Romance

12

LIEUTENANT BYRNES KNEW THAT CARELLA’S DEADLINE WAS Tuesday the fourteenth, and whereas he didn’t with to rain on Carella’s parade, he simply could not see the logic in this thing. Which is why he gathered them all together in his office late that Saturday afternoon. Sometimes a great notion, he figured.

The detectives Byrnes had called in for his informal snowballing session were Carella and Kling — the two actively working the case — and Brown, Meyer, Hawes and Parker, who’d seen enough about it on television and in the papers to believe they themselves were working the damn thing. This was now four-forty in the afternoon, and Parker wanted to go home. Truth be known, he always wanted to go home, even when it wasn’t five minutes before the shift was about to be relieved.

“As I understand this,” he said impatiently, “Nellie Brand’s already arraigned Milton for the murder…”

“That’s right,” Byrnes said.

“…and she’s got to shit or get off the pot by Tuesday.”

“In a manner of speaking,” Carella said.

“In another manner of speaking,” Byrnes said, “if we don’t prove her wrong by Tuesday, she’ll indict him.”

“What do you mean we, Kemo Sabe?” Parker asked, and looked to the others for approval.

As usual, he looked like a bum. That was because he told himself he was on a perpetual stakeout where it was essential that he look like a bum. He had already detected that no one but Carella and Kling appreciated this fucked-up situation. He was right. None of the others wanted more heat from upstairs descending on the squad again. The case was solved, so let it rest. But their personal feelings for Carella and Kling outweighed such considerations.

“Does the Chief of Detectives know you’re still working this thing?” Hawes asked.

He was leaning against Byrnes’s bookcases, threatening to capsize them by sheer size and bulk, his wild red hair catching the afternoon sun, the wilder white streak in his left temple highlighted by the rays.

“Yes,” Carella said. “The way Nellie spelled it out, if she indicts on Tuesday, Weeks gets credit for the kill. If we come up with anyone else, it’s our collar.”

“Weeks and the M&Ms went to see him this morning,” Byrnes said.

“Who?” Meyer asked.

“Chief Fremont.”

“What for?”

“To yell about FMU,” Byrnes said. “From what he told me, he’d already agreed that our public face should be we’ve got the killer, but privately we’re still looking cause nobody wants to prosecute an innocent man. So this morning, Weeks runs to him and says you’re screwing up the case by looking under rocks for somebody doesn’t exist. The M&Ms had their own axe to grind. They caught a whiff of headlines and they wanted I Homicide to be handed the case on a platter.”

“What’d the Chief tell them?”

“To cool it till Tuesday.”

“So they’re out of our hair for now.”

“All of them.”

“You want my private opinion,” Parker said, “I think the agent’s guilty.”

“How about that note in the typewriter?” Carella asked.

“How about that earring under the bed?” Kling asked.

“Slow down,” Brown said, “you’re losing me.”

“You’re losing all of us,” Parker said.

“Here’s the note,” Carella said, and placed it on Byrnes’s desk. This time, it was a Xerox copy of the one the lab had already tested. All four of the other detectives leaned over the desk to look at it:

“No signature,” Parker observed.

“They don’t always sign them.” Meyer said.

“If we’re about to step in shit here, we better at least have a signed note,” Parker said.

“The girl’s earring was under the bed,” Kling said.

“What girl?”

“The actress who took over the dead girl’s part.”

“We call them women these days,” Parker said.

They all turned to look at him.

“Girls are five years old and younger,” he said.

“Were they lovers or what?” Hawes asked. “The actress and the vie.”

“Not according to her.”

“Then how’d her earring get under his bed?”

“That’s what I’d like to ask her,” Carella said. “That’s why I’d like to bring her in.”

“Did you talk to Nellie about this?”

“Not yet.”

“About arresting her, I mean.”

“No.”

“Cause if we bring her in here…”

“I know.”

“She’ll be in custody…”

“We’re already into Miranda,” Parker said.

“We may even be jeopardizing the case Nellie already has.”

“How?”

“I don’t know how. Ask Nellie.”

“Have we got an autopsy report yet?” Brown asked.

