Nocturne

Nocturne

By: Ed Mcbain

The 87th Precinct

The city in these pages is imaginary.

The people, the places are all fictitious.

Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique.

The phone was ringing as Carella came into the squad room The clock on the wall read 11:45 P.M.

"I'm out of here," Parker. said, shrugging into his overcoat.

Carella picked up. "Eighty-seventh Squad," he said.

"Detective Carella."

And listened.

Hawes was coming into the squad room blowing on his hands.

"We're on our way," Carella said, and hung up the phone. Hawes was taking off his coat. "Leave it on," Carella said.

The woman was lying just inside the door to her apartment. She was still wearing an out-of-fashion mink going orange. Her hair was styled in what used to be called finger waves. Silver-blue hair. Orangebrown mink. It was twelve degrees Fahrenheit out there in the street tonight, but under the mink she was wearing only a flowered cotton housedress. Scuffed French-heeled-shoes on her feet. Wrinkled hose. Hearing aid in her right ear. She must have been around eighty-five or so. Someone had shot her twice in the chest. Someone had also shot and killed her cat, a fat female tabby with a bullet hole in her chest and blood in her matted fur.

The Homicide cops had got here first. When Carella and Hawes walked in, they were still speculating on what had happened.

"Keys on the floor there, must've nailed her the minute she come in the apartment," Monoghan said. "Unlocks the door, blooie," Monroe said.

It was chilly in the apartment; both men were still wearing their outer clothing, black overcoats, black fedoras, black leather gloves. In this city, the appearance of Homicide Division detectives was mandatory at the scene, even though the actual investigation fell to the responding precinct detectives. Monoghan and Monroe liked to think of themselves as supervisory and advisory professionals, creative mentors so to speak. They felt black was a fitting color, or lack of color, for professional Homicide Division mentors. Like two stout giant penguins, shoulders hunched, heads bent, they stood peering down at the dead old woman on the worn carpet. Carella and Hawes, coming into the apartment, had to walk around them to avoid stepping on the corpse.

"Look who's here," Monoghan said, without looking up at them.

Carella and Hawes were freezing cold. On a night like tonight, they didn't feel they needed either advice or supervision, creative or otherwise. All they wanted to do was get on with the job. The area just inside the door smelled of whiskey. This was the first thing both cops registered. The second was the broken bottle in the brown paper bag, lying just out of reach of the old

woman's bony arthritic hand. The curled fingers seemed extraordinarily long.

"Been out partying?" Monoghan asked them.

"We've been here twenty minutes already," Monroe said petulantly.

"Big party?" Monoghan asked.

"Traffic," Hawes explained, and shrugged.

He was a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing a woolen tweed overcoat an uncle had sent him from London this past Christmas. It was now the twentieth of January, Christmas long gone, the twenty-first just a heartbeat away but time was of no consequence in the 87th Precinct. Flecks of red in the coat's fabric looked like sparks that had fallen from his hair onto the coat. His face was red, too, from the cold outside. A streak of white hair over his left temple looked like glare ice. It was the color his fear had been when a burglar slashed him all those years ago. The emergency room doctor had shaved his hair to get at the wound, and it had grown back white. Women told him they found it sexy. He told them it was hard to comb.

"We figure she surprised a burglar," Monroe said. "Bedroom window's still open." He gestured with his head. "We didn't want to touch it till the techs got here."

"They must be out partying, too," Monoghan said.

"Fire escape just outside the window," Monroe said, gesturing again. "Way he got in."

"Everybody's out partying but us," Monoghan said.

"Old lady here was planning a little party, that's for sure," Monroe said.

"Fifth of cheap booze in the bag," Monoghan said.

"Musta gone down while the liquor stores were still open."

"It's "Saturday, they'll be open half the night," Monroe said.

'Didn't want to take any chances."

"Well, she won't have to worry about taking chances anymore" Monroe said.

"Who is she, do you know?" Carella asked.

He had unbuttoned his overcoat, and he stood now in an: easy slouch, his hands in his trouser pockets, looking down at the dead woman. Only his eyes betrayed that he was feeling any sort of pain, He was thinking he should have asked Who was she? Because someone had reduced her to nothing but a corpse afloat on cheap whiskey.

"Didn't want to touch her till the M.E. got here," Monroe said.

Please, Carella thought, no par

"He's probably out partying, too," Monoghan said. Midnight had come and gone without fanfare.

But morning would feel like night for along while yet.

To no one's enormous surprise, the: medical examiner cited the apparent cause of death as gunshot wounds. This was even before one of the crime scene techs discovered a pair of spent bullets embedded in the door behind the old woman, and another one in the baseboard behind the cat. They looked like they might be thirty-eights, but not even the creative mentors were willing to guess. The tech bagged them and marked them for transport to the lab. There were no latent fingerprints on the windowsill, the sash, or the

fire escape outside. No latent footprints, either. To everyone's great relief, the tech who'd been out there came back in and closed the window behind him.

The coats came off.

The building superintendent told them the dead. woman was Mrs. Helder. He said he thought she was Russian or something. Or German, he wasn't sure. He said she'd been living there for almost three years. Very quiet person, never caused any trouble. But he thought she drank a little.

This was what was known as a one-bedroom apartment. In this city, some so-called one-bedrooms were really L-shaped studios, but this was a genuine one-bedroom, albeit a tiny one. The bedroom faced the street side, which was unfortunate in that the din of automobile horns was incessant and intolerable, even at this early hour of the morning. This was not a particularly desirable section of the city or the precinct. Mrs. Helder's building was on Lincoln Street, close to the River Harb and the fish market that ran dockside, east to west, for four city blocks.

The team had relieved at a quarter to twelve and would in turn be relieved at seven forty-five A.M. In some American cities, police departments had abandoned what was known as the graveyard shift. This was because detective work rarely required an immediate response except in homicide cases, where any delay in the investigation afforded the killer an invaluable edge. In those cities, what they called Headquarters, or Central, or Metro, or whatever, maintained homicide hot lines that could rustle any

detective out of bed in a minute flat. Not this city. In this city, whenever your name came up on the rotating schedule, you pulled a month on what was accurately called the morning shift even though you worked all through the empty hours of the night. The graveyard shift, as it was familiarly and un affectionately called, threw your internal clock all out of whack, and also played havoc with your sex life. It was now five minutes past midnight. In exactly seven hours and forty minutes, the day shift would relieve and the detectives could go home to sleep. Meanwhile, they were in a tiny one-bedroom apartment that stank of booze and something they realized was cat piss. The kitchen floor was covered with fish bones and the remains of several fish heads.

"Why do you suppose he shot the cat?" Monroe said. "Maybe the cat was barking," Monoghan suggested.

"They got books with cats in them solving murders," Monroe said.

"They got books with all tdnds of amateurs in them solving murders," Monoghan said.

Monroe looked at his watch.

"You got this under control here?" he asked.

"Sure," Carella said.

"You need any advice or supervision, give us a ring." "Meanwhile, keep us informed." "In triplicate," Monoghan said.

There was a double bed in the bedroom, covered with a quilt that looked foreign in origin, and a dresser that " definitely was European, with ornate pulls and painted drawings on the sides and top. The dresser drawers

were stacked with underwear and socks and hose and sweaters and blouses. In the top drawer, there was a painted candy tin with costume jewelry in it.

There was a single closet in the bedroom, stuffed with clothes that must have been stylish a good fifty years ago, but which now seemed terribly out of date and, in most instances, tattered and frayed. There was a faint whiff of must coming from the closet. Must and old age. The old age of the clothes, the old age of the woman who'd once worn them. There was an ineffable sense of sadness in this place.

Silently, they went about their work.

In the living room, there was a floor lamp with a tasseled shade.

There were framed black-and-white photographs of strange people in foreign places.

There was a sofa with ornately carved legs and worn cushions and fading lace antimacassars.

There was a record player. A shellacked 78 rpm record sat on the turntable. Carella bent over to look at the old red RCA Victor label imprinted with the picture of the dog looking into the horn on an old-fashioned phonograph player. The label read:

Albums of 78s and 33 1/3s were stacked on the table beside the record player.

Against one wall, there was an upright piano. The keys were covered with dust. It was apparent that no one had played it for along while. When they lifted the lid of the piano bench, they found the scrapbook.

There are questions to be asked about scrapbooks.

Was the book created and maintained by the person who was its subject? Or did a second party assemble it?

There was no clue as to who had laboriously and fastidiously collected and pasted up the various clippings and assorted materials in the book.

The first entry in the book was a program from Albert Hall in London, where a twenty-three year-old Russian pianist named Svetlana Dyalovich made her triumphant debut, playing Tchaikovsky's B-flat Minor Concerto with Leonard Home conducting the London Philharmonic. The assembled reviews from the London Times, the Spectator and the Guardian were ecstatic, alternately calling her a "great musician" and a "virtuoso," and praising, her "electrical temperament," her "capacity for animal excitement" and "her physical genius for tremendous climax of sonority and for lightning speed."

The reviewer from the Times summed it all up with, "The piano, in Miss Dyalovich's hands, was a second orchestra, nearly as powerful and certainly as eloquent as the first, and the music was spacious, superb, rich enough in color and feeling, to have satisfied the composer himself. What is to be recorded here is the wildest welcome a pianist has received in many

seasons in London, the appearance of a new pianistic talent which cannot be ignored or minimized."

There followed a similarly triumphant concert at New York's Carnegie Hall six months later, and then three concerts in Europe, one with the La Scala Orchestra in Milan, another with the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris and a third with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Holland. In rapid succession, she gave ten recitals in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and then went on to play five more in Switzerland, ending the year with concerts in Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Liege, Anvers, Brussels, and then Paris again. It was not surprising that in March of the following year, the then twenty-four-year-old musical genius was honored with a profile in Time magazine. The cover photo of her showed a tall blond woman in a black gown, seated at a grand piano, her long, slender fingers resting on the keys, a confident smile on her face. They kept turning pages.

Year after year, review after review hailed her extraordinary interpretive gifts. The response was the same everywhere in the world. Words like "breathtaking talent" and "heaven-storming octaves" and "conquering technique" and "leonine sweep and power" became commonplace in anything anyone ever wrote about her. It was as if reviewers could not find vocabulary rich enough to describe this phenomenal woman's artistry. When she was thirty-four, she married an Austrian impresario named Franz Helder... "There it is," Hawes said. "Mrs. Helder."

"Yeah."

.. and a year later gave birth to her only child, whom they named Maria, after her husband's mother At the age of forty-three, when Maria was eight, exactly twenty years after a young girl from Russia had taken the town by storm, Svetlana returned to London to play a commemorative concert at Albert Hall. The critic for the London Times, displaying a remarkable lack of British restraint, hailed the performance as "a most fortunate occasion" and went on to call Svetlana "this wild tornado unleashed from the Steppes

There followed a ten-year absence from recital halls "I am a very poor traveler," she told journalists. "I am afraid of flying, and I can't sleep on trains. And besides, my daughter is becoming a young woman, and she needs more attention from me." During this time, she devoted herself exclusively to recording for RCA Victor, where she first put on wax her debut concerto, the Tchaikovsky B-flat Minor, and next the Brahms D Minor, one of her favorites. She went on to interpret the works of Mozart, Prokofieff, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Liszt, always paying strict attention to what the composer intended, an artistic concern that promoted one admiring critic to write, "These recordings reveal that Svetlana Dyalovich is first and foremost a consummate musician, scrupulous to the nth degree of the directions of the composer."

