Romance

6

REEKING OF GARLIC AND UNIDENTIFIABLE EFFLUVIUM, DETECtive Fat Ollie Weeks oozed into the squadroom, spotted Meyer Meyer sitting alone at his desk, and announced, “Well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well,” in his world-famous imitation of W. C. Fields, which was more and more beginning to resemble Al Pacino doing the blind marine in Scent of a Woman. Meyer looked up wearily.

In all truth, Ollie resembled W. C. Fields more than he did Al Pacino, not for nothing was he called Fat Ollie Weeks. This Wednesday morning, the eighth day of April, a gray and dismal but not yet wet reminder of the day before, Ollie was wearing a white button-down-collar shirt open at the throat, a brownish sports jacket with mustard stains on it, rumpled darker brown slacks, and a pair of scuffed brown loafers which, Meyer noted with surprise, had a penny inserted in the leather band across each vamp, would wonders never.

“How’d you like Schindler’s List?” Ollie asked pointedly.

“I didn’t see it,” Meyer said.

“You didn’t go see a picture about your own people?” Meaning Jews, Meyer figured.

He did not feel he had to explain to a bigot like Ollie that the reason he hadn’t gone to see the movie was that he thought it might be too painful an experience. Unlike Steven Spielberg, who in countless articles preceding the release of the film had confessed that making the movie had put him in touch with his own Jewishness, or words to that effect, Meyer had been in touch with his own Jewishness for a very long time now, thank you. And unlike Spielberg, Meyer did not believe that the Holocaust had been in any danger of becoming “a footnote to history” before this particular movie came along. No more than dinosaurs were a footnote to history before Jurassic Park roared into theaters all over the world. There were Jews like Meyer who would never forget the Holocaust even if there hadn’t been a single Hollwood movie ever made about it.

Meyer’s nephew Irwin, who had been known affectionately as Irwin the Vermin when he was but a prepubescent child, had since grown into a somewhat rabbinical type given to rolling his eyes and davening even when asking someone to please pass the salt. He had seen Schindler’s List and had pontificated that this wasn’t a movie about the Holocaust here, this was a movie here about a man finding in himself depths of feeling and empathy he had not before known he’d possessed. “What this movie is about is a flower growing up through a concrete sidewalk, cracking through that sidewalk and spreading its petals to the sunshine, is what this movie is all about,” Irwin had proclaimed at Aunt Rose’s house last night.

Meyer had said nothing.

He was thinking that here was a Jew who’d gone to see a movie which, according to its director, had been designed to make people remember there’d been such a thing as the Holocaust, and instead it had caused Irwin to forget there’d been a Holocaust and to remember instead that flowers could grow through sidewalks.

Now here was Fat Ollie Weeks, in all his fetid obesity, standing before Meyer’s desk like a fat Nazi bastard, demanding to know why Meyer had chosen not to go see a movie that might cause him to weep.

“You think all that really happened?” Ollie asked.

Meyer looked at him.

“All that stuff?” Ollie said.

“What brings you here?” Meyer asked, attempting to change the subject.

“The stuff they say the Nazis did to the Jews?” Ollie persisted.

“No, they made it all up,” Meyer said. “What brings you here?”

Ollie looked at him for a moment, as if trying to decide whether this wise Jew here was putting him on or what, telling him the whole fuckin Hologram had been invented, whereas Ollie knew there wasn’t a Jew in the world who believed that, who was he trying to kid here? Or maybe he’d finally seen the light himself, and realized governments could stage things like fake moon landings and six million Jews getting exterminated. He let the whole thing go because, to tell the truth, he didn’t give a shit one way or the other, six million Jews getting killed on the moon, or six fake astronauts flying over Poland.

“I think we’re gonna be working together again,” he said, and leaned across Meyer’s desk and nudged him in a ham-fisted gesture of camaraderie. Meyer instinctively backed away from the unctuous reek. How had he got so lucky? he wondered. There he’d been, sitting behind his desk, minding his own business, a good-looking man if he said so himself, thirtysomething but still hale and hearty although entirely bald, tall and burly with bright inquisitive blue eyes — if, again, he said so himself — wearing suspenders that matched the cornflower blue, a gift from his wife Sarah at Christmas, or Chanukah, or both, because each was celebrated in turn at the Meyer household, when all at once comes a two-ton tank smelling of diesel oil and farts, announcing that they’d be working together again, of vay’z mir.