“Verbal,” Carella said.

“Who examined him?” Hawes asked.

“Doctor named Ralph Dwyer.”

“Parkside?”

“Yeah.”

“Good man.”

“What’d he say?”

“Said Madden did a great job on himself. All four extremities fractured, bones of the cranium and face comminuted, brain enucleated. He must’ve hit the sidewalk on his right side because that’s where the ribs and pelvis were most severely broken. The fall also shattered his spine and burst his heart, a fine job all around.”

“Did he think…?”

“Did he say Madden was already…?”

“No. He found fat embolism, inhaled blood, and hemorrhages around the injuries, all signs that they were intravital. The injuries.”

“Meaning?” Parker asked.

“Meaning he was still alive when he hit the sidewalk.”

“Blood work show anything?” Byrnes asked.

“Traces of Dalmane.”

“Dalmane?”

“Enough for Dwyer to believe Madden was asleep when he went out that window.”

“How do you jump out a window if you’re asleep?”

“Somebody helps you,” Carella said.

“She won’t answer anything else unless we bring her in,” Kling said.

“She’s already got a lawyer,” Carella said.

“Our guess is she’s running scared.”

“We get her in here, she may bleat.”

“I doubt it,” Parker said. “Her lawyer’ll tell us to fuck off. He’ll ask us to void the arrest.”

“We’ve got plenty to charge her with. Conspiracy to murder…”

“Accessory before…”

“On what? A fuckin earring?”

“And a suicide note.”

“The note doesn’t implicate her.”

“Have we got any latents?”

“Nothing wild. Almost everything in the apartment was wiped clean. The typewriter, the earring, the Scotch bottle, the club soda bottle…”

“Two glasses by the bed, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Must’ve been how he got the Dalmane in him, huh?”

“Must’ve been. yeah.”

“You think she was wearing gloves?”

“While they fucked?”

“No, when she was cleaning up.”

“Had to’ve done it before she tossed him out the window. Otherwise, there wouldn’t’ve been time.”

“Did she wipe the windowsill?”

“Yes.”

“Couldn’t’ve done that before.”

“No, that had to be after.”

“How about the sash^?”

“Clean.”

“The handles?”

“What handles?”

“The things you raise the window with, whatever the hell they’re called. The little things you grab with your hands to pull the window up.”

“Clean.”

“Fuckin cleaning woman.”

“The more I hear, the less I like it,” Byrnes said. “I don’t want to bring her in till we’ve got something better than this. We don’t need a pointless exercise here.”

“What if there’s Dalmane in her medicine chest?”

“You know any judge who’ll grant you a search warrant on the strength of an earring under a bed?”

“You’d never get a court order on such flimsy shit,” Parker said.

“If we arrest her, we could…”

“How the hell can we arrest her, Steve?” Byrnes asked irritably. “All you’ve got is an earring at the scene. She could’ve left it there last year, for all we know. She told you she lost the damn thing…”

“She also told us she doesn’t know where he lives,” Carella said.

“Never been to his apartment,” Kling said.

“So how’d the earring get there?”

“There’s too much bothering me about this,” Byrnes said.

“Me, too,” Parker said.

“Let’s say, just for the sake of argument,” Meyer said, “she put him up to doing the Cassidy girl…”

“Woman,” Parker corrected.

They all looked at him.

“It’s what they’re called,” he said apologetically.

“But let’s say she did that, okay?”

“Which would be conspiracy.”

“Sure. And let’s say her motive was she wanted the other gir…the other woman’s part in the play. So she gets this jackass to kill her, and she does get the part, it works just the way she planned it. Then why…?”

“Right,” Parker said. “Why the hell…?”

“…would she kill him?” Byrnes said.

“Cause he was the only link,” Carella said.

“The only one who tied her to it,” Kling said.

“They why’d she leave a phony suicide note?” Brown asked.

“To make it look like a suicide.”

“Why?” Hawes asked.

“So we wouldn’t carry it back to her.”

“But we are carrying it back to her.”

“Only because we found the earring!” Carella said, exasperated.