Shortly after her husband's death, Svetlana returned triumphantly to the concert stage, shunning Carnegie Hall in favor of the venue of her first success, Albert Hall in London. Tickets to the single comeback

performance were sold out in an hour and a half. Her daughter was eighteen. Svetlana was fifty-three. To thunderous standing ovations, she played the BachBusoni Toccata in C Major, Schumann's Fantasy in C, Scriabin's Sonata No. 9 and a Chopin Mazurka, Etude and Ballade. The evening was a total triumph. But then... Silence.

After that concert thirty years ago, there was nothing more in the scrapbook. It was as if this glittering, illustrious artist had simply vanished from the face of the earth.

Until now.

When a woman the super knew as Mrs. Helder lay dead on the floor of a chilly apartment at half past midnight, on the coldest night this year.

They closed the scrapbook.

The scenario proposed by Monoghan and Monroe sounded like a possible one. Woman goes down to buy herself a bottle of booze. Burglar comes in the window, thinking the apartment is empty. Most apartments are burglarized during the daytime, when it's reasonable to expect the place will be empty. But some "crib" burglars, as they're called" are either desperate junkies or beginners, and they'll go in whenever the mood strikes them, day or night, so long as they think they'll score. Okay, figure the guy sees no lights burning, he jimmies open the window though the techs hadn't found any jimmy marks goes in, is getting accustomed to the dark and acquainted with the pad when he hears a key sliding in

the keyway and the door opens and all at once the lights come on, and there's this startled old broad standing there with a brown paper bag in one hand and a pocketbook in the other. He panics. Shoots her before she can scream. Shoots the cat for good measure. Man down the hall hears the shots, starts yelling. Super runs up, calls the police. By then, the burglar's out the window and long gone.

"You gonna want this handbag?." one of e techs asked.

Carella turned from where he and Hawes were going through the small desk in the living room. "Cause we're done with it," the tech said. Any prints?"

"Just teeny ones. Must be the vie's."

"What was in it?"

"Nothing. It's empty."

"Empty?"

"Pew must've dumped the contents on the floor, grabbed whatever was in it."

Carella thought this over for a moment.

"Shot her first, do you mean? And then emptied the bag and scooped up whatever was in it?"

"Well... yeah," the tech said.

This sounded ridiculous even to him.

"Why didn't he just run off with the bag itself?."

"

"Listen, they do funny hings.

"Yeah," Carella said.

He was wondering if there'd been money in that bag when the lady went downstairs to buy her booze.

"Let me see it," he said

The tech handed him the bag. Carella peered into it, and then turned it upside down. Nothing fell out of it.

He peered into it again. Nothing.

"Steve?"

Cotton Hawes, calling from the desk.

"A wallet," he said, holding it up.

In the wallet, there was a Visa card with a photo ID of the woman called Svetlana Helder in its left-hand corner.

There was also a hundred dollars in tens, fives and singles.

Carella wondered if she had a charge account at the local liquor store.

They were coming out into the hallway when a woman standing just outside the apartment down the hall said, "Excuse me?"

Hawes looked her over.

Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, he figured, slender dark-haired woman with somewhat exotic features spelling Middle Eastern or at least Mediterranean. Very dark brown eyes. No makeup, no nail polish. She was clutching a woolen shawl around her. Bathrobe under it. Red plaid, lambskin-lined bedroom slippers on her feet. It was slightly warmer here in the hallway than it was outside in the street. But only slightly. Most buildings in this city, the heat went off around midnight. It was now a quarter to one.

"Are you the detectives?" she asked.

"Yes," Carella said.

"I'm her neighbor" the woman said.

They waited.

"Karen Todd," she said.

"Detective Carella. My partner, Detective Hawes. How do you do?"

Neither of the detectives offered his hand. Not because they were male chauvinists, but only because cops rarely shook hands with so-called civilians. Same way cops didn't carry umbrellas. See a guy with his hands in his pockets, standing on a street corner in the pouring rain, six to five he was an undercover cop.

"I was out," Karen said. "The super told me somebody killed her."

"Yes, that's right," Carella said, and watched her eyes. Nothing flickered there. She nodded almost imperceptibly.

"Why would anyone want to hurt her?" she said. "Such a gentle soul."

"How well did you know her?" Hawes asked. "Just to talk to. She used to be a famous piano player, did you know that? Svetlana Dyalovich. That was the name she played under."

Piano player, Hawes thought. A superb artist who had made the cover of Time magazine. A piano player.

"Her hands all gnarled," Karen said, and shook her head.

The detectives looked at her.

"The arthritis. She told me she was in constant pain. Have you noticed how you can never open bottles that have pain relievers in them? That's because America is full of loonies who are trying to hurt people. Who would want to hurt her?" she asked again, shaking her head. "She was in so much pain already. The arthritis. Osteoarthritis, in fact, is what her doctor called it. I

went with her once. To her doctor. He told me he was switching her to Voltaren because the Naprosyn wasn't working anymore. He kept increasing the doses, it was really so sad."

"How long did you know her?" Carella asked. Another way of asking How well did you know her? He didn't for a moment believe Karen Todd had anything at all to do with the murder of the old woman next door, but his mama once told him everyone's a suspect till his story checks out. Or her story. Although the world's politically correct morons would have it "Everyone's a suspect until their story checks out." Which was worse than tampering with the jars and bottles on supermarket shelves and ungrammatical besides.

"I met her when I moved in," Karen said.

"When was that?"

"A year ago October. The fifteenth, in fact."

Birth date of great men, Hawes thought, but did not say.

"I've been here more than a year now. Fourteen months, in fact. She brought me a housewarming gift. A loaf of bread and a box of salt. That's supposed to bring good luck. She was from Russia, you know. They used to have the old traditions over there. We don't have any traditions anymore in America."

Wrong, Carella thought. Murder has become a tradition here.

"She was a big star over there," Karen said. "Well, here, too, in fact."

Bad verbal tic, Hawes thought.

"She used to tell me stories of how she played for royalty all over the world, in fact, She had a lot of memories."

"When did she tell you these stories?"

"Oh, in the afternoons. We had tea together every now and then."

"In her apartment?"

"Yes. It was another tradition. Tea time. She had a lovely tea set. I had to pour because of her hands. We used to sit and listen to records she'd made when she was famous. And sip tea in the late afternoon. It reminded me of T. S. Eliot somehow."

Me, too, Hawes thought, but again did not say.

"So when you said you knew her just to talk to," Carella said, "you were including these visits to her apartment..."

"Oh, yes."

"... when you listened to music together."

"Yes. Well, my apartment, too. Some nights, I invited her in. We had little dinner parties together. She was alone and lonely and.." well, I didn't want her to start drinking too early. She tended to drink more heavily at night."

"By heavily... ?"

"Well ... she started drinking as soon as she woke up in the morning, in fact. But at night.." well.." she sometimes drank herself into a stupor."

"How do you know that?" Hawes asked.

"She told me. She was very frank with me. She knew she had a problem."

"Was she doing anything about it?"

"She was eighty-three years old. What could she do about it? The arthritis was bad enough. But she wore a hearing aid, you know. And lately, she began hearing ringing in her head, and hissing, like a kettle, you know? And sometimes a roaring sound, like heavy machinery? It was really awful. She told me her ear doctor wanted to send her to a neurologist for testing, but she was afraid to go."

"When was this?" Hawes asked.

"Before Thanksgiving. It was really so sad." "These afternoon teas," Carella said, "these little dinner parties.." was anyone else at them? Besides you and Miss Dyalovich?"

Somehow he liked that better than Mrs. Helder. Cover of Time magazine, he was thinking. You shouldn't end up as Mrs. Helder.

"No, just the two of us. In fact, I don't think she had any other friends. She told me once that all the people she'd known when she was young and famous were dead now. All she had was me, I guess. And the cat. She was very close to poor Irina. What's going to happen to her now? Will she go to an animal shelter?" "Miss, he killed the cat, too," Hawes said.

"Oh dear. Oh dear," Karen said, and was silent for a moment. "She used to go out early every morning to buy fresh fish for her, can you imagine? No matter how cold it was, arthritic old lady. Irina loved fish."

Her brown eyes suddenly welled with tears. Hawes wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her. Instead, he said, "Did she have any living relatives?"

People to inform, Carella thought. He almost sighed.

"A married daughter in London." "Do you know her name?" "No."

"Anyone here in this country?"

"I think a granddaughter someplace in the city." "Ever meet her?" "No."

"Would you know her name?"

"No, I'm sorry."

"Did Miss Dyalovich ever mention any threatening phone calls or letters?"

"NO."

Run her through the drill, Carella was thinking.

"Had she ever seen anyone lurking around the building ... ?"

"No."

"Following her... ?"

"No."

"Do you know of any enemies she may have had?" "No."

"Anyone with whom she may have had a continuing dispute?"

"No."

"Anyone she may have quarreled with?"

"NO o o o"

"Even anyone on unfriendly terms with her?"

"NO "

"Did she owe anyone money?"

"I doubt it."

"Did anyone owe her money?"

"She was an old woman living on welfare. What money did she have to lend?"

Toast of six continents, Hawes thought. Ends up living on welfare in a shithole on Lincoln. Sipping tea and whiskey in the late afternoon. Listening to her own old 78s. Her hands all gnarled.

"This granddaughter," he said. "Did you ever see her?"

"No, I never met her. I told you."

"What I'm asking is did you ever see her? Coming out of the apartment next door. Or in the hall. Did she ever come here to visit, is what I'm asking?"

"Oh. No. I don't think they got along."

"Then there was someone on unfriendly terms with her," Carella said.

"Yes, but family," Karen said, shrugging it off.

"Was it Miss Dyalovich who told you they didn't get along?"

"Yes."

"When was thisT"

"Oh, two or three months ago."

"Came up out of the blue, did it?"

"No, she was lamenting the fact that her only daughter lived so far away, in London..."

"How'd that lead to the granddaughterT"

"Well, she said if only she and Priscilla could get

along..."

"Is that her name?" Hawes asked at once. "The granddaughter?"

"Oh. Yes. I'm sorry, I didn't remember it until it popped out of my mouth." "Priscilla what?" "I don't know."

"Maybe it'll come to you."

"No, I don't think I ever knew it."

"The obit will tell us," Carella said. "Later this morning."

It was now exactly one A.M.

The man who owned the liquor store told them Saturdays were his biggest nights. Made more in the hour before closing on Saturday nights than he did the rest of the entire year. Only thing bigger was New Year's Eve, he told them. Even bigger than that was when New Year's Eve fell on a Saturday night. Couldn't beat it.

"Biggest night of the year," he said. "I could stay open all night New Year's Eve and sell everything in the store."

This was already Sunday, but it still felt like Saturday night to the guy who owned the store. It must have still felt like Christmas, too, even though it was already the twenty-first of January. A little Christmas tree blinked green and red in the front window. Little cardboard cutouts, hanging across the ceiling, endlessly repeated HAPPY HOLIDAYS. Gift-packaged bottles of booze sat on countertops and tables.

The store owner's name was Martin Keely. He was maybe sixty-eight, sixty-nine, in there, a short stout man with a drunkard's nose and wide suspenders to match it. He kept interrupting their conversation, such as it was, to make yet another sale. This hour of the night, he was selling mostly cheap wine to panhandlers who straggled in with their day's take. This became a different city after midnight. You saw different people in the streets and on the sidewalks. In

the bars and clubs that were open. In the subways and the taxicabs. An entirely different city with entirely different people in it.