“On what?” Meyer asked.

“On this girl got stabbed and slashed twenty-two times-and incidentally murdered, by the way-in apartment 6C at 1214 Carter Avenue in the Eighty-eighth Precinct, which happens to be where I work, ah yes,” he said, falling into his W. C. Fields mode again. “Whereas I under-stand, m’boy, that the vie was previously stabbed right here in the old Eight-Seven, although a mere superficial wound, ah yes.”

“What are you saying?”

“Michelle Cassidy.”

“Was murdered?“

“Twenty-two times over.”

“When?”

“Sometime last night. When she didn’t show for rehearsal this morning, somebody at the theater called nine-one-one, and they dispatched a car from the Eight-Eight.”

“Michelle Cassidy? The actress Kling and Carella…?”

“Is that who was working it?”

“Yeah,” Meyer said. “In fact, they got a search warrant this morning to…”

“What search warrant?”

“To toss the agent’s office.”

“What agent?”

“The one living with her.”

“They shouldn’ta done that,” Ollie said, and scowled darkly. “This is my case.”

Ollie was annoyed that they’d gone around him-a — difficult task under any circumstances — to obtain their warrant while his people were still conducting a search of the crime scene. Carella explained that when they’d applied for the warrant, they hadn’t known the apartment on Carter Avenue had become a crime scene. They were merely looking for a weapon possibly used in an assault, and they reasoned that Milton wouldn’t have left that weapon in the apartment he shared with the assault victim. It was Carella’s guess that the warrant would have been denied if Michelle Cassidy hadn’t been mentioned in it some half dozen times; even judges of the superior court watched television and read newspapers.

“Point is…” Ollie said.

“Point is, we’ve got the knife,” Nellie Brand said.

They had called her in because the court-ordered search of Johnny Milton’s office on Stemmler Avenue had yielded surprisingly good results. Nellie was an assistant district attorney, dressed for work this morning in a smart suit the color of her sand-colored hair, a blouse a shade lighter, darker brown panty hose, and brown leather shoes with French heels. Carella liked her style. She always looked breezy and fresh to him.

“Moreover,” she said, “there appears to be blood caked in and around the hinge. If Milton wasn’t cleaning chickens, I want to know where that blood came from. And if the lab can match it with Michelle Cassidy’s.

“Goodbye, Johnny ” Kling said.

“Let’s go talk to him,” Carella said.

The Q and A took place in Lieutenant Byrnes’s corner office at eleven twenty-seven that Wednesday morning. Present in addition to the three detectives and Nellie was a female video technician from the D. A.’s Office, and Lieutenant Byrnes himself, who sat in the swivel chair behind his desk trying not to appear too excited about his detectives maybe cracking this celebrity case so soon. He could see naked greed gleaming in Ollie Weeks’s eyes. Ollie had caught the squeal this morning. This was a hot collar, and Ollie wanted it. Byrnes was ready to defend it to his death.

Milton had been read his rights the moment they found the knife and slipped the cuffs on him. The video technician turned on the camera, and Nellie read Miranda yet another time, advising Milton again that he was entitled to a lawyer if he wished one. Milton said, again, that he’d done nothing, had committed no crime, had nothing to hide, and therefore was in no need of legal representation. Every other person in the room figured these were famous last words.

“Do you recognize this?” Nellie asked, firing from the hip and aiming straight between the eyes, even though the weapon she held in her hand was a knife in a clear plastic bag. No knife, no case, she was thinking. Get to it. Nail him fast.

“I recognize it, yes,” Milton said.

“Is this the knife Detectives Carella and Kling found in your office at 1507 Stemmler Avenue?”

“It appears to be that knife, yes,” Milton said.

“Well, is it or isn’t it?” Nellie said.

“I believe it is.^,

“Yes or no?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Does this knife belong to you, sir?”

“No, it does not,” Milton said.

“This knife…”

“Is not mine, that’s correct.”

“This knife the detectives found in your office…”

“Is not mine. I never saw that knife before the detectives found it. ”

“Came as a surprise to you, did it?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Detectives pulling books from your bookcase…”

“Um-huh.”

“… and they spot a switchblade knife you never saw before, huh?”

“Never.”

