Money, Money, Money

Money, Money, Money

Ed McBain

1 .

THE TWO MEN ON THE NARROW DIRT STRIP were both wearing white cotton pants and shirts. They stood beside the Piper Warrior III in broad daylight, waiting for Cass to hand over the locked aluminum suitcase. She gave it to the larger of the two men, and watched as they walked to a dark blue Mercedes-Benz glistening in the sun alongside the cornfield. The doors on either side slammed shut into the stillness, and then there was only the sound of insects racketing in the scraggly woods nearby.

Today was Pearl Harbor Day, the seventh of December, though it didn’t much feel like it here in Guenerando, Mexico. Cass stood beside the airplane, sweating in the afternoon heat. She assumed there was money in the aluminum suitcase. She further assumed they were counting it over there in the Benz. She guessed that the cargo they’d be turning over in exchange for the money would be dope—either heroin or cocaine. She didn’t care much either way. She stood in the shade of a spindly eucalyptus for almost forty minutes. At last, the two men came out of the Benz and handed the aluminum suitcase back to her. The one with the mustache was grinning. He handed her a long white business envelope with a rubber band around it. The other one watched solemnly, expectantly.

“Open it,por favor,” the one with the mustache said.

She slipped the rubber band over her wrist, opened the envelope. There was a whole bunch of hundred-dollar bills in it.

“Count them,” the serious one said.

She counted them.

There seemed to be ten thousand dollars in that envelope.

“For me?” she asked.

“Para ti,”the one with the mustache said.

Damn if they weren’t tipping her!

“Well thanks,” she said.“Muchas gracias.”

“Muchas gracias,”the one with the mustache said, grinning.

“Muchas gracias,”the other one said. He was grinning now, too.

She couldn’t help grinning herself.

THE BABOQUIVARI MOUNTAINS STRETCHED northward to Kitt Peak. She flew low behind them. There was an anti-drug radar blimp in the sky over Fort Huachuca, but she had talked to other pilots who’d made the identical run dozens of times and who knew there was a so-called radar deficiency within plus-or-minus four degrees of the Kitt Peak Observatory. If she flew northward through “Gringo Pass,” as the security gap was called, she could avoid detection. Besides, she’d be on the ground again near Avra Valley in eighteen minutes, so even in the unlikely event that she did show up on radar, there wouldn’t be enough time for Customs planes to take off and chase her.

She didn’t even know the last name of the man who was paying her $200,000 to do this little job for him, a quarter of it already in a bank account back East, where she’d rented an apartment within ten minutes of laying her hands on all that cash. She’d first met him in Eagle Branch, Texas, after one of her whistle-stop hops. What she did was fly light machinery, chickens in crates, melons, computer parts, sandals, what have you, all over Mexico in single-engine planes that were new when Zapata was still a boy. She’d occasionally been dating a Texas Ranger named Randolph Biggs, who made frequent trips to the Rio Grande where he helped the border patrol dissuade wetbacks from entering the sacred shores Cass had gone to the Persian Gulf to preserve and protect. In a bar one night, he’d introduced her to this guy named Frank. Kind of cute, but no last name. Just Frank. Frank’s enough, he’d told her. She wondered now how much Randy had got for introducing him to a good pilot willing to take risks.

Instruments on the Warrior—such a mighty name for a single-engine light aircraft—were kindergarten compared to the Chinook helicopter Cass had flown during the Gulf War. Way they played it on television back home, everything was a surgical strike and nobody but the enemy suffered any casualties, which of course was a crock. More hardware up there in the Iraqi skies than she’d care to fly through ever again in her lifetime. Little different here in Arizona. Better pay, too.

She could see the lights of some quiet little desert town down below in the near distance. What’s a bad girl like you doing in a nice place like this? she wondered. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Man says fly four shipments for me from Texas to Mexico, I’ll give you fifty grand a trip, two hundred total, you tell him Mister, you’ve got a deal. This was the last of the four trips. Rented the Warrior in San Antone, nice little rig that handled like a dream. She’d drop the plane off at the Phoenix airport later tonight, as pre-arranged, hop a commercial liner back East, be snug in her own apartment long before Christmas.

There.

Just below.

The signal light.

She flashed her own wing lights, dipped in lower for a better look. When you came in low over Baghdad, it was to drop a smart bomb down Saddam Hussein’s chimney. Only trouble was they’d never got to him, ended the war too damn soon. Well, some you win, some you lose. She guessed.

She made a pass over the site, and then swung around for her actual approach into the wind. A car’s headlights came on, illuminating the strand of sand more fully. It was long and narrow. She watched the altimeter, pulled back on the flaps, leveled the pedals, glanced at the speedometer, this would be a piece of cake, douse your lights, boys, who needs them?

The strip here was level and flat, she felt the wheels touching, hit the brakes, lowered the flaps, and rolled along the beach to a full stop some twenty yards from where she’d seen the headlights. She cut the engine. The night was still. Immediately, she took the forty-five from the flap pocket of her jump suit.

She waited inside the cockpit, in the dark.

Kept waiting.

In the Gulf, she’d packed a forty-five automatic in a holster at her waist, case she got shot down, a distinct possibility. Lots of unfriendly people down there, waiting to get their hands on an American pilot, well, who could blame them? A female pilot, no less. Cassandra Jean Ridley, Lieutenant, U.S. Army, 714-56-32, that’s all she was obliged to tell them. Didn’t even have to say she was with the 101st Airborne. Here, she didn’t knowwho’d be waiting for her. But she knew she had a hundred and fifty thousand coming for delivering this last suitcase. Money like that, a girl couldn’t be too careful.

The rap on the window startled her.

She slid it back, right hand tight around the walnut grip of the Browning in her lap. She had to pee. First thing you did when you got back to base was rush to barracks to pee. The male pilots just unzipped and pissed right where they’d landed.

“Welcome to Arizona,” someone said.

Cheerful voice, the speaker nothing more than a blur in the dark. Two other men with him. She did not loosen her grip on the automatic. She was waiting for the single word that would tell her these were the people expecting the shipment. Buried any which way in whatever sentence they chose to use. But until she heard it, she sat right where she was with the gun in her hand and her finger inside the trigger guard.

“Nice night,” one of the men said.

Try again, sweetheart.

“Hasn’t been much rain.”

Rain.

Bingo.

“Who’s got my money?” she asked.

“Where’s the suitcase?”

She released the door lever, climbed out onto the wing, and dropped to the ground, the gun dangling lazily, familiarly at her side.

“You won’t need that,” one of the men said.

“Gee, I hope not,” she answered.

The desert air was a bit chilly. She wished she had on her flight jacket. One of the men was carrying a small leather case the size of a laptop. He placed it on the rim of the door, snapped it open. Another man turned on a penlight. She was looking at a lot of U.S. currency.

“A hundred and fifty thousand,” one of the men said. “Final payment. As agreed.”

“Where’s the suitcase?” another man said.

“Mind if I count it first?” Cass said.

“Why don’t we all just sit out here in the open till Customs spots us?” the third man said.

“Count it out for me,” Cass said.

“Count it out for her,” the first man said.

He was the one with the cheerful voice. He sounded a trifle impatient now, but she didn’t give a damnhow he sounded. One thing she’d learned in the Army was you didn’t back off. Not on the ground, not in the air. So far all the risk these guys had taken was to sit here in Shit Wallow, Arizona, waiting for her. She was the one carrying the cargo, she was the one whostill had the cargo sitting in a planeshe’d rented. So go right ahead, she thought,get impatient. That’smy money you’re treating so casually there.

The one who’d mentioned Customs slipped the thick rubber band from one of the packets and looped it over his wrist. There was a small tattoo on the back of his left hand. Some kind of bird, looked like a hawk, wings spread wide, claws gripping a fish. He spread the bills to show her there weren’t any pieces of newspaper cut to size in the bundle. Then he began counting them out loud, one by one, “… five, six, seven,” Cass holding the gun, watching, listening, “eight, nine, ten, a thousand. One, two, three, four …”

On and on. There were fifty bills in the packet, all of them hundred-dollar bills. When he counted out the last bill, he rubber-banded the stack again, and dropped it back into the leather case. There were thirty packets of bills in all, each of them about three-quarters of an inch thick. It took the man less than fifteen minutes to count them all out. He snapped the lid on the case shut, and handed it to the first man, who folded his arms across it and held it against his chest like a schoolgirl carrying books. She suddenly thought of Fall River, Massachusetts, where Lizzie Borden had got away with killing her father and her stepmother and where, coincidentally, Cassandra Jean Ridley had spent the first fifteen years of her life, my how the time did fly. What am I doinghere? she wondered.

“The suitcase,” he said.

Cass climbed back into the plane and pulled out the suitcase from where she’d stowed it. She carried it out again in her left hand, the gun in her right, still hanging loose. She was thinking they could shoot her dead the minute she dropped to the ground again, grab the suitcase full of dope, she was sure it was, ride off into the night with the dopeand the money they’d so patiently counted out for her.

It didn’t happen.

She revved up the engine again, the little leather case with $150,000 sitting on the seat beside her, another ten grand in the flap pocket of her jump suit. Tonight I’ll be back in the big bad city, she thought. Her heart was pounding as fiercely as it had over the sands of Iraq.

HANUKKAH WOULD START at sundown today, the twenty-first day of December. Will didn’t much care. He wasn’t even Jewish.

This was always the most dangerous time, going in. Well, comingoutwas no picnic, either, but then you could march right through the front door, say you’d been there to fix the toilet or the sink, nice day, ain’t it? Somebody saw you going in, though, that was another story. Specially when you were going in through a window on a fire escape, nowthat was a little difficult to explain.

He’d been watching the apartment from the roof across the way for the better part of a week now, knew when the lady came and went, even had an opportunity once to see her in the altogether, though inadvertently, he wasn’t no damn Peeping Tom. Redheaded as a cardinal, she was, carpet matching the drapes, a fair sight to behold and a rarity in this day and age. He always so-called cased a joint, he hated criminal jargon, for at least a week before he went in, sometimes two or three, because the one yearning he did not have was to spend any more time behind bars.

Lady was putting on a short red fox jacket now, which meant maybe there were more furs in there than he’d figured. Thing that had first attracted him to her when he was scopingall the apartments across the way was a sable coat came down to the floor, had to be worth fifty large at least. You could always tell a woman with a new fur coat, she pranced in front of the mirror with it all day long. He decided that going into the apartment for just the sable alone might be worth it, plus whatever other little goodies he might find in there. The building was on South Ealey Street in a section of Isola called Silvermine. It was a doorman building, which usually meant any other kind of security was lacking. The lady was heading for the front door now—

“There we go,” Will said out loud.

He still spoke with a Texas twang he should’ve lost after thirty-seven years on this planet, especially since he’d left the state when he was eighteen and never did go back except for his mother’s funeral. He was still a sophomore at UCLA when she died. He guessed maybe her death had something to do with him flunking out the very next year. Her dying so young and all. He sometimes wondered if his life might’ve turned out different if she hadn’t died and he hadn’t flunked out of college. He wondered if he’d’ve become a burglar, anyway. He guessed maybe he would’ve.

Will gave her ten minutes to get clear.

Then he jumped the airshaft to the roof of her building, and came down the fire escape to the ninth floor. He wasn’t expecting any kind of burglar alarm, and there wasn’t any. He jimmied the turnbolt lock on the window, and was inside the apartment in ten seconds flat. No need for a flashlight here in the living room at ten in the morning. Anyway, there was nothing to steal in this room but a TV set and a stereo and he wasn’t any junkie burglar, thank you. He went into the bedroom, went to the windows first to pull down the shades so nobody would look in and see a guy six feet tall at a buck-ninety roaming a bedroom where a lady lived alone. Only when the shades were down did he go to the wall switch and snap on the overhead lights. Bed nicely made, he surely did appreciate neat people. He yanked back the cover, stripped both pillows of their pillow cases, and then went to the closet. The door was closed. He opened it and found—well, oh my stars—not only the long sable coat but a mink stole as well, the lady reallyhad been on a shopping spree. Both were too bulky to fit inside the pillow cases, he tossed them on the bed for now, and went to the dresser.

Everything neatly laid out here, too, rolled nylons and pantyhose in one drawer, tank tops and cotton panties in another, T-shirts and sweaters, all precisely put away as if they were color-coded or something, he figured all at once that either the lady was a nurse or else she’d been in the military. In the top drawer, there was a jewelry box. He opened it. Nothing in it but a bunch of cheap costume jewelry and a long white business envelope with a rubber band around it. He slid the rubber band off, opened the envelope. What he was looking at was a whole big bunch of U.S. currency. He fished in his jacket pocket for his eyeglass case, slipped the glasses out of it, hung them on his nose and his ears, and looked into the envelope again.

The money in there was hundred-dollar bills.

HE DIDN’T STOP TO COUNT THEM till he was safe at home again in his apartment on South Twelfth Street, just off Stemmler Avenue. This was now close to twelve noon, and it had begun snowing outside. He sat in an easy chair under a lamp with a lamp shade that somehow had ketchup stains on it, and took the white envelope out of his jacket pocket, and then took the rubber band off the envelope again, and took out the bills and began counting them.

What it turned out to be was $8,500 in hundred-dollar bills.

Will hadn’t expected such a big haul, and the very idea of sitting alone here four days before Christmas, in an apartment even he admitted was dingy, seemed illogical for a suddenly wealthy individual. He took $500 from the stack of hundreds, put on his coat, and went out whistling.

IT WAS SNOWING QUITE HEAVILY by the time Cass got back to the apartment at two-thirty that afternoon. She went into the living room, tossed the red fox jacket over the arm of the sofa, turned on the Christmas tree lights, and then poured herself a Courvoisier on the rocks. Sitting alone in a chair by the window, she sipped the cognac and basked in the winking glow of the Christmas tree, thinking how lucky she was to have a nice apartment like this one in this wonderful city at this very special time of the year. She wondered what she might like to buy next. Or should she wait till after Christmas, when she could get everything on sale? Today was the twenty-first. Christmas wasn’t too far off.

She eased out of her pumps, $400 at Bruno Magli, stretched her legs, and suddenly realized just how tired she was. Rising, carrying the shoes in one hand and the brandy snifter in the other, she walked into the bedroom, snapped on the light switch, and almost spilled cognac all over her brand-new dress, $2,100 at Romeo Gigli. The closet door was open. She saw in a single eye swipe that the sable and the mink were gone. All the dresser drawers were open, too. Her envelope with what was left of the Mexican tip money was gone. She felt an immediate sense of violation, someone had been in here, someone had taken her things, gone through her private possessions, taken her goddamnthings! She felt as angry as she had when some twerps in Basic pissed in her footlocker, felt like rushing to the still-open window and screaming at the top of her lungs, “You goddamnthief!,”a lot of good that would do. Calming herself slightly, but only slightly, she checked the closet and the dresser more closely, trying to ascertain if he’d taken anything more than the obvious. It seemed that was it. Hadn’t bothered with the Angela Cummings bracelet she’d bought last week, all shiny and bright in its aqua blue box. Hadn’t been lured by the Hermès scarf, or the cashmere sweater, or the pre-Hellenic winged Eros pendant from an antiques shop on Jefferson, had satisfied himself merely—merely!—with the sable and the mink and what was $8,500 in cash the last time she’d counted it, the son of a bitch!

She actually pounded the dresser top in anger, pounded it again and again with her closed fist, screaming, “You mother-fucking son of a bitch bastard!,” obscenities she hadn’t used since the war, and then calmed down just a little bit and went to the phone and dialed 911.

WILL WAS TELLING THE BLONDE that he’d been born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, but that he hadn’t been back there in quite a while.

“What’s the Will for?” she asked. “William?”

“No, Wilbur,” he said.

“Wilbur Struthers?”

“Wilbur Struthers is what it is, ma’am.”

She almost burst out laughing. She didn’t. She even managed to keep herself from smiling, which he certainly appreciated. They were sitting in a booth in a bar called Flanagan’s, on Twenty-first and Culver. Will had first ordered a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, which the waiter didn’t know what it was, or care to know, it was that kind of bar. So he had asked Jasmine—that was her name—what she might prefer instead, and she had ordered a Harvey Wallbanger, and he had ordered a bourbon and water for himself, and they were now on their third drink each, with their knees touching under the table, and their heads very close together above the table. He figured if he played this one correctly, she would soon be in his bed back at the apartment.