One of them had killed Svetlana Dyalovich.

"What time did she come in here, would you remember?" Hawes asked.

"Around eleven o'clock."

Which more or less tied in. Man down the hall said he heard the shots at about eleven-twenty. Super called

911 five minutes after that. "What'd she buy?" "Bottle of Four Roses."

Exactly the brand that had dropped to the floor when someone shot her.

"How much did it cost?"

"Eight dollars and ninety-nine cents." "How'd she pay for it?" "Cash." "Exact?"

"What do you mean?"

"Did she hand you exactly eight dollars and ninety-nine cents."

"No, she handed me a ten-dollar bill. I gave her change."

"Where'd she put the change?"

"In this little purse she was carrying. Took a ten out of the purse, handed it to me. Gave her one dollar and one cent in change. Put that in the purse." "The dollar was in change, too?" "No, the dollar was a bill."

"And you say she put the change in her handbag?"

"No, she put it in this purse A little purse. A change purse. With the little snaps on top you click open with your thumb and forefinger. A purse, you know?" he said, seeming to become inappropriately agitated. "You know what a purse is? A purse ain't a handbag. A purse is a purse. Doesn't anybody in this city speak English anymore?"

"Where'd she put this purse?" Carella asked calmly. "In her coat pocket."

"The pocket of the mink," he said, nodding.

"No, she wasn't wearing a mink. She was wearing a cloth coat."

The detectives looked at him.

"Are you sure about that?" Hawes asked. "Positive. Ratty blue cloth coat. Scarf on her head. Silk, I think. Whatever. Pretty. But it had seen better days."

"Cloth coat and a silk scarf," Carella said.

"Yeah."

"You're saying that when she came in here at eleven o'clock last night..."

"No, I'm not saying that at all."

"You're not saying she was wearing a cloth coat and a silk scarf?."

"I'm not saying she came in at eleven last night."

"If it wasn't eleven, what time was it?"

"Oh, it was eleven, all right. But it was eleven yesterday morning."

They found the change purse in the pocket of a blue cloth coat hanging in, the bedroom closet.

There was a dollar and a penny in it.

In the year 1909, There used to be forty-four morning newspapers in this city. By 1929, that figure had dropped to thirty. Three years later, due to technological advances, competition for circulation, standardization of the product, managerial faults, and, by the way, the Great Depression, this number was reduced to a mere three. Now there were but two.

Since there was a killer out there, the detectives didn't want to wait till four, five A.M." when both papers would hit the newsstands. Nor did they think a call to the morning tabloid would be fruitful, mainly because they didn't think it would run an obit on a concert pianist, however famous she once may have been. It later turned out they were wrong; the tabloid played the story up big, but only because Svetlana had been living in obscurity and poverty after three decades of celebrity, and her granddaughter but that was another story.

Hawes spoke on the phone to the obituary editor at the so-called quality paper, a most cooperative man who was ready to read the full obit to him until Hawes assured him that all he wanted were the names of Miss Dyalovich's surviving kin. The editor skipped to the last paragraph, which noted that Svetlana was survived by a daughter, Maria Stetson, who lived in London, and a granddaughter, Priscilla Stetson, who lived right here in the big bad city.

"You know who she is, don't you?" the editor asked. Hawes thought he meant Svetlana. "Yes, of course," he said.

"We couldn't mention it in the obit because that's supposed to be exclusively about the deceased." "I'm not following you," Hawes said.

"The granddaughter. She's Priscilla Stetson. The singer."

"Oh? What kind of singing does she do?" "Supper club. Piano bar. Cabaret. Like that."

"You wouldn't know where, would you?" Hawes asked.

In this city, many of the homeless sleep by day and roam by night. Nighttime is dangerous for them; there are predators out there and a cardboard box offers scant protection against someone intent on robbery or rape. So they wander the streets like shapeless wraiths, adding a stygian dimension to the nocturnal landscape.

The streetlamps are on. Traffic lights blink their intermittent reds, yellows and greens into the empty hours of the night, but the city seems dark. Here and there, a bathroom light snaps on. In the otherwise blank face of an apartment building, a lamp burns steadily in the bedroom of an insomniac. The commercial buildings are all ablaze with illumination, but the only people in them are the office cleaners, readying the spaces for the workday that will begin at nine Monday morning. Tonight it still feels like night even though the morning is already an hour and a half old the cables on the bridges that span the city's river are festooned with bright lights that reflect in the

black waters below. Yet all seems so dark, perhaps because it is so empty.

At one-thirty in the morning the theater crowd has been home and in bed for along time, and many of the hotel bars have been closed for a half hour already. The clubs and discos will be open till four A.M." the outside legal limit for serving alcoholic beverages, at which time the' delis and diners will begin serving breakfast. The underground clubs will grind on till six in the morning. But for now and for the most part, the city is as still as any tomb.

Steam hisses up from sewer lids.

Yellow cabs streak like whispered lightning through deserted streets.

A black-and-white photograph of Priscilla Stetson was on an easel outside the entrance to the Cafe Mouton at the Hotel Powell. Like an identifying shot in a home movie, the script lettering above the photo read Mrs. Priscilla Stetson. Below the photo, the same script lettering announced:

Now Appearing

9:00 P.M. - 2:00 A.M.

The woman in the photo could have been Svetlana Dyalovich on the cover of Time magazine. The same flaxen hair falling straight to her shoulders and cut in bangs on her forehead. The same pale eyes. The same high Slavic cheekbones. The same imperial nose and confident smile.

The woman sitting at the piano was perhaps thirty years old, dressed in along black gown with a risky decolletage. A creamy white expanse of flesh from bosom to neck was interrupted at the throat by a silver choker studded with black and white stones. She was singing "Gently, Sweetly" when the detectives came in and took stools at the bar. There were perhaps two dozen people sitting at tables scattered around the smallish candlelit room. It was twenty minutes to two in the morning.

Here with a kiss

In the mist on the shore Sip from my lips And whisper

I adore you... Gently, Sweetly,

Ever so completely, Take me, Make me Yours.

Priscilla Stetson struck the final chord of the song, bent her head, and looked reverently at her hands spread on the keys. There was a spatter of warm applause. "Thank you," she whispered into the piano mike. "Thank you very much." Raising her head, tossing the long blond hair. "I'll be taking a short break before the last set, so if you'd like to order anything before closing, now's your chance." A wide smile, a wink. She played a lithe signature riff, rose, and was walking toward a table where two burly men

sat alone, when the detectives came off their stools to intercept her.

"Miss Stetson?" Carella said.

She turned, smiling, the performer ready to greet an admirer. In high-heeled pumps, she was perhaps five-eight, five-nine. Her blue-grey eyes were almost level with his.

"Detective Carella," he said. "This is my partner,

Detective Hawes."

"Yes?"

"Miss Stetson," he said. "I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but..."

"My grandmother," she said at once, looking certain rather than alarmed.

"Yes. I'm sorry. She's dead."

She nodded.

"What happened?" she asked. "Did she fall in the bathtub again?"

"No, she was shot." "Shot? My grandmother?" "I'm sorry," Carella said.

"Jesus, shot," Priscilla said. "Why would... ?" She shook her head again. "Well, this city," she said. "Where'd it happen? On the street someplace?"

"No. In her apartment. It may have been a burglar." Or maybe not, Hawes thought, but said nothing, just allowed Carella to continue carrying the ball. This was the hardest part of police work, informing the relatives of a victim that something terrible had happened. Carella was doing a fine job, thanks, no sense g him. Not at a quarter to two in the when the whole damn world was asleep.

"Was she drunk?" Priscilla asked.

Flat out.

"There hasn't been an autopsy yet," Carella said. "She was probably drunk," Priscilla said.

"We'll let you know," Carella said. It came out more harshly than he'd intended. Or maybe it came out exactly as he'd intended. "Miss Stetson," he said, "if this is what it looks like, a burglar surprised during the commission of a felony, then we're looking for a needle in a haystack. Because it would've been a random thing, you see."

"Yes."

"On the other hand, if this is someone who wanted your grandmother dead, who came into the apartment with the express purpose of killing her..."

"Nobody wanted her dead," Priscilla said.

"How do you know that?"

"She was already dead. No one even knew she existed. Why would anyone go to the trouble of shooting her?"

"But someone did, you see."

"A burglar then. As you said."

"The problem with that is nothing was stolen." "What was there to steal?" "You tell us." "What do you mean?

"There didn't seem to be anything of value in the apartment but was there? Before he broke in?"

"Like what? The Imperial Czar's crown jewels? My grandmother didn't have a pot to piss in. Whatever she got from welfare, she spent on booze. She was drunk morning, noon and night. She was a pathetic, whining

old bitch, a has-been with nothing of value but her memories. I hated her."

But tell us how you really feel, Carella thought.

He didn't much like this young woman with her inherited good looks and her acquired big-city, wise ass manner. He would just as soon not be here talking to her, but he didn't like burglaries that turned into murders, especially if maybe they weren't burglaries in the first place. So even if it meant pulling teeth, he was going to learn something about her grandmother, anything about her grandmother that might put this thing to rest one way or another. If someone had wanted her dead, fine, they'd go looking for that someone till hell froze over. If not, they'd go back to the squad room and wait until a month from now, a year from now, five years from now, when some junkie burglar got arrested and confessed to having killed an old lady back when you and I were young, Maggie. Meanwhile... "Anyone else feel the way you do?" he asked. "How do you mean?" "You said you hated her."

"Oh, what? Did I kill her? Come on. Please." "You okay, Priss?"

Carella turned at once, startled. The man standing at his elbow was one of the two Priscilla had been heading to join when they'd intercepted her. Even before he noticed the gun in a holster under the man's arm

Carella would have tapped him for either a or a mobster. Or maybe both. Some and weighing in at a possible two-twenty, he advanced on the balls of his feet, hands dangling

half-clenched at his sides, a pose that warned Carella he could take him out in a minute if he had to. Carella believed it.

"I'm fine, Georgie" Priscilla said.

Georgie, Carella thought, and braced himself when he saw the other man getting up from the table and moving toward them. Hawes was suddenly alert, too. "Because if these gentlemen are disturbing you..." Carella flashed the tin, hoping to end all discussion. "We're police officers," he said.

Georgie looked at the shield, unimpressed.

"You got a problem here, Georgie?" the other man said, approaching. Georgie's twin, no doubt. Similarly dressed, down to the hardware under the wide-shouldered suit jacket. Hawes flashed his shield,

too. It never hurt to make the same point twice. " "Police officers," he said.

Must be an echo in this place, Carella thought.

"Is Miss Stetson in some kind of trouble?" Georgie's twin asked. Two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and bone draped in Giorgio Armani threads. No broken nose, but otherwise the stereotype was complete.

"Miss Stetson's grandmother was killed," Hawes said calmly. "Everything's under control here. Why don't you just go back to your table, hm?"

