibald, I don't think it would be appropriate for me to come to your home and to intrude on what doesn't even appear to be a family dispute as yet. I would suggest . . .'


'A pistol is a family dispute,' Archibald said. 'If she has threatened to kill me with it.'


'Did she use those exact words? I'm going to kill you?'


'She said she would shoot me with the pistol. A .22-caliber pistol'


'Was this during an argument?'


'No, it was calmly. Over breakfast.'


'When?'


'Every day this week.'


'Every day.'


'Yes.'


Kling sighed.


'She keeps the pistol in the bread box,' Archibald said.


'I see.'


'In the kitchen.'


'Uh-huh.'


'She probably plans to shoot me while we're eating.'


Kling sighed again.


'I can't come with you . . .'


'Then my murder . . .'


'. . . just now,' Kling said. 'I've got a showdown to run, some women are coming in at one o'clock.' He looked at his watch. 'I should be done around two, two-thirty. I can maybe get over there around three. Will your wife be home then?'


'Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.'


'Where do you live?'


'337 South Eustis. Apartment 44.'


'You make sure your wife's there, okay? I'll come by and talk to her. Does she have a license for that pistol?'


Archibald looked as if he suddenly realized he'd bought more trouble than he'd bargained for.


'No, sir,' he said. 'But I don't want to . . .'


'Gives me a reason to take the gun away from her, right?' Kling said, and smiled.


Archibald did not return the smile.


'Relax, nobody's going to hurt her,' Kling said.


'Thank you, sir,' Archibald said.


'I'll see you at three,' Kling said.


It never occurred to him that in this city certain types of Jamaicans sometimes shot policemen.


* * * *


There were times when the irony of the situation amused Teddy.


She was deaf. She had been born deaf. She had never heard a human voice, an animal's cry, the shriek of machinery, the rustle of a fallen leaf. She had never spoken a word in her life. A woman like Teddy used to be called a 'deaf mute.' A label. Intended to be descriptive and perhaps kind. 'Dummy' would have been the cruel word. Now she was called 'hearing-impaired.' Progress. Another label. She was, after all, merely Teddy Carella.


What sometimes amused her was that this deaf mute, this hearing-impaired person, this dummy was in fact such a good listener.


Eileen Burke apparently understood this.


Perhaps she'd understood it all along, or perhaps she'd only reached her understanding last Friday night, when during dinner she had seized upon Teddy as a sympathetic ear.


'I've always thought of you as my best friend,' she said now, surprising Teddy. Their relationship had, at best, been a casual one. Dinner out with their respective men, an occasional movie, a football game, a private party, a big police affair. But best friend? Strong words. Teddy was a woman who chose her words carefully. Perhaps because her flying fingers could only accommodate so few of them in a single burst. Best friend? She wondered.


'I wouldn't tell this to anyone else,' Eileen said. 'I've been seeing a shrink, Teddy. I go twice a . . .'


She hesitated.


There was a puzzled expression on Teddy's face.


One of the words had thrown her.


Eileen thought back for a moment, and then said, 'Shrink,' exaggerating the word on her lips. Then, to nail it down, she said, 'Psychologist.'


Teddy nodded.


'I go to her twice a week.'


Without saying a word, merely by slightly raising her eyebrows and opening her eyes a trifle wider, Teddy said - and Eileen understood - a multitude of things.


And?


How's it going?


Tell me more.


'I think she's going to be okay,' Eileen said. 'I mean, I don't know yet. It bothers me that she's younger than I am . . .'


Teddy began signing.


And caught herself.


But she used her hands, anyway, signaling Eileen to go on, to elaborate, to tell her exactly . . .


'Twenty-six or -seven,' Eileen said.


Teddy pulled a face.


'Yeah,' Eileen said, 'that's just it. She seems like a kid to me, too.'


The restaurant was crowded with Saturday shoppers taking a break away from the Hall Avenue department stores. Eileen was wearing jeans, a bulky green sweater, and brown boots. A dark blue car coat was draped over the back of her chair. Her service revolver was in her shoulder bag, on the floor under the table. Teddy had taken the subway in from Riverhead. She, too, was dressed for a casual afternoon in the city. Jeans, a yellow turtleneck with a tan cardigan over it, Adidas jogging shoes. A black ski parka was draped over the back of her chair. Her small handbag was on the table. At a nearby table, two women noticed that she was using her hands a lot, making exaggerated facial expressions. One of them whispered, 'She's deaf and dumb,' another quaint label Teddy would have found offensive had she heard it. She did not hear it because she was too busy talking and listening.


Eileen was telling her that she'd stopped seeing Kling.


'Because I don't think he understands what I'm trying to do here.'


Teddy watched her intently.


'Or how much . . . how . . . you know ... I don't think he ... he's a man, Teddy, I don't think any man in the world can really understand what . . . how . . . you know . . . the effect that something like . . . like what happened . . . how traumatic it can be to a woman.'


Teddy was still watching her.


Dark brown eyes luminous in her face.


Listening.


Waiting.


'Rape, I mean,' Eileen said.


Teddy nodded.


'That I was raped.'


Tears suddenly sprang to Eileen's eyes.


Teddy reached across the table, took her hands in her own.


'So ... so you ... I figure if I have to cope with his goddamn feelings while I'm trying to understand my own ... I mean, it's just too much to handle, Teddy.'


Teddy nodded. She squeezed Eileen's hands.