“You think she took off the earring, is that it?” Byrnes asked. “Before she shoved him out the window?”

“I think she took it off before they started making love.”

“And forgot to put it on again?”

“Yes. If you’d just killed someone…”

“Come on, Steve,” Hawes said. “She drugs the guy…”

“Yes.”

“Drops Dalmane into the Scotch they’re drinking…”

“Exactly.”

“And then takes off her earrings before they make love? Didn’t she have other things on her mind?”

“Like throwing him out the fuckin window?” Parker said.

“Wait a minute,” Brown said, “I think Steve’s right.”

“No, he’s not,” Meyer said.

“Lots of women take off their earrings before they climb into bed,” Brown said.

“Their watches, too,” Kling said.

“Sometimes even their rings,” Brown said. “So that’s not unusual.”

“Both earrings, right?” Hawes said. “She took off both earrings.”

“Well…yeah.”

“And then put on just one of them afterward?”

“Without noticing the other one was gone?”

“Without looking for the other one?”

“She’s just thrown a guy out the window, and she realizes she’s lost her earring, and she doesn’t go looking for it?”

“When did you notice the earring was gone?” Byrnes asked.

“What?” Carella said.

“Your report says she was wearing only one earring…”

“That was Thursday, Steve,” Kling said.

“When you noticed?”

“Yes.”

“And she told you she’d lost it?”

“Right.”

“This is two days after Michelle got murdered…”

“Yes.”

“…and Josie’s running around with just the one earring in her ear. Who do you think killed Michelle, Steve?”

“Madden.”

“You think Josie put him up to it, is that it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you must also think they were lovers.”

“I do.”

“And you think that by the ninth, when you noticed the missing earring, she already had a plan in place to murder him.”

“I think that’s entirely possible, yes.”

“Possible, possible,” Hawes said, shaking his head.

“You’re saying she put Madden up to killing Michelle…”

“Yes.”

“…and then started planning his murder.”

“Yes.”

“Is that why she told you she’d lost her lucky earring?”

Carella looked at him.

“Steve?”

“Well…”

“Was she planning to leave that earring under Madden’s bed?”

“Well…”

“Was she planning to implicate herself in his murder?”

The room went silent.

“She didn’t do it, Steve,” Byrnes said gently.

“You know who did?” Parker asked suddenly, grinning in his day-old whiskers. “Whoever didn’t get the part.”

It was now five-thirty P.M. that Saturday, the eleventh day of April. This was the day before Palm Sunday, and everyone was already thinking about Easter and Passover, which this year happened to fall on the same day, so much for religious diversity. But at nine o’clock on Tuesday morning, Nellie Brand would go to the grand jury.

Everybody, especially Parker, wanted to go home. However, they were the ones who’d been lucky enough to stumble upon a possible approach to this thing, so Byrnes insisted that they follow through on it, rather than dumping it on the night shift.

They broke up into three teams.

Carella and Kling, of course.

Meyer and Hawes.

Parker and Brown, lucky him.

They were looking for probable cause to go into Andrea Packer’s apartment.

Since she knew Carella and Kling by sight, and since they didn’t want her dumping evidence before they even had a court order to look for it, it was thought provident to send two of the other detectives to her building.

The doorman at 714 South Hedley had been working at the building for twenty-five years, and he was due to retire in June. His plan was to move back to the house he’d owned in Puerto Rico for the past ten years now. Do some fishing. Walk the beach. Smell the tropical flowers. He did not want trouble here. That was the first thing he told Parker and Brown. He didn’t want trouble two months before he was supposed to retire.

Parker felt real sorry for this little spic here who could hardly speak English, going back where coconuts would fall on his head while he sipped pi˜a coladas. Twenty-five years standing in a doorway with his finger up his ass, now he was afraid of getting involved, didn’t want trouble on his watch.

“This is a homicide we’re investigating here,” Parker said.

The magic word.

Homicide.

Supposed to cause them to wet their pants.

The little spic just blinked at him.

“You know a tenant named Andrea Parker?” Brown asked.

“I juss worr here,” the doorman said.