A buzz was starting in the room now. Four big guys surrounding the room's star, looked like there might be some kind of trouble here. One thing people in this city didn't much care for was trouble. First whiff of trouble, people in this city picked up their skirts and ran for the hills. Even out-of-towners in this city (which some of the people in the room looked like),

even foreigners in the city (which some of the other people in the room looked like), the minute they caught that first faint whiff of trouble brewing, they were out of here, man. Miss Priscilla Stetson, Now Appearing 9:00 P.M.-2:00 A.M. was in imminent danger of playing her last set to an empty room. She suddenly remembered the time. "I'm on," she said. "We'll talk later," and left the four men standing there with their thumbs up their asses. Like most macho fools who display their manhood to no avail, the men stood glaring at each other a moment longer, and then mentally flexed their muscles with a few seconds of eye lock before the two cops went back to the bar and the two gun-toting whatever-they-weres went back to their table. Priscilla, professionally aloof to whatever masculineness were surfacing here, warmly sang a setting of 'My Funny Valentine," "My Romance," I Loved You" and "Sweet and Lovely." A woman at one of the tables asked her escort why they don,t write love songs like that anymore, and he said,

now they write hate songs." It was 2:00 A.M.

Either Georgie (or his twin brother Frankie or or Dominick or Foongie) asked Priscilla why she hadn't played the theme song from The Godfather

She sweetly told them no one had requested it, them both on their respective cheeks and kissed them off. Big detectives that were, neither Carella nor Hawes yet knew they were bodyguards or wiseguys. Priscilla the bar.

"Too late for a glass of champagne?" she asked the bartender.

He knew she was kidding; he poured one in a flute. Dispersing guests came over to tell Priscilla how terrific she'd been. Graciously, she thanked them all and sent them on their early morning way. Priscilla wasn't a star, she was just a good singer in a small cafe in a modest hotel, but she carried herself well. They could tell by the way she merely sipped at the champagne that she wasn't a big drinker. Maybe her grandmother had something to do with that. Which brought them back to the corpse in the shabby mink coat.

"I told you," Priscilla said. "All her friends are dead. I couldn't give you their names if I wanted to."

"How about enemies?" Carella asked. "All of them dead, too?"

"My grandmother was alonely old woman livin alone. She had no friends, she had no enemies. Period."

"So it had to be a burglar, right?" Hawes asked. Priscilla looked at him as if discovering him for the first time. Looked him up and down. Red hair white streak, size twelve gunboats.

"That's your job, isn't it?" she asked coolly "Determining whether it was a burglar or not?"

"And, by the way, she did have a friend," he corrected.

"Oh?"

"Woman down the hall. Played her old records to her."

"Please. She played those old 78s for anyone who'd listen."

"Ever meet her?"

"Who?"

"Woman named Karen Todd. Lived down the hall from your grandmother."

"No."

"When's the last time you saw her alive?" Hawes asked.

"We didn't get along."

"So we understand. When did you see her last?" "Must'a been around Eastertime." "Long time ago."

"Yeah," she said, and fell suddenly silent. I guess

'i'll have to call my mother, huh?" she asked. "Might be a good idea," Carella said. "Let her know what happened." "Mm."

"What time is it in London?"

"I don't know," Carella said.

"Five or six hours ahead, is that it?"

Hawes shook his head, shrugged.

Priscilla fell silent again.

The champagne glass was empty now. "Why'd you hate her?" Carella asked. "For what she did to herself."

"She didn't cause the arthritis," Hawes said. "She caused the alcoholism." "Which came first?"

"Who knows? Who cares? She was one of the

She ended up a nobody."

"Enemies," Carella said again.

don't know of any."

it had to be a burglar," Hawes said again.

"Who cares what it was?" Priscilla asked. "We do," Carella said.

It was time to stop the clock.

Time was running by too fast, someone out there had killed her, and time was on his side, her side, whoever's side. The faster the minutes went by, the greater would become the distance between him, her, whomever and the cops. So it was time to stop the clock, hardly a difficult feat here in the old Eight-Seven, time to pause for a moment, and reflect,

time to make a few phone calls, time to call time out. Carella called home.

When he'd left there at eleven last night, his son Mark was burning up with a hundred-and two-degree fever and the doctor was on the way. Fanny Knowles,

the Carella housekeeper, picked up on the third ring. "Fanny," he said, "hi. Did I wake you?" "Let me get her," Fanny said.

He waited. His wife could neither speak nor hear. There was a TDD telephone answering device in the house, but typing out long messages was time consuming tedious, and often frustrating. Better that Teddy should sign and Fanny should translate. He waited.

"Okay," Fanny said at last.

"What'd the doctor say?"

"It's nothing serious," Fanny said. "He thinks it's the flu."

"What does Teddy think?"

"Let me ask her."

There was a silence on the line. Fanny signing,

Teddy responding. He visualized both women in their nightgowns Fanny some five feet five inches tall, a stout Irish woman with red hair and gold-rimmed eyeglasses, fingers flying in the language Teddy had taught her. Teddy an inch taller, a beautiful woman with raven-black hair and eyes as dark as loam, fingers flying even faster because she'd been doing this from when she was a child. Fanny was back on the line.

"She says what worried her most was when he started shakin like a leaf all over. But he's all right now. The fever's come down, she thinks the doctor's right, it's only the flu. She's going to sleep in his room, she says, just in case. When will you be home, she wants to know." "Shift's over at eight, she knows that." "She thought, with the lad sick and all ..." "Fanny, we've got a homicide. Tell her that." He waited.

Fanny came back on the line.

"She says you've always got a homicide."

Carella smiled.

I'll be home in six hours," he said. "Tell her I love her."

"She loves you too," Fanny said.

"Did she say that?"

"No, I said it," Fanny said. "Its two in the mornin, mister. Can we all go back to bed now?"

"

"Not me, Carella said.

Hawes was talking to a Rape Squad cop named Annie Rawles. Annie happened to be in his bed. He was telling her that since he'd come to work tonight, he'd

met a beautiful Mediterranean-looking woman and also a beautiful piano player with long blond hair.

"Is the piano player a woman, too? "Annie asked. Hawes smiled.

"What are you wearing?" he asked.

"Just a thirty-eight in a shoulder holster," Annie said.

"I'll be right there," he said.

"Fat Chance Department," she said.

The clock began ticking again.

Every hour of the day looks the same inside a morgue. That's because there are no windows and the glare of fluorescent light is neutral at best. The stench, too, is identical day in and day out, palpable to anyone who walks in from the fresh air outside, undetectable to the assistant medical examiners who are carving up corpses for autopsy.

Dr. Paul Blaney was a shortish man with a scraggly black mustache and eyes everyone told him were violet, but which he thought were a pale bluish-grey. He was wearing a bloodstained blue smock and yellow rubber gloves, and was weighing a liver when the detectives walked in. He immediately plopped the organ into a stainless-steel basin, where it sat looking like the Portnoy family's impending dinner. Yanking off one of the gloves, presumably to shake hands, he remembered where the hand had recently been, and pulled it back abruptly. He knew why the detectives were here. He got directly to the point.

"Two to the heart," he said. "Both bull's-eyes, and not a bad title for a movie."

"I think there was one," Hawes said.

"Bull's-Eyes?"

"

"No, no... "You're thinking of One-Eyed Jacks."

"No, Two to the Heart, something like that."

"Two for the Road, you're thinking of," Blaney said.

"No, that was a song," Hawes said.

"That was, "One for the Road." "

"This was a movie. Two from the Heart, maybe."

"Cause Two for the Road was very definitely a movie."

Carella was looking at them both.

"This had the word 'heart' in the title," Hawes said. Carella was still looking at them. Everywhere around them were bodies or body parts on tables and countertops. Everywhere around them was the stink of death.

"Heart, heart," Blaney said, thinking out loud. "Heart of Darkness? Because that became a movie, but it was called Apocalypse Now.""

"No, but I think you're close."

"Is it Coppola?"

"Carella," Carella said, wondering why Blaney,

'whom he had known for at least a quarter of a century,

was getting his name wrong.

"Something Coppola directed?" Blaney asked, ignoring him.

"I don't know," Hawes said. "Who's Coppola?"

"He directed the Godfather movies."

Which reminded Carella of the two hoods in the hotel bar. Which further reminded him of Svetlana's

granddaughter. Which brought him full circle to why they were here.

"The autopsy," he reminded Blaney.

"Two to the heart," Blaney said. "Both of them in a space the size of a half-dollar. Which didn't take much of a marksman because the killer was standing quite close."

"How close'

"I'd say no more than three, four feet. All the guy did was point and fire. Period."

"Was she drunk?" Carella asked.

"No. Percentage of alcohol in the brain was point-oh-two, well within the normal range. Urine and blood percentages were similarly normal."

"Can you give us a PMI?"

"Around eleven, eleven-thirty last night. Ballpark." No postmortem interval was entirely accurate. They all knew that. But Blaney's educated guess coincided with the time the man down the hall had heard shots. "Anything else we should know?" Hawes asked. "Examination of the skull revealed a schwannoma arising from the vestibular nerve, near the porus acusticus, extending into both the internal auditory meatus. "

"In English, please," Carella said. "An acoustic neuro ma "Come on, Paul."

"In short, a tumor on the auditory nerve. Quite large and cystic, probably causing hearing loss, headache, vertigo, disturbed sense of balance, unsteadiness of gait, and tinnitus."

"Tinnitus?"

"Ringing of the ears."

"oh."

"Liquid chromatography of the coagulated blood disclosed a drug called diclofenac, in concentrations indicating therapeutic doses. But the loose correlation between dosage and concentration is a semi quantitative process at best. All I can say for certain is that she was taking the drug, not why she was taking it. "Why do you think she was taking it?"

"Well, we don't normally examine joints in a post, and I haven't here. But a superficial look at her fingers suggest what I'm sure a vertebral slice would reveal." "And what's that?"

"Lipping on the anterior visible portion." "What'slipping

"Knobby, bumpy, small excrescences of bone. In short, smooth, asymmetric swellings on the body of the vertebrae."

"Indicating what?"

"Arthritis?"

"Are you asking?"

"Do you know whether or not she was arthritic?" "She was."

"Well, there," Blaney said.

Hawes was still trying to remember the title of that movie. He asked Sam Grossman if he remembered seeing it.

"I don't go to movies," Grossman said.

He was wearing a white lab coat, and standing before a counter covered with test tubes, graduated cylinders, beakers, spatulas, pipettes and flasks, all of

which gave his work space an air of scientific inquiry that seemed in direct contrast to Grossman himself. A tall, angular man with blue eyes behind dark-framed glasses, he looked more like a New England farmer worried about drought than he did the precise police captain who headed up the lab.

Some ranking E-flat piano player in the department had undoubtedly decided that the death of a once-famous concert pianist rated special treatment, hence the dispatch with which Svetlana's body and personal effects had been sent respectively to the Chief Medical Examiner's Office and the lab. The mink coat, the cotton housedress, the pink sweater, the cotton panty hose, and the bedroom slippers were all on Grossman's countertop, dutifully tagged and bagged. At another table, one of Grossman's assistants sat with her head bent over a microscope. Hawes looked her over. A librarian type, he decided, which he sometimes found exciting.

"Why do you ask?" Grossman said.

"Cause of death was two to the heart," Carella said. "Plenty of blood to support that," Grossman said, nodding. "All of it hers, by the way. Nobody else bled all over the sweater and dress. The dress is a cheap cotton schmatte you can pick up at any Woolworth's. The house slippers are imitation leather, probably got those in a dime store, too. But the sweater has a designer label in it. And so does the mink. Old, but once worth something."

Which could have been said of the victim, too, Carella thought.

"Anything else?"

"I just got all this stuff," Grossman said. "Then when?"

"Later."

"When later?"

"Tomorrow afternoon."

"Sooner."

"A magician I'm not," Grossman said.

They went back to the apartment again.

