Nocturne

2

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.

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's lipping?"

"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.