He told her how he’d booked onto a tramp steamer after he quit college, headed for the Pacific Rim, found himself in Cambodia just about when the Khmer Rouge were rampaging there, got himself taken prisoner, and spent two years waiting for them to blow his brains out before he attempted a daring escape that landed him first in Manila and next in Singapore. Jasmine figured he was full of shit, but he had the tall rugged look of a cowboy, wearing a dark blue turtleneck that complemented the lighter blue of his eyes. Gray sports jacket, darker gray slacks. His hair a sort of sunwashed brown, rather than truly blond. Good strong face, good strong hands. Southern accent—or whatever it was—that didn’t hurt the Home-on-the-Range image. Too bad he’s a trick, she thought, although he hadn’t yet asked her how much this would cost him, or anything so crass as that, which she considered the sign of a true gent. She figured he’d get around to it sooner or later, but meanwhile she enjoyed listening to him tell her about the time a Khmer Rouge soldier put the barrel of a pistol in his mouth, which only happened to her every night of the week, more or less.

When it got time to pay for the drinks, Will handed the waiter a hundred-dollar bill, and then asked her if she’d made any other plans for the night. If she hadn’t, did she think she might enjoy accompanying him back to his place? Perhaps they could find a liquor store that sold Veuve Cliquot, a truly astonishing champagne, he told her, which they could drink while watching a movie on HBO. She still figured he was full of shit, but she thought this might be a good time to mention that she got five bills for the night, Around-the-World understood, of course.

Will blinked.

“I’m a working girl,” she said. “I thought you knew.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I surely didn’t.”

“So what do you think?”

“I never paid for a lady’s favors in my life,” Will said.

“Always a first time, cowboy. Teach you things you never dreamt of.”

“I dreamt most everything,” he said.

“Does that mean yes or no?”

“I guess it means no,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“No sorrier’n I am,” Jasmine said, and picked up her handbag and said, “Have a nice Christmas,” and threw her coat over her shoulders and went swiveling toward the front door, passing within a few feet of where the waiter was handing Will’s hundred-dollar bill to the cashier.

The cashier, a woman named Savina Girasole, held up the bill to the light to check the otherwise invisible polyester strip. The embedded security tape revealed itself at once, the upside downUSA 100 USA 100 USA 100 repeating itself over and over again down the left hand side of the bill. So it’s genuine, Savina thought. But there was something about the feel of it—well, not exactly thefeel, the paper certainlyfelt as reliable as any other U.S. bill. But …

Well … thelookof it.

The funny writing in ink across Franklin’s face, for one thing. Thesmellof it, too. It had a sort of sweet smell. Savina didn’t normally go around sniffing money that came in, but this bill really did have an odd aroma. Not like marijuana, nothing like that. More like some kind of cheap perfume. As if it had been between the breasts of some girl who bought her brassieres off downtown pushcarts.

The guy whose bill it was sat in the booth all alone now, nursing his drink as sad as could be. He looked like an all-American back yard barbecue champ, which didn’t mean he was above passing a phony hundred-dollar bill, which if it ended up in her cash register would cause Mr. O’Brien to fire her. Ronnie O’Brien was the owner of the place and not anybody named Flanagan, no matter what it said on the sign outside. Savina didn’t want to lose her job. So she picked up the phone resting alongside the credit card machine, and called the number she had Scotch-taped to the side of the cash register.

“ SO AS I UNDERSTAND THIS ,” one of the detectives was telling Cass, “all this guy took is two expensive furs, is that it?”

“Yes, that’s it,” Cass said.

She hadn’t mentioned the missing cash, and she didn’t intend to.

“One of them a full-length sable coat …”

“Yes, from Revillon.”

“How much would you say it’s worth, Miss?”

“Forty-five thousand dollars,” she said.

“And the mink stole? How much wasthat worth?”

“Six thousand.”

“Insured?”

“No.”

“You should insure things, Miss.”

“I intended to.”

“Your initials in either of them?”

“Both of them.”

“And what would those initials be?”

“CJR.”

“For?”

“Cassandra Jean Ridley.”

“Could you please spell Ridley for us?”

“R-I-D-L-E-Y,” she said. “What are the chances of getting them back?”

One of the detectives was redheaded. With a white streak in his hair. The other was short. She figured the chances were nil.

“We have a very good recovery record, don’t we, Hal?” the redheaded one said.

“Well, so-so,” the short one said, and smiled.

Which confirmed Cass’s doubts.

“We’ll let you know if we come up with anything,” the redheaded one said. “Here’s my card, I’ll write my beeper number on the back in case you think of anything else.” The card said he was Detective/Second Grade Cotton Hawes of the Eighty-seventh Detective Squad.

“Thank you,” Cass said, though she couldn’t imagine what else she might think of to call them about.

“We know just how you feel,” the short one said.

“Oops!” the redheaded one said, and stopped dead in his tracks and bent to pick up a black eyeglass case on the floor near the dresser. “Almost stepped on them,” he said.

Cass did not wear eyeglasses.

“Thank you,” she said at once, and took the case.

“Have a nice Christmas,” the short one said.

“You, too,” Cass said.

She led them to the door, and locked it behind them. The minute they were gone, she looked at the name and address imprinted on the case in barely legible gold letters:

Eyewear Fashions, Inc. 1137 Stemmler Avenue (corner of 22nd Street)

Cass went to the closet for her red fox jacket.

THE KNOCK ON THE DOOR came at a little past four that afternoon. Will went to the door and said, “Yes?”

“Secret Service,” a voice said. “Mind opening the door for us?”

Secretwhat?Will thought.

“Say again?” he said.

“Special Agent David A. Horne,” the voice said. “Few questions I’d like to ask you, sir. Routine matter.”

Which to Will meant he ought to go out the window this very minute. Trouble was, there was no fire escape outside the window.

“Just a minute, let me put something on,” he said, even though he was fully clothed. In the next thirty seconds, he debated whether he should go hide the stolen hundred-dollar bills in the toilet tank or the freezer compartment of the fridge, both of which places would be searched at once if this was related to the burglary he’d committed on South Ealey. He decided to play it cool.

“Just a minute,” he said again, and went to the door and opened it.

The man standing there was tall and thin and blue-jowled, wearing a neon blue parka and a woolen hat with ear flaps. “Special Agent David A. Horne,” he said again, “with an ‘e,’” and opened a little leather case to show a gold star that looked like the ones the Texas Rangers carried back home. Will tried to think if there were any outstanding warrants on him back home. He couldn’t think of a single one.

“Good evening,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“It’s still afternoon,” Horne corrected. “Is your name Wilbur Struthers?”

“It is.”

“Ask me in,” Horne said, and smiled.

“Sure, come on in,” Will said.

He was somewhat frightened now, but he spoke calmly and politely because it was always best to be polite to policemen. Even back home in Texas, Will spoke politely to policemen, whose long suit was definitely not courtesy. But Horne was a Secret Service agent with considerably more sophistication, he hoped. He stepped into the room now, looking around as if there might be an accomplice or two lurking about.

“You were in Flanagan’s earlier today,” Horne said. It was not a question.

“That’s right,” Will said.

The hooker, he thought at once. Something happened to the hooker, so now the Secret Service is here to question me about her. He hoped it was nothing serious. He hoped nobody had killed her or raped her.

“You had some drinks there,” Horne said.

“I did.”

Had she been poisoned?

“You paid for them with a hundred-dollar bill,” Horne said.“This bill,” he said, and removed from the inside pocket of the bulky blue parka a narrow folder that looked like the kind you put money in for a Christmas gift to your mailman or your doorman, except that it had a gold star embossed on the front of it. Horne opened the folder and took a hundred-dollar bill from it. “Recognize it?” he asked, and handed it to Will.

“All hundred-dollar bills look alike to me,” he said.

“Where’d you getthis hundred-dollar bill?” Horne asked.

“I won it in a crap game,” Will said.

“Won a hundred dollars in a crap game.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Where? What crap game?”

“Pickup game on Laramie,” he said.

“Where on Laramie?”

“Don’t recall the address,” he said.

Two different agendas here, he was thinking. Man here wants to know all about this hundred-dollar bill, I want to make sure he don’t find out I stole it.

“This all you won in the crap game?”

“Just the hundred, that’s all.”

“Went out to spend it, is that right?”

“That’s right.”

Listen, he thought, why the fuck are you asking all these questions?

But knew better than to say.

Two different agendas here.

“I talked to a girl named Jasmine before I came up here,” Horne said.

“Oh?”

“Got your name from her.”

“So?”

“Ran a computer check.”

Will said nothing.

“Seems you ran into a little trouble here in this city, is that right, Wilbur?”

“It’s Will, by the way.”

“Sorry, I didn’t know that, Will.”

“That’s okay,” Will said.

He was thinking it still didn’t take the curse off the oldest cop trick in the world, calling a suspected perp by his first name, which reduced him to the status of a menial. What this was here wasWill andMr. David Horne.

“Burglarized a gas station seven years ago, did time for the deed up at Castleview. That the only burglary you ever committed, Will?”

“The one and only,” Will lied.

“That’s commendable,” Horne said. “But nonetheless, on the basis of this hundred-dollar bill here, I was able to obtain a search warrant.”

“A what?”

“I believe you heard me,” Horne said, and handed Will a court order with a judge’s signature and all on the bottom of it, authorizing a search of this very apartment for monies paid as ransom …

“Ransom?” Will said.

“Ransom in a kidnapping, is what it says.Ransom money, Will.”

“That’s not my bill,” Will said at once. “I told you. I won it in a crap game.”

“Well, that’s good, Will, because the serial numbers on this bill match the serial numbers on one of the bills paid as ransom in a kidnapping case we’re investigating. Do you understand the implications of that?”

“I’m not a kidnapper,” Will said.

“That’s good, too, Will, because I have a search warrant to look for anyother bills that may have been part of the ransom payment,” Horne said, and took off the blue parka to reveal a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a red tie. The suit jacket was taut over bulging pectorals and broad shoulders. The man was a fitness freak. He took off the hat with the ear flaps, revealing a head of very black, very thick hair.

“Is it the President?” Will asked.

“Is what the President?”

“Who got kidnapped?”

“I have to warn you not to say anything that might prove incriminating,” Horne said.

Oh, Jesus, it’s the President, Will thought. Because if itwasn’t the President, then what was the Secret Service doing in this? It was theFBIwho investigated kidnappings, wasn’t it? All the Secret Service did was protect the President of the United States. And his family. So it had to be somebody in the White House who’d got kidnapped.

Horne was moving over to the closet now, where the bills sat in a shoe box on the shelf over the hanging sable coat and mink stole, both of which Will had also stolen. I can run right this minute, he thought, go visit my cousin Earl living in Fort Worth with a girl used to be Miss Texas in the Miss America contest, came within a curly blond crotch hair of winning it. Spend a few weeks down there till this whole kidnapping thing blew over, which he hadn’t done anyway,damn it! All he’d done was burglarize a fucking apartment!

“Well, well, what have we here?” Horne said.

He was looking in at the sable coat and the mink stole.

“Your search warrant says you’re supposed to look for money,” Will said.

“These are in plain view,” Horne said.

“In plain view” was an expression the police used when they appropriated something without benefit of a search warrant.

“They’re my girlfriend’s,” Will said.

“What’s her name?”

“Jasmine. Who you talked to.”

“She told us you only just met,” Horne said.

“Well, that’s true.”

“And she left her furs here?”

“She trusts me.”

Horne gave him a look. But he didn’t pursue the matter of the furs any further, perhaps because his mind was on the President’s kidnapping, who it had to be, or else someone in his family, otherwise why the Secret Service? I ought to run for it right this minute, Will thought. Horne was reaching for a shoe box on the shelf. Run for it or not? Will thought. Horne took down the box. Which? Horne took the lid off the box and looked into it. He reached in for a white envelope with a rubber band around it. He took the rubber band off the envelope. He opened the envelope.

“Well, well,” he said again.

“That’s not plain view,” Will said.

“Now it is,” Horne said, and fanned the bills. “Where’d you getthese little mothers?”

“Same crap game,” Will said.

Horne began counting.

“This is a lot of money here,” he said.

“Yeah, it was a big crap game.”

“Looks like five, six thousand dollars here.”

“More like eight,” Will said.

“You won eight thousand dollars in a crap game?”

“I got lucky.”

“Who was in this game?”

“Bunch of guys I never saw in my life.”

“So let me get this straight, Will,” Horne said. “You’re asking me to believe that one or more of the men in this crap game of yourscould have been the kidnappers to whom these bills were paid as ransom, is that it?”

“I guess that’s it,” Will said.

He knew he was already in the toilet. He knew Horne would yank out a gun and a pair of handcuffs in the next minute. He’d be spending Christmas Day in jail for a goddamn kidnapping he didn’t do.

“Listen,” he said, “you really do have the wrong person here.”

“Maybe so,” Horne said, and gave him a long, hard look.

Will’s hands were shaking. He put them in his pockets so Horne wouldn’t see. He hated himself for being so goddamn scared here, but he couldn’t help it. A kidnapping was serious stuff.

“Tell you what,” Horne said.

Will waited.

“What I think I should do is confiscate this money here,” Horne said. “Give you a receipt for it, check the serial numbers downtown, get back to you later today.”

Sure, Will thought.

Secret Service or not, every cop in the world was identical to every other cop, and they were all fuckin crooks. Next thing you knew, eight thousand bucks would find its way into a fund for the widows of Secret Service men who had died in the line of duty. Only thing he didn’t understand was why Horne was granting a possible kidnapper the opportunity to flee. He watched as the man meticulously copied the serial numbers on all the bills, signed the sheet of paper with the numbers on it, and handed it to Will. He looked for his parka, found it where he’d draped it over one of the chairs, and put it on.

“I don’t have to warn you not to leave the city,” he said.

“Not while you’ve got all my money,” Will said.

“See you later,” Horne said, and put on the hat with the ear flaps, and walked out of the apartment.

It was twenty minutes to five.

So what do I do now? Will wondered.

Hell, I’m an innocent man here!

Except for the burglary.

But Horne hadn’t been interested in any burglary, Horne didn’t even know any burglary hadhappened. Horne had been interested only in the hundred-dollar bills that had maybe or maybe not been paid as ransom in a kidnapping case he was investigating—but how come the Secret Service? Anyway, that was the entire scope of Special Agent David A. Horne’s interest. The money. Check the serial numbers. If they match, come fetch old Wilbur here.

But let’s say the serial numbers donot match. I mean, out of all the millions of apartments in New York City, what are the odds on my breaking into the only one that happens to be the apartment of a redhead who’d done a kidnapping and stashed the ransom money there? What are the odds on that kind of thing happening? I mean,really. A thousand to one? A million to one? I’ll take odds like that on a horse any day of the week.

So the odds have got to be in my favor, right? The serial numbers will not match, Horne will come back with my money, I’ll sign off on the receipt, and he’ll apologize for having taken so much of my time.

I hope, he thought.

AT FIVE MINUTES TO SIX that Thursday evening, Cass walked into Eyewear Fashions, Inc. on Stemmler Avenue and Twenty-second Street. The evening was clear and cold. Pinprick points of stars dotted a black sky, and the streets and sidewalks glistened with fresh snow, but Cass did not have a white Christmas on her mind. All she wanted to do was find the man who’d taken her money and her mink stole and her long sable coat, which should have been keeping her toasty warm on this frighteningly cold day. She’d been a cold puppy all her life, and the first thing she’d purchased from the money she’d earned on the Mexico job was the sable. Hell with people who went around in the nude protesting the wearing of furs. Anyone ever tried to spray paint on her furs was somebody who’d better already own a funeral plot.

Instead of the stolen sable, she was wearing the short red fox jacket over blue jeans and a green turtleneck sweater, freezing her ass off nonetheless. One of the reasons she’d left Fall River, Massachusetts, was that it had been so damn cold up there. That and her father shouting hell and damnation at her day and night. Her mother was a mathematics teacher. Cass guessed she thought it made sense to marry a Presbyterian minister and then present him with two daughters, one of whom grew up to be a holy person like Papa. The second and youngest, Cassandra Jean Ridley herself, fed up to here, ran away from home instead. Went to live on a commune in New Hampshire, which was even colder than it was here on this street corner in Isola. Left there when the group’s youth advisor came into her room naked one midnight clear, determined to read to her out loud a short story fromHustler magazine. Cass clobbered him with a frying pan.

“Hi,” she said to the man behind the counter, “my name is Harriet Daniels,” which was the name of the woman who’d run the rooming house she’d lived in down in Eagle Branch, Texas. “I found an eyeglass case with your store name on it, and I was wondering if you could help me locate the owner of the glasses.”

“Well, gee, I don’t know,” the man said.

“You are?” she asked.

“Wesley Hand,” he said.