The yellow CRIME SCENE tapes were still up. A uniformed cop stood on the stoop downstairs, his hands behind his back, peering out at the deserted street. It was bitterly cold. He was wearing earmuffs and a heavy-duty overcoat, but he still looked frozen to death. They identified themselves and went upstairs. Another of the blues was on duty outside the door to apartment 3A. A cardboard CRIME SCENE card was taped to the door behind him. The door was padlocked. He produced a key when they identified themselves.

Hidden under a pile of neatly pressed and folded, lace-trimmed silk underwear at the back of the bottom drawer in her dresser, they found another candy tin. There was a savings account passbook in it.

The book showed a withdrawal yesterday of an even one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, leaving a balance of sixteen dollars and twelve cents. The withdrawal slip was inserted in the passbook at the page that recorded the transaction. The date and time on the slip were January 20"I0:27 A.M.

This would have been half an hour before Svetlana Dyalovich went downstairs to buy a fifth of Four Roses.

According to Blaney and the man down the hall, she was killed some twelve hours later.

The man in apartment 3D did not enjoy being awakened at ten minutes to three in the morning. He was wearing only pajamas when he grumblingly unlocked the door for them, but he quickly put on a woolen robe, and, still grumbling, led the detectives into the apartment's small kitchen. A tiny window over the sink was rimed with frost. Outside, they could hear the wind howling. They kept on their coats and gloves.

The man, whose name was Gregory Turner, went to the stove, opened the oven door, and lighted the gas jets. He left the door open. In a few moments, they could feel heat beginning to seep into the kitchen. Turner put up a pot of coffee. A short while later, while he was pouring for them, they took off the coats and gloves.

He was sixty-nine years old, he told them, a creature of impeccable habit, set in his ways. Got up to pee every night at three-thirty. They'd got him out of bed forty minutes early, he didn't like this break in his routine. Hoped he could fall back asleep again after they were done with him here and he had his nocturnal pee. For all his grumbling, though, he seemed cooperative, even hospitable. Like buddies about to go on an early morning fishing trip, the three men sat around the oil cloth covered kitchen table sipping coffee. Their hands were warm around the steaming cups. Heat poured from the oven. Springtime didn't seem all that far away.

"I hated those records she played day and night," he told them. "Sounded like somebody practicing. All clasical music sounds that way to me. How could

anyone make any sense of it? I like swing, do you know what swing is? Before your time, swing. I'm sixty-nine years old, did I tell you that? Get up to pee regular every night at three-thirty in the morning, go back to sleep again till eight, get up, have my breakfast, go for along walk. Jenny used to go with me before she died last year. My wife. Jenny. We'd walk together in the park, rain or shine. Settled a lot of our problems on those walks. Talked them out. Well, I don't have any problems now she's gone. But I miss her like the devil."

He sighed heavily, freshened the coffee in his cup. "More?" he asked.

"Thank you, no," Carella said.

"Just a drop," Hawes said.

"Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, that was swing. Harry James, the Dorsey Brothers, wonderful stuff back then. You had a new song come out, maybe six, seven bands covered it. Best record usually was the one made the charts. "Blues in the Night' came out, there must've been a dozen different big-band versions of it. Well, that was some song. Johnny Mercer wrote that song. You ever hear of Johnny Mercer?"

Both detectives shook their heads.

"He wrote that song," Turner said. "Woody Herman had the best record of that song. That was some song." He began singing it. His voice, thin and frail, filled the stillness of the night with the sound of train whistles echoing down the track. He stopped abruptly. There were tears in his eyes. They both wondered if he'd been singing it to Jenny. Or for Jenny.

"People come and go, you hardly get a chance to say hello to them, not less you really know them," he said. "Woman who got killed tonight, I don't think I even knew her name till the super told me later on. All I knew was she irritated me playing those damn old records of hers. Then I hear three shots and first thing I wonder is did the old lady shoot herself?. She seemed very sad," he said, "glimpses I got of her on the stairs. Very sad. All bent and twisted and bleary-eyed, a very sad old lady. I ran out in the hall..."

"When was this?"

"Right after I heard the shots."

"Do you remember what time that was?" "Around a quarter past eleven." "Did you see anyone in the hall?"

"No."

"Or coming out of her apartment?"

"No."

"Was the door to the apartment open or closed?" "Closed."

"What'd you do, Mr. Turner?"

"I went right downstairs and knocked on the super's door."

"You didn't call the police?" "No, sir." "Why not?"

"Don't trust the police."

"What then?"

"I stayed in the street, watched the show, Cops coming, ambulances coming. Detectives like you. A regular show. I wasn't the only one."

"Watching, do you mean?"

"Watching, yes. Is it getting too hot in here for you?" "A little."

"If I turn this off, though, we'll be freezing again in five minutes. What do you think I should do?" "Well, whatever you like, sir," Hawes said.

"Jenny liked it warm," Turner said. He nodded. He was silent for several moments, staring at his hands folded on the kitchen table. His hands looked big and dark and somehow useless against the glare of the white oilcloth.

"Who else was there?" Carella asked. "Watching the show?"

"Oh, people I recognized from the building mostly. Some of them leaning out their windows, others coming downstairs to see things firsthand." "Anyone you didn't recognize?" "Oh, sure, all those cops."

"Aside from the cops or the ambulance people

"Lots of others, sure. You know this city. Anything happens, a big crowd gathers,"

"Did anyone you didn't recognize come out of the building? Aside from cops or..."

"See what you mean, yeah. Just let me think a minute."

The gas jets hissed into the stillness of the apartment. Somewhere in the building, a toilet flushed. Outside on the street, a siren; doowah, doo-wahed to the night. Then all was still again.

"A tall blond man," Turner said.

As he tells it, he first sees the man when he comes out of the alleyway alongside the building. Comes out and

stands there with the crowd behind the police lines, hands in his pockets. He's wearing a blue overcoat and a red muffler. Hands in the pockets of the coat. Black shoes. Blond hair blowing in the wind. "Beard? Mustache?" "Clean-shaven."

"Anything else you remember about him?"

He just stands there like all the other people, behind the barricades the police have set up, watching all the activity, more cops arriving, plainclothes cops, they must be, uniformed cops, too, with brass on their hats and collars, the man just stands there watching, like interested. Then the ambulance people carry her out of the building on a stretcher, and they put her inside the ambulance and it drives off.

"That's when he went off, too," Turner said. "You watched him leave?" "Well, yes." "Why'?"

"There was a... a sort of sad look on his face, I don't know. As if... I don't know."

"Where'd he go?" Hawes asked. "Which direction?"

"Headed south. Toward the corner. Stopped near the sewer up the street..."

Both detectives were suddenly all ears.

"Bent down to tie his shoelace or something, went on his way again."

Which is how they found the murder weapon.

The gun they'd fished out of the sewer was registered to a man named Rodney Pratt, who on his application for the pistol permit had given his occupation as "security escort" and had stated that he needed to carry a gun because his business was "providing protection of privacy, property, and physical wellbeing to individuals requiring personalized service." They figured this was the politically correct way of saying he was a private bodyguard.

In the United States of America, no one is obliged to reveal his race, color, or creed on any application form. They had no way of knowing Rodney Pratt was black until he opened the door for them at five minutes past three that morning, and glowered out at them in undershirt and boxer shorts. To them, his color was merely an accident of nature. What mattered was that Ballistics had already identified the gun registered to him as the weapon that had fired three fatal bullets earlier tonight.

"Mr. Pratt?" Hawes asked cautiously.

"Yeah, what?" Pratt asked.

He did not have to say This is three o'fucking clock in the morning, why the fuck are you knocking my door down? His posture said that, his angry frown said that, his blazing eyes said that.

"May we come in, sir?" Hawes asked. "some questions we'd like to ask you."

"What kind of questions?" Pratt asked.

The "sir" had done nothing to mollify him. THere were two honkie cops shaking him out of bed in the middle of the night, and he wasn't buying any thank you. He stood barring the door in his tank undershirt and striped boxer shorts, as muscular as a prizefighter at a weigh-in. Hawes now saw that tattoo on his bulging right biceps read Semper Fidelis An ex-Marine, no less. Probably a sergeant. had seen combat in this or that war the United State seemed incessantly waging. Probably drank the bl of enemy soldiers. Three o'clock in the momingl Hawes bit the bullet.

"Questions about a .38 Smith & Wesson reg to you, sir."

"What about it?"

"It was used in a murder earlier tonight, sir. May come in?"

"Come in," Pratt said, and stepped out of the frame, back into the apartment.

Pratt lived in a building on North Carlton Street, the intersection of St. Helen's Boulevard, across way from Mount Davis Park. The neighborhood mixed black, white, Hispanic, some A rents price-fixed. These old prewar apartments boasted high ceilings, tall windows and parquet

In many of them, the kitchens and bathrooms were hopelessly outdated. But as they followed Pratt toward a lighted living room beyond, they saw at a glance that his kitchen was modern and sleek, and an open-door

of a hall bathroom revealed marble and shed brass. The living room was furnished in oak wood and nubby fabrics, throw pillows

, chrome-framed prints on the white walls. upright piano stood against the wall at the far end of the room, flanked by windows that overlooked the park. "Have a seat," Pratt said, and left the room. Hawes looked at Carella. Carella merely shrugged. He was by the windows, looking down at the park stories below. At this hour of the night, it appeared ghostly, its lampposts casting eerie

illumination on empty winding paths.

Pratt was back in a moment, wearing a blue robe over his underwear. The robe looked like cashmere. It conspired with the look of the apartment to create a distinct impression that the "security escort" business paid very well indeed these days. Hawes wondered if he should ask for a job recommendation. Instead, he said, "About the gun, Mr. Pratt."

"It was stolen last week," Pratt said.

They had seen it all and heard it all, of course, and they had probably heard this one ten thousand, four hundred and thirteen times. The first thing any criminal learns is that it is not his gun, his dope, his car, his burglar's tools, his knife, his mask, his gloves, his bloodstains, his semen stains, his anything. And if it is his, then it was either lost or stolen.

Catch a man red-handed, about to shoot his girlfr a gun in his fist, the barrel in the woman's mouth, and he will tell you first that it isn't his gun,

hey, what kind of individual do you think I am? Besides, we're only rehearsing a scene from a play

here. Or if they won't quite appreciate that one in Des Moines, then how about she was choking on a fish bone, and I was trying to hook it out with the gun barrel while we were waiting for the ambulance to take her to the hospital? Or if that sounds a bit fishy, how about she asked me to put the barrel in her mouth in order to test her mettle and her courage? Anyway, isn't even my gun, and if it is my gun, it was stolen lost. Besides, I'm a juvenile.

"Stolen," Carella said, turning from the windows No intonation in his voice, just the single unstresse word, spoken softly, and sounding like a boomin accusation in that three A.M. living room.

"Yes," Pratt said. "Stolen."

Unlike Carella, he did stress the word. "When did you say this was?" Hawes asked. "Thursday night."

"That would've been..."

Hawes had taken out his notebook and was pointing to the calendar page.

"The eighteenth," Pratt said. "A hoodoo jinx ofa day. First my car quits dead, and next somebody takes my gun from the glove compartment."

"Let's back up a little," Hawes said.

"No, let's back up a lot," Pratt said. "Reason putting me through this shit at three A.M. in the mornin is I'm black. So just do your little ritual dance and get the hell out, okay? You've got the wrong party here."

"We may have the wrong party," Carella said, "but we've got the right gun. And it happens to be yours."