“You know, do you not, that from the moment the detectives removed several books from the shelf and spotted the knife…”

“I don’t know how it got there. Someone must have put it there.”

“Well, who if not you?” Nellie said. “You realize, don’t you, that from the moment the knife was discovered, no one has touched it with a naked hand? Not the arresting detectives, not me, not anyone in the police department or connected with the District Attorney’s Office. The detectives were wearing white cotton gloves when they conducted their search…”

“Yes, I saw that.”

“And when they found the knife, they dropped it into a plastic evidence bag, and that’s where it’s been since. No one has touched this knife with a naked hand. Except the person who hid it behind those books.”

“I don’t know how it got there.”

“But you do know, do you not, that what appears to be blood is caked in and around the hinge of that knife?”

“No, I didn’t know that until just this minute.”

“You know, do you not, that this knife will be sent to the police laboratory where it will be determined whether or not the suspect substance is, in fact, blood?”

“I would assume so. But it’s not my knife. I don’t care where you send it.”

“Mr. Milton, do you know that we can take your fingerprints whenever we want to?”

Milton looked surprised.

“Is that something else you didn’t know until just this minute?” Nellie asked.

“You don’t have the right to take my fingerprints. I didn’t commit any crime.”

“Yes, we do have the right, believe me, Mr. Milton.”

“I would have to ask a lawyer if you have that right.”

“Would you like to call your lawyer now?”

“I only have an entertainment lawyer.”

“Would you like to call a criminal lawyer?”

“I’m not a criminal. And I don’t know any criminal lawyers.”

“If you like, I can give you the names of ten high fliers who’ll come up here in a minute.”

“Anyway, why would I need a criminal lawyer? I didn’t commit any crime.”

“Be that as it may, you’ve been arrested for a crime, and any lawyer will tell you that we can take your fingerprints without permission. Under the Miranda ruling, fingerprinting you without permission would not be taking incriminating testi…”

“I won’t give you my permission.”

“We don’t need your permission. We can fingerprint or photograph you without permission, Mr. Milton, that is the long and short of it. The same way we can ask you to submit to a blood test or a Breathalyzer test…”

“No, you can’t.”

“Yes, we can. These are all non-testimonial responses and are permitted under the ruling.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means we’re going to take your prints and compare them with whatever’s on that knife. And it means we’re going to compare the blood on that knife with Michelle Cassidy’s blood, and if the fingerprints match and the blood matches, then we’ve got you stabbing her and killing her, Mr. Milton. That’s what it…”

“Killing her? What?”

“Killing her, Mr. Milton.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You want to tell me if this is your knife?”

“I already told you it’s not my knife. And I didn’t…”

“You want us to go through the whole dog and pony act, is that it?”

“I don’t know which dog and pony act you mean.”

“The fingerprinting, the comparison tests…”

“You’re not allowed to fingerprint me.”

“Fine, we’re not allowed to,” Nellie said, exasperated. “So I guess we’ll just have to break the law right this minute by doing what we’re not allowed to do. Fellas, you want to take him out and print him?” she said, turning to where Carella and Kling sat watching and listening.

“I want a lawyer,” Milton said.

“Lieutenant, can you get a lawyer for this man, please?”

“I want my own lawyer.”

“Your entertainment lawyer?”

“Better than some kid fresh out of law school.”

“Fine, get him up here, maybe he’ll entertain us. Meanwhile, we’ll print you. Give us something to discuss when he gets here.”

“You can’t print me before I talk to my lawyer.”

“Print him,” Byrnes said flatly.

Harry O’Brien — no relation to Bob O’Brien, the squad’s own hoodoo cop — came into the squadroom at a little past one that Wednesday afternoon, announced that he’d been contacted by Milton’s personal attorney and then produced a card identifying himself as a partner with the law firm of Hutchins, Baxter, Bailey and O’Brien. He shook hands with Milton and then Nellie, nodded to the assembled cops, and said, “So what is this?”

He was a man in his fifties, Nellie guessed, well-toned and tanned, with gray hair and a neatly trimmed gray mustache, wearing a double-breasted gray nailhead suit with a smart, solid blue silk tie. He half sat on, half leaned against the lieutenant’s desk, his arms folded across his chest, giving an impression of casual ease in a cops-and-robbers environment.

“This is about Murder Two,” Nellie said.