He was perhaps twenty-eight or twenty-nine, a round little man with moist blue eyes and a pleasant looking face except for the complexion. He looked sincerely concerned about the eyeglass case she now put on the counter top. He also looked bewildered. She guessed that was his natural expression.

“Is there some way you could do that for me?” she asked. “Help me locate the owner?”

“That might be difficult,” he said. “Except for some very special prescriptions, most eyeglasses …”

“Isn’t there some machine or something you can put them on?” she asked. “To see what the prescription is?”

“Well, sure, but …”

“Because maybe it’s one of thespecial ones, you see.”

“Well …”

“I would appreciate it,” she said, and flashed what she hoped was a warm and convincing smile.

“I close at six,” he said, and glanced up at the clock.

“Well, how long would it take …?”

“And I have to be someplace.”

“The thing is, I found them earlier today,” she said. “So chances are he’ll be missing them by now.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So could you put these on your machine and see if …?”

“Not now,” he said. He was already moving around the counter toward a small closet on the side of the shop. “Call me tomorrow morning,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said. He was putting on his coat. “I appreciate it,” she said, and smiled sweetly.

You prick, she thought.

HORNE CAME BACK to see Will at ten-thirty that night. He came unannounced, and when he pressed the buzzer downstairs to say he was there, Will was enormously surprised. He’d never expected to see those hundred-dollar bills again. Tonight, Horne was wearing a blue car coat with a faux fur collar, wide wale, dark brown corduroy trousers, and a brown fedora. By comparison to this afternoon, he looked positively dapper.

“Will, I must apologize,” he said.

“Why’s that?” Will asked.

“These arenot the ransom bills.”

“I didn’t think they were,” Will said, but he was tremendously relieved nonetheless.

“We checked the serial numbers, and except for that one bill they simply didn’t match. So … I’m sorry for whatever inconvenience the Department may have caused you …”

“What department is that, by the way?”

“Why, the Treasury Department,” Horne said, looking surprised. “The U.S. Secret Service is part of the Treasury Department.”

“I didn’t know that,” Will said.

“Not many people do,” Horne said. “So if you’ll just let me have that receipt I gave you earlier today …”

“Okay,” Will said, and fished in his wallet for it.

Horne carried the receipt to the kitchen table, sat, removed from his briefcase a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills, and handed them to Will.

“If you’ll just count these,” he said.

“I’m sure I can trust the Treasury Department,” Will said.

“Even so,” Horne said, “I’d feel safer if you counted them.”

Will sat across from him at the kitchen table, and began counting the bills. Horne took out his pen and drew a straight line under the list of serial numbers on the receipt. Just below the line, he wrote the wordsReceipt of $8,000 acknowledged in full. It took maybe a minute and a half for Will to count all eighty bills. They were all there.

“If you’ll just sign this,” Horne said, and handed him the pen, and passed the receipt across the table to him. Will signed his name to it. Horne folded the receipt and put it into his briefcase.

“Mr. Struthers,” he said, and extended his hand. “Please keep your nose clean.”

“You, too, David,” Will said, and opened the door for him. Horne stepped out into the hallway. Will closed and locked the door behind him. He listened at the wood until he could no longer hear Horne’s footfalls in the hallway or on the steps. Then he whirled away from the door, grinning, and slapped his hand on his thigh and shouted, “Will Struthers, you are one lucky son of a bitch!”

CASS’S PHONE RANG at precisely two minutes past ten on Friday morning. Today was the first full day of Hanukkah, the twenty-second of December, three days before Christmas. The man calling was Wesley Hand.

“The optician?” he said.

“Yes, Mr. Hand?”

“I checked the glasses …”

“And?” she said at once.

“As I told you, most prescriptions fall into routine categories,” he said, “what we call plus-one biopters, absolutely commonplace. That was the case here. But I remembered the frames. He insisted on the mocha brown frames, even though I said they wouldn’t go well with his coloring.”

“Whatwashis coloring?” Cass asked.

“Dirty blond hair, blue eyes, the mocha brown frames were all wrong. He’d have done much better with the midnight blue.”

“But he insisted on the brown.”

“Yes.”

“Which is how you remembered him.”

“Yes.”

“What was his name?” she asked at once.

“I have it right here,” he said. “It’s Wilbur Struthers.”

“Do you have an address for him?”

“I do,” Wesley said. “Are you sure it’s okay for me to give this to you?”

“Oh, yes, I’m positive. May I have it, please?”

“Well …”

“Please?” she said.

“Well,” he said again, and read off the address like a prisoner of war revealing under torture the location of an infantry division.

“I can’t thank you enough,” Cass said.

“YES?” a man’s voice said.

“Delivery,” she said.

“What kind of delivery?”

“Pair of eyeglasses,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m from Eyewear Fashions. Somebody found your glasses, brought them in this morning. Did you want me to bring them up?”

“Thank you, yes, come on up. Hey, terrific. It’s 2C, on the second floor.”

The buzzer sounded. Cass opened the entry door at once and felt in her tote bag for the reassuring grip of the Browning automatic. No elevator, of course. She climbed the steps to the second floor and yanked the gun out of the bag as she came down the corridor. She used the muzzle to tap gently on the door to 2C.

When Will opened the door, he saw the redheaded woman whose apartment he’d ripped off. Moreover, she was holding in her fist what appeared to be a .45 automatic. He tried to slam the door shut on her, but she hit it with her shoulder at once, shoving it in against him, almost knocking him off his feet, he hadn’t realized she was that strong. She was in the apartment in a wink, slamming the door behind her, and whirling on him with the automatic pointed at his head.

“Where’s my money?” she asked.

“Don’t get excited,” he said.

“My money,” she said. “My furs,” she said. “You’re a thief,” she said. She kept using the gun for punctuation, which made Will believe she was somewhat unstable and therefore capable of hysterically pulling the trigger.

“Don’t get excited,” he said again. “Everything’s here, all of it’s here, no need to go waving the gun around like that.”

She was maybe five-eight, five-nine, taller than she’d looked from the rooftop across the way, a tall good-looking redhead wearing a red fox jacket open over blue jeans and a bulky green turtleneck sweater that made her look like Christmas although it was still three days away.

“Get it,” she said.

“Would you mind putting up the gun?” he said. “Makes me nervous, you standing there with a gun in your hand.”

“Get my stuff,” she said.

“Right away,” he said.

“You fuckingcrook,” she said.

He wanted to tell her that a Khmer Rouge soldier had once pistol-whipped him with a weapon just like the one in her hand, but instead he went to the closet and took from it the long sable coat and the mink stole, and carried them to where she was standing alongside the sofa, the gun still in her hand, and dumped them onto the cushions, and then went back to the closet to take down from the shelf the shoe box containing what he’d last counted out for Horne as $8,000 dollars in hundred-dollar bills. He was hoping she knew how to handle that big gun in her fist because he sure didn’t want to get hurt here.

“Take off the lid,” she said, and waved the gun again.

“It’s all here, I just counted it last night.”

“That what you do in your spare time, you crook? Count other people’s money?”

“I’ll be happy to count it for you now,” he said, taking the rubber-banded white envelope from the box. “Or you might want to put down the gun and do it yourself.”

“You count it,” she said.

He removed the rubber band, took the bills from the envelope, began counting the money for the second time in as many days, a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred, eight hundred, nine hundred, a thous …

“Stop!” she said.

“What?” he said.

“Hold it right there!”

“Why? What …?”

“That isn’t my money,” she said.

“What do you …?”

“That isnot my money! What are you trying to pull here?”

“Ma’am, I can assure you …”

“That isnot my money! My money had funny marks on it. And it smelled sweet.”

“Lady,all money smells sweet.”

“Where are the marks?”

“What marks?”

“The writing, the funny writing!” She picked up a handful of bills, spread them open like a fan. “Do you see any writing on these bills? These bills are clean! Smell them! Do you smell anything sweet?”

“No, ma’am, but …”

“What did you do with my money?”

“Thisisyour money.”

“It isnot my money! What’d you do with my money?”

“Lady, I’m telling you for the last time, thisis your money. Inyour envelope. They even gave me a receipt with the serial numbers on it. I had to sign it to …”

“What do you mean? Who?”

“To get the money back. I had to sign the receipt.”

“Get itback? Where was it?”

“At the Department.”

“What department? What are youtalking about?”

“The Treasury Department. A Secret Service agent took the money to check the serial numbers.”

Oh Jesus, she thought. Those Mexicans tipped me with hot money. Slowly, trying not to lose control, reminding herself that she had been in worse situations than this—she had once flown a Chinook helicopter over a desert blooming with black shrapnel, she had flown through horrific firestorms from below and had not lost it, she was not going to lose it now—slowly, carefully, she asked, “Why did they want to check the serial numbers?”

“Don’t worry, they didn’t match,” he said.

“But why did they want to check them?”

“They thought they were ransom bills.”

Calm, she thought. Stay calm. Just hear him out. Just try to get to the bottom of this.

“What ransom?” she asked calmly.

“There was a kidnapping,” he said. “The ransom was paid in hundred-dollar bills. They thought these might be the bills.”

“What made them think that?” she asked evenly, calmly.

“Because the serial numbers on a bill I cashed …”

“You cashedmy money?”

“Just that one bill. I didn’t spend any more than that. And the serial numbers on itdid match.”

Don’t shoot him, she thought. Just remain extremely calm.

“Did matchwhat?” she asked.

“Did match the numbers on one of the ransom bills.”

“A bill the Secret Service was looking for.”

“Yes.”

“Why the Secret Service?”

“I don’t know.”

“And you say they took therest of the money …”

“Yes. To check the serial numbers. Which didnot match. So they brought all of it back.”

“Brought backthis money here on the table.”

“Yes. Your money. In your very envelope. Right there on the table.”

She stood there nodding, looking down at the money, trying to make some sense of everything he’d told her. Then she said, “This is not my money.”

Will wished she would stop repeating the same words over and over again when her goddamn money was sitting right there on the kitchen table, in plain view for the entire world to see. Why wouldn’t she just let himcount it, for Christ’s sake, and then get out of here with her goddamn furs and her gun?

“Ma’am,” he said, “I am telling you for the last time that this is your money that the Treasury Department returned to me. I gave them a signed receipt with all the serial numbers on it, stating that the money was all here because I counted it last night and there was indeed eight thousand dollars here. Now if you’ll let me count it for you now, ma’am, I’m sure it will come to eight thousand dollars all over again because nobody has touched a cent of it since Mr. David A. Horne, with an ‘e,’ left here.”

“I’ll let you count it for me,” she said. “But it isn’t my money.”

Goddamn broken record, he thought, and began counting all over again. She kept watching the bills as he passed them from one hand to the other, counting, “twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three …” shaking her head as if trying to dope out the great mystery of what had happened here, when it was all so simple a caterpillar could grasp it, “thirty-four, thirty-five” and on and on, money, money, money, “fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty,” if he had to count these damn bills one more time, “seventy-one, seventy-two …” and at last he counted the eightieth and last bill, and looked up at her and said, “Satisfied?”

She did not answer him. She rubber-banded the bills again, and dropped the wad into her tote, leaving the white envelope on the table. Then she took off the red fox, put on the sable, draped the fox and the mink over her arm …

“Would you like something to carry those in?” he asked.

She looked at him.

“Little bulky that way,” he said. “Let me see if I’ve got anything.”

Not trusting him for a minute, she followed him into a bedroom with an unmade bed and what looked like a week’s laundry strewn all over the floor. He opened a closet door, rummaged around inside there, and came up with a duffel that looked like the one she’d carried in the Army, except her name and rank weren’t stenciled in black on the side.

“Thanks,” she said, and folded her furs into the bag, first the fox jacket and then the mink stole. Pulling the drawstrings tight through the grommets, she wondered if she should offer to pay for the duffel, and then asked herself if she was losing her mind, the man here was a thief who’d caused her a great deal of unnecessary trouble. She slung the duffel over her shoulder, backed toward the front door with the gun still in her hand, and without saying another word, walked out.

Will still considered himself lucky.

She’d forgotten to ask for the four hundred dollars and change he still had left over from the five he’d borrowed yesterday.

SHE STOPPED AT A BANK ostensibly to change three of the hundreds into twenties, tens, and fives, but actually to test the bills. She was still wondering why a Secret Service agent had exchanged her own world-weary hundreds for these obviously used but relatively fresh ones, and she was relieved when the teller held them up to the light to check the security strip, and then changed them without raising either an eyebrow or a fuss. It was close to three when she came out of the bank but yesterday had been the shortest day of the year, and with the heavy clouds overhead, the afternoon seemed already succumbing to dusk. The day was still piercingly cold. She was grateful for the sable, luxuriating in its long silken swirl, feeling like a Russian empress all at once, $8,000 in cash in her handbag, the city all aglitter for Christmas, what more could a person wish for?

How about caviar and champagne? she thought.

THE TWO MEN WERE SITTING in their overcoats, one on either side of the Christmas tree in her living room. They popped out of the dusky gloom the moment she turned on the lights. The larger of the two men had a gun in his hand and it was pointing up at Cass’s head.

“Buenas noches,”he said and smiled. “We are here for dee money.”

She thought at once that it was really shitty of Wilbur Struthers to recruit two Latino goons to reclaim the money he’d stolen from her in the first place, the son of a bitch. But here they were, both of them smiling now, somewhat apologetically it seemed to her, but perhaps she was mistaken. She put down the brown paper bag with the caviar she’d bought at Hildy’s Market and the Dom Perignon she’d bought in the liquor store on Twenty-sixth Street.

“What money?” she said.

“One million seven hun’red t’ousan dollars,” the one on the other side of the tree said.

“I think you’re in the wrong apartment,” she said.

“I don’t theenk so,” the first one said.

Very heavy Spanish accents on both of them, something suddenly clicked. The men on the narrow dirt strip in Guenerando, Mexico, except that earlier this month they’d been wearing baggy white cotton pants and wrinkled shirts.

“I don’t know what money you’re talking about,” she said.

“Dee money we paid you for a hun’red kilos of pure cocaine,” the one with the gun said.

“I don’t want to know anything about that cargo,” she said.

“You delivered the money, we gave you dee fockin cocaine …”

“I didn’t know what the cargo was. I don’t know anything about the money, either. All I did was hand it over.”

“We know that.”

“We know you were only dee messenger.”

“We want to know whogave you dee money.”

“I don’t know his name. Look, if the money was short, I’m sorry. You should have counted it more carefully. Anyway …”

“We did coun’ it carefully.”

“It took us a fockinhour to coun’ it.”

“We counted itvery carefully.”

“Dee moneywassen short,” the one with the gun said. “Who gave it to you?”

“I told you, I don’t …”

“His name,por favor .”

The gun was in her face now.

“He called himself Frank. But I’m sure that wasn’t his real name.”

“Frank what?”

“All he gave me was Frank.”

“Where wass this?”

“I was living in Eagle Branch at the time. He was introduced to me by someone I know.”

“Andhisname? The one who introduce you?”

“I don’t want to get anyone in trouble. If the money was short …”

“Dee moneywassen short.”

The gun in her face again.

“Then why …?”

“We delivered quality cocaine. We expected …”

“I don’t want to know about it.”

“Wherewassthis in Eagle Branch?”

“A bar.”

“Tell us his name. The one who introduce you.”

She suddenly wondered how much Randy Biggs had got for introducing her to the man who’d paid her $200,000 for making four trips to Mexico, to transport—at least on the last trip, anyway—what now turned out to be cocaine.

“Wha’ wass his name?” the one with the gun said again.

“I told you …”

“We don’ want to kill you,” the other one said.

“Then tell him to put the gun away.”

“Su nombre,”the one with the gun said.

She knew with absolute certainty that he would kill her in the next instant if she did not give up Randolph Biggs. She wondered what she owed Randy, wondered what she owed the one who’d called himself Frank and who seemed to have offended these men in some unspeakable way. She decided this was not the Persian Gulf. She was not sworn to tell them only her name, rank, and serial number.

“His name was Randolph Biggs,” she said.

2 .

DETECTIVE STEVE CARELLA WISHED that one of the lions hadn’t dragged the victim’s left leg into the 88th Precinct. That was what brought Fat Ollie Weeks into the case. As it was, most of the vic’s body was being consumed by three lionesses, a young lion, and a big thickly maned patriarch, apparent leader of the pride, none of whom seemed at all disturbed by a fascinated audience of detectives, zoo personnel, and television reporters gathered outside the Lion Habitat at the Grover Park Zoo.

Half of the zoo was in the 87th Precinct.

The other half was in the 88th.

By Carella’s rough estimate, four-fifths of the vic’s body was in the Eight-Seven. The remaining fifth, the vic’s leg, was over there in the Eight-Eight, where Fat Ollie—watching a young lion claw and gnaw at the leg—was beginning to get hungry himself.