“Cómo se llama?” Parker asked, showing off the Spanish he’d been picking up from this girl named Catalina Herrera he’d been seeing. Called herself Cathy. listen, who cared what she called herself? She wanted to think she was really American, that was fine with him, even if she did speak with a Spanish accent you could cut with a machete, but on her it sounded cute.

“You hear me?” he asked.

“Sí ya lo oí, no soy sordo,” the doorman answered in Spanish, apparently figuring Parker was more fluent than he actually was, most of his exchanges before now having taken place in Cathy Herrera’s bed — Caralina’s, who was kidding who?

“Huh?” Parker said.

“Luis Rivera,” the doorman said.

“Listen, Luis,” Parker said, “nobody’s tryin’a get you in any trouble here. All we want to know is does Andrea Packer live alone here or does somebody live with her? If so, who is it? That’s all we want to know, You stand here at the door all the time, protectin the tenants here in this building, ready to defend them with your life day and night, twenty-five years you been here, that’s a brave thing you done, Luis, that takes real cojones. But now we’re dealin with a homicide here, Luis, which is murder, as you know, homicidio, we call it in Spanish, a very serious crime, Luis. So just tell us yes or no, she was living with somebody or she wasn’t, and we’ll take it from there, what do you say, amigo?” Parker said, and winked.

“I call dee super,” Luis said.

There were four pharmacies within a six-block radius of Andrea Packer’s building. Meyer and Hawes entered the first one at ten minutes past six that Saturday evening. By now, all of the detectives were very conscious of the time. Tuesday at nine seemed very close, and tomorrow was not only Sunday, it was palm Sunday. In this city, things had a habit of slowing down on holidays even when the holiday was merely a prelude to a bigger holiday — like the Passover and Easter celebrations next Sunday.

“They’re both spring festivals, anyway,” Meyer said, apropos of nothing. “Joyous celebrations of life.”

Hawes didn’t know what he was talking about.

The pharmacy was one in a chain of big impersonal discount stores that on television advertised courtesy, friendliness and personal attention. There were six pharmacists in white coats scurrying around behind the counter, all of them women. There were twice that many people standing in line in front of the counter. Hovering over everything was an air of absolute panic. Meyer was happy he wasn’t here to have a prescription filled. The people on line gave both detectives dirty looks as they stepped up directly to the counter. A man wearing sweats and running shoes seemed about to say something to Hawes, but Hawes merely glared at him and he changed his mind.

“Police,” Meyer said, and showed his shield. “May we speak to your head pharmacist, please?”

The head pharmacist — or chief pharmacist, as she introduced herself — was an exceedingly tall woman named Felicia Moss, her eyes a piercing brown, her hair pulled back into a severe bun that emphasized startlingly beautiful features in a face as chiseled as a Roman marble.

“I’m sorry,” she said when they told her what they wanted. “That would be completely contrary to policy.”

“What policy?” Meyer asked.

“Company policy.”

“Why?” Hawes asked flatly.

“Pharmacist-patient confidentiality,” she said.

“There’s no such thing,” Hawes said.

“All we want to know is whether or not you’ve filled any prescriptions recently for a woman named…”

“Yes, I…”

“Andrea Packer, and whether one of those…”

“I quite understand what you’re looking for. The answer…”

“Miss Moss, let’s not be ridiculous, okay?” Hawes said. “We’re in investigating a homicide here…”

“And I have prescriptions to fill,” she said. “Good day, gentlemen.”

It was going to be one of those days.

The superintendent of Andrea Packer’s building was a burly white man not quite as bald as some people Parker knew, but plenty bald enough. His scalp was red and flaking. It looked as if he’d spent a lot of time up on the roof taking the sun. His eyes were blue and piercing and suspicious.

Brown asked him if there was a tenant named Andrea Packer in the building.

“I’m not required to give out information on my tenants,” he said. He had not yet given them his name or offered them his hand. He had simply materialized from the bowels of the building when the doorman picked up a handset at the entrance desk and punched out a mysterious number.

“What’s your name, sir?” Parker asked.

He had found over the years that using the word “sir” very often caused them to wet their pants.