"I don't know anything about what that gun was doing earlier tonight. You say it killed somebody, I'll

take your word for it. I'm telling you the gun has not been in my possession since Thursday night, when my car quit and I stopped at an all-night gas station to have it looked at."

"Where was that?"

"Just off the Majesta Bridge."

"Which side of it?"

"This side. I'd driven a diamond merchant home and was coming back to the city."

The location marked him as a native. This sprawling city was divided into five separate distinct geographical zones, but unless you'd just moved here from Mars, only one of these sectors was ever referred to as "the city."

"Started rattling on the bridge," Pratt said. "Time I hit Isola, she quit dead. Brand-new limo. Less than a thousand miles on it." He shook his head in disgust and disbelief. "Never buy a fuckin American car," he said.

Carella himself drove a Chevrolet that had never given him a moment's trouble. He said nothing. "What time was this?" Hawes asked. "Little before midnight." "This past Thursday."

"Hoodoo jinx of a day," he said again. "Remember the name of the gas station?" "Sure."

"What was it?"

"Bridge Texaco."

"Now that's what I call inventive," Hawes said. "You think I'm lying?" Pratt said at once. "No, no, I meant..."

"When did you discover the gun was missing?" Carella asked.

Get this thing back on track, he thought. Pratt wasn't quite getting all this. He thought two white cops here hassling him only because he was black when instead they were hassling him only because he owned the gun used in a murder. So let's hear about the gun, okay?

"When I picked the car up," Pratt said, turning on him. He still suspected a trap, still figured they were setting him up somehow.

"And when was that?"

"Yesterday morning. There weren't any mechanics on duty when I pulled in Thursday night. The man told me they'd have to work on it the next day." "Which they did, is that right?"

"Yeah. Turned out somebody'd put styrene in my fuckin crankcase."

Carella wondered what styrene in the crankcase had to do with buying an American car.

"Broke down the oil and mined the engine," Pratt said. "They had to order me a new one, put it in on Friday."

"And you picked the car up yesterday?" "Yes." "What time?"

"Ten o'clock in the morning."

"So the car was there all night Thursday and all day Friday."

"Yeah. And two hours yesterday, too. They open eight."

"With the gun in the glove compartment." "Well, it disappeared during that time." "When did you realize that?"

"When I got back here. There's a garage in the

I parked the car, unlocked the glove conpartment to take out the gun, and saw it was gone."

"Always take it out of the glove compartment when you get home?"

"Always."

"How come you left it at the garage?"

"I wasn't thinking. I was pissed off about the car quitting on me. It's force of habit. I get home, I unlock the box, reach in for the gun. The garage wasn't home. I just wasn't thinking."

"Did you report the gun stolen?"

"No."

"Why not?" Hawes asked.

"I figured somebody steals a piece, I'll never see it again, anyway. So why bother? It not like a TV set.

A piece isn't gonna turn up in a hockshop. It's gonna end up on the street."

"Ever occur to you that the gun might be used later in the commission of a crime?"

"It occurred to me."

"But you still didn't report its theft?"

"I didn't report it, no."

"How come?"

This from Hawes. Casually. Just a matter of curiosity. How come your gun is stolen and you know somebody might use it to do something bad, but you don't go to the cops? How come?

Carella knew how come. Black people were beginning to believe that the best way to survive was to keep their distance from the police. Because if they

didn't, they got set up and framed. That was O.J."s legacy. Thanks a lot Juice, we needed you.

"Talked privately to the day manager," Pratt said. "Told him somebody'd ripped off the piece. He said he'd ask around quietly."

"Did he ask around? Quietly."

"None of his people knew anything about it." Naturally, Carella thought.

Hawes was thinking the same thing.

"And you say the glove compartment was locked when you got back home here?"

"I think so, yeah."

"What do you mean, you think so?"

"Why do you guys think everything I say is a lie?" Carella sighed in exasperation.

"Come on, was it locked or wasn't it?" he said. "That isn't a trick question. Just tell us yes or no."

"I'm telling you I don't know. I put the key in the lock and turned it. But whether it was locked or not..."

"You didn't try to thumb it open before you put the key in?"

"No, I always leave it locked."

"Then what makes you think it may have been unlocked this time?"

"The fucking gun was missing, wasn't it?"

"Yes, but you didn't know that before you opened the compartment."

"I know it now. If it was already unlocked when I turned the key, then what I was doing was locking it all over again. So I had to turn the key back again to unlock it."

"Is that in fact what you did?"

"I don't remember. I might have. A glove compartment isn't like your front door, you know, where you lock it and unlock it a hundred times a day, and you know just which way to turn the key to open it."

"Then what you're saying now, in retrospect, is that it might have been unlocked."

"Is what I'm saying in retrospect. Because the gun was missing. Which means somebody had already got in there."

"Did you leave a valet key with the car, or... ?" "I lost the valet key."

"So the key you left in the ignition could have unlocked the glove compartment, is that it?" "That's it."

"So you're saying someone at the garage unlocked it and stole the gun."

exactly what I'm saying."

"You don't think whoever put styrene in the crankcase might have stolen the gun, do you?"

"I don't see how."

"You didn't notice the hood open, did you?"

"Yeah, the hood was open. How would they get at the engine without liftingthe hood?" ,"I mean, before you took it to the garage.

"No, I didn't see the hood open."

"Tell us where you went with the car that Thursday. Before somebody did the styrene job"

"I don't know when the styrene job was done."

"Tell us where you went, anyway, okay? Help us out here, willya?"

"First, I drove an actress over to NBC for a television interview that morning..."

"NBC where?"

"Downtown. Off Hall Avenue."

"When was that?" "Six-thirty in the morning." "Did you go inside with her?" "No, I stayed with the car." "Then what?"

"Drove her back to her hotel, waited downstairs for her."

"Leave the car?"

"No. Well, wait a minute, yeah. I got out of the car to have a smoke, but I was standing right by it." "Gun still in the glove compartment?" "Far as I know. I didn't look."

"You said you waited for her downstairs..." "Yeah."

"What time did she come back down?" "Twelve-fifteen." "Where'd you go then?"

"To J. C. Willoughby's for lunch. She was meeting her agent there."

"And then?"

"Picked her up at two, drove her to..."

"Were you with the car all that time?"

"Come to think of it, no. I went for a bite myself. Parked it in a garage."

Where?

"Near the restaurant. On Lloyd."

"So somebody could have lifted the hood and poured that styrene in."

"I guess."

"Did you leave the key in the car?"

"Of course. How else could they drive it?"

"Then someone could have unlocked the glove compartment, too." "Yeah, but..." "Yeah?"

"I still think somebody at the gas station swiped that piece."

"What makes you think that?"

"Just a feeling. You know how you get a feeling something's wrong? I had the feeling those guys knew something about the car I didn't know."

"Like what?"

"I don't know what."

"Which guys?"

"All of them. The day manager when I went to pick it up, all the guys working..."

"When did you pick up your diamond merchant?" "What?" "You said..."

"Oh, yeah, Mr. Aaronson. I was with the actress all day, stayed with her while she shopped Hall Avenue. She was doing some shopping before she went back to L.A. Drove her to meet some friends for dinner, took her back to the hotel afterward."

"Stayed with the car all that time?"

"Didn't budge from it. Picked up Mr. Aaronson at ten-thirty, drove him home. He was heavy that night." "Heavy."

"Lots of gems in his suitcase."

"What'd you do then?"

"Started back over the bridge, heard the car starting to conk out."

"Would you remember where you parked the car while you were having lunch?"

"I told you. Place on Lloyd, just offDetavoner. Only one on the block, you can't miss it."

"You wouldn't know who parked it, would you?" "All those guys look the same to me."

"Can you think of anyone who might've put that styrene in your crankcase?"

"No."

"Or stolen the gun?"

"Yeah. Somebody at the fuckin gas station."

"One last question," Carella said. "Where were you tonight between ten and midnight?"

"Here it comes," Pratt said, and rolled his eyes. "Where were you?" Carella asked again. "Right here." "Anyone with you?"

"My wife. You want to wake her up, too?" "Do we have to?" Carella asked. "She'll tell you." "I'll bet she will."

Pratt was beginning to glower again. "Let her sleep," Carella said. Pratt looked at him.

"I think we're finished here. Sorry to have bothered you." "Cotton? Anything?"

"One thing," Hawes said. "Do you know who worked on your car?"

"Yeah, somebody named Gus. He's the one who signed the service order, but he wasn't there when I picked the car up yesterday."

"Do you know if the day manager asked him about the gun?"

"He says he did."

"What's his name?"

"The day manager? Jimmy." "Jimmy what?" "I don't know."

"How about the night manager? The one you left the car with?"

"Ralph. I don't know Ralph what. They have their names stitched on the front of their coveralls. Just the first names."

"Thanks," Hawes said. "Good night, sir, we're sorry to have bothered you."

"Mm," Pratt said sourly.

In the hallway outside, Carella said, "So now it becomes the tale of a gun."

"I saw that movie, too," Hawes said.

Bridge Texaco was in the shadow of the Majesta Bridge, which connected two of the city's most populous sectors, creating massive traffic jams at either end. Here in Isola simply and appropriately named since it was an island and Isola meant "island" in Italian. the side streets and avenues leading to the bridge were thronged with taxis, trucks and passenger vehicles from six A.M. to midnight, when things began slowing down a bit. At three-thirty in the morning, when the detectives got there, one would never have guessed that just a few hours earlier the surrounding streets had resonated with the din of

honking horns and shouted epithets, the result of a stalled track in the middle of the bridge.

There were two city statutes, both of them punishable by mere fines, that made the blowing of horns unlawful. Using profanity in public was also against the law. The pertinent section in the Penal Law was 240.20, and it was titled Disorderly Conduct. It read: "A person is guilty of disorderly conduct when, with intent to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof, he uses abusive or obscene language, or makes an obscene gesture." Disorderly conduct was a simple violation, punishable by not more than a term of fifteen days in jail. The two statutes and the Penal Law section only defined civilization. Perhaps this was why a uniformed cop on the street corner had merely scratched his ass at midnight while an angry motorist leaned incessantly on his horn, yelling "Move it, you fuckin cocksucker!"

Now, at 3:30 A.M." all the horn-blowing stopped, all the profanity had flown on the wind. There was only the bitter cold of the January streets, and a gas station with fluorescent lights that seemed to winter's chill. A yellow taxicab was parked at one of the pumps. Its driver, hunched against the cold, jiggling from foot to foot, was filling the tank. The paneled doors opening on the service bays were closed tight against the frigid air. In the station's warmly lighted office, a man wearing a brown uniform and a peaked brown hat sat with his feet up on the desk, reading a copy of Penthouse. He looked up when the detectives came in. The stitched name on the front of his uniform read Ralph.

Carella showed the tin.

"Detective Carella," he said. "My partner, Detective Hawes."

"Ralph Bonelli. What's up?"

"We're trying to trace a gun that..."

"That again?" Bonelli said, and looked heavenward. "Any idea what happened to it?"

"No. I told Pratt nobody here knew anything about it. That hasn't changed."

"Who'd you ask?"

"The mechanic who worked on it. Gus. He didn't see it. Some of the other guys who were working on

Friday. None of them saw any gun."

"How many other guys?"

"Two, They're not mechanics, they just pump gas." "So Gus is the only one who worked on the car." "Yeah, the only one." "Where'd he Work on it?"

"One of the service bays in there," Bonelli said, and gestured with his head. "Had it up on the hydraulic lift." "Key in it?"

