Sadie When She Died

“I would say we’ve got a nice lower-middle-class clientele bent on making contact with members of the opposite sex.”

“A pretty decent element, would you say?”

“Oh, yes,” Carella answered. “You go into some places, you know immediately that half the people surrounding you are thieves. I don’t smell that here. Small businessmen, junior executives, divorced ladies, bachelor girls—for example, there isn’t a hooker in the lot, which is unusual for a bar on the Stem.”

“Can you recognize a hooker by just looking at her?”

“Usually.”

“What would you say if I told you the blonde in the Pucci is a working prostitute?”

Carella looked at the woman again. “I don’t think I’d believe you.”

“Why not?”

“Well, to begin with, she’s a bit old for the young competition parading the streets these days. Secondly, she’s in deep conversation with a plump little girl who undoubtedly came down from Riverhead looking for a nice boy she can bed and eventually marry. And thirdly, she’s not selling anything. She’s waiting for one of those two or three older guys to make their move. Hookers don’t wait, Gerry. They make the approach, they do the selling. Business is business, and time is money. They can’t afford to sit around being coy.” Carella paused. “Is she a working prostitute?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Fletcher said. “Never even saw her before tonight. I was merely trying to indicate that appearances can sometimes be misleading. Drink up, there are a few more places I’d like to show you.”

He knew Fletcher well enough, he thought, to realize that the man was trying to tell him something. At lunch last Tuesday, Fletcher had transmitted a message and a challenge: I killed my wife, what can you do about it? Tonight, in a similar manner, he was attempting to indicate something else, but Carella could not fathom exactly what.

Fanny’s was only twenty blocks away from Paddy’s Bar & Grille, but as far removed from it as the moon. Whereas the first bar seemed to cater to a quiet crowd peacefully pursuing its romantic inclinations, Fanny’s was noisy and raucous, jammed to the rafters with men and women of all ages, wearing plastic hippie crap purchased in head shops up and down Jackson Avenue. If Paddy’s had registered a seven on the scale of desirability and respectability, Fanny’s rated a four. The language sounded like what Carella was used to hearing in the squadroom or in any of the cellblocks at Calcutta. There were half a dozen hookers lining the bar, suffering severely from the onslaught of half a hundred girls in skin-tight costumes wiggling their behinds and thrusting their breasts at anything warm and moving. The approaches were blatant and unashamed. There were more hands on asses than Carella could count, more meaningful glances and ardent sighs than seemed possible outside of a bedroom, more invitations than Truman Capote had sent out for his last masked ball. As Carella and Fletcher elbowed their way toward the bar, a brunette, wearing a short skirt and a see-through blouse without a bra, planted herself directly in Carella’s path and said, “What’s the password, stranger?”

“Scotch and soda,” Carella said.

“Wrong,” the girl answered, and moved closer to him.

“What is it then?” he asked.

“Kiss me,” she said.

“Some other time,” he answered.

“That isn’t a command,” she said, giggling, “it’s only the password.”

“Good,” he said.

“So if you want to get to the bar,” the girl said, “say the password.”

“Kiss me,” he said, and was moving past her when she threw her arms around his neck and delivered a wet, open-mouthed, tongue-writhing kiss that shook him to his socks. She held the kiss for what seemed like an hour and a half, and then, with her arms still around his neck, she moved her head back a fraction of an inch, touched her nose to his, and said, “I’ll see you later, stranger. I have to go to the Ladies.”

At the bar, Carella wondered when he had last kissed anyone but his wife, Teddy. As he ordered a drink, he felt a soft pressure against his arm, turned to his left, and found one of the hookers, a black girl in her twenties, leaning in against him and smiling.

“What took you so long to get here?” she said. “I’ve been waiting all night.”

“For what?” he said.

“For the good time I’m going to show you.”

“Wow, have you got the wrong number,” Carella said, and turned to Fletcher, who was already lifting his martini glass.

“Welcome to Fanny’s,” Fletcher said, and raised his glass in a toast, and then drank the contents in one swallow and signaled to the bartender for another. “You will find many of them on exhibit,” he said.

“Many what?”

“Many fannies. And other things as well.” The bartender brought a fresh martini with lightning speed and grace. Fletcher lifted the glass. “I hope you don’t mind if I drink myself into a stupor,” he said.