“Howard Rank,” the super said.

“Mr. Rank,” Parker said, “I don’t know what you mean by required or not required, who’s saying you’re required to do anything here? We’re asking a simple question we can get the answer to just by looking at the mailboxes in your hallway there, for which we don’t need any authority but the shield in our pocket. We did you the courtesy of asking you the question instead of walking over there to the mailboxes, so why don’t you do us the courtesy of giving a simple answer instead of required or not required?”

“She lives in the building, yes,” Rank said.

“Good, now can you tell us what apartment she lives in, or do we have to go look at the mailbox for that, too?”

“She lives in apartment 4C.”

“Thank you,” Parker said. “Now can you tell us whether she lives alone up there, or whether there’s somebody living with her?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Rank said.

“Why not?” Brown asked sharply, glowering.

“Super-tenant confidentiality,” Rank said.

The drugstore on the corner of Easton and Hedley had been at this same location for fifty years; it said so in gold-leaf lettering on the front plate-glass window. Stepping into the shop, Carella had the feeling he was walking into an apothecary somewhere in London, though he’d never been to London and didn’t really know whether or not they were called apothecaries there. But there was something reminiscent of Charles Dickens here, something about the little bell tinkling over the paned-and-paneled front door, in itself a rarity in this city of instant break-ins. The heavy glass-fronted cabinets, the thick wooden shelves, the bell jars and decanters all seemed to contain rare oils, ointments, and unguents transported from the farthest reaches of the world. There was something ineffably timeworn and musty about this shop and the creaky old man behind the counter. This was a shop to enter on a rainy day.

“Yes, gentlemen?” the man asked. “How may I help you?”

Like the Dickens character he most surely was, he wore a long-sleeved lavender-colored shirt and a little purple bow tie, and a plaid vest over which a watch chain ran from pocket to buttonhole. He squinted at them through narrow little glasses, dark eyes bright behind them. His skin was the color and texture of thin parchment paper.

“We’re police officers,” Carella said at once, though the man seemed not at all afraid of imminent robbery.

“How do you do,” he said, “I’m Graham Quested.”

Dickens for sure, Carella thought.

“We’re trying to track a prescription,” Kling said.

“Ah yes,” Quested said.

He told them he’d had many such requests from the police over the years, usually in cases where overdoses of prescription drugs seemed indicated during autopsy. He also told them he’d been held up sixty-two times at this location since he opened the store fifty-one years ago come August.

“All sixty-two of the robberies took place during the past twenty years,” he said. “I guess that says something about the way this city is changing, doesn’t it?”

Carella guessed it did.

“What we’re looking for,” he said, “is a prescription you might have filled for a woman named Andrea Packer.”

“Not a name that’s familiar to me,” Quested said. “Which doesn’t mean anything, of course. She could have been someone who just walked in off the street, rather than one of my regular customers. When would this have been, would you know?”

“I’m sorry, we don’t.”

“A prescription for what?”

“Dalmane.”

“Very popular sleeping pill. Its generic name is flurazepam, one of the benzodiazepines. More than fifteen, sixteen million prescriptions written for it each year. Do you know her doctor’s name?”

“No.”

“Andrea Packer, did you say?”

“P-A-C-K-E-R.”

“Do you have an address for her?”

“714 South Hedley.”

“Right around the corner. Was she a suicide?”

“No, sir,” Carella said.

“Because benzodiazepines are rarely used in suicides,” Quested said. “Have to take ten to twenty times the normal dose to do yourself in that way. Dalmane’s got the longest half-life of any of the ben…”

“Half-life?”

“That’s the time it takes to eliminate half’ the drug the person ingested. If you took a ten-milligram capsule of something, for example, and its half-life is two hours, then an hour after ingestion there’d still be five mils in the bloodstream.”

“What’s the half-life of Dalmane?”

“Forty-seven to a hundred hours,” Quested said.

Kling whistled.

“You said it. A person using Dalmane can sometimes have as much of the stuff in his blood during the day as he has at night. Let’s have a look at the files, shall we?”