"Yeah, he had to drive it in, didn't he?"

"How about when he was finished with it? Where'd the key go then?"

"Key box there on the wall," Bonelli said, indicating a grey metal cabinet fastened to the wall near the cash register. A small key was sticking out of a keyway on the door.

"Do you ever lock that cabinet?"

"Well... no."

"Leave the key in it all the time?"

"I see where you're going, but you're wrong Nobody who works here stole that gun."

"Well, it was in the glove compartment when

Pratt drove the car in..."

"That's what he says."

"You don't think it was, huh?"

"Did I see it? Did anybody see it? We got only jig's word for it."

"Why would he say there was a gun in the compartment if there wasn't one?"

"Maybe he wanted me to write off the repair job, who knows?"

"What do you mean?"

"A trade, you know? He forgets the gun, we forget the bill."

"You think that's what he had in mind, huh?" "Who knows?"

"Well, did he actually suggest anything like that?" "No, I'm just saying."

"So, actually," Hawes said, "you have no reason to believe there wasn't a gun in that glove compartment?"

"Unless the jig had some other reason to be about it."

"Like what?"

"Maybe he had some use for it later on. Claim it was stolen, build an alibi in advance, you follow?"

"Can you write down the names of everyone who was working here while the car was in the shop?" Carella asked.

"Would anyone else have access to that key cabinet? Aside from your people?" Hawes asked.

"Sure. Anybody walking in and out of the office But there's always one of us around.

'we would have seen anybody trying to get in the cabinet." "Addresses and phone numbers, too," Carella said.

Despite the cold, the blonde was wearing only a brief black miniskirt, a short red fake-fur jacket, gartered black silk stockings and high-heeled, red leather, ankle-high boots. A matching red patent-leather clutch handbag was tucked under her arm. Her naked thighs were raw from the wind, and her feet were freezing cold in the high-heeled boots. Shivering, she stood on the corner near the traffic light, where any inbound traffic from Majesta would have to stop before moving into the city proper.

The girl's name was Yolande.

She was free, white, and nineteen years old, but she was a hooker and a crack addict, and she was here on the street at this hour of the morning because she hoped to snag a driver coming in, and spin him around the block once or twice while she gave him a fifty dollar blow job.

Yolande didn't know it, but she would be dead in three hours.

The detectives coming out of the gas station office spotted the blonde standing on the corner, recognized her for exactly what she was, but didn't glance again in her direction. Yolande recognized them as well, for exactly what they were, and watched them warily as they climbed into an unmarked, dark blue sedan. A white Jaguar pulled to the curb where she was standing. The window on the passenger side slid

noiselessly down. The traffic light bathed the car the sidewalk and Yolande in red. She waited until she saw a plume of exhaust smoke billow from the dark sedan up the street. Then she leaned to the window of the car at the curb, smiled and said "Hey, hiya. Wanna party?"

"How much?" the driver asked.

The changing traffic light suddenly turned everything to green.

A moment later, the two vehicles moved off opposite directions.

The night was young.

They found Gus Mondalvo in an underground club a largely Hispanic section of Riverhead. This was a little past four in the morning. His mother, refused to open the door of her apartment repeated declarations that they were police, told them they could find her son at the Club Fajardo "up block," which is where they were now, trying to convince the heavyset man who opened the door that they weren't here to bust the place.

The man protested in Spanish that they weren't serving liquor here, anyway, so what was there bust? This was just a friendly neighborhood club having a little party, they could come in and see for themselves, all of this while incriminating bottles and glasses were being whisked from behind the bar and off the table tops By the time he took off the some five minutes later, you would have thought it was a teenage corner malt shop instead of a club selling booze after hours to a clientele that included

kids. The man who let them in told them Gus was sitting at the bar drinking... "But nothing alcoholic," he added hastily. and pointed him out to them. A Christmas tree stood in the corner near the bar, elaborately decorated, extravagantly lighted. The detectives made their way across a small dance floor packed with teenagers dancing and groping to Ponce's Golden Oldies, moved past tables where boys and girls, men and women alike were all miraculously drinking Coca-Cola in bottles, and approached the stool where Gus Mondalvo sat sipping what looked like a lemonade.

"Mr. Mondalvo?" Hawes asked.

Mondalvo kept sipping his drink.

"Police," Hawes said, and flipped a leather case open to show his shield.

There are various ways to express cool when responding to a police presence. One is to feign total indifference to the fact that cops are actually here and may be about to cause trouble. Like "I've been through this a hundred times before, man, and it don't faze me, so what can I do for you?" Another is to display indignation. As, for example, "Do you realize who I am? How dare you embarrass me this way in a public place?" The third is to pretend complete ignorance. Cops. Are you really cops? Gee. What business on earth could cops possibly have with me?" Mondalvo turned slowly on his stool. "Hi," he said, and smiled.

They had seen it all and heard it all.

This time around, it would be pleasant indifference.

"Mr. Mondalvo," Hawes said, "we understand you worked on the engine of a Cadillac belonging to a Rodney Pratt on Friday, would you remember doing that?"

"Oh, sure," Mondalvo said. "Listen, do you think we'd be more comfortable at a table? Something to drink? A Coke? A ginger ale?"

He slid off the stood to reveal his full height five-six, five-seven, shorter than he'd looked while sitting, a little man with broad shoulders and a waist, sporting a close-cropped haircut and mustache. Carella wondered if he'd acquired the weight lifter build in prison, and then realized he was someone who was, after all, gainfully employed as automobile mechanic. They moved to a table near the dance floor. Hawes noticed that the club was discreetly and gradually beginning to clear out, slipping into their overcoats and out the door. If a bust was on the cards, nobody wanted to be here when it came down. Some foolhardy couples, enjoying music and maybe even the sense of imminent clan. flitted past on the dance floor, trying to ignore them but everyone knew The Law was here, and sideswiped them with covert glances.

"We'll get right to the point," Carella said. "Did you happen to notice a gun in the glove compartment of that car?"

"I didn't go in the glove compartment," Mondalvo said. "I had to put in a new engine, why would I go in the glove compartment?"

"I don't know. Why would you?"

"Right. Why would I? Is that what this is about?"

"Yes."

"Because I already told Jimmy I didn't know anything about that guy's gun."

"Jimmy Jackson?"

"Yeah, the day manager. He asked me did I see a gun, I told him what gun? I didn't see no gun."

"But you did work on the Caddy all day Friday." "Yeah. Well not all day. It was a three-, four-hour job. What it was, somebody put styrene in the crankcase."

"So we understand."

"Styrene is what they use to make fiberglass. It's this oily shit you can buy at any marine or boat supply store, people use it to patch their fiberglass boats. But if you want to fuck up a guy's engine, all you do you mix a pint of it with three, four quarts of oil and pour it in his crankcase. The car'll run maybe fifty, sixty miles, a hundred max, before the oil breaks down and the engine binds. Pratt's engine was shot. We had to order a new one for him. Somebody didn't like this guy so much, to do something like that to his car, huh?

Maybe that's why he packed a gun."

Maybe, Carella was thinking.

"Anybody else go near that car while you were working on it?"

"Not that I saw."

"Give us some approximate times here," Hawes said. "When did you start working on it?"

"After lunch sometime Friday. I had a Buick in needed a brake job, and then I had a Beamer had something wrong with the electrical system. I didn't

get to the Caddy till maybe twelve-thirty, one o'clock.

That's when I put it up on the lift."

"Where was it until then?"

"Sitting out front. There's like a little parking space out front, near where the air hose is?" "Was the car locked?" "I don't know."

"Well, were you the one who drove it into the bay and onto the lift?"

"Yeah."

"So, was the car locked when you... ?"

"Come to think of it, no."

"You just got into it without having to unlock the door."

"That's right."

"Was the key in the ignition?"

"No, I took it from the cabinet near the cash register."

"And went to the car..."

"Yeah."

"And found it unlocked." "Right. I just got in and started it." "What time did you finish work on it?" "Around four, four-thirty." "Then what?"

"Drove it off the lift, parked it outside again." "Did you lock it?" "I think so."

"Yes or no? Would you remember?"

"I'm pretty sure I did. I knew it was gonna be outside all night, I'm pretty sure I would've locked it."

"What'd you do with the key after you, locked it?"

"Put it back in the cabinet."

"You weren't there on Thursday night when Mr.

Pratt brought the car in, were you?" Carella asked.

"No, I go home six o'clock. We don't have any mechanics working the night shift. No gas jockeys,

either. It's all self-service at night. There's just the night manager there. We mostly sell gas to cabs at night. That's about it."

"What time did you get to work on Friday morning?"

"Seven-thirty. I work along day."

"Who was there when you got there?"

"The day manager and two gas jockeys."

Carella took out the list Ralph had written for him.

"That would be Jimmy Jackson..."

"The manager, yeah."

"Jose Santiago ..."

"Yeah."

... "And Abdul Sikhar."

"Yeah, the Arab guy."

"See any of them going in that Caddy?"

"No."

"Hanging around it?"

"No. But I have to tell you the truth, I wasn't like watching it every minute, you know? I had work to do."

"Mr. Mondalvo, the gun we're tracing was used in a homicide earlier tonight..."

"I didn't know that," Mondalvo said, and looked around quickly, as if even mere possession of this knowledge was dangerous.

"Yes," Hawes said. "So if you know anything at all . . ."

"Nothing."

... "About that gun, or who might have taken off the cross

gun from the car..."

"Nothing, I swear."

"Then you should tell us now. Becaus otherwise..."

"I swear to God," Mondalvo said, and made the sl

"Otherwise you'd be an accessory after the fact. Carella said.

"What does that mean?"

"It means you'd be as guilty as whoever pulled the trigger."

"I don't know who pulled any trigger."

Both cops looked at him hard.

"I swear to God," he said again. "I don't know." Maybe they believed him.

The three kids were all named Richard.

Because they were slick-as-shit preppies from a New England school, they called themselves Richard the First, Second, and Third, after Richard the Lion-Hearted, Richard the son of Edward, and Richard who perhaps had his nephews murdered in the Tower of London. They were familiar with these monarchs through an English history course they'd had to take back in their sophomore year. The three Richards were now seniors. All three of them had been accepted at Harvard. They were each eighteen years old, each varsity football heroes, all smart as hell, handsome as devils, and drunk as skunks. To coin a few phrases.

Like his namesake Richard Coeur de Lion, Richard Hopper for such was his real name was six feet tall and he weighed a hundred and ninety pounds, and he had blond hair and blue eyes, just like the twelfth century king. Unlike that fearless monarch, however, Richard did not write poetry although he sang quite well. In fact, all three Richards were in the school choir. Richard the First was the team's star quarterback.

The real Richard the Second had ruled England from 1377 to 1399 and was the son of Edward the Black Prince. The present-day Richard the Second was named Richard Weinstock, and his father was

Irving the Tailor. He was five feet ten inches tall and weighed two hundred and forty pounds, all of it muscle and bruised bones. He had dark hair and brown

" eyes, and he played fullback on the team.

Richard the Third, whose true and honorable name was Richard O'Connor, had freckles and reddish hair and greenish eyes and he was six feet three inches tall and weighed two-ten. His fifteenth-century namesake was the third son of the duke of York, a mighty feudal baron. Richard's left arm was withered and shrunken,

but this did not stop him from being a fierce fighter and a conniving son of a bitch. The king, that is. The present-day Richard was known to cheat on French exams, but he had two strong arms and very good hands and he played wide receiver on the Pierce

Academy team.