“Go right ahead,” Carella answered.

“Merely pour me into the car at the end of the night, and I’ll be eternally grateful.” Fletcher lifted the glass and drank. “I don’t usually consume this much alcohol,” he said, “but I’m very troubled about that boy . . .”

“What boy?” Carella said immediately.

“Listen, honey,” the black hooker said, “aren’t you going to buy a girl a drink?”

“Ralph Corwin,” Fletcher said. “I understand he’s having some difficulty with his lawyer, and . . .”

“Don’t be such a tight-ass,” the girl said. “I’m thirsty as hell here.”

Carella turned to look at her. Their eyes met and locked. The girl’s look said, What do you say? Do you want it or not? Carella’s look said, Honey, you’re asking for big trouble. Neither of them exchanged a word. The girl got up and moved four stools down the bar, to sit next to a middle-aged man wearing bell-bottomed suede pants and a tangerine-colored shirt with billowing sleeves.

“You were saying?” Carella said, turning again to Fletcher.

“I was saying I’d like to help Corwin somehow.”

“Help him?”

“Yes. Do you think Rollie Chabrier would consider it strange if I suggested a good defense lawyer for the boy?”

“I think he might consider it passing strange, yes.”

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

“Not at all. Why, I’d guess that ninety percent of all men whose wives have been murdered will then go out and recommend a good defense lawyer for the accused murderer. You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I’m not. Look, I know that what I’m about to say doesn’t go over very big with you . . .”

“Then don’t say it.”

“No, no, I want to say it.” Fletcher took another swallow of his drink. “I feel sorry for that boy. I feel . . .”

“Hello, stranger.” The brunette was back. She had taken the stool vacated by the hooker, and now she looped her arm familiarly through Carella’s and asked, “Did you miss me?”

“Desperately,” he said. “But I’m having a very important conversation with my friend here, and . . .”

“Never mind your friend,” the girl said. “I’m Alice Ann, who are you?”

“I’m Dick Nixon,” Carella said.

“Nice to meet you, Dick,” the girl answered. “Would you like to kiss me again?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have these terrible sores inside my mouth,” Carella said, “and I wouldn’t want you to catch them.”

Alice Ann looked at him and blinked. She reached for his drink then, apparently wishing to wash her possibly already contaminated mouth, realized it was his filthy drink, turned immediately to the man on her left, pushed his arm aside, grabbed his glass, and hastily swallowed a mouthful of disinfectant alcohol. The man said, “Hey!” and Alice Ann said, “Cool it, Buster,” and got off the stool, throwing Carella a look even more scorching than her kiss had been, and swiveling off toward a galaxy of young men glittering in a corner of the crowded room.

“You won’t understand this,” Fletcher said, “but I feel grateful to that boy. I’m glad he killed her, and I’d hate to see him punished for what I consider an act of mercy.”

“Take my advice,” Carella said. “Don’t suggest this to Rollie. I don’t think he’d understand.”

“Do you understand?” Fletcher asked.

“Not entirely,” Carella said.

Fletcher finished his drink. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said. “Unless you see something you want.”

“I already have everything I want,” Carella answered, and wondered if he should tell Teddy about the brunette in the peekaboo blouse.

The Purple Chairs was a bar farther downtown, apparently misnamed, since everything in the place was purple except the chairs. Ceiling, walls, bar, tables, curtains, napkins, mirrors, lights, all were purple. The chairs were white.

The misnomer was intentional.

The Purple Chairs was a Lesbian bar, and the subtle question being asked was: Is everybody out of step but Johnny? The chairs were white. Pure. Pristine. Innocent. Virginal. Then why insist on calling them purple? Where did perversity lie, in the actuality or in the labeling?

“Why here?” Carella asked immediately.

“Why not?” Fletcher answered. “I’m showing you some of the city’s more frequented spots.”

Carella strenuously doubted that this was one of the city’s more frequented spots. It was now a little past eleven, and the place was only sparsely populated, entirely by women—women talking, women smiling, women dancing to the jukebox, women touching, women kissing. As Carella and Fletcher moved toward the bar, tended by a bull dagger with shirt sleeves rolled up over her powerful forearms, a rush of concerted hostility focused upon them like the beam of a death ray. The bartender verbalized it.