“Oh?”

Face expressing mild surprise, as if Milton’s entertainment lawyer hadn’t already told him this on the phone.

“Who is supposed to have murdered whom, may I ask?”

Faint derisive smile on his face now. His pose, his manner, the smile, even the expensive hand-tailored suit all said Johnny Milton would be out of here in ten minutes flat. Over my dead body, Nellie thought.

“Mr. Milton is being charged with murder in the second degree,” she said dryly. “Did you want to talk to your client about it before we proceed further?”

“Thank you, I would appreciate that,” Milton said.

They all left Byrnes’s office. Outside in the squadroom, none of them said very much. The lab had already come back with a double match on fingerprints and blood. They had Milton cold. Nellie wasn’t even willing to do any deals here. This was Murder Two, plain and simple, and Milton was looking at twenty-five to life.

Some ten minutes later, O’Brien opened the door to Byrnes’s office, poked his head out into the corridor, smiled under his gray mustache and said, “Mrs. Brand? Ready when you are.”

They filed back into the lieutenant’s office again.

“Would you like to tell me what you think you have?” O’Brien said.

“Happy to,” Nellie said, and laid it all out for both of them. She told them that Milton’s fingerprints matched the latent impressions lifted from the knife found in his office, that the residue substance clogged in the hinge of the knife was indeed blood and that moreover it matched the AB blood group of Michelle Cassidy, who had been stabbed and slashed to death the night before. She pointed out that Miss Cassidy shared her apartment on Carter Avenue with Mr. Milton and that the investigating detectives from the Eighty-eighth Squad had found no evidence of forcible entry to the apartment. It was her assumption that Mr. Milton had his own keys to the apartment. If she was wrong in this assumption, she wished Mr. Milton would correct her when the questioning was resumed. If it was resumed.

“That’s it,” she said.

“My client is willing to admit to the assault on Michelle Cassidy on the night of April sixth,” O’Brien said. “But he had nothing to do with her murder.”

“No, huh?” Nellie said.

“No,” O’Brien said.

“You’re trying to deal an A-l felony down to a Class D, is that it?” Nellie said, and shook her head in amazement.

“Better than that,” O’Brien said. “I’m looking for Assault Three, a Class A mis.”

“Why should i buy that?”

“Because you’ve got nothing that puts my client in that apartment last night.”

“Where was he last night?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“Does that mean I can question him now?”

“Sure. I’ve only just met the man, but I’m convinced he’s got nothing to hide.”

Nellie nodded. The technician turned on the video camera again. Milton was read his rights again, this time in the presence of his attorney, and he ascertained that he was willing to answer questions. The dog and pony act began.

“Mr. Milton, did you stab Michelle Cassidy on the night of April sixth at approximately seven P.M.?”

“I did.”

Good. That nailed down the assault.

“You previously told Detectives Carella and Kling that you were in a restaurant named O’Leary’s at that time, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So you weren’t quite telling them the truth, is that right?”

“I wasn’t.”

“In fact, you were lying.”

“Yes.”

“You were instead in the alley outside the Susan Granger Theater, stabbing Miss Cassidy.”

“Yes.”

“With this knife?” Nellie asked, and showed him the knife in the plastic evidence bag.

“With that knife, yes.”

“Then, contrary to what you told me earlier, this knife is yours.”

“Yes, it’s my knife.”

“And are you the person who hid it behind the books in your office?”

“Yes.”

“So when you said earlier… tell me if I’m quoting you incorrectly… when you said, `I don’t know how it got there. Someone must have put it there,’ referring to this knife, you were not telling the truth then, either, were you?”

“I was not.”

“You were lying again.”

“I was lying.”

“This is your knife, and you did hide it behind those books in your bookcase.”

“Yes.”

“And you now say you used this knife to stab Michelle Cassidy on the night of April sixth.”

“Yes.”

“How about last night? Did you use this knife to stab her last night?”

“No, I did not.”

“Did you use some other knife to stab her last night?”

“I didn’t stab her last night.”

“You stabbed her Monday night, but not last night.”

“That’s correct.”

“Would you care to explain that, Mr. Milton?”

Milton turned, looked at his attorney. O’Brien nodded.

“Well…” Milton said.