'I mean, I can't worry about his . . . his . . . you know . . . his sensitivity, he's not the one who got raped. Aw, shit, I don't know, maybe I did the wrong thing. But don't I count, Teddy? Isn't it important that I ... aw, shit,' she said again, and reached down into her bag for the package of Kleenex tissues alongside her gun.


'Excuse me,' a man said, 'are you all right?'


He was standing alongside the table. Tall. Brown eyes. Dark hair. Craggy good looks. Perhaps thirty-seven, thirty-eight years old. Wearing a brown overcoat and brown gloves. Obviously just leaving the restaurant Obviously concerned about Eileen's tears.


'I'm fine,' she said to him, turning her head away, drying her eyes.


He leaned over the table. Gloved hands on the table.


'Are you sure?' he said. 'If there's any way I can help . . .'


'No, thank you, that's very nice of you,' Eileen said, 'but I'm okay, really Thank you.'


'As long as you're all right,' he said, and smiled, and turned swiftly the table and began walking toward-


'Hey!' Eileen yelled and shoved back her chair, knocking it over. 'Hey, you!'


She was on her feet and running, shoving past a waitress carrying a trayload of sandwiches, throwing open the front door and racing after the man, who made an immediate right turn on the sidewalk outside. Teddy could not hear Eileen shouting, 'Police, stop!' but she did see the man as he came past the restaurant's plate glass window, and she did see Eileen come up fast behind him, both of them running, and she saw Eileen leap at the man in a headlong tackle that sent something flying out of his gloved hand, and only then did she realize that the something was a woman's handbag, and the handbag was hers.


They went down in a jumble of arms and legs, Eileen and the man, rolling over on the sidewalk, Eileen on top now, her right arm coming up, no gun in her hand, her gun was still in her shoulder bag on the floor under the table. Her right fist was bunched. It came down hard on the side of the man's neck. The man stiffened as if a nerve had been struck. A uniformed cop was suddenly on the scene, trying to break them apart, Eileen screaming she was on the job, which Teddy did not hear but which she guessed the officer understood because all at once his gun was in his hand and he was cuffing the man on the sidewalk and having a nice friendly chat with Eileen who just kept nodding at him impatiently.


She picked up Teddy's handbag from where it lay beside the handcuffed man. The cop wanted the bag. Eileen was telling him no, shaking her head. The conversation seemed to get very heated. Eileen began using her hands, the bag in one hand, both hands waving around in the air. Finally, she turned away from the cop, the bag still in her hand, and skirted back for the restaurant, automatically shooing away the crowd that had gathered outside, a holdover from the days when she herself had been a uniformed cop.


She came back to the table.


'How do you like that guy?' she said, shaking her head in amazement.


Teddy nodded.


She was thinking how strong Eileen had been, how brave and-


But Eileen, noticing everyone looking at her, flushed a red the color of her hair, and said in embarrassment, 'Could we get out of here, please?'


And to Teddy she suddenly seemed like a little girl standing in front of a mirror in her mother's dress and shoes.


* * * *


In Calm's Point, there was a Jamaican neighborhood called Camp Kingston. In Riverhead, the Jamaican section was called Little Kingston. In other parts of the city, there was a Kingston North and even a Kingston Gulch, though how that name had originated was anyone's guess. Here in the Eight-Seven, the Jamaican section ran for several blocks from Culver Avenue to the River Harb, where what was still officially called Beaudoin Bluff was now familiarly called Kingston Heights. In any of these neighborhoods, whenever a cop broke up a street fight and asked the participants where they were from, the proud answer was 'Kingston.' Not a single Jamaican in this city was from Montego Bay or Savannala-Mar or Port Antonio. Every Jamaican in this city came from Kingston. The Capital, man. The same way every Frenchman in the world came from Paris. Mais je suis Parisien, monsieur! The raised eyebrow. The indignant tone. Kingston, mon, where you tink?


Kling had not been in this part of the precinct since it was Puerto Rican. Before that, it had been Italian. And before that, Irish. And if you went back far enough, Dutch and Indian. But there was no sense of history in these streets. There was merely a feeling of a transient population inhabiting a decaying slum. The buildings were uniformly gray here, even though there was red brick beneath the ageless soot. The streets had been only partially cleared of snow; in this neighborhood - as was the case in most of the city's ghettos - garbage collection, snow clearance, pothole repair, and most other municipal services were provided at a rather leisurely pace. The streets here looked dirty at any time of the year, but particularly so during the winter months. Perhaps because of the soiled snow. Or perhaps because it was so goddamn cold. In the summer months, for all its poverty, a slum looked extravagantly alive. During the winter, the deserted streets, the vain bonfires in vacant lots, the wind sweeping through narrow gray canyons, only exaggerated the ghetto's meanness. Here is poverty, the ghetto said. Here is dope. Here is crime. Here is only the thinnest thread of hope.


The mayor seemed not to know that the snow up here hadn't been cleared yet.


Perhaps because he rarely went to dinner in the 87th Precinct.


337 South Eustis Street was in a line of tenements on a street that dropped swiftly toward the river. There was ice out there today. The sky over the high rises in the next state glowered with clouds threatening more snow. Kling walked with his head ducked against the fierce wind that blew in over the choppy gray water. He was thinking that what he'd hated most as a patrolman was a family dispute, and here he was a detective about to march into somebody's house to settle a marital problem. Call used to come in over the radio, 10-64, Family Dispute, a non crime incident, and the dispatcher would almost always tag it with 'See the lady,' because it was usually the wife who'd called 911 to say her husband was batting her around the apartment. Today, he was about to see the man; it was Dudley Archibald who'd made the complaint about his wife Imogene.