“Sightseeing?” she asked.

“Just browsing,” Fletcher answered.

“Try the public library.”

“It’s closed.”

“Maybe you’re not getting my message.”

“What’s your message?”

“Is anybody bothering you?” the bartender asked.

“No.”

“Then stop bothering us. We don’t need you here, and we don’t want you here. You like to see freaks, go to the circus.” The bartender turned away, moving swiftly to a woman at the end of the bar.

“I think we’ve been invited to leave,” Carella said.

“We certainly haven’t been invited to stay,” Fletcher said. “Did you get a good look?”

“I’ve been inside dyke bars before.”

“Really? My first time was in September. Just goes to show,” he said, and moved unsteadily toward the purple entrance door.

The cold December air worked furiously on the martinis Fletcher had consumed, so that by the time they got to a bar named Quigley’s Rest, just off Skid Row, he was stumbling along drunkenly and clutching Carella’s arm for support. Carella suggested that perhaps it was time to be heading home, but Fletcher said he wanted Carella to see them all, see them all, and then led him into the kind of joint Carella had mentioned earlier, where he knew instantly that he was stepping into a hangout frequented by denizens, and was instantly grateful for the .38 holstered at his hip. The floor of Quigley’s Rest was covered with sawdust, the lights were dim, the place at twenty minutes to midnight was crowded with people who had undoubtedly awoken at 10 P . M . and who would go till ten the next morning. There was very little about their external appearances to distinguish them from the customers in the first bar Fletcher and Carella had visited. They were similarly dressed, they spoke in the same carefully modulated voices, they were neither as blatant as the crowd in Fanny’s nor as subdued as the crowd in The Purple Chairs. But if a speeding shark in cloudy water can still be distinguished from a similarly speeding dolphin, so were the customers in Quigley’s immediately identified as dangerous and deadly. Carella was not sure that Fletcher sensed this as strongly as he, himself, did. He knew only that he did not wish to stay here long, especially with Fletcher as drunk as he was.

The trouble started almost at once.

Fletcher shoved his way into position at the bar, and a thin-faced young man wearing a dark blue suit and a flowered tie more appropriate to April than December turned toward him sharply and said, “Watch it.” He barely whispered the words, but they hung on the air with deadly menace, and before Fletcher could react or reply, the young man shoved the flat of his palm against Fletcher’s upper arm, with such force that he knocked him to the floor. Fletcher blinked up at him, and started to get drunkenly to his feet. The young man suddenly kicked him in the chest, a flatfooted kick that was less powerful than the shove had been but had the same effect. Fletcher fell back to the floor again, and this time his head crashed heavily against the sawdust. The young man swung his body in preparation for another kick, this time aiming it at Fletcher’s head.

“That’s it,” Carella said.

The young man hesitated. Still poised on the ball of one foot, the other slightly back and cocked for release, he looked at Carella and said, “What’s it?” He was smiling. He seemed to welcome the opportunity of taking on another victim. He turned fully toward Carella now, balancing his weight evenly on both feet, fists bunched. “Did you say something?” he asked, still smiling.

“Pack your bag, sonny,” Carella said, and bent down to help Fletcher to his feet. He was prepared for what happened next, and was not surprised by it. The only one surprised was the young man, who threw his right fist at the crouching Carella and suddenly found himself flying over Carella’s head to land flat on his back in the sawdust. He did next what he had done instinctively since the time he was twelve years old. He reached for a knife in the side pocket of his trousers. Carella did not wait for the knife to clear his pocket. Carella kicked him cleanly and swiftly in the balls. Then he turned to the bar, where another young man seemed ready to spring into action, and very quietly said, “I’m a police officer. Let’s cool it, huh?”

The second young man cooled it very quickly. The place was very silent now. With his back to the bar, and hoping the bartender would not hit him on the head with a sap or a bottle or both, Carella reached under Fletcher’s arms and helped him up.

“You okay?” he said.

“Yes, fine,” Fletcher said.

“Come on.”

He walked Fletcher to the door, moving as swiftly as possible. He fully recognized that his shield afforded little enough protection in a place like this, and all he wanted to do was get the hell out fast. On the street, as they stumbled toward the automobile, he prayed only that they would not be cold-cocked before they got to it.