This was Saturday morning, the twenty-third day of December, the true start of the big Christmas weekend that only yesterday had included the first full day of Hanukkah, now history. Carella and Meyer had caught the squeal some twenty minutes ago, at a quarter past seven, when the man in charge of the zoo’s Animal Commissary called the police to report that a woman had wandered into the habitat and was at that very moment being attacked by a pride of lions who hadn’t yet been fed this morning.

At seven-thirty-sevenA.M ., there was a heavy layer of snow on the paths that wound past the barred fence, and the moat beyond that, and then the island habitat where the lions and lionesses feasted. The television reporters were having a field day. Never before had a photo op like this one presented itself, a pride of lions tearing apart a woman wearing nothing at all on one of the coldest days of the year, the animals greedily feasting on the woman’s flesh and bones. Some fifty feet away, in the 88th Precinct, a solitary lion contentedly gnawed on the victim’s leg.

Detective Oliver Wendell Weeks had caught the squeal some ten minutes after Carella and Meyer had, which was when the young lion had dragged the leg over into the Eight-Eight. None of the detectives were particularly happy to have caught a case like this one—oranycase for that matter—a half-hour or so before their shifts ended, especially on a holiday weekend, when they had shopping to do and trees to put up and gifts to wrap.

On a morning when the temperature hovered at just above freezing, Ollie was wearing only a sports jacket over dark slacks, a white shirt, a food-stained tie, white socks, black shoes, and a red woolen watch cap. He had eaten breakfast an hour ago, but all the activity out there on the island was making him wonder if the zoo’s coffee shop was open yet. By contrast, Carella and Meyer were both wearing heavy overcoats, gloves, and mufflers. They were each and separately wishing Fat Ollie hadn’t been dragged into the case by the victim’s leg. They were each and separately wondering how they were going to get the victim off the island before there was nothing left of her but chewed-over bones.

The Emergency Services truck had arrived not five minutes ago, and the captain in charge of the ES Squad was talking to the zoo’s Assistant Director, a man named William Boyd, who had been notified at home by the Commissary Superintendent who’d told him that one of their people had just finished feeding the great apes and was approaching the Lion Habitat to deliver two hundred pounds of horse meat enriched with vitamins and minerals when he spotted a woman being attacked on the island there. Boyd was now advising the ES Captain that he should take his truck and his team and go home.

“Our own personnel are quite capable of getting onto the island and recovering whatever’s left of the dead woman,” he said.

The ES Captain told him it might be very risky for a “civilian” to go over there to retrieve the body while the lions were in a “feeding frenzy,” as he put it, though in all truth the animals seemed to be taking their morning meal in a leisurely manner. The ES Captain’s team tended to agree with him. The team had rescued people trapped in elevators, had scissored open automobiles with people squashed inside them, had plucked charred bodies from sizzling electrical cables, had even picked the locks on cell doors when hookers plugged them with bubble gum to avoid court appearances. This, however, was the first time they’d ever seen a woman being chewed to ribbons by half a dozen lions. Which did not stop them from becoming instant experts.

One of the guys on the team suggested that maybe they should go for the leg first, as a sort of training exercise. Throw the young lion over there in the Eight-Eight somethingelse to eat, lure him away from the leg, lay a ladder across the moat, snatch the leg away from him while he was thus distracted. The ES Captain was of the opinion that human flesh was something of a treat for these animals and it might not be easy to tempt them away from it with ordinary fare. Ollie was getting hungrier and hungrier. Carella and Meyer were watching the pride at work. Over on the island, the ground around the kill was disturbed, the snow trampled and spattered with blood.

Ollie wandered over to where the ES Captain and his team were discussing their next move. The Captain’s name was Ernie Levine. This being the Hanukkah weekend and all, Ollie figured it wouldn’t hurt to remind Levine that he was a Jew.

“Hey, Ernie,” he said, “what’re you doing on the job, your holiday and all?”

Levine knew Ollie from previous jobs. He greeted him with something less than enthusiasm.

“Hello, Ollie,” he said briefly.

“You put up your Hanukkah bush yet?” Ollie asked.

“We don’t have anything like that in our house,” Levine said.

“You light all ten of your candles?”

“Nine,” Levine corrected.

“You think that lady out there is kosher?” Ollie asked. “Cause I hear lions don’t eat pork.”

“Eatthisa while,” Levine said, and briefly grasped his crotch, and then walked over to where the zoo’s General Director had just arrived in a dither. The director’s name was Alfred Hardy. He was in his late thirties, Carella guessed, a tall slender man you’d figure for a lawyer or an accountant rather than somebody running a small city. Which was what the Grover Park Zoo was, in effect: a small city within a much larger city. Hardy took one look at the situation and told Levine he wanted everyone out of here while his people performed what to him was a simple rescue operation. Levine explained that there was nobody to rescue anymore. The victim was already dead and in fact being consumed at this very moment. Hardy said there were five healthylions to rescue. Levine said he would have to clear that with his Deputy-Inspector.

“Fine,” Hardy said heatedly, “you go do that. Meanwhile, I’ll be getting my lions off that island.” He turned to Boyd. “Make sure nobody tries to go out there. I’ll be in the holding area,” he said, and marched off in a huff. Carella figured that anyone who arrived in a dither and went off in a huff couldn’t be all bad. Levine went back to the truck to call his superior. Ollie shrugged and turned to where Carella and Meyer were still watching the lions. A pretty blonde from Channel Four News sidled up to Carella and said, “Fascinating, isn’t it?”

“Thrilling,” Ollie said.

The blonde turned to him as if surprised to learn that a hippopotamus could speak.

“Want to go for some breakfast?” Ollie asked.

“Thanks, I’ve already eaten,” she said.

“I didn’t mean you, Miss,” he said, and grinned. “I was talking to my colleagues here. These superior sleuths from the Eighty-seventh Precinct.”

“Better wait till the ME gets here, don’t you think?” Carella said.

“But now that you mention it, I’m Detective/First Grade Oliver Wendell Weeks,” Ollie said, turning back to the blonde. “Want to interview me?”

“What for?”

“The leg over there is in my jurisdiction.”

“Then why don’t you go take it away from that lion?”

“I might in a little while.”

“Good. You go get the leg, and then I’ll interview you.”

“I also play piano,” he said.

“A shame we don’t have a piano here in the park,” the blonde said, and turned back to Carella. “How do you suppose the woman got out there?” she asked.

“I’ve been taking lessons for almost two weeks now,” Ollie said. “Right now, I’m working on ‘Night and Day.’ ”

Boyd had been told to make sure no one went out onto the island. But he had just heard the blonde’s question and he wanted to get a little closer to someone who looked so leggy and all in a short skirt and high-heeled boots and a brown leather jacket. So he came over to explain that the way personnel got onto the island was through a tunnel under the moat …

“The lions are brought inside every night,” he explained. “To cages in the holding area.”

“That’s very interesting,” the blonde said.

“I’m gonna learn five songs,” Ollie said.

“That’s very interesting, too,” the blonde said, and turned back to where Carella and Meyer were still watching the lions. It was a frighteningly cold morning, but neither of the men was wearing a hat. Carella’s hair was brown, dancing on his head now in a brisk wind. Meyer was totally bald; his barren pate made him look colder than he actually was. The two detectives stood like bookends flanking Fat Ollie, whose little red watch cap was tilted at a rakish angle. Actually, Ollie thought he cut a fine figure of sartorial elegance.

“My name is Honey Blair,” the blonde told Carella, “I rove for the Five o’Clock News.”

“Hello, Honey,” Ollie said. “I rove for the Eighty-eighth Squad.”

Honey was thinking the two big detectives made a nice picture standing there watching the voracious lions. They were both tall and wide-shouldered, the bald guy looking solid and serious, the other one looking sexy as hell in a way she couldn’t quite understand, he wasn’t that good-looking. Something about the way his eyes slanted downward maybe, giving him a sort of Chinese appearance, though he certainly wasn’t Oriental. Something about thelook in the eyes, maybe. Dark and brooding. As if it pained him to see the woman out there being torn to shreds.

“You new in the job?” she asked him.

“New? Me?” he said, and smiled, and shook his head.

The smile got to her, too.

“Want me to take your picture?” she asked.

“Sure,” Ollie said.

“You and your partner,” Honey said. “Looking over at the lions.”

“I don’t think so, thanks,” Carella said.

“Why not?”

“Wouldn’t be professional,” he said.

“Make a nice shot, though,” Honey said, and beamed a dazzling smile at him.

Meyer raised his eyebrows.

“Thanks, no,” Carella said again.

“Think it over,” she said, and turned away and walked back toward her camera crew, flirty little skirt fluttering about her elegant long legs. Ollie watched her go. So did Meyer. Carella walked over to where Levine was still on the phone with the DI.

“We’re going to have to get on that island soon,” Levine was saying. “ Before the Five o ’ Clock News tells everybody we let wild animals eat ’ em for Christmas. ” He listened, and then said, “ You think so? ” He listened again. “ I ’ m not sure the CEO here is gonna buy that. ” He listened, nodded, said, “ Okay, Boss, whatever you say, ” and put the phone back on its bracket in the truck ’ s cab. He turned to Carella and said, “ Quote: ‘ If a dangerous animal is threatening human life, destroy it. ’ Period. Unquote. ”

“So what does he want?”

“A team of sharpshooters.”

“Mr. Hardy won’t like that.”

“Just what I told the DI.”

“Let me go talk to him. You call SWAT, tell them we need enough sharpshooters to take care of five healthy lions.”

Meyer walked over to the truck.

“What are we doing?” he asked.

“Shooting the lions,” Carella said.

“I’LL HAVE THEM OFF THAT ISLAND before your sharpshooters get here,” Hardy said. “What’s the sense in killing them? The woman is already dead. Besides, it isn’t as if they escaped confinement and wentlooking for prey. The woman found her own way onto the island somehow. These are wild animals. Carnivores. It was in theirnatureto attack her and devour her.”

“Sir, I’m merely telling you what we plan to do,” Carella said. He looked at his watch. “A SWAT team should be here in ten, twelve minutes. They’ll dispose of the animals at that time.”

“Meanwhile, I’ll have them off the island. You have your plan, I have mine.”

“What’syour plan, Mr. Hardy?”

“I’ll have my vets anesthetize the animals and carry them back here to the holding cages.”

“Back here” was a bunker-like building connected to the island by a ramp and a tunnel that ran under the moat. By now, a considerable number of zoo people had gathered here in the holding area. In addition to zookeepers of various grade levels, there were people from the Curation Department, and two animal behaviorists, and the three veterinarians who would be handling the anesthetizing of the animals out there.

The way Hardy explained it to Carella and Meyer—and to Ollie, who had now joined them—the forthcoming operation was really a simple one. The vets would use either dart guns or blowpipes to administer the anesthetic. The holding cages inside the bunker were flanked by keeper walkways. Guillotine doors opened from squeeze cages on the walkways into the larger holding cages. A five foot high concrete wall formed the back of each cage. The front of each cage was constructed of steel wire mesh. The keeper work area ran down the center of the building. There were access doors to the cages on either side of the work area. The anesthetized animals would be carried from the island to the ramp to the walkways and into the holding cages.

Considering that Carella had told Hardy the shooters would be here in ten to twelve minutes, he took his time debating with his staff the procedures they would use in safely anesthetizing and transporting the lions from the island to the holding area. Should they use an explosive projectile dart or a blowdart? Should they use a dissociative anesthetic, a tranquilizer, a non-narcotic sedative, or a narcotic drug?

“Even smaller cats than the ones out there are dangerous to handle without anesthesia,” Hardy explained. “The young lion who carried off that woman’s leg must weigh at least four hundred pounds. I’d say he measures ten feet long including his tail and stands at least three feet at the shoulders. You try to put a net on a wild animal that size, you’re asking for trouble.”

The drug they debated using was ketamine hydrochloride, a dissociative anesthetic most commonly delivered intramuscularly in doses of 100 to 200 mg/ml. For a dose sufficient enough to provide a rapid effect, a larger dart and more powerful delivery force was required. One of the keepers argued that this heightened the possibility of injury to the animal. Another argued that ketamine HCl was a painful injection. One of the vets argued that the drug induced a tendency for the animal to convulse. With three minutes to spare, they agreed to use the drug, after all, and decided that instead of using a blowdart, which had a higher probability of successful injection, they would use an explosive projectile dart, which had a traumatic impact but which was necessary because the drug was ketamine HCl.

At seven minutes to nine, just as Carella thought he heard the approaching siren of the van bearing the SWAT team, Hardy’s own team went through the steel guillotine doors, out onto the run, down the ramp, and into the tunnel that led to a second pair of guillotine doors that opened discreetly onto the jungle-like environment where the young lion was gnawing on the woman’s severed leg. If the lion heard the guillotine doors opening, he gave no sign of it. He was still busy with the bone—which was what the woman’s leg had now become—when the first of the darts hit him in the forehead. The vets were going for the frontal or dissociative cortex of the brain. But as often happened with explosive projectile darts, the impact was insufficient to detonate the charge. Freddie, which was the lion’s name, lifted his head from the bone, spotted the three vets crouched behind one of the habitat bushes—

“Easy now, Freddie,” one of vets whispered.

—crouched for just an instant, and then charged them.

They ran for the guillotine doors, the lion behind them, ran into the tunnel under the moat, and up the ramp, into the run behind the holding cages, startling Hardy, who realized too late that a lion was loose. He stabbed at the button that began closing the guillotine doors behind the three vets—but the lion was inside as well. The doors clanged shut. Everyone was suddenly in a long narrow holding cage with a lion who’d just had his first taste of human flesh.

The access door to the work area was at the far end of the cage. Between that door and the lion were four zookeepers, three veterinarians, two animal behaviorists, two curators, an assistant director, a director, three detectives, and a partridge in a pear tree.

One of the detectives was Steve Carella.

The lion went directly for him.

Maybe it was his smile.

But Carella wasn’t smiling. In fact, he was terrified, his eyes bulging, his mouth falling wide open as the lion leaped into the air at him. He brought his hands up defensively. Four hundred and some odd pounds of animal force knocked him flat on his back to the concrete floor of the cage. Pinned by enormous paws, Carella looked up at a head the size of a beach ball, all tawny fur and yellow eyes and open jaws and teeth. The lion’s roar resounded through every nerve in Carella’s body. He twisted his head away just as the animal lunged for his face.

A shot rang out.

It took the lion clean between the eyes.

He collapsed onto Carella like a huge smelly rug in somebody’s den.

Fat Ollie Weeks waddled over, grinning, a nine-millimeter Glock in his hand.

He flipped back his jacket, holstered the gun, and said, “You owe me one, Steve-a-rino.”

OVER ALFRED HARDY’S VIOLENT OBJECTIONS , the SWAT team disposed of the remaining four lions in short order. Honey Blair got some nice shots of the sharpshooters doing their job, aiming down their rifle barrels and all, the lions happily munching away on the lady out there, whoever she was, unaware that in minutes they would be merely trophies. Hardy refused to let Honey take any pictures of the carcasses on the island, animal or human, and ordered her off the premises. She went over to where a pair of paramedics were searching Carella for any cuts or bruises caused by what they insisted was a “mauling.”

“I wasnot mauled,” Carella told them over and over again. “I was almosteaten,but I was not mauled.”

“Sounds like a good idea either way,” Honey said, and smiled. “Here’s my card. You ever feel like discussing police work or television reportage, give me a ring. Or even just a cappuccino, mm?” she said, and smiled again.“Ciao, bambino.”

Carella watched her walking off.

He looked at the card.

And tossed it into the trash bin near the railing where he sat.

The paramedics thought the lion mauling him had damaged his brain.

THE THING THAT BOTHERED CARELLA MOST about the dead woman—or what was left of her, which wasn’t very much—was that she was naked.

“Woman wandering around the zoo without any clothes on, dead of winter,” Carella said.

“Which does seem peculiar,” Meyer agreed.

“Almost makes it seem as if she didn’twant to be identified.”

He was thinking that this was the worst time of the year for suicides. Girl loses her man, her job, her mind, her gold watch—she wasn’t wearing a watch, he noticed, unless one of the lions ate it—she decides to end it all. Ashamed of the act she’s about to commit, she strips herself naked, goes for a bare-assed walk in the zoo, straight into the lion’s den.

Another thing that bothered him was the fact that Ollie Weeks had saved his life. Once upon a time, Bert Kling had saved a Puerto Rican courier from a near-fatal baseball-bat beating. The man’s name was José Herrera, and he had informed Kling that in certain cultures—Asian or North American Indian, he wasn’t sure which—if you saved a person’s life, you were responsible for that person’s life forever. The one thing Carella did not want was Fat Ollie Weeks being responsible for his life forever.