He entered the building.


The stench of urine.


He wondered if there was a building in the entire 87th Precinct that did not stink of piss in the entrance hallway.


Broken mailboxes. Jimmied for the welfare, Social Security or Medicare checks.


A naked light bulb overhead. Miraculously unbroken and unscrewed; victimizers normally preferred waiting in the dark.


An inner door with a missing doorknob. Stolen for the brass. You unscrewed enough brass doorknobs, you sold them to the junkman, you picked up the five bucks you needed for your vial of crack.


Kling put his palm flat against the door, a foot and a half above the hole left by the missing doorknob, shoved the door open, came into the ground-floor vestibule, and began climbing.


Cooking smells.


Alien.


Exotic.


Tile floors on the landings. Cracked, chipped, faded, worn. But tile nonetheless. From a time when the city's North Side was flourishing and apartments here were at a premium.


Television sets going behind every door. The afternoon soaps. A generation of immigrants learning all about America from its daytime serials.


Apartment 44, Archibald had told him.


He kept climbing.


The tile on the fourth-floor landing had been ripped up and replaced with a tin floor. Kling wondered why. The staircase wound up for another flight, dead-ending at a metal door painted red and leading to the roof. Four apartments here on the fourth floor. Forty-one, two, three, and four, count 'em. No light here on the landing. He could barely make out the numeral forty-four on the door at the far end of the hall. Not a sound coming from behind that door. He stood in the near-darkness, listening. And then, because he was a cop, he put his ear to the wood and listened more intently.


Nothing.


He looked at his watch. Squinted in the gloom. Ten minutes past three. He'd told Archibald he'd be here at three.


He knocked.


And the shots came.


He threw himself instinctively to the floor.


His gun was already in his hand.


There were two bullet holes in the door.


He waited. He was breathing very hard. The only sound in the hallway. His breathing. Harsh, ragged. Those two holes in the door right at about the level of where his head had been. His heart was pounding, He waited. His mind raced with possibilities. He'd been set up. Come talk to my wife, mon, she bought herself a .22-caliber pistol, and she has threatened to shoot me with it. Come help me, mon. A woman named Gloria told me about you. You did a burglary for her. A fat lady. Set the cop up because he's been talking to a man who knows that a huge shipment of cocaine will be coming into the city nine days from now. Kill the cop here in Kingston Heights where life is cheap and where those holes in the door did not look as if they'd been drilled by a mere-


Bam, bam, bam, three more shots in rapid succession and more wood splintering out of the door, showering onto the air like shrapnel.


And Archibald's voice.


'You crazy, woman?'


Kling was on his feet.


He kicked at the door where the lock was fastened, followed the door into the room as it sprang open, gun fanning the room, eyes following the gun, eyes swinging with the gun to where a skinny woman the color of whole-wheat bread stood near the kitchen sink opposite the door. She was wearing only a pink slip. A substantial-looking piece was in her right hand, a thirty-eight at least, the hand sagging with the weight of it, and Dudley Archibald over there on Kling's left, five shots gone now, Archibald balancing on his feet like a boxer trying to decide which way to duck when the next punch came.


Kling wished he knew how many bullets were in that gun, but he didn't.


There were thirty-eights with five-shot capacities.


There were also thirty-eights with nine-shot capacities.


'Hey, Imogene,' he said softly.


The woman turned toward him. Gray-green eyes. Slitted. The big gun sinking in her tiny fist. The big gun shaking but pointed at his chest.


'Why don't you put down the gun?' he said.


'Kill the bastard,' she said.


'No, you don't want to do that,' Kling said. 'Come on. Let me have the gun, okay?'


Jesus, don't shoot me, he thought.


'I told you,' Archibald said.


'Just stay out of this,' Kling said. He did not turn to look at him. His eyes were on Imogene. His eyes were on her eyes.


'Put down the gun, okay?' he said.


'No.'


'Why not? You don't want to get yourself in trouble, do you?'


'I'm in trouble already,' she said.


'Nah, what trouble?' Kling said. 'Little family argument? Come on, don't make things worse than they are. Just let me have the gun, nobody's going to hurt you, okay?'


He was telling the truth.


But he was also lying.


He did not plan on hurting her. Not physically. Not he himself.


But neither he nor the police department were about to forget a lady with a gun. And the criminal justice system would hurt her. As sure as he was standing there trying to talk her out of firing that gun again.


'What do you say, Imogene?'


'Who tole you my name?'


'He did. Put the gun there on the table, okay? Come on, you're gonna hurt yourself with that thing.'


'I'm gonna hurt him,' she said, and swung the gun from Kling toward her husband.


'Hey, no!' Kling said at once.


The gun swung back again.


One of us is gonna get it, he thought.


'You're scaring hell out of me,' he said.


She looked at him.


'You really are. Are you gonna shoot me?'


'I'm gonna shoot him!' she said, and again the gun swung onto her husband.


'And then what? I'm a police officer, Imogene. If you shoot this man, I can't just let you walk out of this apartment. So you'll have to shoot me, too, am I right? Is that what you want to do? Shoot me?'


'No, but . . .'


'Then come on, let's quit this, okay? Just give me the gun, and . . .'


'No!'


She shouted the word.


It cracked into the apartment like another pistol shot. Archibald winced. So did Kling. He had the sudden feeling that his watch had stopped. The gun was pointed at him again. He was drenched in sweat. Nineteen degrees out there, he was covered with sweat.


He did not want to shoot this woman.


But if she turned that gun toward her husband again, he would make his move.