And now he told Nellie and the assembled detectives how the idea had been Michelle’s from the very start… well, premised on something he’d said while they were in bed together this past Sunday night. She’d been complaining about how stupid the play was, Romance, the play they were rehearsing, and Johnny had mentioned that the play had pretensions of being something it couldn’t ever possibly be, there was simply no way you could turn a murder mystery into a silk purse. He’d gone on to explain that the minute anybody stuck a knife in somebody else, all attention focused on the victim, and all anybody wanted to know was whodunit.

Which wasn’t such a bad idea, he’d thought.

Focusing attention on the victim.

Which he’d said aloud.

To Michelle.

“It wouldn’t be such a bad idea to get some attention focused on you,” he’d said, “never mind the dumb play.“

Well, if there’s anything an actress loves, it’s getting attention focused on her. The minute he mentioned this thought — what was actually just a passing thought, an idle thought, a whim, you know — Michelle wanted to now what he meant, what kind of attention? He had mentioned somebody sticking a knife in a person, which happens in the play, of course, and now she picked up on that, saying it was too bad some nut out there didn’t get it in his head to stab her, the way the girl in the play gets stabbed, which would certainly focus a lot of attention on her, and wouldn’t hurt the play besides, since a stabbing is what happens in it. The whole damn audience would be sitting there waiting for the stabbing scene, knowing that Michelle had been stabbed in real life, though not as seriously as the girl in the play, who almost gets killed from what she could determine, although it was such a goofy play that the next minute she’s up off the floor and answering the Detective’s questions, sheeesh.

“Too bad there isn’t some nut out there,” she’d said, and they’d lain there in each other’s arms, quiet for a while, and then she said, “Why does it have to be some nut?”

“What do you mean?” he’d said.

“Why don’t we get someone to do it? Stab me. Not too seriously. Just seriously enough to focus attention on me. As the victim.”

Well, they’d discussed this for a while, back and forth, and she finally agreed with his opinion that if you ever hired somebody to do something like that, it always carne out in the wash. Whoever did the job always came clean for one reason or another, and it would all lead right back to them and have the opposite effect from the one intended.

“Why can’t it be someone we know real well?” Michelle said. “Who does the stabbing, I mean.”

So they batted this around for a while, back and forth, trying to think of anyone they knew who could be trusted first to stab her not too seriously and then to keep his mouth shut afterward…

“Or even hers,” Michelle offered.

… but they couldn’t come up with anyone, male or female, who they felt they could absolutely, positively trust to pull this off and not implicate them later on.

“How about you?” Michelle suggested.

The idea of him stabbing her did not immediately appeal to him. He wasn’t sure, first of all, that he could succeed in stabbing her “not too seriously,” as she kept putting it, because he was not a surgeon, after all, and he had no idea what arteries or veins might be inside her chest or her shoulder that could rupture and cause her to bleed to death if he hit one of them by accident. So she lowered the strap of the sheer purple baby-doll nightgown she’d been wearing that night, and showed him her shoulder, and together they started poking and probing, trying to figure out how to stab her without doing too much harm. They finally figured that he could just cut her rather than actually stab her, and they decided to do it the following night, when the cast broke for dinner.

“But it was her idea,” Milton said.

“To focus attention on her.”

“Yes. First to go to the cops and tell them she’d been threatened…”

“Which she did.”

“Yes. It was also her idea to say the person calling her sounded like Jack Nicholson.”

“I see,” Nellie said.

“Yes. Because Nicholson sounds very menacing even when he isn’t trying to be. The whole idea was to get media attention.”

“Which is exactly what happened,” Nellie said.

“Yes. We got a lot of attention.”

“So why’d you kill her?”

“Now, now, Counselor,” O’Brien said.

“Why’d you kill her, Mr. Milton?”

“I didn’t.”

“When’s the last time you saw her, Mr. Milton?”

“When I left the house yesterday morning.”

“Do you have your own keys to the apartment, by the way?”

“I do, yes.”

“What time did you leave yesterday morning?”

“Around nine.”

“Lock up after you?”

“No. Michelle was still in the apartment.”

“Where’d you go?”

“To my office. These detectives came to see me there around eleven o’clock.”

“What time did you leave the office?”

“I went out for lunch around twelve-thirty, I guess it was.

“Who with?”

“Producer named Elliot Michaelman.”

“Did you go back to the office after lunch?”