“You think somebodythrew her to those lions?” he asked Meyer.

“Be a new one, all right,” Meyer answered.

CARL BLANEY HATED EXAMINING BODIES that were in parts. If he’d wanted to become a butcher, he would not have gone to medical school. This one was particularly disgusting. All chewed over and everything. Your cases involving severed parts were usually your blunt force injuries, where a person got run over by a truck or a subway train. The other times you got a bundle of disconnected arms and legs was when somebody was trying to dispose of a murder victim, and sawed the body up into pieces and packed them in a trunk. This particular corpse, he’d been told, had been attacked by lions, of all things, you’d think this city was the African veldt.

There was not much more than the bare bones remaining of the victim’s left leg. All the tissue and muscle had been torn away, leaving the exposed femur, patella, tibia, and fibula, portions of which had been gnawed through as well. The right leg was in a similar state of obliteration, the bones cracked open, the marrow sucked out. The woman’s right breast was completely gone, her left breast consumed to almost where it joined the chest. Her right arm was still connected to the body, but the hand had been consumed, bones and all, and from the wrist up to the elbow, the tissue and muscle were gone, exposing the ulna and radius.

The heart, the liver, the pancreas, the stomach—all the tasty parts—were gone. He was examining the woman’s head and face, which had been partially consumed, the nose and ears gone, the lips gone, the eyes gone, when he noticed—

But how could that be?

He was looking at a tiny circular perforation in the skull, just above what was left of the woman’s hairline.

To the naked eye, it looked a great deal like a small-caliber pistol wound.

IT WAS TWO-THIRTY THAT SATURDAY AFTERNOON when the phone on Carella’s desk rang. He picked up the receiver.

“Carella,” he said.

“Blaney here.”

“Hey, Carl.”

“On this dead girl who got eaten by lions?” Blaney said, as if he still couldn’t quite believe it. “I’ve lifted a good thumbprint and two fingerprints. I don’t imagine you know much about her …”

“Not a thing so far.”

“Reason I’m asking … I’ve come up with something interesting.”

“What’s that, Carl?”

“I found a tiny perforation in the left temporal region of the skull. At first, it looked like a bullet wound, but upon further …”

“Looked like awhat?” Carella said.

“But it wasn’t.”

“What was it?”

“An ice-pick wound. Somebody stabbed her with an ice pick.”

He waited while Carella absorbed this.

“The tract passed into the brain as deep as the left cerebral peduncle,” he said. “Now, the reason this is interesting, such a wound will rarely cause instant death. Absent concussion of the brain, we’ve had victims surviving for as long as five days after an assault.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, Carl.”

“I’m saying there are cases on record of victims walking long distances from the scene of the trauma. Eventually, there’ll be either subcortical or subdural hemorrhaging from the wound, with subsequent compression of the brain and resultant death. Butbefore then …”

“Before then, she could’ve walked to the park, is that it?”

“Yes. Or someone could have transferred her there from wherever the trauma occurred. In either case, I’m merely stating as a positive fact that she was stabbed first. With an ice pick.”

“When will I have those prints?” Carella asked.

“They’re on the way now,” Blaney said.

THE PRINTS REACHED CARELLA by messenger at three-seventeen that afternoon. A half-hour later, AFIS—the automated fingerprint identification system—got back to him with a hit on a United States Army lieutenant named Cassandra Jean Ridley.

3 .

THE TELEPHONE DIRECTORY gave them a listing for a C J Ridley on South Ealey Street in Silvermine. Carella and Ollie went there at once. They had phoned ahead and a pair of technicians from the Mobile Crime Unit were waiting for them downstairs. The building was a twelve-story red brick a block away from the oval. They introduced themselves to the doorman, and asked to speak to the superintendent, a man named Peter Dooley, who immediately took them up to apartment 9C and unlocked the door for them.

Carella and Ollie stayed out in the hall with Dooley while the techs got to work. The super was a tall, wide-shouldered man with a shock of black hair and piercing blue eyes. He was wearing wide-wale blue corduroy trousers and a navy blue sweater vest over a red plaid shirt. He told them the woman lived here alone, took the apartment in November, was gone for a little while, came back again early in December. He figured she was worth a little something, the fur coats and all, don’t y’know.

“When’s the last time you saw her?” Carella asked.

“She was in and out a lot the past few days,” Dooley said. “Doing her Christmas shopping, I guess. This the same case as the other one?”

Carella and Ollie looked at each other, puzzled.

“Had some detectives from the Eight-Seven here the other day,” Dooley said.

“Oh? When was that?” Ollie asked.

“The other day. Thursday.”

“What do you mean by the other case?” Carella asked.

“The break-in. We had a patrol car come by and then two detectives.”

“No, this has nothing to do with that.”

“I thought… well … Miss Ridley and all.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was her apartment got broken into. She had me change the lock on the door the very next day.”

“Let me get this straight,” Carella said.

“There was a burglary here?” Ollie said.

“On Thursday, yes, sir. I changed the lock on this door only yesterday.”

“Because the apartment was broken into?” Ollie said.

“Yep. I was outside with the doorman when your two detectives come by to investigate,” Dooley said. “One of them a redhead, the other one this short little fellow with curly black hair. Doorman called upstairs, Miss Ridley told him to send them right up.”

“Who were they, do you know?”

“Thought you might.”

Carella was already on the cell phone.

“Anybody else here for the lady in recent days?” Ollie asked.

“Not that I noticed. I’m busy in the office most of the time.”

“Bert?” Carella said. “This is Steve. Can you check with the Loot, see if Willis and Hawes responded to a burglary here on South Ealey this past Thursday?” He listened. “321,” he said. “Apartment 9C. Sure.” He turned to Ollie. “Kling. He’s checking.”

“Did you see anyone coming out of the building with Miss Ridley late last night, early this morning?” Ollie asked the super.

“I go home at six,” Dooley said. “You’re lucky you caught me.”

“Which doorman was on last night, would you know?”

“Same one as now.”

“Can you send him up, please?”

“Sure,” Dooley said, and walked off toward the elevator.

“Yeah,” Carella said into the phone. “Just what I thought. Are either of them there now? Put him on, willya?” He turned to Ollie. “Willis and Hawes were here around four Thursday,” he said. “He’s getting Willis now.”

They waited.

The apartment seemed suddenly very still.

“Hal, hi, it’s Steve,” he said. “Bert tells me you investigated a burg here at 321 South Ealey this past Thursday. Can you tell me a little about it?” He listened. “No, this is a homicide. Right. The lady got stabbed with an ice pick and thrown into the lion exhibit at the zoo. No, I’m dead serious. Can you give me the back story?” He listened. “A sable worth forty-five grand, right. And a mink stole worth six. Initials in both of them, CJR. Is that it? Okay, good, thanks a lot.” He hit the end button, flipped the lid shut, turned to Ollie. “You heard?” he said.

“I heard.”

Dooley was back with a man wearing a blue uniform with gold trim, blue hat with a shiny black peak. He looked Hispanic to Ollie, but Dooley introduced him as Muhammad Hassid, which meant he had just arrived from the Sahara and was plotting to blow up the nearest municipal building. Ollie asked him if he’d seen Miss Ridley leaving the building with anyone anytime last night.

“No, sir, I have seen no one,” Hassid said.

“What time did you leave here?” Ollie asked.

“I was relieved at eleven-forty-five,” Hassid said.

“Who came on after you?”

“Manuel Escovar.”

“We’ll want his address and phone number,” Carella told Dooley.

“I have them in the office,” Dooley said. “Will you be needin either of us any further?”

“Not right now,” Ollie said. “We’ll stop by on our way out.”

“Good luck to you, lads,” Dooley said.

“Thank you, sirs,” Hassid said.

IT TOOK A GOOD HOUR AND A HALF for the techs to vacuum the place for fibers and hair and to dust for fingerprints. The lights were on when Carella and Ollie finally went in to join them.

“Got some nice latents,” one of the techs said. “How urgent is this?”

“It’s a fuckin homicide,” Ollie said. “What do you mean, how urgent is it?”

“Cause what I can do …”

“The fuckin lady got chewed to bits by lions!” Ollie said.

“I can run the prints for you, was what I was gonna suggest, save a little time,” the tech said, unruffled. “Call you if I get a make.”

“That’d be a help,” Carella said.

“My name’s Murphy, here’s my card,” he said. “Probably be late tonight, early tomorrow morning.”

“Gee, that’s abig fuckin help,” Ollie said.

Murphy looked at him.

“Talk to you later,” he said to Carella and walked out shaking his head.

The apartment was a one-bedroom with a good-sized living room and a utility kitchen. They started in the bedroom, which was where they hoped to learn the most about the woman.

Three furs were hanging in the closet there: an ankle-length sable, a mink stole, and a red fox jacket. The initials in each of the furs were CJR.

Ollie turned to Carella.

“Didn’t you say … ?”

“That’s what Willis told me.”

“So what are they doing here?”

“Maybe she had two of each.”

“Maybe my aunt has balls,” Ollie said.

There were also two woolen cloth coats in the closet, and a fleece-lined brown-leather flight jacket. The jacket had a silver bar on each shoulder and a diamond-shaped leather name patch over the left breast: Lt. C. J. Ridley. Hanging lengthwise on trouser hangers were two pairs of blue jeans and three pairs of tailored slacks. Hanging in the rest of the closet were dresses, skirts, and several bulky sweaters.

The clothes in her dresser drawer were laid out like soldiers lined up for inspection, rolled nylons and pantyhose in one drawer, tank tops and cotton panties in another, T-shirts and sweaters in the bottom drawer, all precisely stored away.

In the top drawer of the night table on the left hand side of the bed, they found a candy tin with a floral design on its lid. They opened the tin. Inside the box was a stack of photographs, several airmail letters, and a small black ring box that contained a slender gold wedding band. The letters were from a Captain Mark William Ridley—the return address indicated he was stationed with the U.S. Air Force in Germany—to a woman named Cassandra Jean Ridley in Eagle Branch, Texas.

“Probably her husband,” Ollie said. “Got killed over there in Germany for some reason or other, and the letter’s from a chaplain or somebody, telling her he was dead and returning the wedding band.”

“Very romantic,” Carella said.

“Let’s read ’em.”

“Also there’s no war going on in Germany right this minute.”

“Be the only place there isn’t,” Ollie said.

They opened one of the letters.

It was dated November 13 of this year, and it was from the dead woman’s brother. He was telling her he’d just received a Dear John letter from his wife back in Montana, and he was sending their wedding band to Cassandra Jean to dispose of because he couldn’t bear doing that himself, nor could he bear even looking at it ever again.

“That’s romantic, too,” Ollie said.

The letter went on to say that the job his sister had lined up for the early part of December sounded good to him, “so long as you won’t be flying anything that might get you in trouble.”

“Might’ve got her in a wholelot of trouble,” Carella said.

“Let’s take these, read ’em all later.”

Sitting on the living room desk was an appointment calendar for the current year. They immediately flipped to the week of December 3. Someone—presumably Cassandra Jean Ridley—had scrawled the wordMexico into the box for Sunday the third. An inked arrow ran over the boxes for the next four days, its point leading to the box for December 7, Pearl Harbor Day, where the wordsEnd Mexico were written in the same hand. The single wordEast was written in the box for December 8.

In the top drawer on the right hand side of the kneehole, they found a checkbook from Chase, another for Midlands, and a savings account passbook from a bank called First Peoples. For yet another bank called Banque Française, they found a safe deposit box key in a little red packet with a snap catch.

A pile of rubber-banded hundred-dollar bills was resting on edge, at the right hand side of the drawer.

There were eighty of them.

$8,000 in cash.

They wished they could take a peek at her Banque Française safe deposit box, but this was the Saturday before Christmas Day, and the bank had closed at noon. Even a court order would not get it to open again before Tuesday morning, the twenty-sixth.

They went to see Manuel Escovar instead.

THE STREETS OF Little Santo Domingo were ablaze with light when they got there at eight that night. Stringed white lights hung from sidewalk to sidewalk, and dancing red and green lights flashed in every window overlooking the street. Spotlighted banners wishedFELIZNAVIDAD to the world. All up and down the street, pushcarts lighted with flashlights displayed last-minute gifts ranging from Louis Vuitton handbags to Hermès scarves and Rolex watches. Christmastime was the biggest thriller of the year, and the countdown had begun in earnest.

“All of this shit fell off the back of a truck,” Ollie commented.

They found Escovar in a little bar off Swift Street, where he was enjoying a few beers with his cronies before heading off to work at eleven. Nervously, he told them his shift began at midnight and ended at eight in the morning. Anything more than two beers would be dangerous, he told them, but he assured them he was all right with just two. Ollie suspected Mr. Escovar here did not have a green card. He suspected the man did not wish the slightest bit of trouble with the law. Which was why his hands were trembling as he smilingly explained that he was just a mellow little man with a sporty little mustache enjoying a few peaceful brews with his pals. My ass, Ollie thought. Instinctively, he knew Escovar had something to hide if only because he was a spic.

“There’s a woman who lives at 321 South Ealey,” Ollie said. “Her name’s Cassandra Jean Ridley. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“Miss Ridley, yes,” Escovar said, nodding at once. “Appar’menn nine C.”

“That’s the one,” Ollie said. “Did you see her leaving the building at anytime late last night, early this morning?”

Escovar thought this one over. Because he’s getting ready to lie, Ollie thought. He had never met anyone of Spanish descent who gave you a straight answer. Then again, he had never met any Jew, Chinaman, Polack, Irishman, or Wop, for that matter—present company excluded—who could look you in the eye and give you an unequivocal yes or no. Ollie was a consummate bigot. He knew that virtually everyone he met in this business was inferior to Detective/First Grade Oliver Wendell Weeks. That was simply the way it was, kiddies, take it or leave it. Otherwise, a fart on thee.

Escovar’s drinking buddies had moved from the bar to one of the booths, but they were watching the action here with intense interest now. Ollie glanced in their direction, and they all turned their heads away. He figuredthey didn’t have green cards, either. Escovar was still thinking.

“Take all the time you need, ah yes,” Ollie said, doing his world-famous W. C. Fields imitation.

Escovar took the suggestion to heart, the dumb little spic. The detectives waited.

“This might have been very early in the morning,” Carella suggested. “Four, five o’clock, around then.”

“I’m trine to remember,” Escovar said.

Try speaking a little English, Ollie thought.

“She might have seemed disoriented,” Carella said.

She might have had an ice pick in her forehead, Ollie thought.

“I thought she wass drunk,” Escovar said.

The way he finally tells it, Miss Ridley got out of the elevator at about four-thirty this morning, accompanied by two girls—he called them “gorls”—one on each side of her, each holding one of her arms to support her, it looked like to him.

“Can you describe these girls?” Carella asked.

“They wass big gorls. Very tall.”

“White? Black? Hispanic?”

“White,” Escovar said.

“What color hair? Black? Blond? Red?”

“It wass two blondies,” Escovar said.

Blondies, Ollie thought. Jesus.

“Skinny? Fat?” he asked.

“They wass wearin overcoats.”

Ollie wondered what the fuck that had to do with the question.

“You can still tell if a person’s skinny or fat,” he said. “Look at me. Am I skinny or fat?”

Escovar hesitated.

“Go ahead, you won’t hurt my feelings, I know I’m fat.”

“If you say so,” Escovar said shrewdly.

“In fact, I like being fat. It means I eat good.”

“Okay,” Escovar said.

“So were these two broads skinny or fat?”

“They wass healthy,” Escovar said.

“What does that mean, healthy? Big tits? Did they havetetas grandes, amigo?”

Escovar grinned.

“Bigtetas,huh?” Ollie said, grinning with him.

“Bigger than they gorlfrenn, anyhow,” Escovar said, still grinning.

“How do you know she was their girlfriend?” Ollie asked. He was no longer grinning.

Neither was Escovar.

“How do you know Miss Ridley was their girlfriend?” Ollie asked.

Escovar looked at him blankly.

“Answer the question, Pancho.”

“My name iss Manuel,” Escovar said.

“Answer the fuckin question!”

“Slow down, Ollie,” Carella warned.

“Never mind that man behind the curtain,” Ollie said, jerking his thumb at Carella. “He’s just being Good Cop. I’m theBad Cop, Pancho, you dig? And in a minute I’m gonna ask you for your green card.”

“I hass a green card.”

“Oh, I’m sure you do.”

“I hass it home.”

“I’m sure that’s just where you have it. How’d you know they were Miss Ridley’s girlfriends?”