Please don't let me shoot you, he thought.


'Imogene,' he said, very softly.


The gun was trained on his chest. The gray-green eyes watching.


'Please don't let me hurt you,' he said.


Watching.


'Please put the gun down on the table.'


Watching, watching.


'Please, Imogene.'


He waited for what seemed forever.


First she nodded.


He waited.


She kept nodding.


Then she walked to the table, and looked down at the table top, and looked at the gun in her hand as if first discovering it, and then she nodded again, and looked at Kling, and put the gun on the table. He walked to the table slowly, picked up the gun, slipped it into his coat pocket, and said, 'Thank you.'


He was putting the handcuffs on her when Archibald, safe now, shouted, 'Bitch!'


* * * *


Kling made the phone call from the super's apartment downstairs.


People had gathered in the hallway. They all knew there'd been shooting on the fourth floor. Some of them seemed disappointed that no one had been killed. In a neighborhood where violence was commonplace, a shooting without a corpse was like scrambled eggs without onions. It would have been nice, in fact, if the cop had been killed. Not many people in this neighborhood liked cops. Some of the people in the hallway began jeering Kling as he led Imogene out.


At that moment, he didn't feel very good about himself, anyway. He was thinking that the system would wring Imogene out like a dirty dishcloth. Ninety-six pounds if she weighed a nickel, the system would destroy her. Not twenty minutes ago, all he'd been thinking about was his own skin. Heard shots, figured they were meant for him. Ambush for the big detective. A genuine family dispute erupting into a lady-with-a-gun situation, and all he could think at the time was that someone had set him up. Maybe he deserved to be jeered.


They came out of the building into the bitter cold.


Imogene in handcuffs.


Archibald on one side of her, looking penitent now that it was all over, Kling on the other side, holding her elbow, guiding her toward the patrol car atthe curb.


He did not notice a tall, thin black man standing in a doorway across the sheet.


The man was watching him.


The man was Lewis Randolph Hamilton.


* * * *


9


It was Fat Ollie Weeks who came up with the lead on Doctor Martin Proctor.


Fat Ollie was not an informer; he was a detective working out of the Eight-Three. Fat Ollie was not as fat as Fats Donner; hence Ollie's obesity was in the singular whereas Donner's was in the plural. The men did have two things in common, however: they were both very good listeners and nobody liked either one of them. Nobody liked Fats Donner because his sexual preferences ran to prepubescent girls. Nobody liked Fat Ollie because he was a bigot. Moreover, he was that rare sort of bigot who hated everyone.


The cops of the Eight-Seven still remembered Roger Havilland, who'd been an Ollie Weeks sort of person before he got thrown through a plate glass window to his final reward. No one - well, hardly anyone - wished such a dire fate would befall Ollie, but they did wish he would bathe every now and again. On a fair day with a brisk wind, you could smell Ollie clear across Grover Park.


On Monday morning, the sixteenth day of January, Ollie walked into the Eight-Seven's squadroom as if he owned the joint. Pushed his way familiarly through the slatted rail divider, his beer barrel belly preceding him as surely as did his stench, wearing only a sports jacket over his open-collared shirt, despite the frigid temperature outside. His cheeks were rosy red, and he was puffing like a man actively seeking a heart attack. He walked directly to where Carella was typing at his desk, clapped him on the shoulder, and said, 'Hey, Steve-a-rino, how you been?'


Carella winced.


'Hello, Ollie,' he said unenthusiastically.


'So you're looking for the Doctor, huh?' Ollie said, and put his finger to the side of his nose like a Mafia sage. 'You come to the right person.'


Carella hoped Ollie didn't mean what he thought Ollie meant.


'Martin Proctor,' Ollie said. 'Sounds like a Jew, don't he? The Martin, I mean. You ever heard of anybody named Martin who wasn't a Jew?'


'Yes, Martin Sheen,' Carella said.


'He's worse than a Jew,' Ollie said, 'he's a fuckin' Mexican. His son's name is Emilio Estevez, so where does he come off usin' an American name like Sheen? There was this bishop in New York, his name was Sheen, wasn't it? So who's this fuckin' Mexican using a Jewish first name and an Irish last name?'


Carella was suddenly sorry he'd brought it up.


But Ollie was just gathering steam.


'You get these fuckin' immigrants, they change their names so nobody can tell they're foreigners. Who do they think they're kiddin'? Guy writes a book, he's a fuckin' wop, he puts an American name on the book, everybody knows he's really a wop, anyway. Everybody says. You know what his real name is? His real name ain't Lance Bigelow, it's Luigi Mangiacavallo. Everybody knows this. Behind his back, they laugh at him. They say Good morning, Lance, how are you? Or Good evening, Mr Bigelow, your table is ready. But who's he kidding? They all know he's only a wop.'


'Like me,' Carella said.


'That's true,' Ollie said, 'but you're okay otherwise.'


Carella sighed.


'Anyway, you got me off the track with your fuckin' Martin Sheen,' Ollie said. 'You want what I got on Proctor, or you want to talk about Mexicans who put makeup on their faces to earn a living?'


Carella sighed again.


He did not for a moment doubt that Ollie Weeks had a line on Martin Proctor. But he did not want favors from Ollie. Favors had to be paid back. Favors owed to a bigot were double-edged favors. However good a cop Ollie Weeks was - and the sad truth was that he happened to be a very good cop - Carella did not want to owe him, did not want Ollie to come back later to say the note he'd signed was due. But a six-month-old baby and her sitter had been murdered.