All three Richards had come down to the city for the weekend. They were not due back at school till Monday morning. All three Richards were wearing the team's hooded parka, navy blue with a big letter P in white on the back. Just below the stem of the P, there was a white logo in the shape of a football, about three inches wide and five inches long. The patch indicated which team they played on. Over the left pectoral on the front of the parka, the name of the school was stitched in white script lettering, Pierce Academy tara.

The Richards Three.

At four-thirty on that gelid morning, it was doubtful that any of the three, despite the similarity, knew his

own name. Turning back to yell "Fuck you!" and "g

eat shit!" at the bouncer who'd told them the club was now closed and then politely but firmly showed them

the front door, they came reeling out onto the sidewalk and stood uncertainly toggling their parkas closed, pulling the hoods up over their heads, wrapping their blue and white mufflers, trying to light cigarettes, burping, farting, giggling, and finally throwing their arms around each other and going into a football huddle.

"What we need to do now," Richard the First said, "is to get ourselves laid."

"That's a good idea," Richard the Third said. "Where can we find some girls?"

"Uptown?" Richard the First suggested.

"Then let's go uptown," Richard the Second agreed. They clapped out of the huddle.

Uptown, Yolande was Climbing into another automobile.

The three Richards hailed a taxi.

Jimmy Jackson's kids knew there was a black Santa Claus because they'd seen one standing alongside a fake chimney and ringing a bell outside a department store downtown on Hall Avenue after their mother had taken them to sit on the lap of a white Santa Claus inside. The white Santa apparently hadn't listened all that hard because James Jr. hadn't got the bike he'd asked for, and Millie hadn't got this year's hot doll, and Terrence hadn't got this year's hot warrior. So when the doorbell rang at a quarter to five that Sunday morning, they ran to wake up their father because they figured this might be the black bell ringing Santa coming back to make amends for the white department-store Santa's oversights.

Jimmy Jackson was only mildly annoyed to be awakened by his kids so early on a Sunday mornin when his mother-in-law was coming to visit, not to mention his sister Naydelle and her two screamin brats. He became singularly irritated, however, when he opened the door and found it wasn't no joke but, really two honkie dicks, just like they'd said through the wood, standing there with gold and blue badges in their hands. On a Sunday no less, did the motherfuckers have no consideration whatever?

The kids were asking if he would make pancakes. since everybody was up, anyway.

Jackson told them to go ask their mother.

"So whut is it?" he said to the cops.

"Mr. Jackson," Carella said, "we realize it's early in the morning..."

"Yeah, yeah, whut is it?"

"But we're investigating a homicide..."

"Yeah, yeah."

"And we're trying to track the murder weapon." Jackson looked at them.

He was a tall, rangy, very dark man, wearing a over pajamas, his eyes still bleary from sleep, his mouth pulled into a thin angry line. Man had a right to the sancty of his own home on Sunday morning, he was thinking, th out these motherfuckers comin roun. Murder weapon my ass, he was thinking.

"Is this about that damn gun again?" he asked.

From somewhere in the apartment, a woman asked, "Who is it, James?"

"It's

the police," one of the children shouted gleefully. "Can Daddy make pancakes now?"

"The police?" she said. "James?"

"Yeah, yeah," he said.

"It's about the gun again, yes," Hawes said.

"I tole Pratt I dinn see no damn gun in his car. Nobody seen that damn gun. You want my opinion, that gun is a fiction of Pratt's imagination."

No one had yet invited them into the apartment. Mrs. Jackson came down the hall now in a robe and slippers, a perplexed frown on her face. She was a tall woman with the bearing of a Masai warrior, the pale yellow eyes of a panther. She didn't like cops here scaring her kids, and she was ready to tell them so.

"What's this," she said, "five o'clock in the mornin?"

"Ma'am," Carella said, "we're sorry to be bothering you, but we're working a homicide and..."

"What's anybody in this household got to do with a homicide?"

"We're simply trying to find out when the murder weapon disappeared from the owner's car. That's all." "What car?" she asked.

"Caddy was in for service," her husband explained.

"You work on that Caddy?"

"No. Gus did."

"Then why they botherin you?" she said, and turned to the cops again. "Why you botherin my man?"

"Because an old lady was killed," Carella said simply.

Mrs. Jackson looked into their faces.

"Come in," she said, "I'll make some coffee." They went into the apartment. Jackson closed the door behind them, double-bolted it, and put on the safety chain. The apartment was cold; in this city, in

this building, they couldn't expect heat to start comin up till six-thirty, seven o'clock. The radiators will begin clanging then, loud enough to wake the dead. Meanwhile, all was silent, all was chilly. The children wanted to hang around. This was better than TV. Jackson hushed them off to bed again. Husband and wife sat at the small kitchen table with the two detectives, drinking coffee like family. This was A.M." it was pitch-black outside. They could hear police sirens, ambulance sirens wailing into the night. All four of them could tell the difference; sirens the nocturnes of this city.

"That car was a headache minute it come in," Jackson said. "I'da been the night man, I'da tole go get a tow truck, haul that wreck outta here, trouble'n it's worth. Had to turn away two, three cars the next day, cause Gus had that damn Caddy on the lift. When I finely figured we were done with it. I come in yesterday mornin, the car's a mess. Man' coming in to pick it up at ten, it's a mess like I seen before in my life."

"What do you mean? Was there still trouble with the engine?" Carella asked.

"No, no. This was inside the car."

Both detectives looked at him, puzzled. So did his wife.

"Somebody musta left the window open when they moved it outside," Jackson said.

They were still looking at him, all three of them trying to figure out what kind of mess he was talkin about.

"You see The Birds he asked. "That movie Alfred Hitchcock wrote.?"

Carella didn't think Hitchcock had written it. "Birds tryin'a kill people all over the place?" "Whut about it?" Mrs. Jackson asked impatiently.

"Musta been birds got in the car," Jackson said. "Maybe cause it was so cold."

"What makes you figure that?" Hawes asked reasonably.

"Bird shit and feathers all over the place," Jackson said. "Hadda put Abdul to cleanin it up fore the man came to claim his car. Never seen such a mess in my life. Birds're smart, you know. I read someplace when they was shootin that movie, the crows used to pick the locks on their cages, that's how smart they are. Musta got in the car."

"How? Did you notice a window down?"

"Rear window on the right was open about six inches, yeah."

"You think somebody left that window open overnight?"

"Had to've been."

"And a bird got in, huh?"

"At least a few birds. There was shit and feathers all over the place."

"Where was all this?" Carella asked.

"The backseat," Jackson said.

"And you asked Abdul to clean it up, huh?"

"Directly when he come in Saturday mornin. I seen the mess put him to work right away." "Was he alone in the car?" "Alone, yeah."

"You didn't see him going into that compartment, did you?"

"Nossir."

"Fiddling around anywhere in the front seatg" "No, he was busy cleanin up the mess in back." "Did you watch him all the time he was in the car?" "No, I din't. There was plenty other work to do." "How long was he in the car?"

"Hour or so. Vacuuming, wiping. It was some you better believe it. Man came to pick it up at ten, was spotless. Never've known some birds was nesting in it overnight."

"But the birds were already gone when you noticed, that open window, huh?"

"Oh yeah, long gone. Just left all their feathers and shit."

"I wish you'd watch your mouth," Mrs.

Jackson said, frowning.

"You figure they got out the same way they got in Hawes asked.

"Musta, don't you think?"

Hawes was wondering how they'd managed a little trick.

So was Carella.

"Well, thank you," he said, "we appreciate your time. If you can remember anything else, here's my..." "Like what?" Jackson asked.

"Like anyone near that glove compartment."

"I already tole you I didn't see anyone near the glove compartment."

"Well, here's my card, anyway," Carella said. "If you think of anything at all that might help us... "Just don't come around five o'clock again,"

Jackson said.

Mrs. Jackson nodded.

What we'd like to do," Carella said on the phone, "is send someone around for the car and have our people go over it."

"What?" Pratt said.

This was a quarter past five in the morning. Carella was calling from a cell phone in the police sedan. Hawes was driving. They were on their way to Calm's Point, where Abdul Sikhar lived.

"When do I get some sleep here?" Pratt asked.

"I didn't mean someone coming by right this minute. If we can..."

"I'm talking about you waking me up right this minute."

I'm sorry about that, but we want to check out the car, find out..."

"So I understand. Why?"

"Find out what happened inside it."

"What happened is somebody stole my gun."

"That's what we're working on, Mr. Pratt. Which is why we'd like our people to go over the interior." "What people?" "Our techs." "Looking for what?"

Carella almost said feathers and shit. "Whatever they can find," he said. "You're lucky it's Sunday," Pratt said. "Sir?"

"I'm not working today."

The three Richards were beginning to sober up beginning to get a little surly. They had come all way up here to Diamondback which was not such a good idea to begin with and now they couldn't find any girls on the streets, perhaps because a sensible girl was already asleep at five-twenty in the morning. Richard the First wasn't afraid of black people. He knew that Diamondback was a notoriou dangerous black ghetto, but he'd been up here in search of cocaine not for nothing was he nicknamed Lion-Hearted and he felt he knew how to deal with African Americans.

It was Richard the First's contention that a man, or a black woman, for that matter, could tell in a wink whether a person was a racist or not. Of the only black men and women he knew were dealers and prostitutes, but this didn't lessen his conviction. A black person could look in a man's eyes and either find those dead blue eyes he' been conditioned to expect, or else he might that the white person was truly colorblind. the First liked to believe he was color-blind, which was why he was up here in Diamondback at this looking for black pussy.

"Trouble is," he told the other two Richards, "We are here too late. Everybody's asleep already."

"Trouble is we're here too early," Richard the Second said. "Nobody's awake yet." "Man, it's fuckin cold out here," Richard the said. Up the street, three black men warmed hands at a fire blazing in a sawed-off oil drum, oblivious to the three preppies in their hooded

The lights of an all-night diner across the street threw warm yellow rectangles on the sidewalk. The sun still an hour and forty-five minutes away. The three boys decided to urinate in the gutter. This was perhaps a mistake.

They were standing there with their dicks in their hands--what the hell, this was five-thirty in the morning, the streets were deserted except for the three old farts standing around the oil drum looking like three monks in their hooded parkas, certainly intending no affront, merely answering the call of nature, so to speak, on a dark and stormless night. It was not perceived in quite this manner by the black man who came out of the night like a solitary guardian of public decency, the sole member of the Pissing in Public Patrol, dressed in black as black as the night, black jeans, black boots, a black leather jacket, a black O.J. Simpson watch cap pulled down over his ears.

He came striding toward them at exactly the same moment Yolande stepped into a taxi a mile and a half downtown.

"Thing I hate about the boneyard shift," Hawes said, "is you just start getting used to it and you're back on the day shift again."

Carella was dialing his home number.

The boneyard shift was the graveyard shift, which was the so-called morning shift that kept you up all night.

Fanny piked up on the third ring.

"How is he?" Carella asked.

angel." She paused for the briefest tick of "Which is what I'd like to be doing," she said.

"Sorry," Carella said. "I won't call again. See you in a few hours."

That's what he thought.

"You a working girl?" the cabbie asked. "You a cop?" Yolande said. "Sure, a cop," he said.

"Then mind your own business," she said.

"I'm just wondering if you know where you're going."

"I know where I'm going."

"White girl going up to Diamondback..."

"I said I..."

"This hour of the night."