“They tole me they wass.”

“Oh? When was this? When they carried her out of the fuckin elevator? They stopped and told you they were all good girlfriends here, is that it?”

“Sí,that wass when.”

“You’re lying, Pancho.”

“That wass when.”

“You sure it wasn’t when they camein?”

Escovar looked at Carella again.

“Don’t look at him, he ain’t gonna help you. What’d they do, slip you a few bills to let them upstairs without buzzing the apartment?”

Escovar went pale.

“That’s it, ain’t it, Pancho?”

“They had a bahl of champagne,” Escovar said. “They tole me it wass her burr’day. They said they wass good frenns, they wann to sorprise her.”

“How much did they give you?”

“Ten dollars.”

“To let them in, huh?”

“They said they wass frenns.”

“Some friends, they stuck a fuckin ice pick in her head. What was she wearing, Pancho?”

“I tole you. Overcoats.”

“MissRidley.What wasshe wearing when they carried her out of there? She wasn’t naked, was she?”

“Naked? No. A gray suit. Jacket, skirt, a suit.”

“Was she wearing shoes?” Carella asked.

“Shoes?” Escovar said, looking offended. “Of course, shoes,señor. The two gorlfrenns walk her by where I am holdin dee door open for them, out in the street. I thought she wass drunk,” he said. “I thought it wass dee champagne. I wash them …”

He watched them as they walked up the street to a black Lincoln Town Car parked just outside the Korean nails place. Both of the girls got in the back seat with Miss Ridley. The car drove off around five, five-fifteen.

“Chauffeur driving the car?”

“I theenk so, yes.”

“You didn’t happen to notice the license plate number, did you?” Carella asked.

“I’m sorry,señor,” Escovar said. “I did not.”

It was too early for Christmas presents.

OR MAYBE NOT .

At nine that night, when Carella went back to the squadroom to check on any phone calls and to sign out, there was a message that a detective named John Murphy had called to say he’d run the prints he’d lifted from the vic’s apartment and had got hits on an Army lieutenant named Cassandra Jean Ridley and a guy named Wilbur Colley Struthers who’d taken a burglary fall in this city seven years ago. Struthers had dropped the better part of a five-and-dime at Castleview before getting released on parole two years ago. His last known address was 1117 South Twelfth …

“Right up there in the Eight-Seven,” Murphy said. “Now ain’tthat a stroke of luck?”

Carella figured maybe it was.

HE WENT THERE with three other detectives as backup; the man was a convicted felon whose fingerprints had been found all over the vic’s apartment. The building on South Twelfth was a brick walkup, no doorman. The name under the doorbell was W. Struthers. Carella rang every other doorbell in the row. To the first voice that erupted on the speaker, he said, “Police, want to buzz me in, please?”

“What?” the voice said.

“Detective Carella, Eighty-seventh Squad,” he said. “Please buzz me in, sir.”

“What is it?”

“We need access to the roof. Buzz us in, sir.”

“But what is it?”

“An air vent,” Carella said.

Hawes shook his head, suppressed a smile. The buzz sounded a moment later.

“Thank you, sir,” Carella said to the speaker, and the four detectives entered the building. Hawes was still shaking his head and smiling. Outside the door to 2C, Carella put his ear to the wood. Meyer was behind him, on his right. Brown was standing to the left of the door. This was ten o’clock on the Saturday night before Christmas, the building was alive with sound. Radios and television sets going, toilets flushing, people talking behind closed doors, there was a city in miniature inside the walls of this building. They had no warrant, hadn’t even bothered to approach a judge for one because they’d felt certain Struthers’ fingerprints alone would not constitute probable cause for arrest. They had to hope that the man inside there did not bolt for a window the minute they knocked on the door and announced themselves as policemen. Like most cops, they considered burglars—even convicted burglars—people who were not particularly dangerous. The “Burglars-Are-Gents” myth persisted, even though a surprised burglar could turn as violent as any other thief in the world.

There was music behind the closed door, coming from either a radio, an audio system, or a TV set, Carella couldn’t tell which. Christmas music. He kept listening. He heard nothing but the music.

He turned to the others, shrugged.

Nobody said anything.

They all stood there with drawn weapons pointing up at the ceiling. Meyer Meyer, bald and blue-eyed and burly, looking patient and attentive and somewhat bored, to tell the truth; Cotton Hawes standing tall and square and redheaded, a white streak in the temple over his left ear, memento of an assailant whose name he’d long since forgotten, still looking amused by Carella’s doorbell bullshit; Arthur Brown resembling nothing so much as a dark, scowling Sherman tank. Stalwarts of the law. Waiting for a signal either to come down the chimney or go home.

Carella shrugged again, knocked on the door.

There was silence except for the music, and then, “Yes?”

A man’s voice.

“Police,” Carella said, what the hell.

“Shit, what is itthis time?” the man said.

They heard footsteps approaching the door. Heard a lock turning, tumblers falling, a chain coming off. The door opened wide. The man inside backed away the instant he saw four guys standing outside there with guns in their hands. He was about six feet tall in his bare feet, Carella guessed, wearing blue jeans and a brown woolen sweater with the sleeves shoved up to his elbows. His hair was a muddy blond color and his eyes were blue, opened wide now in either fear or surprise or both. A Christmas special was on the television set behind him.

“For Christ’s sake, don’t shoot,” he said, and threw his hands up alongside his head. The cops in the hallway suddenly felt like horses’ asses.

“Okay to come in?” Carella asked, and showed the tin.

“Yes, fine, come in,” the man said, his hands still up. “Just watch how you handle them pieces, okay?”

“Your name Struthers?” Brown asked.

“Yes, sir, that’s my name,” Struthers said.

“Wilbur Struthers?”

“But you can call me Will, sir. Is this the kidnapping again?”

“What kidnapping?” Carella asked at once.

The detectives were maneuvering so that he was the center of a loose circle, their guns still drawn, nobody even dreaming of holstering them now that they’d heard the word “kidnapping,” which was a federal offense that carried with it the death penalty.

“Is it the President’s been kidnapped?” Struthers asked, and Carella thought, Oh dear, we’ve got ourselves a nutcase here, but he still didn’t put up the gun.

“Know anybody named Cassandra Jean Ridley?” he asked.

Recognition flashed in Struthers’ eyes.

“Do you know her?” Carella asked.

“I have met her, yes. But I do notknow her, sirs. I would not say I trulyknowher. Excuse me, Officers, but it’s been my experience that when there are firearms on the scene, one of them is bound to go off, either because of undue excitement or some other impulse of the moment. So, if it’s all right with you, I’d appreciate it …”

“How’d your fingerprints get in her apartment?” Carella asked.

“Her goods and her money have already been returned,” Struthers said.

The detectives looked at each other.

“What goods? What money?” Carella asked.

“I gave it all back to her yesterday,” Struthers said.

“What are you saying?”

“He’s saying he burglarized the joint,” Brown said.

“Is that it?”

“No, no. There was a misunderstanding, that’s all,” Struthers said.

“What kind of misunderstanding?”

“Two of her furs came into my possession, was all. And a little cash, too. But everything was returned to her yesterday. Officers, if you think I’m armed and dangerous, why not simply frisk me, so I can put my hands down?”

Hawes frisked him. He was still smiling. He was finding all of this somehow very comical. He nodded okay to the other detectives. They all holstered their guns except Brown, who had grown up in a neighborhood where people sometimes hid weapons up their asses. Struthers lowered his hands. He looked relieved.

“When yesterday?” Carella asked.

Struthers blinked at him, puzzled.

“Did you return her stuff?” Carella explained.

“Oh. She came here around ten-thirty in the morning.”

“How’d she know where to find you?”

“I think through my eyeglasses,” Struthers said.

Carella was still thinking the man was a bit off his rocker. Hawes was still smiling. Brown still had his gun in his hand. Meyer was wondering what the man had meant about a kidnapping.

“What kidnapping?” he asked.

“What do you mean, through your eyeglasses?” Carella asked.

“I think she may have found my eyeglasses. She said she was delivering my eyeglasses.”

“Found them where?” Carella asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What kidnapping?” Meyer asked again.

“The man from the Secret Service said there’d been a kidnapping.”

Next comes the CIA giving him instructions, Carella thought. Through his radio or his television set.

“Said the President had been kidnapped?” he asked.

“No, that wasmy notion.”

“Youthought the President had been kidnapped.”

“Well, why else the Secret Service?”

Why else indeed? Carella thought.

Hawes was still smiling. Nodding his head and smiling. This was turning out to be a very amusing evening after all. Meyer was thinking if the Secret Service had really been here, then maybe someone in the White House had really been kidnapped. Brown was beginning to think along the same lines as Carella: the man was a loonie. He kept his gun in his hand, just in case.

“When was the Secret Service here?” Meyer asked.

“Day before yesterday,” Struthers said, “around four in the afternoon. And he came back again that night, around ten, ten-thirty.”

“Who was this? Did he give you a name?”

“Yes, sir, he did. Special Agent David A. Horne. With an ‘e.’ ”

“Show you any ID?”

“Showed me his badge, yes, sir.”

“What’d it look like?”

“You know that gold star the Texas Rangers carry? It looked a lot like that.”

“And he told you he was with the Secret Service, is that right?”

“Yes, sir. The U.S. Treasury Department.”

“What’d he want here?”

“He said a hundred-dollar bill I’d spent earlier in the day had serial numbers that matched the ones paid as ransom in a kidnapping. Which is why I thought it might be the President, the Secret Service and all.”

“Naturally,” Carella said.

“He took the rest of the money with him,” Struthers said.

“The rest ofwhat money?” Hawes asked.

“The money that was part of the misunderstanding between me and the Ridley woman.”

“The money youburglarized,” Brown said, and waved the nine for emphasis.

Struthers looked at the gun.

“I’m not admitting to any burglary here,” he said. “Or anything else.”

“Like what?” Carella asked.

“Like anything at all,” Struthers said.

“Maybe you’d like to tell us how your prints got in her apartment,” Brown said.

“I took down her drapes,” Struthers said.

Carella tried to remember if there’d been any drapes in the dead woman’s apartment.

“Because I was going to paint the place for her,” Struthers said. “Which is why I thought she wanted the furs moved. So they wouldn’t get any paint on them.” He nodded to the detectives, seeking approval and encouragement. “That was the misunderstanding,” he said.“I thought she wanted the furs moved, whereasshe didn’t want them moved.”

“How about the money?” Brown asked.

“That, too,” Struthers said.

“You didn’t want to get paint all over the money, is that it?”

“Exactly. There was just a misunderstanding, is all. She didn’t know I was planning to move it, you see.”

“Maybe she thought you’d be painting the place green.”

“Huh?” Struthers said.

“The color of money.”

“No, no …”

“In which case it wouldn’t’ve mattered if you got paint all over it.”

“No, it was beige.”

“Which made a difference, of course.”

“Yes.”

“So you moved the furs and the cash before you took down the drapes and got your fingerprints all over everything.”

“Well … yes.”

“Man, you are so full of shit,” Brown said.

“It wouldn’t have been eight thousand in cash, would it?” Carella asked.

“The money was returned to her,” Struthers said. “And I didn’t kill her.”

Whoa now, Carella thought.

“Who said anything about her beingdead?” he asked.

“Television,” Struthers said.

They all looked at him.

“I saw you and some fat cop on television early this morning. At the zoo? Where some lady got tossed to the lions? That was her, wasn’t it? That’s what this is all about, ain’t it?”

THE MAN THEY KNEW ONLY as Frank Holt was waiting in the other room while they tasted and tested the cocaine. What he was selling them here was a hundred kilos divided into ten-kilo packets. He was getting a million-nine for the lot, so they wanted to make sure it was good stuff. If it was anything but what he’d advertised it to be, they would kill him. He knew that, he was no fool.

The apartment they were in was a second-floor walkup on Decatur and Eighth. Tigo and Wiggy the Lid were in the second bedroom, such as it was. The man who called himself Frank was waiting outside, in what passed for a living room, chatting with a third man whose name was Thomas, and who was carrying a nine-millimeter Uzi. A radio playing rap music was on in the living room. Frank was the only white man in the apartment. He and Thomas were talking about recent movies they had seen. Thomas was saying he didn’t believe none of the gunplay shit in any of the so-called action-adventure movies because all that ricochet stuff and sparks flying and sound effects like zing zang zing was all full of shit. Most gun fights didn’t last an hour and a half, anyway. You shot somebody, he was either dead or gonna shoot you soyou were dead. Frank tended to agree, though he himself had never been in a gun fight. He admitted this to Thomas now.

“You never shot nobody?” Thomas said.

“Never,” Frank said.

“Shit, man,” Thomas said unbelievingly, and began chuckling. “Where you from, man, the planet Mars?”

“I’ve just never found the opportunity.”

“How long you been doing this?” Thomas asked.

“Almost eight years now.”

“And you never found no opportunity to shoot nobody?”

“Most people I deal with aren’t interested in ripping anyone off. We’re traders, pure and simple.”

“I got to tell you bout Wiggy,” Thomas said. “He ain’t such a pure and simple trader, man.”

“He seems like your average businessman.”

“He ain’t so average, neither. You know how many peoplehe has found the opportunity to kill?”

“I’d rather not know,” Frank said.

“He got the name Wiggy not ony cause his lass name’s Wiggins. It’s also cause he wigsout whenever things don’t go his way. Blows hislid,that’s the second part of the handle, he Wiggy theLid, man. Reason he so tempermennul, is he doped up day and night. This is one man involved in dealing shit who don’t believe shit isshit, you take my meanin? He believes shit isgood for a person. I don’t know how much you sellin him in there …”

“A hundred keys.”

“Wiggy goan snort half that fore the week is out.”

“I know you’re exaggerating.”

“I am. But the mando like his cocaine. And when he’s stoned, why, man, that’s when he wigs out, that’s when he blows his lid, that is when you has to shoot him first or he goan shoot you dead, man. He shot and killed …”

“I don’t want to know. Really.”

“… twelve niggers ony last year,” Thomas said, and shrugged. “It was Nigger of the Month Club roun here.”

Frank never felt safe when black men—especially black men named Thomas—began calling themselves niggers in his presence because he never knew when the inside familiarity would suddenly turn against him. And whereas he’d never shot a man, he did not particularly encourage situations where gunplay might be called for. He himself carried a Walther P-38. It made him feel like a Nazi in a war movie. They had not relieved him of the gun when he’d come up here. Perhaps because they knew he’d be crazy to attempt a shootout. Anyway, he’d have handed it over in a minute because there was no need to worry about his cocaine failing any test put to it.

The stuff Frank was selling had been grown in Bolivia and processed in Colombia for about $4,000 a kilo. That came to a growing-and-manufacturing cost of $400,000. The Mexicans he’d purchased it from in Guenerando had probably paid $800,000 for it, and had sold it to him for $1,700,000. He was now about to turn it over for $19,000 a key—$1,900,000. That’s the way it worked. A pyramid with everyone making a profit from top to bottom. Eight hundred large in Colombia, a million-seven in Guenerando and now a million-nine in New York.

But Frank served a much higher cause than any of these assholes knew about.

Besides, he had a decided edge.

WIGGY HAD TASTED THE COKE , and so had Tigo, but tasting it meant nothing because you could get bad stuff’d fool the keenest taste buds. Ony way to make sure was the trio of tests Wiggy called the TNT, for “Tried ’N’ True.”

First test you got straight from the water tap.

Opened the faucet, filled the glass with a few ounces of plain water, then scooped a spoonful of shit out of the plastic bag and dropped it in. If it dissolved directly, it was pure cocaine hydrochloride. If any of it stayed solid, the dope had been cut with sugar.

Second of the TNT was Clorox.

Put a little in a glass jar, drop a spoonful of the powder in it, and watch the movie. If you got a white halo trailing the powder, it was cocaine, my dear. If you got red following the powder as it fell, the stuff was cut with some kind of synthetic, and somebody was going to get killed.

Last of the three was the best of them all, cobalt thiocyanate. What you did with the chemical was you dropped it onto the cocaine, also known as the White Leash, or the White Lady, or Lady, or sometimes just plain Girl, or any one of a thousand other cute little names to lure the kiddies in. If the powder turns blue, you’ve got cocaine. The brighter the blue, the better the Girl. Is what they say, man. The brighter the blue.

Frank’s stuff lit up the sky like neon.

Wiggy had been taught to distrust every white man in the universe. He turned to Tigo and said in something like astonishment, “Why, the honkie’s honest!”

But Wiggy also served a much higher cause.

Himself.

And he, too, had a decided edge.

4 .