'What've you got?' he asked.


'Ah yes, the man is interested,' Ollie said, doing his world-famous W. C. Fields imitation.


Carella looked at him.


'Very definitely interested, ah yes,' Ollie said, still doing Fields. 'Let us say for the sake of argument that there is a certain lady who frequents a bar, ah yes, in the Eighty-Third Precinct, which some of us mere mortals call home, ah yes. Let us further say that this lady has on occasion in the past dispensed certain favors and information to certain detectives in this fair city who have looked the other way while the lady was plying her trade, do I make my point, sir?'


Carella nodded.


Weeks was banging a hooker in the Eight-Three.


'What's her name?' He asked.


'Ah yes, her name. Which, may I say, sir, is none of your fucking business, ah yes.'


'Could you please drop the Fields imitation?' Carella said.


'You knew it was him, huh?' Ollie said, pleased. 'I also do Ronald Reagan.'


'Don't,' Carella said.


'I do Ronald Reagan after they cut off his legs.'


'What about this hooker?'


'Who said she was a hooker?'


'Gee, for some reason I thought she was a hooker.'


'Whatever she may be, let us say she got to talking the other night . . .'


'When?'


'Saturday night.'


'And?'


'And seeing as I am a law enforcement officer, and seeing as how we were sharing a few intimate moments together . . .'


'Get to it, Ollie.'


'The lady inquired as to whether I knew why the police were looking for Martin the Doctor. This was like a strange situation, Steve. Usually, I'm the one pumping her. But there we were . . .'


His sex life, no less, Carella thought.


'. . . both of us naked as niggers in the jungle, and she's the one tryin'a get information outa me. Can you see how peculiar that was?'


Carella waited.


But Ollie hadn't intended the question rhetorically.


'Do you see how peculiar that was?' he repeated.


'Yes,' Carella said. 'Very peculiar.'


'I mean, she is riding me bareback like a fuckin' Indian on a pony and she wants to know why the cops are lookin' for Proctor, who I don't know from a hole in the wall'


'So?'


'So I get outa bed afterward, and I go wipe my dick on the drapes . . . do you know that joke?'


'No.'


'It's what a Jewish guy does to get his wife excited after he comes. He wipes his dick on the drapes, you get it? To get his wife excited. Because Jewish girls . . .'


'I get it,' Carella said.


'I didn't really wipe my dick on the drapes,' Ollie said. 'I mean, I know I'm a fuckin' slob but I'm not that big a slob.'


'What did you use?' Carella asked. 'Your tie?'


'That's very funny,' Ollie said, but he didn't laugh. 'Anyway, while she's squatting over a basin rinsing herself out, she tells me this friend of hers is a friend of Proctor's, and he was wonderin' why the cops were snoopin' around Proctor's old address, lookin' for him. And if I knew anything about it, she would appreciate it if I would tell her, seeing as we were old friends and all. So she could pass the information on to her friend. Who I guess, but she didn't say, would then pass it on to Proctor, saving his ass from whatever terrible thing we had in mind for him, the cops. I told her I would sniff around.'


'So where is he?'


'Proctor? One thing at a time. Don't you want to hear what a brilliant detective I am?'


'No.'


'Okay, then I won't tell you how I went to this spic snitch named Francisco Palacios, who is also known as The Gaucho, or sometimes The Cowboy, and who runs a little store that sells in the front medicinal herbs, dream books, religious statues, numbers books, tarot cards and such, but in the back French ticklers, open-crotch panties, vibrators, dildoes, benwa balls and the like, not that this is against the law. I won't tell you how The Cowboy mentioned to me that another stoolie named Donner had been in asking about this very same Doctor Proctor who it seems the boys of the Eight-Seven have been inquiring about. I won't tell you how it occurs to me that perhaps it was somebody from up here who was nosing around 1146 Park Street, which was Proctor's last known address, who according to The Cowboy he has busted parole and is being very cautious, anyway. I will not tell you all this, Steve-arino,' Ollie said, and grinned.


'What will you tell me?'


'Not where Proctor is, 'cause I don't know.'


'Terrific,' Carella said. 'So what are you doing up here?'


'My friend? This lady I was telling you about?'


'Yeah?'


'I know her friend's name.'


* * * *


Eileen hadn't said a word for the past twenty minutes.


Just kept sitting there staring at Karin.


Karin hadn't said anything either.


It was a staring contest.


Eileen looked at her watch.


'Yes?' Karin said.


'Nothing.'


'You can leave whenever you want to,' Karin said. 'This isn't violin lessons.'


'I didn't think it was.'


'What I mean is . . .'


'Yes, I . . .'


'No one's forcing you to do this.'


'I'm here of my own free will, I know.'


'Exactly.'


'But that doesn't…'


Eileen caught herself, shook her head.


'Doesn't what?'


'Doesn't mean I don't know you're sitting there waiting to pounce on whatever I might say.'


'Is that what you think?'


Eileen said nothing.


'That I'm waiting to pounce on you?'


'That's your job, isn't it? To take whatever I say and make a federal case out of it?'


'I never thought of my job as . . .'


'Let's not get into your job, okay? The reason I'm here is I want to quit my job. And so far I haven't had any help in that direction.'


'Well, we've only seen each other . . .'


'So how long does it take to write a resignation letter?'


'Is that what you want me to help you with? A resignation letter?'


'You know what I . . .'


'But I don't know.'


'I want to quit, damn it! And I can't seem to do it.'


'Maybe you don't want to quit.'


'I do.'


'All right.'


'You know I do.'