“I did.”

“What time would that have been?”

“A little after three.”

“When did you see Michelle again?”

“I didn’t,”

“You didn’t see her from when you left the apartment at nine that morn…?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, didn’t you go back to the apartment, Mr. Milton? Isn’t that where you live?“

“Yes, but I didn’t go there last night.”

“Why not?”

“Because we had a fight on the phone.”

“Oh?” Nellie said, and saw the warning glance O’Brien shot Milton. “When was this?” she asked at once.

“I guess around six o’clock. I tried the theater as soon as I got back from a meeting, but they’d already stopped rehearsing for the day, so I kept calling the apartment every ten minutes till I reached her.”

“And you say this was around six o’clock.”

“Yes. She’d just come in.”

“What’d you fight about, Mr. Milton?”

“I told her the detectives here had come to my office, and she was worried they might be getting suspicious.”

“That doesn’t sound like a fight to me.”

“Well, she finally said that if they came to the apartment asking questions, she would say she didn’t know anything about it, that I must’ve dreamt up the whole thing on my own, without telling her about it. She told me she wasn’t going down with me, she was going to be a star.”

“Then what?”

“I told her she was the one who’d planned the damn thing, for Christ’s sake! So she said ^`Prove it’ and hung up.

“How’d you feel about that?”

“Rotten.”

“In addition to feeling rotten, did you also feel angry?”

“No, I just felt rotten. I thought we were supposed to love each other. I wouldn’t have gone along with her scheme if I hadn’t loved her. I did it for her. So she really could become a star. I’ve known her since she was ten, I’ve been grooming her all that time.”

“And now she tells you you’re on your own, right?”

“In essence, yes.”

“If they catch you…”

“Yeah.”

“… she knew nothing about it.”

“Yeah.”

“She gets her shot at stardom…”

“Well, yeah.”

“…while you go to jail for assault.”

“I wasn’t thinking about jail. I was thinking we were supposed to love each other.”

“So you decided to kill her.”

“No, I didn’t kill her.”

“You had nothing to lose anymore…”

“No…”

“So you went back to the apartment…”

“No, I didn’t. I never left the office. I. sent out for a sandwich and a bottle of beer…”

“When? What time?”

“Around six.”

“It was delivered at six?”

“Six-fifteen, six-twenty.”

“Who delivered it?”

“Some black kid. I ordered it from a deli on the Stem.”

“Name of the deli?”

“I have it in the office. On one of those menus they slide under the door.”

“But you don’t know the name of the deli offhand.”

“I don’t.”

“How about the kid who delivered your order? Know him?”

“By sight.”

“You don’t know his name?”

“No.”

“And you say he delivered your sandwich and beer…”

“And some fries.”

“… and some fries at six-fifteen, six-twenty.”

“Yes, around then.”

“Then what?”

“I ate.”

“Then what?”

“I went to sleep.”

“You went home to sleep?”

“No. I slept in the office.”

“Anyone see you sleeping there?”

“No. But I was there when Lizzie came in this morning. My secretary. Elizabeth Campieri.”

“Found you sleeping, did she?”

“No, I was awake by then.”

“Is there anyone who can say with certainty that you were in that office all last night?”

“No, but…”

“Is there anyone who can say with certainty that you didn’t leave the office after your sandwich was delivered at six-twenty, and go to Michelle Cassidy’s apartment, and open the several locks with your keys, and stab…”

“I didn’t…”

“… her to death? Is there anyone who saw you where you say you were? Or is this another alibi like the one you had for the night you stabbed her in that theater alleyway? Are you lying yet another time, Mr. Milton?”

“I am telling you the God’s honest truth. I did not kill Michelle.”

“He done it,” Ollie said. “Go for the jug, Nellie.”

She knew Ollie Weeks only casually, having seen him in the corridors of justice on one or another occasion, but he was already calling her Nellie, Also, he seemed not to have bathed in a while. But she agreed with him.

“He’s admitted to the assault,” she said. “That’s open and shut. And I think we’ve got enough cause to arrest him on the homicide, too.”

“I don’t think so,” Carella said.

They all turned to him.

They had asked O’Brien and Milton to wait in the squad-room outside while they deliberated. Lieutenant Byrnes was still seated in the swivel chair behind his desk. Ollie was overflowing a straight-backed chair near the windows. Nellie had moved across the room now, as far away from him as possible. Carella stood alongside Kling, near the bookcases opposite Byrnes’s desk.