OLLIE WEEKS HAD CALLED his sister to tell her he might not be able to make it there on Christmas Day cause he’d caught a leg being chewed on by a lion, and she’d said, “You ought to find yourself another job.” Typical Isabelle Weeks remark, the jackass.

Now, to make matters worse, here was a dead guy stuffed in a garbage can, with a bullet hole at the back of his head. Your classic Mafia-style murder, except that the gangs up here in the Eight-Eight were all either black or Hispanic. Ollie could remember a time when the Mob ruled this part of the city, and all the Negroes and spics were running around doing the legwork for them while the Wops pulled in all the hard cash. Now it was different. The Wops should have learned to speak Spanish or so-called black English, which meant saying, “I done gone sell some dope to school chillun.”

Ollie loved using the word “Negro” because he knew it pissed off “people of color,” as they sometimes chose to be called. “Blacks” was another favorite, they should make up their fuckin minds. Same thing with the spics up here, which word he didn’t dare use to their faces or they would cut him up and serve him from acuchifrito stand. They didn’t know whether to call themselves “Hispanics,” which sounded too much like “spics,” or “Latinos,” which sounded like a team of tango dancers. Ollie thought maybe they should concentrate instead on calling themselves “American,” huh? and not flying Puerto Rican or Dominican Republic flags from their car antennas. Or marching in Columbus Day parades, the Wops. Or St. Patrick’s Day parades, the Irish micks, getting drunk and puking all over the city streets, while cops got paid time and a half for overtime. Ollie hated all this high-profile nationalism for countries that weren’t the U.S. of A. If they liked Santo Domingo or San Juan or Islamabad or Jerusalem or Dublin or Calcutta so fuckin much, they should go back home instead of leaving dead bodies in garbage cans. Ollie hated everyone and everything except food.

They had stuffed the corpse in the garbage can feet first, knees up, which was considerate of them. It meant that you could look the dead man right in the eyes. Looked like some kind of sculpture you could find in one of the elite, highbrow, so-called art museums downtown. Ollie could remember a time when a person could stroll along the avenue and buy an artistic landscape in real oil paints for twenty-five bucks. Nowadays, you got a dead man in a garbage can who looked like he was alive and posing for someartiste except that he had a bullet hole at the base of his skull.

The medical examiner had come and gone, offering his learned opinion that the guy in the garbage can was indeed dead and that the possible cause of death …

“Possible,” he’d actually said.

. . was a bullet wound in the head.

With the help of the Mobile Unit techs—who had arrived some ten minutes ago and were dusting the alleyway as if it would reveal anything surprising about the corpse in the garbage can—Ollie lifted him out, and spread him on the alley floor. He was aware of the fact that in about ten minutes, an ambulance would arrive to pick up the body and carry it to the morgue, where they would cut it open to make sure the guy hadn’t been poisonedbefore he got shot, a distinct possibility in police work, where nothing was as it appeared to be, ah yes, m’dear. Sometimes, Ollie eventhought like W. C. Fields.

The dead man was carrying a wallet with a lot of identification in it. There was a driver’s license that gave his name as Jerome L. Hoskins (no relation to the disease, Ollie hoped) and his address as 327 Front Street in Calm’s Point—shit, he’d have to make a trip all the way to a section of the city for which he had no particular fondness. There was an American Express credit card made out to Jerome L. Hoskins, and MasterCard and Visa cards made out to the same name. There was a MetTrans card for the subway and bus lines in this considerate city, and also a health plan card from an outfit called MediPlan, whose main offices were in Omaha, Nebraska, wherever that was. There was seven hundred dollars in hundred-dollar bills in the wallet, plus three twenties, a ten, and eight singles. A little card said that the person to notify in case of an emergency was Clara Hoskins at the same address in Calm’s Point, who could be reached at 722-1314. Great. He justloved breaking the news to somebody’s wife, mother, or sister.

A handful of change was in the right hand pocket of the stiff’s trousers, along with what appeared to be a house key, a mailbox key, and a car key with a big gold L for Lexus in a circle on its black plastic head. The luxury car maybe spelled dope, though the vehicle of choice these days was a Range Rover, there being not much difference between big-city dope dealers and Hollywood producers, ah, yes. Strengthening the possibility of the stiff being drug-connected (as who wasn’t up here these days?) was a carry pistol-permit tucked into one of the wallet flaps.

The carry was for a P-38 Walther, however, a somewhat ancient weapon for anyone in the drug trade, but perhaps the man was merely a diamond merchant who’d wandered uptown in search of black pussy and flirted by mistake with the girlfriend of a Negro warlord named High Five or some such. The gun itself was in a shoulder holster under the man’s hand-tailored suit jacket. He was wearing no overcoat; when you’re about to shoot a man at the back of his head, you don’t dress him for the cold weather outdoors.

Well, Ollie guessed he had to talk to this Clara Hoskins, whoever she might turn out to be, find out if she was home, and then go all the way out to Calm’s Point to give her the sad tidings, ah yes. He gave one of the techs his card, and asked him to call if he came up with any valuable fingerprints, Fat Chance Department. He also advised them to keep an eye out for a meat wagon from St. Mary Boniface, which should be along any minute now. He could tell the techs didn’t like fat people. Hell with them.He didn’t like nerds who tiptoed around alleyways treating garbage as if it was some priceless piece of evidence instead of the messy shit it actually was.

“Have a merry Christmas,” he told them.

“You, too,” one of the techs said cheerlessly.

A fart on thee, Ollie thought, and smiled in farewell.

This was now twenty-seven minutes past ten on Sunday morning, the twenty-fourth day of December—Christmas Eve, by Ollie’s own reckoning, ah yes.

His jackass sister was probably in church.

CARELLA’S PHONE DIRECTORY for law enforcement agencies gave him a number for the U.S. Treasury Department at 427 High Street, all the way downtown, close to where the old police headquarters building used to be located. A recorded message told him the offices were closed for the holiday and would not reopen until Tuesday morning, December 26.

On the offchance that Special Agent David A. Horne might be listed in one of the city’s five telephone directories, Carella tried the Isola book first and came up with dozens of listings for the surname Horne, but none for a David A. Horne. He began dialing, anyway. On his twelfth try, he hit paydirt.

“David Horne, please,” he said.

“Who’s this?”

“Detective Steve Carella, Eighty-seventh Squad.”

“This is David Horne.”

“Mr. Horne, we’re investigating a homicide here, woman named Cassandra Jean Ridley …”

“Yes?”

“… whom we’ve linked to a man named Wilbur Struthers …”

“Yes?”

“Did three and a third at Castleview on a burglary fall …”

“Yes, I know the man. I questioned him about some suspect hundred-dollar bills.”

“Related to a kidnapping,” Carella said, nodding.

There was a silence on the line.

“Can you tell me which kidnapping that was?” Carella asked.

“No, I’m afraid that’s classified information,” Horne said.

“Even to a fellow law enforcement officer?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“This is a homicide, you know.”

“So you told me.”

“Well, can you at least tell me how it worked out?”

“How what worked out?”

“The questioning.”

“I confiscated eight thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, checked the serial numbers against our list, and came up negative. I returned the bills to Mr. Struthers that very same day. End of story.”

“Which list would that be? That you checked the bills against?”

“I’m afraid that’s classified, too.”

“Who was kidnapped, Mr. Horne? Can you tell me that?”

“Classified.”

“If I showed you the bills we recovered in the victim’s apartment, could you tell me if they’re the same ones you checked against this mysterious list of yours?”

“Do I detect a note of sarcasm in your voice, Detective Coppola?”

“It’s Carella.”

“Oh, forgive me. But this is Christmas Eve, you know …”

“Yes, I know that.”

“And I’m home here with my family. If you can …”

“Gee,I’mstill here at the office,” Carella said.

“That’s admirable, I’m sure. Call me on Tuesday, okay? Perhaps we can talk then.”

“Mr. Horne, the victim won’tever be talking again.”

“That’s unfortunate. But I’m certain our separate cases aren’t at all linked.”

“Then why were the serial numbers on her money being checked against bills paid in ransom, isn’t that what you said?”

“I said nothing of the sort.”

“Then it’s what Struthers told me.”

“A man with a criminal record.”

Carella could almost hear the dismissive shrug.

“He seemed to be telling the truth,” Carella said.

“Be that as it may.”

“Mr. Horne, I’m trying to find out who …”

“It’s Special Agent Horne, by the way.”

“Oh, forgive me. But somebody tossed a woman to the lions the other day …”

“Is that a metaphor, Detective?”

“I wish. We’re trying to find out who. Any help you can give us …”

“I have no help to offer. Our case is, as I said, classified. Besides, the bills we checked have nothing to do with that woman’s death.”

“How do you know that?”

“I feel certain they’re unrelated.”

“Then why were you checking them?”

“Detective …”

“Please don’t sound so annoyed,” Carella said.

He wanted to say, Don’t sound so fucking annoyed, okay, Mr. Special Agent Horne?

“I can subpoena those serial numbers,” he said.

“You’d never get a court order.”

“Why not?”

“Detective,” Horne said, and paused. “Let it go, okay? Leave it alone.”

“Sure,” Carella said, and hung up.

He had no intention of leaving it alone.

CLARA HOSKINS , as it turned out, was Jerome Hoskins’wife. On the phone, Ollie told her he was investigating something or other …

Actually, he mumbled the words “identification process” so that they were unintelligible, a bullshit ploy that did nothing to quell Mrs. Hoskins’ curiosity.

“You’re investigatingwhat?” she asked.

“Routine matter,” he said. “Better to discuss it in person. Okay to come out there, Mrs. Hoskins?”

“Well, all right, I guess,” she said. “But you’d better have identification.”

The drive to Calm’s Point took him half an hour from the North Side of the city to the bridge and over it into a community only recently reclaimed from urban decay. Hillside Commons consisted of low-rise tenements which had been inhabited by runaway hippies during the Sixties and Seventies, immigrant Hispanics in the early Eighties, Koreans in the Nineties, and now—here in the bright new millennium—upwardly mobile Yuppies yearning for a glimpse of the distant towers across the River Dix. The way Ollie looked at it, all those former immigrant residents could move right next door to Hillside Heights, where there were still street gangs and dope pushers and prostitutes and all the other amenities they were used to. Not that he liked the fuckin preppie Yuppies, either, but if an individual couldn’t speak the fucking language, he had no right living in a nice neighborhood.

Clara Hoskins spoke the language just fine.

She would not open the door until Ollie had flashed both his ID card and his gold detective’s shield, and then she unlocked two locks and took off a security chain before letting him in. She was a blonde in her early forties, Ollie guessed, dressed in tailored gray slacks and a tight red sweater with a little Santa Claus pin over the left breast. Five-seven, five-eight, he supposed, good-looking woman except for the suspicious blue eyes and the frown. She led him into the living room, where a Christmas tree was ablaze with light in one corner of the room. There was the scent of greenery all over the apartment, in fact. All the place needed was a log burning on the hearth, but this was the city, and only cannel coal was allowed, and not even that was in evidence.

“Mrs. Hoskins,” he said, figuring he’d get straight to the point, “I’m afraid I have bad news for you.”

“Oh Jesus,” she said.

“Your husband is dead, ma’am, I’m sorry to have to tell you this way.”

“Oh Jesus,” she said again.

They all reacted in different ways. Some of them burst into tears, some of them staggered around the room like drunks, some of them looked as if they’d been hit by a locomotive, some of them couldn’t speak for ten, fifteen minutes, some of them denied it, told you you’d made a mistake, or this was all a horrible joke, anything to get away from the fact that the Grim Reaper had come to the door and knocked on it and found somebody home. Clara Hoskins just stood there staring at him.

“Tell me what happened,” she said.

“He was murdered,” Ollie said.

“Are you a homicide detective?” she asked.

“No, ma’am, that’s not the way we work it here. The precinct detective who catches the squeal …”

He caught himself.

“The responding detective follows the case through to its conclusion, ma’am, is the way we work it here in this city.”

“Where was this?” she asked.

“In a section of the city called Diamondback, ma’am.”

“That’s black, isn’t it?” she said.

“Largely, ma’am. And Hispanic.”

“What was Jerry doing up there?”

“I thought maybe you could help me with that.”

“Diamondback,” she said, and shook her head.

“Do I smell something baking, ma’am?” Ollie asked.

“Oh my God,” she said, “thank you,” and turned away from him and rushed into the kitchen. He watched as she yanked open the oven door and took from it a steaming cake. “Caught it just in time,” she said, and put it down on the counter top. “I bake one every Christmas,” she said.

“What is it, ma’am?”

“An apple upside down cake.”

“I’ll bet it’s delicious,” Ollie said.

But she didn’t offer him any.

Instead, she suddenly burst into tears. Sometimes apple upside down cakes did that to people. Or maybe she had just realized her husband was dead. Either way, if she wasn’t going to offer him anything to eat, he had no sympathy at all for the woman.

“Ma’am,” he said, “weren’t you concerned when your husband didn’t come home last night?”

“He’s often gone a lot,” Clara said.

“Were you expecting him home?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Well, did he call to say hewouldn’t be home?”

“No, he didn’t. But that’s usual. I don’t worry about him. He comes and goes.”

“What does he do for a living, ma’am?”

“He sells books.”

“He works in a bookstore?”

“No, he’s a booksalesman. For Wadsworth and Dodds. The publishing house. His territory is the entire northeast corridor. He goes all the way up to Maine and down to Washington, D.C. He’s gone a lot.”

Ollie tried to think if there were any bookstores in Diamondback. He couldn’t recall a single one.

“Does he make stops in Diamondback?” he asked.

“I don’t know where he makes stops,” Clara said, and yanked a Kleenex from a box on the counter. “Can’t you see I’m crying here?” she said. “Don’t you have any sensitivity at all?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m trying to learn who might have killed him. Your husband wasn’t doing drugs, was he?”

“What!”

“I said …”

“I heard what you said. Howdare you?”

“Mrs. Hoskins, I was simply asking a question. Your husband was found in a garbage can in Diamon …”

“A garbage can!”

“Yes, ma’am, with a bullet hole in the back of …”

“A bullet hole!”

“Yes, ma’am, which all sounds very strange for a man who sells books for a living, wouldn’t you say? Did you know that he carried a gun?”

“A gun!”

“Yes, ma’am, a P-38 Walther was the make. In a holster on his right side. Was he left-handed, ma’am?”

“Yes. I have to tell you, Detective Weeks, I find all of this extremely upsetting.” She pulled another tissue from the box, and blew her nose. Ollie hoped she wouldn’t get snot all over the cake. She still hadn’t offered him a piece. “I can’t imaginewhat my husband was doing up there in Diamondback, or why he was carrying a gun, or why anyone would want to kill him. This is all simply beyond belief,” she said, and blew her nose again.

“Yes, well, I’m terribly sorry it happened, too, ma’am, or even that I had to report it to you.”

He was thinking he would like a piece of her apple upside down cake.

He was also thinking he would like to grab her ass.

“Your husband had a permit for the gun,” he said.

“A permit!”

She had a very bad habit of repeating the key words in everything he said and shouting them back at him, very loudly, as if he were deaf. Each time she did that, he winced. The kitchen was redolent with baking smells. He felt like grabbing that cake in both his hands and gobbling it down.

“You sure he wasn’t doing drugs?” he asked.

“No, I’mnot sure, how would Iknow if he was doing drugs or not? He was on the road two, three weeks at a time, for all I know he was robbing banks with his goddamn P-thirty-six …”

“Eight, ma’am.”

“Whatever, and shooting heroin in his veins, how the hell wouldI know what he was doing when he wasn’t here? He ends up in a garbage can, how the hell doI know what he was or evenwho he was?”

“That’s just my point, ma’am.”

“I fail to see your point.”

“Just that it seems so strange.”

“It does,” she agreed, and burst into tears again.

He wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her. He wanted to reach up under that tight red sweater.

“I wish I could play piano for you sometime,” he said.

She looked at him.

She had very blue sad wet eyes.

“To ease your pain,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, “that’s very kind of you.”

“I play piano,” he said.

“I wouldn’t have suspected it,” she said.

“I’m sorry for your trouble,” he said. “Here’s my card. Call me if you think of anything.”

“What would I think of?” she asked.

“Anything that might help us find your husband’s murderer.”

She burst into tears again.

“Where do I go to … to claim … to … to … where is he now? His body?”

“At the St. Mary Boniface morgue,” Ollie said. “You can identify the remains …”

“Remains!” she said.

“Yes, ma’am, his body, ma’am. You don’t think he had a black girlfriend up there, do you?”

“A what!”

“I guess not,” he said. “Call me, okay? I know ‘Night and Day,’ if you happen to like that song.”