'Yes, that's what you told me.'


'Yes. And it's true.'


'You want to quit because you killed a man.'


'Yes.'


'And you're afraid if you stay on the job . . .'


'I'll be forced into another situation, yes, where I'll have to use the gun again.'


'Have to fire the gun again.'


'Yes.'


'Kill again.'


'Yes.'


'You're afraid of that.'


'Yes.'


'What else are you afraid of?'


'What do you want me to say?'


'Whatever you're thinking. Whatever you're feeling.'


'I know what you'd like me to say.'


'And what's that?'


'I know exactly what you'd like me to say.'


"Tell me'


'You'd like me to say rape.'


'Uh-huh.'


'You'd like me to say I'm afraid of getting raped again . . .'


'Are you?'


' . . .that I want to quit before some son of a bitch rapes me again.'


'Is that how you feel?'


Eileen did not answer.


For the remaining five minutes of the hour, she sat there staring at Karin.


At last, Karin smiled and said, 'I'm sorry, our time is up. I'll see you on Thursday, okay?'


Eileen nodded, slung her shoulder bag, and went to the door. At the door, she hesitated with her hand on the knob. Then she turned and said, 'I am. Afraid of that, too.'


And turned again and went out.


* * * *


Sammy Pedicini was used to talking to cops. Whenever a burglary went down in this city, the cops paid Sammy a little visit, asked him all kinds of questions. Sammy always told them the same thing. Whatever it was they were investigating, it wasn't Sammy who did it. Sammy had taken a fall ten years ago, and now he was outside again, and he had learned his lesson.


'Whatever this is,' Sammy told Carella now, 'I didn't do it.'


Carella nodded.


'I learned my lesson up at Castleview, I been clean since.'


Meyer nodded, too.


'I play saxophone in a band called Larry Foster's Rhythm Kings,' Sammy said. 'We play for these sixty-year-old farts who were kids back in the Forties. They're very good dancers, those old farts. All the old Glenn Miller stuff, Harry James, Charlie Spivak, Claude Thornhill. We have all the arrangements. We get a lot of jobs, you'd be surprised. I learned how to play the sax in stir.'


'You must be pretty good at it,' Meyer said. 'To earn your living at it.'


'Which, if that's supposed to be sarcastic, happens to be true. I do earn my living playing saxophone.'


'Just what I said,' Meyer said.


'But what you meant is I'm still doing burglaries on the side. Which ain't true.'


'Did I say that?' Meyer asked. He turned to Carella. 'Steve, did I say that?'


'I didn't hear you say that,' Carella said. 'We're looking for Martin Proctor. Do you know where he is?'


'Is he a musician?' Sammy asked. 'What does he play?'


'The E-flat jimmy,' Meyer said.


'He's a burglar,' Carella said. 'Like you.'


'Me, I'm a saxophone player. What Proctor is, I don't know, because I don't know the man.'


'But your girlfriend knows him, doesn't she?'


'What girlfriend?'


'Your girlfriend who's a hooker and who was asking a detective we know why the police were snooping around Proctor's old address.'


'Gee, this is news to me. I'll tell you the truth, I wish my girlfriend was a hooker. Teach me a few tricks, huh?' Sammy said, and laughed. Nervously.


'Proctor did a job on New Year's Eve,' Carella said, 'in a building on Grover. Two murders were also done in that same building, the same night.'


Sammy let out a long, low whistle.


'Yeah,' Carella said.


'So where is he?' Meyer asked.


'If I don't know the man, how can I tell you where he is?'


'We're going to bust your girlfriend,' Carella said.


'What for?'


'For prostitution. We're going to get her name from this detective we know, and we're going to haul her ass off the street and ask her about Martin Proctor. And we'll keep busting her until . . .'


'Oh, you mean Martin Proctor. I thought you said Marvin Proctor.'


'Where?' Meyer said.


* * * *


Hamilton followed Kling from the station house on Grover Avenue to the subway station three blocks away, and then boarded the downtown train with him. Stood right at the man's elbow. Bertram A. Kling. Detective/ Third Grade. Isaac had got the information from the court records. Isaac was very good at gathering information. He was, however, somewhat dim when it came to comprehending the complexities of high-level business arrangements. Which was why Hamilton had not told him about the telephone call last month from Carlos Ortega in Miami. Or the necessity of employing a fool like José Herrera, who had turned out to be a fucking crook as well. Isaac would not have understood. But, giving the devil his due, he had done well on the cop. Bertram A. Kling. Who had testified at the arraignments of Herbert Trent, James Marshall, and Andrew Fields. Bertram A. Kling. Who did not know that the man standing next to him hanging on a subway strap was Lewis Randolph Hamilton, who would kill him the moment he could do it conveniently and vanish like smoke.


There were perhaps forty blacks on the subway car.


This was good for Hamilton.


Even if there were recent pictures of him in this city's police files -which he knew there were not - but even if there were, a while cop like Kling wouldn't have recognized him, anyway. Kling - with his blond hair and his peachfuzz appearance - looked like the kind of white cop who thought all black criminals looked alike. Only thing that was different on the mug shots was the numbers. Otherwise, they all looked like gorillas. He had heard too many white cops say this. Actually, it would give him great pleasure to kill Kling.


He liked killing people.


Blowing them away with the big mother Magnum.


He particularly liked killing cops.


He had killed two cops in LA. They were still looking for him out there. Black man with a beard. Gorilla with a beard. He didn't have a beard, anymore, he'd shaved in Houston before the posse took that big shipment coming up via Mexico. Wore his hair Rastafarian down there in Houston.