And then, surprisingly for a fellow out of Great Expectations or Oliver Twist, he led them to a computer in a back room brimming with mortars and pestles, and searched first for Andrea Packer’s name, and then her address, and then the brand name Dalmane and next the generic name flurazepam and lastly the chemical group benzodiazepine and came up with nothing each and every time.

“Oh gentlemen,” he said, looking truly regretful, “I’m so terribly, terribly sorry.”

The door to apartment 4D was opened by a young black man wearing blue jeans, a gray T-shirt with a maroon Ramsey University seal on its front, and horn-rimmed glasses that gave him a peering, suspicious look. He had asked them to hold their badges up to the peephole in the door before he’d opened it for them, and now he studied their shields and ID cards at greater leisure and with closer scrutiny. Satisfied at last, he said, “What’s the trouble?”

“No trouble,” Brown said.

“What’s your name, son?” Parker asked pleasantly.

He had determined over the years that using the word “son” also caused them to wet their pants, especially when they were nineteen years old and black, the way this kid seemed to be.

“Daryll Hinks,” the kid said.

“Do you know the lady who lives in 4C next door?”

“Only by sight.”

“Andrea Packer, that her name?” Brown asked.

“I don’t know her name. Long blond hair, nineteen, twenty years old, good-looking girl. What’d she do?”

“Nothing. Ever see her going in or out of that apartment?”

“Sure.”

“Apartment 4C, right?”

“Yeah. Next door.”

“Ever seen anybody else going in or out?”

“Sure.”

“A man, for example?”

“What is she, a hooker?”

“What makes you say that?”

“You’re asking about men going in and out…”

“No, no, we’re just thinking of a specific man.”

“Did this man do something?”

“Yeah, he threw himself out a window,” Parker said.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.’^.

“Gee.”

“So would you have seen a guy maybe six feet tall, husky white guy, twenty-six years old, brown hair, brown…”

“Yeah,” Hinks said.

“Liked to wear painter’s coveralls, high-topped workman’s…”

“Yeah, I’ve seen him. Talked to him in the elevator, in fact.”

“Ever see him going in or coming out of apartment 4C?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“Well, I leave for school early in the morning…”

“Ever see him coming out of there early in the morning?”

“Oh sure.”

“What time in the morning?”

“I leave at seven.”

“Thanks,” Brown said.

“What’d she do?” Hinks asked again.

The pharmacist at G&R Drugs on Hedley and Commerce knew Andrea Packer by name and by sight. She was, in fact, a regular customer at the store. He described her as a “lissome” blonde, maybe twenty years old or so, with dark brown eyes and a kind of “flamboyant” manner.

“I think she’s an actress or something,” he said. “Or a model. One or the other. We had some interesting talks about movies. Did you see the movie Orlando? We had some interesting talks about that movie. It’s about gender exchange, I guess you’d call it. It was very interesting. You should try to get it from your video store. We also talked about Speed, which is a different sort of film, but also very interesting. Either of the two are well worth…”

“When was she in here last?” Hawes asked.

“Oh, I don’t know, she’s in and out all the time. Toothpaste, lipstick, deodorant…”

“How about prescription drugs?” Meyer asked.

“I’d have to look that up. She had a cold recently, I know, and was taking an antibiotic…”

“How about sleeping pills?” Hawes asked.

“Oh, yes, she had a running prescription for those.”

“Running?”

“Refilled it every month or so.”

“When’s the last time she refilled it?”

“Couple of weeks ago, I guess. I’d have to check the computer.”

“What drug?”

“Dalmane.”

The judge struck out the last sentence of Carella’s affidavit as being too broad in its scope, something Carella knew, anyway.

Otherwise, the petition was granted.

They were waiting in the hallway outside her door when she got back from rehearsal that night at nine. Their court order for a search warrant had not included a No-Knock provision, which they’d have been foolish to ask for in the first place. This wasn’t an armed and dangerous desperado living in apartment 4C. This was merely a woman some five feet nine inches tall and weighing a possible hundred and twenty-five pounds, who’d first dragged a sedated man across the floor of his apartment, and hoisted him up onto the sill of an open window, and then shoved him out to the street ten stories below.