She was sitting by the Christmas tree in the living room, weeping, when he left the apartment. He could smell the goddamn apple upside down cake all the way down to the street.

THE HALLS OF JUSTICE were somewhat less than thronged with judges eager to hand down rulings at three o’clock on this Christmas Eve, which also happened to be a Sunday. Most pickpockets, shoplifters, and daytime burglars had called it a day yesterday, packing it in at six o’clock, when all the stores closed. Most of the judges had done the two-step at around the same time, the Christian judges eager to get back to their homes and hearths so they could start the Yuletide festivities, the judges of other faiths heading to vacation spots where they could escape a holiday that excluded them so completely. Only skeleton crews manned the courtrooms. The entire Criminal Courts building resembled nothing so much as a marble mausoleum.

Abe Feinstein was the judge who read Carella’s petition for a search warrant. He was sixty-three years old, and he’d been a criminal court judge for twenty-three years now, having been appointed at the age of forty, which was relatively young for such a judgeship. He read the signed affidavit and then peered over the rims of his eyeglasses and the top of his bench, and said in a rather astonished voice, “You want a warrant to search the offices of the U.S.Treasury Department?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Because—if I’m reading this correctly—you wish to examine a list ofserial numbers …”

“Yes, sir.”

“… for hundred-dollar bills that you believe may have been used asransommoney in a kidnapping?”

He still sounded astonished.

“Yes, Your Honor,” Carella said.

“Which kidnapping would that have been, Detective?”

“I don’t know, sir. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“I must be missing something,” Feinstein said, and shook his head.

“Your Honor, a special agent named David A. Horne confiscated eight thousand dollars in hundred-dollar …”

“Hold it, hold it, where’s that on the affidavit?”

“Paragraph number three, Your Honor.”

“ ‘Upon personal knowledge and belief,’ ” Feinstein quoted, “ ‘and facts supplied to me by …’”

“Yes, Your Honor, by an ex-con named Wilbur Struthers, who burglarized the suspect money from the apartment of a woman now deceased, the victim of a homicide. That’s all in paragraph three, Your Honor.”

“Eaten bylions, does this say?”

“Yes, sir. At the Grover Park Zoo yesterday. But that wasn’t the cause of death. The woman was first stabbed with an ice pick.”

“I see that, yes.”

“In the head, Your Honor.”

“Yes. And you think her murder may be related to this kidnapping you mention?”

“Yes, Your Honor, I do.”

“But you don’t know anything about this kidnapping?”

“Only what Struthers reported to me.”

“Does he seem reliable?”

“As reliable as any thief can be, Your Honor.”

“Have you contacted the Secret Service?”

“I spoke personally to Special Agent Horne, yes, Your Honor.”

“And what did he have to say?”

“He advised me to leave it alone.”

“Any idea why he would have made such a suggestion?”

“He told me the case was classified, sir.”

“I see. And you’re asking for a search warrant that would invade this confidentiality, is that it?”

“A woman was murdered, Your Honor. An ice pick …”

“I have no idea what this kidnapping case is about—and neither do you, I might add. Which means you don’t have probable cause, Detective. If the Secret Service has deemed its case classified, I’m not going to allow you to poke around confidential documents. Take Horne’s advice, Detective. Leave it alone. Petition denied.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Carella said.

“Merry Christmas,” Feinstein said.

OLLIE WEEKS CALLED the offices of Wadsworth and Dodds at four that afternoon. He got a message telling him the firm was closed for the holidays and would not reopen until Tuesday morning, December 26.

He figured he was the only person working in this fucking city, so he went home.

5 .

SO THIS IS WHAT the family has turned out to be, Carella thought.

This is what this family has become on this Christmas Day in the new millennium.

There’s still me and Teddy, thank God, and the twins, thank God again, although he didn’t appreciate the fact that they were slowly inching their way toward puberty. Before he knew it, Mark would be readingPenthouse and April would be dating seniors, and he and Teddy would be in wheelchairs in a nursing home. Forty years old, he thought. Jesus. Where did it all go so soon?

There was his sister Angela, too, of course, with her own twins— they ran in the family—and their older sister. Tess was eight, the twins four, all three far distant from puberty. Angela had named the twins Cynthia and Melinda, and then had begun calling them Cindy and Mindy, as if they were a tap-dancing team in Vegas, shame on you, Sis, even though their father had insisted they be called Cynthia and Melinda as originally planned, a noble thought.

Tommy wasn’t here this Christmas, the little girls’ father was God-knew-where on this bright cold afternoon as everyone was called to dinner, or lunch, or whatever it was at two in the afternoon. Tommy Giordano wasn’t here today because he and Angela were divorced now—but not because he’d insisted on calling his daughters by their true and proper names. Tommy Giordano had been caught having a love affair, was still having a love affair, but the lady in question wasn’t a lady at all, although she was often called that. Tommy Giordano was having a love affair with cocaine. He had tried psychiatric help, had tried rehabilitation, had tried every damn thing he and the family could think of, but he was hooked through the bag and back again, and nothing had worked. The marriage had fallen apart when Angela just couldn’t take it any longer. Tommy was still snorting the Devil’s Dandruff,wherever he was— the last time they’d heard it was Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In Tommy’s place today was an assistant district attorney named Henry Lowell, who had received his undergraduate degree from Duke, his law degree from Harvard, and a smattering of lesser education from Oxford University, or so the precinct locker-room jive maintained. Lowell had been with the D.A.’s Office for almost five years now. In that time, he had racked up thirty-eight convictions, an impressive record, four of them on murder cases. The only murder case he’d ever lost, in fact, was the one he’d prosecuted against the man who’d killed Carella’s father.

Maybe this was why Carella didn’t like him too much.

Gee.

What Carella couldn’t understand was why hissister was sleeping with the son of a bitch, and bringing him around to his mother’s house on every goddamn holiday that came along. That was what Carella couldn’t understand, but maybe he was just old-fashioned. Maybe he thought real life here in the big bad city wasn’t the same thing as Greek tragedy where you slept with your father’s murderer or ate your own children. Given that the murderer had finally been gunned down by Carella himself or maybe Brown, who’d been standing by his side and firing at the same time …

Or maybe both of them …

Given that bygones should be bygones …

Justice had been served …

An eye for an eye and all that …

Givenall that …

Should Angelareally be considering marriage to the man?

But even worse thanher defection …

How could hismother have forgotten so soon?

THE SECOND INTERLOPER at the table today was a man named Luigi Fontero from Milan, Italy. Henry Lowell was sitting on Angela’s right, and Luigi Fontero was sitting on Louise Carella’s right—Carella’smother’s right, right! Nor was this the “Luigi” of ancient television fame, a fruit peddler or whatever the hell he’d been, a man who spoke broken English the way the immigrants at the turn of the century had, although the show took place in the Fifties, Carella guessed, he’d only seen a single rerun on theNick at Nite channel or one of the other hundred and ninety-nine channels proliferating like fleas on a dog.

ThisLuigi was a furniture manufacturer.This Luigi made furniture fashioned by some of Europe’s most important designers.This Luigi spoke fluent English with merely the faintest trace of an accent.ThisLuigi wore suits hand-tailored in Rome, and shoes hand- cobbled in Florence.This Luigi was holding his mother’s hand. If this were Greek tragedy, Carella would have cut offthis Luigi’s hand at the wrist.

“How was the weather when you left Milan?” Lowell asked pleasantly.

“Milan is always the same this time of year,” Fontero replied pleasantly. “Drizzly and cold. Very much like Paris.”

Two old buddies chatting about the weather.

Carella wanted to kill them both.

“Couldwego to Paris sometime?” April asked her mother, simultaneously signing.

Teddy signed back,Yes, next weekend, darling.

“Really?” April said, her eyes opening wide.

Image of her mother, black hair and brown eyes. Talked up a storm, a constant chatterer—well, exactly like her mother in that respect as well, except that Teddy could only talk with her hands and her eyes. Born deaf, she had never heard a human voice, never heard any sound at all. Almost everyone at this table knew how to sign, some perfectly, some to a lesser degree. Except the interlopers, of course. They looked at Teddy’s hands as if she were scribbling Sanskrit on the air.

April was wearing lipstick. Not yet thirteen, and wearing lipstick. Teddy assured Carella it was all right. Carella didn’t want to think his daughter was growing up. He didn’t want to think his sister would be marrying the man who’d let their father’s killer go free. He didn’t want to think his mother was starting up with some Italian gigolo so soon after his father’s death. On Christmas Day a year ago, she’d burst into tears whenever his father’s name was mentioned. Now she was openly holding hands with a man who looked too fucking much like a young Marcello Mastroianni.

Maybe I’ve had too much wine, Carella thought.

“I love Italian furniture,” Angela said.

Right, Sis, Carella thought. Aiding and abetting.

“Yes, it is quite beautiful,” Fontero said.

In all modesty, Carella thought.

“Lamps, too,” Angela said.

Compounding the felony, Carella thought.

“What’s the name of your company?” Lowell asked.

“Mobili Fontero.”

“Could I have more lasagna, please?” Mark asked.

The conversation ebbed and flowed, washing the table in familiar sound, except for the voices of the inept district attorney and the sartorially resplendent furniture man from Milan. Carella’s mother had been on a diet for the past two months. Now he knew why. She was styling her hair differently. Now he knew why. He wondered how long they’d known each other. Wondered how they’d met. Wondered …

“How’d you two guys meet, anyway?” Lowell asked.

You two guys. As if they were teenagers. His mother was sixty-three years old. Fontero was sixty-seven if he was a day. You two guys.

“You tell him, Luigi,” his mother said, and patted his hand.

Looking like a schoolgirl. The funeral meats not yet cold upon the table. He suddenly remembered his brief stay in college, remembered playing a bearded Claudius to Sarah Gelb’s Gertrude, a girl he’d later taken to bed—if you could call it that—in the back seat of his father’s car.

He missed his father so very much.

Luigi was telling them about Louise’s best friend—

That was Carella’s mother he was talking about. Louise. Louise Carella. Luigi and Louise. And, of course, Luigi was Louis in Italian, Carella’s middle name, Louis and Louise, oh howcute!

—Louise’s best friend Kate, who lived next door, and who was related somehow to Luigi’s brother in Florence (Firenze, Luigi said) who had suggested that Luigi stop by to say hello while he was on his business trip to America, which he had done, taking a taxi the first time …

“That was a mistake,” Louise Carella said, his mother said, rolling her eyes. “Luigi didn’t know how much it would cost, all the way up here to Riverhead.”

“You should have asked for a flat rate,” Angela suggested.

“Well, at home they warn us all the time about the taxi drivers in this city, but I must tell you I have never once been cheated on any of my visits here.”

“How often do you come here?” Lowell asked.

“Three, four times a year. To sell my line to American dealers. But also because I love this city.” He smiled. Beautiful white teeth. Marcello Mastroianni teeth. “Now I have reason to come more often,” he said, and squeezed Louise’s hand, squeezed Carella’s mother’s hand.

“To make a long story short,” his mother said, Louise said, “I was there having coffee with Katie when this taxi pulled up and Luigi stepped out …”

“This was in October,” Luigi said.

“He was wearing a gray coat with a black fur collar …”

Like a Russian diplomat, Carella thought.

“No hat,” Louise said.

Carella noticed that he had thick black hair, Luigi did.

“He came up the walk, and rang the doorbell,” Louise said. “Katie was expecting him, of course, but not until much later. He introduced himself …”

“I soon forgot I was there to say hello to my brother’s friend,” Luigi said, and squeezed her hand again, Carella’s mother’s hand, Louise’s.

“We went out to dinner, the three of us,” Louise said.

“I asked Katie to join us for the sake of courtesy,” Luigi said.

A beard, Carella thought.

“And that’s how we met,” Louise said.

“I came back the very next month.”

“Before Thanksgiving.”

“We talk every day on the phone.”

“We’ve known each other since October fifteenth,” Louise said.

Birthdate of great men, Carella thought, but did not say.

“Seventy-one days today,” Luigi said.

But who’s counting? Carella thought.

His sister’s eyes met his.

There was something like a warning in them.

Et tu, brute?he thought.

He’d played Caesar, too. And had gone to bed with Portia after the opening-night party. A year and seven months in college, and he’d been able to score with only two girls, big Lothario. How did he suddenly get to be forty? It occurred to him that he had never been to bed with another woman since the day he met Teddy. Nor did he ever plan to. Nor had he ever felt the slightest desire for any other woman. He wondered how many womenSignore Marcello over there had been to bed with,Signore Casanova, wondered if he’d already been to bed with Carella’s mother, Louise, with her stylish new clothes and her svelte new figure and her elegant new coiffure, wondered if his mother had already forgotten that once upon a time there’d been a gentle, loving man named Anthony Carella who’d been shot to death during a holdup in his bakery shop, wondered if sooner or later everyone who dies is forgotten, and thought, curiously, Shakespeare isn’t forgotten, I was Claudius, I was Caesar.

He poured himself another glass of wine.

This time, it was his wife’s eyes that shot a warning across the table.

He smiled at her and raised his glass in a silent toast.

She sighed and turned away.

SHE DID NOT SAY ANYTHING to him until she was certain the children were asleep. Carella was already in bed when she came to him. She sat on the edge of the bed, and in the light of the lamp burning on the night table, her fingers and her eyes told him what was on her mind.

You’re drinking too much,she said.

“Come on,” he said, “a few glasses of wine, what’s wrong with you?”

It started in November, when Danny Gimp got killed …

“Danny was a stool pigeon,” he said.

He was your friend.

“I never considered him a friend.”

He came to the hospital.

“That was a long time ago.”

He came when you were hurt. And now he’s dead. And you never cried for him.

“He meant nothing to me,” Carella said.

Did your father mean something to you?

Carella looked at her.

You didn’t cry for him, either.

“I cried,” Carella said.

No!her hands shouted. Her eyes were flashing. He realized all at once that she was containing enormous anger.

“I cried inside,” he said.

Why are you still so angry with Henry?

“Oh for Christ’s sake, is heHenry already?” Carella said.

Your sister’s going tomarryhim!Teddy said.You have no right to make her feel guilty about it! She loveshim!

“Love!” Carella said.

Is that all at once a dirty word?

“He lost the case!”

Do you think he wanted to?

“He let the man who killed my father …”

Steve,she said, and put her hand on his arm.Sonny Cole is dead. You killed him, Steve. He’s dead. Let it go, honey. Leave it alone.

“Seems everyone’s asking me to do that these days,” he said, and shook his head.

What does that mean?

“Nothing,” he said. “Forget it.”

You never used to say Nothing, forget it.

Her hands stopped, the room went suddenly still. She looked at him for what seemed a very long time.

Steve?she said at last.Do you still love me?

“I adore you,” he said.

Then what is it? Is it the job?

He shook his head.

Is it?

“No. No, I love the job.”

She took a deep breath.

And in the stillness of the night, she asked him why he’d drunk so much at his mother’s house today, and at first he told her he hadn’t drunk that much at all, a glass or two of wine, and then he admitted he’d had at least a full bottle, but this was Christmas Day, so what the hell, she didn’t have to start talking to him as if he was some kind ofdrunkard, this wasn’t Tommy Giordano here sniffing his life up his nose in Santa Fe or wherever. Then he admitted that he was annoyed that his sister would evenconsider marriage to the man who’d let Sonny Cole walk out of that courtroom …

“Never mind that it ended with me shooting him, do you think that’s something Ienjoy doing?” he asked. “Gunning down a man? Do you think I became a cop so I could shoot people dead in the street, twenty yards from the house where my wife and my children are sleeping, do you think Ienjoy doing that?”

I think the job is getting to you, she said, and he told her Don’t be ridiculous, and she said I think the job is beginning to get to you, honey, you’re not the same since your father got killed, you just aren’t the same man I married, and she began sobbing into his shoulder. He told her Come on, nothing’s changed, Ilove the job. And Idid cry for my father, you don’t know how much I cried. I cried for Danny, too, hewas a friend, I know he was, he practically died in my arms! Jesus, Teddy, don’t you think Icare for people, don’t you think I have any feelings?

And suddenly he was crying again—or perhaps for the first time.

She moved out of his arms.

She sat up.

Listen to me,she said.

He nodded. His nose was running. Tears were rolling down his cheeks.

If it’s the job,she said,I want you to leave it.

He shook his head. No. Kept shaking it. No.

I don’t want to lose my husband to the job.

Tears kept streaming from his eyes.

I don’t want you eating your gun one day.

He kept sobbing.

At last, she turned out the light and went to bed with him cradled in her arms.

He fell asleep thinking that only two days ago, he’d seen a woman chewed to pieces like raw meat.