Hamilton hated cops.


Not even knowing Kling, he hated him. And would have enjoyed killing him even if Herrera hadn't told him a goddamn thing. Which was possible, after all, because how could Herrera have learned anything about the Tsu shipment coming up next Monday? When not even Isaac knew as yet.


Hamilton stood by Kling's side on the subway, a black man invisible among other black men, and smiled when he wondered how many people on this train even imagined that he and the big blond man were both wearing guns.


* * * *


Kling got off the train at Brogan Square, and came up out of the tunnel into a day that was still cold but beginning to turn a bit sunny. He had tailed Karin Lefkowitz first, to make an appointment with her, and now he hurried along High Street to her office in what used to be the Headquarters Building. Linked to the Criminal Courts Building by a third-floor passageway through which prisoners going to court could be moved, the old gray building looked like a Siamese twin to the one beside it. He came up the low flat steps out front, entered through the huge bronze doors, showed his identification to a uniformed cop sitting behind a desk in the marbled ground-floor corridor, and then took the elevator up to the fifth floor. A sign hand-lettered PSAS indicated by way of a pointing arrow that the office was to the right. He followed the corridor, spoiled another sign and yet a third one, and then found a door with a glass paneled top, lettered with the words Psychological Services and Aid Section.


He looked at his watch.


Five minutes to two.


He opened the door and went in.


There was a small waiting room. A closed door opposite the entrance door. Two easy chairs, a lamp, a coat rack with two coats on it, several kick-issues of People magazine. Kling hung up his coat, sat in one of the chairs and picked up a copy with Michael Jackson on the cover. In a few moments, a portly man with the telltale veined and bulbous nose of a heavy drinker came through the inner door, went to the rack, took his coat from it, and left without saying a word to Kling. He looked like a thousand sergeants Kling had known. A moment after that, a woman came through that same door.


'Detective Kling?' she said.


'Yes.'


He got to his feet.


'I'm Karin Lefkowitz. Won't you come in, please?'


Short brown hair, blue eyes. Wearing a gray dress, with pearls and Reeboks. Twenty-six or -seven, he guessed. Nice smile.


He followed her into her office. Same size as the waiting room. A wooden desk. A chair behind it. A chair in front of it. Several framed degrees on the wall. A framed picture of the police commissioner. Another framed picture of the mayor.


'Please,' she said, and indicated the chair in front of the desk.


Kling sat.


Karin went to the chair behind the desk.


'Your call surprised me,' she said. 'Did you know that Eileen was here this morning?'


'No.'


'I thought she may have . . .'


'No, she doesn't know I called. It was entirely my idea.'


'I see.'


She studied him. She looked like the kind of woman who should be wearing glasses. He wondered if she had contacts on. Her eyes looked so very blue. Sometimes contacts did that.


'What was it you wanted to discuss?' she said.


'Has Eileen told you that we've stopped seeing each other?'


'Yes.'


'And?'


'And what?'


'What do you think about it?'


'Mr Kling, before we go any further . . .'


'Confidentiality, I know. But this is different.'


'How?'


'I'm not asking you to divulge anything Eileen may have told you in confidence. I'm asking your opinion on . . .'


'Ah, I see. My opinion. But a very thin line, wouldn't you say?'


'No, I wouldn't. I want to know whether this . . . well, separation is the only thing I can call it ... whether you think it's a good idea.'


'And what if I told you that whatever is good for Eileen is a good idea?'


'Do you think this separation is good for Eileen?'


Karin smiled.


'Please,' she said.


'I'm not asking you to do anything behind Eileen's . . .'


'Oh? Aren't you?'


'Miss Lefkowitz ... I need your help.'


'Yes?'


'I ... I really want to be with Eileen. While she's going through this. I think that her wanting to ... to ... stay apart isn't natural. What I wish . . .'


'No.'


Kling looked at her.


'No, I will not advise her to resume your relationship unless that is what she herself wishes.'


'Miss Lefkowitz . . .'


'Period,' Karin said.


* * * *


Hamilton saw him coming down the steps of the old Headquarters Building, walking at a rapid clip like a man who was angry about something. Blond hair blowing in the sudden fierce wind. Hamilton hated this city. You never knew from one minute to the next in this city what was going to happen with the weather. The sun was shining very bright now, but the wind was too strong. Newspapers rattling along the curbs, people walking with their heads ducked, coattails flapping. He fell in behind Kling, no chance of a shot at him here in this crowded downtown area, courthouses everywhere around them, cops moving in and out of them like cockroaches, Christ, he was walking fast.


Hamilton hurried to keep up.


Where the hell was he going, anyway?


He'd already passed the entrance to the subway.


So where was he headed?


* * * *


The pocket park was an oasis of solitude and quiet here in the city that normally paid only lip service to such perquisites of civilization. Kling knew the park because on days when he'd had to testify in one case or another, he'd buy himself a sandwich in the deli on Jackson, and then come here on the lunch break. Sit on one of the benches, eat his sandwich in the sunshine, think about anything but a defense attorney wagging his finger and wanting to know if he'd really observed the letter of the law while making his arrest.


'The park was virtually deserted today.


Too windy for idlers, he guessed.


Set between two office buildings on Jackson, the space was a long rectangle with a brick wall at its far end. A thin fall of water cascaded over the top of this wall, washing down over the brick, even in the dead of winter; Kling guessed the water was heated. The park was dotted with trees, a dozen of them in all, with benches under them.