She was taking her keys out of her handbag as she stepped out of the elevator. She saw them at once, hesitated a moment, and then walked directly toward them.

She looked tired tonight.

It must have been a grueling rehearsal.

“Hello,” she said, “what a surprise,” and smiled faintly.

“Miss Packer,” Carella said, “I have here a court order authorizing the search of your apar…”

“A what?” she said.

“A search warrant,” Kling said. “Could you please unlock the door?”

“No, I will not unlock the door,” she said, backing away from them. “A search warrant? What in the hell for?”

“Maybe you ought to read it,” Carella said, and handed it to her.

She read it silently.

“I want to call my lawyer,” she said.

“Fine, you can call him while we conduct our search.”

“No, I want to call him now. Before I let you in the apartment.”

“Miss Packer,” Carella said, “I’m not sure you understand. This is a court order. If you refuse to…”

“I’m not refusing anything. I simply want my lawyer here while you…”

“Miss Packer,” Kling said, “I suggest…”

“Oh, stop with the Mutt and Jeff routine, will you please?”

“Either open the door or we’ll be forced to arrest you for obstructing governmental administration,” Carella said.

“What kind of double talk is that?”

“It means you’re preventing a search ordered by a court,” he said. “And if you persist, we’ll have to arrest you,”

“Is he telling me the truth?” she asked Kling.

“He’s telling you the truth.”

“What is this, Nazi Germany?”

“No, it’s America,” Carella said.

“Jesus,” she said, and angrily rammed her key into the keyway. She unlocked the door, threw it open, and stamped immediately to the phone on the kitchen wall. The detectives followed her into the apartment, pulling on white cotton gloves as she dialed.

“Where’s your bathroom?” Kling asked.

“Don’t you dare use my bathroom!” she shouted.

“Nobody’s going to use your bathroom,” Carella said. “You’ve already read the warrant, you know what we’re looking for.”

“You just keep out of my personal… Mr. Foley, please. This is Andrea Packer, tell him it’s urgent. Don’t you go anywhere in this apartment without me!” she warned.

“Miss Packer…”

“You can damn well wait till my lawyer…”

“No, we can’t,” Carella said.

“Holly?” she said into the phone. “This is Andrea. I’ve got two detectives here… where are you going?” she shouted to their backs. “Holly, you’d better get here right away,” she said into the phone again. “They’re searching my apartment, they’ve got something signed by a judge, just get here!” she shouted, and slammed down the phone and went flying through the apartment after them.

They had passed through the bedroom already, where they’d glanced toward an open closet door revealing what were clearly men’s clothes. If the judge hadn’t specifically deleted the “And any and all evidence” phrase from Carella’s petition, they might have risked taking the stuff as proof that Madden had been living here. After all, they hadn’t been searching for the clothing, but had merely happened to spot it hanging there “in plain view,” a favorite expression of confiscating cops the world over. But with Andrea Packer in hot pursuit, they were unwilling to jeopardize finding what they had come here for, so they barged straight into a bathroom done in pale blue tile and decorated with midnight-blue towels and went directly to the sink where they also happened to notice a man’s razor sitting an the rim in plain view. Carella yanked open the mirrored door of the cabinet with his gloved right hand, and he and Kling leaned in over the sink, their eyes riffling the labels on the various little brownish-orange, white-lidded plastic bottles on the shelves. Several of the drugs had been prescribed for Charles Madden, another pretty good sign that he’d been living here. Most of them were prescriptions in Andrea’s name, though, the 250-milligram capsules of amoxicillin, and the A.P.C. with codeine, and the 400-milligram tablets of meprohamate, and the Nasalcrom 4 % spray, and the Donnatal, and the 500-milligram capsules of tetracycline, and the AVC cream and…

“There it is,” Kling said, and reached into the cabinet.

He rattled the container to see if there were any pills still in it, and then pried off the lid with his thumb. They were looking at possibly a dozen capsules of Dalmane.

“All right,” Andrea said, appearing behind them in the bathroom doorway, “my lawyer’s…”

“You’re under arrest,” Carella said.