“What bothers you?” Byrnes asked.

“Motive,” Carella said.

“She threatened to burn him,” Ollie said. “That’s motive enough.”

“I think he’s right,” Byrnes said.

“What does he gain by killing her?” Carella said.

“If he doesn’t kill her, he goes down for the assault.”

“We’ve got him on that, anyway.”

“He done her before he knew that,” Ollie said. “He was still figuring if he done her, he’d walk.”

“If I bring both charges on the same indictment,” Nellie said, thinking out loud, “O’Brien can take his misdemeanor plea and shove it.”

“Why not charge Milton with just the assault?” Carella said.

“Oh, I see,” Ollie said. “You get the assault collar and I get bupkes, is that it?”

“You can have both collars,” Carella said.

“By rights, both collars are ours,” Byrnes said.

“Let’s not debate credit here,” Nellie said. “If there’s no real evidence to support the homicide, then frankly the assault isn’t worth more than a mis. But I think Milton did kill her, so how about that?”

“Hooray for you, lady,” Ollie said.

“If we lock him up for Assault Two,” Carella said, “we can explain to the court that we’re still investigating the homicide…”

“That’ll make a strong case, all right,” Nellie said.

“It will if we find the evidence we need to back up a…”

“Come on, Steve, we’ve got circumstantial coming out of our ears.”

“I don’t think so. The blood on that knife was caked into the hinge. Really dry blood. The girl was killed…”

“So how long does it take for blood to dry?” Ollie said. “He done her last night, you think the blood’s still gonna be wet?“

“No, but…”

“The blood’s gonna be dry,” Ollie said. “Same as blood from two days ago, three days ago, dry is dry, there are no gradations of dry. What are we talking here, martinis?”

“Okay, why’d he keep the knife?”

“They do that all the time,” Ollie said, and waved the question away. “Nobody says these guys are rocket scientists.”

“A man’s looking at Murder Two, and he hangs on to the weapon?”

“I’d have thrown it down the nearest sewer,” Kling said.

“Then why didn’t he toss it after the assault?” Byrnes asked.

“Right,” Ollie said. “If he didn’t toss it after he stabbed her the first time, why would he toss it the next time around?”

“Because it would cost more to keep it,” Carella said.

“Only your pros think that way,” Ollie said.

“He was looking at fifteen on the assault, anyway,” Nellie said. “If he didn’t toss the knife then…“

“Fifteen years isn’t life.”

“It ain’t chopped liver, either. Besides, the man’s an agent,” Ollie said scornfully. “What does he know about how much time you can get for what? This isn’t a pro here, this is an amateur. ”

“Steve,” Nellie said, “I wish I could agree with you on this one…”

“Just give us a chance to run it down, that’s all I’m asking. If we tell the arraigning judge we’re investigating a linked homicide, he’ll set a juicy bail on the assault. That means Milton stays inside while we develop a good case. If there is one.”

“I’ve already got a good case,” Nellie said.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Nellie, if Milton didn’t kill her, the real murderer…”

“What makes you…?”

“… walks.”

“… think he didn’t kill her?”

“Gut instinct.”

The room went silent.

“What do you want?” Nellie asked.

“I told you. Lock him up on the assault, let us pursue the murder investigation. If we come up empty, you can always tack on the second charge.”

“Today’s what?” she asked no one.

Byrnes looked at his desk calendar.

“The eighth,” he said.

“Okay, our 180.80 Day is six days from arrest. That means on the fourteenth, I have to indict Milton on one or more felony charges or else release him on his own recognizance. Here’s what I’m willing to do. I’ll arraign him for both the assault and the murder…”

“Good,” Ollie said.

“… but I’ll ask my bureau chief to talk to the Chief of Trial Division…”

“What for?” Ollie askd.

“So he can go to the Chief of Detectives and explain the situation to him.”

“What situation?”

“That one of his best detectives has doubts and is still investigating the homicide.”

“I don’t have any goddamn doubts!” Ollie said.

“Steve, you’ve got till the morning of the fourteenth. Bring me something better by then, or I’ll indict Milton for the homicide.”

“Thanks,” Carella said.

“You meant him?“ Ollie said.