Only one of the benches was occupied as Kling came in off the street.


A woman reading a book.


The sounds of the streetside traffic suddenly vanished, to be replaced by the sound of the water gently running down the brick wall.


Kling took a seat on a bench facing the wall.


His back was to the park entrance.


In a little while, the woman looked at her watch, got up, and left.


* * * *


Hamilton couldn't believe it!


There he was, sitting alone in the park, his back to the entrance, no one in the place but Bertram A. Kling!


This was going to be too simple. He almost regretted the sheer simplicity of it. Walk up behind the man, put a bullet in the back of his head, gangland style. They might even think the Mafia had done it. This was delicious. He could not wait to tell Isaac about it.


He checked the street, eyes swinging right, then left.


And moved swiftly into the park.


The Magnum was in the right-hand pocket of his overcoat.


Patches of snow on the ground.


Water rolling down the brick wall at the far end.


The park silent otherwise.


Ten feet away from him now.


Careful, careful.


The gun came out of his pocket.


* * * *


Kling saw the shadow first.


Suddenly joining his own shadow on the ground in front of him.


He turned at once.


And saw the gun.


And threw himself headlong off the bench and onto the ground just as the first shot boomed onto the air, and rolled over, and reached in under his overcoat for the gun holstered on the left side of his belt, another shot, and sat upright with the gun in both hands and fired at once, three shots in succession at the tall black man in the long gray coat who was running out of the park.


Kling ran after him.


There were only three hundred and sixty-four black men on the street outside the park.


But none of them looked like the man who'd just tried to kill him.


* * * *


Martin Proctor had just come out of the shower and was drying himself when the knock sounded on his door.


He wrapped the towel around his waist, and went out into the living room.


'Who is it?' he asked.


'Police,' Meyer said. 'Want to open the door, please?'


Proctor did not want to open the door.


'Yeah, just a second,' he said. 'I just got out of the shower. Let me put on some clothes.'


He went into the bedroom, took a pair of undershorts from the top drawer, slipped them on, and then hastily put on a pair of blue corduroy trousers, a blue turtleneck sweater, a pair of blue woolen socks, and a pair of black, seventy-five-dollar French and Shriner shoes with some kind of synthetic soles that gripped like rubber.


From outside the apartment door, he heard the same cop asking, 'Mr Proctor? You going to open this door for us?'


'Yeah, I'll be with you in a minute,' he yelled and went to the closet and look from a hanger the eleven-hundred-dollar Ralph Lauren camel hair coat he had stolen on New Year's Eve, and then he went to his dresser and look from the same top drawer containing his undershorts and handkerchiefs a .22-caliber High Standard Sentinel Snub he had stolen last year sometime from a guy who also had a stamp collection, and then he yelled to the door, 'Just putting on my shoes, be there in a second,' and went out the window.


He came down the fire escape skillfully, not for nothing was he a deft burglar with the courage of a lion tamer and the dexterity of a high wire performer. There was no way he was going to have any kind of discussion with any representative of the law, not when he was looking at a renewed stretch in the slammer for breaking parole. So he came down those fire-escape ladders as fast as he knew how, which was damn fast, because he knew that the cop in the hallway would be kicking in the door if he hadn't already done it, and him and his partner, they always traveled in pairs, would be in that apartment in a flash, and the minute they went in the bedroom-


'Hello, Proctor,' the man said.


The man was looking up at him from the ground just below the first-floor fire escape. The man had a gun in one hand and a police shield in the other.


'Detective Carella,' he said.


Proctor almost reached for the gun in the pocket of the coat.


'Just lower the ladder and come on down,' Carella said.


'I didn't do anything,' Proctor said.


He was still debating whether he should go for the gun.


'Nobody said you did. Come on down.'


Proctor stood undecided.


'My partner's up there above you,' Carella said. 'You're sandwiched.'


Proctor's hand inched toward the coat pocket.


'If that's a gun in there,' Carella said, 'you're a dead man.'


Proctor suddenly agreed with him.


He lowered the ladder and came on down.


* * * *


10


The Q & A began in Lieutenant Byrnes's office that Monday evening at ten minutes past six. Present were the lieutenant, Detectives Carella and Meyer, Martin Proctor, a lawyer named Ralph Angelini who'd been requested by Proctor, and a stenographer from the Clerical Office, as backup to the tape recorder. The detectives did not know as yet whether Proctor had asked for a lawyer because he was facing a return trip to Castleview on the parole violation, or whether he knew that the subject about to be discussed was murder. Twice.


The lawyer was Proctor's very own and not someone supplied by Legal Aid.


A nice young man in his late twenties.


Carella knew that even thieves and murderers were entitled to legal representation. The thing he couldn't understand was why honest young men like Ralph Angelini chose to defend thieves and murderers.


For the tape, the lieutenant identified everyone present, and then advised Proctor of his rights under Miranda-Escobedo, elicited from him his name and present address, and turned the actual questioning over to his detectives.


Carella asked all of the questions.


Proctor and his lawyer took turns answering them.


It went like this:


Q:Mr Proctor, we have here a report from the . . .


A: Just a minute, please. May I ask up front what this is in reference to?


Q: Yes, Mr Angelini. It is in reference to a burglary committed on New Year's Eve in the apartment of Mr and Mrs Charles Unger at 967 Grover Avenue, here in Isola, sir.


A: Very well, go ahead.


Q: Thank you. Mr Proctor, we have here a report from the Detective Bureau's Latent Print Unit . . .


A: Your police department?


Q: Yes, Mr Angelini.

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