A half-dozen men came out of the bar just as they climbed into the automobile. “Lock that door!” Carella snapped, and then turned the ignition key, and stepped on the gas, and the car lurched away from the curb in a squeal of burning rubber. He did not ease up on the accelerator until they were a mile from Quigley’s, by which time he was certain they were not being followed.

“That was very nice,” Fletcher said.

“Yes, very nice indeed,” Carella said.

“I admire that. I admire a man who can do that,” Fletcher said.

“Why in hell did you pick that sweet dive?” Carella asked.

“I wanted you to see them all,” Fletcher said, and then eased his head back against the seat cushion, and fell promptly asleep.

11

E arly Monday morning, on Kling’s day off, he called Cindy Forrest. It was only seven-thirty, but he knew her sleeping and waking habits as well as he knew his own, and since the phone was on the kitchen wall near the refrigerator, and since she would at that moment be preparing breakfast, he was not surprised when she answered it on the second ring.

“Hello?” she said. She sounded rushed, a trifle breathless. She always allowed herself a scant half hour to get out of the apartment each morning, rushing from bedroom to kitchen to bathroom to bedroom again, finally running for the elevator, looking miraculously well-groomed and sleek and rested and ready to do battle with the world. He visualized her standing now at the kitchen phone, only partially clothed, and felt a faint stirring of desire.

“Hi. Cindy,” he said, “it’s me.”

“Oh, hello, Bert,” she said. “Can you hold just a second? The coffee’s about to boil over.” He waited. In the promised second, she was back on the line. “Okay,” she said. “I tried to reach you the other night.”

“Yes, I know. I’m returning your call.”

“Right, right,” she said. There was a long silence. “I’m trying to remember why I called you. Oh, yes. I found a shirt of yours in the dresser, and I wanted to know what I should do with it. So I called you at home, and there was no answer, and then I figured you probably had night duty, and I tried the squadroom, but Steve said you weren’t on. So I decided to wrap it up and mail it. I’ve already got it all addressed and everything.”

There was another silence.

“So I guess I’ll drop it off at the post office on my way to work this morning,” Cindy said.

“Okay,” Kling said.

“If that’s what you want me to do,” Cindy said.

“Well, what would you like to do?”

“It’s all wrapped and everything, so I guess that’s what I’ll do.”

“Be a lot of trouble to unwrap it, I guess,” Kling said.

“Why would I want to unwrap it?”

“I don’t know. Why did you call me Saturday night?”

“To ask what you wanted me to do with the shirt.”

“What choices did you have in mind?”

“When? Saturday night?”

“Yes,” Kling said. “When you called.”

“Well, there were several possibilities, I guess. You could have stopped here to pick up the shirt, or I could have dropped it off at your place or the squadroom, or we could have had a drink together or something, at which time . . .”

“I didn’t know that was permissible.”

“Which?”

“Having a drink together. Or any of those things, in fact.”

“Well, it’s all academic now, isn’t it? You weren’t home when I called, and you weren’t working, either, so I wrapped up the goddamn shirt, and I’ll mail it to you this morning.”

“What are you sore about?”

“Who’s sore?” Cindy said.

“You sound sore.”

“I have to get out of here in twenty minutes and I still haven’t had my coffee.”

“Wouldn’t want to be late for the hospital,” Kling said. “Might upset your friend Dr. Freud.”

“Ha-ha,” Cindy said mirthlessly.

“How is he, by the way?”

“He’s fine, by the way.”

“Good.”

“Bert?”

“Yes, Cindy?”

“Never mind, nothing.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing. I’ll put the shirt in the mail. I washed it and ironed it, I hope it doesn’t get messed up.”

“I hope not.”

“Good-bye, Bert,” she said, and hung up.

Kling put the receiver back onto its cradle, sighed, and went into the kitchen. He ate a breakfast of grapefruit juice, coffee, and two slices of toast, and then went back into the bedroom and dialed Nora Simonov’s number. When he asked her if she would like to have lunch with him, she politely refused, saying she had an appointment with an art director. Fearful of being turned down for dinner as well, he hedged his bet by asking if she’d like to meet him for a drink at about five, five-thirty. She surprised him by saying she would love it, and they agreed to meet at The Oasis, a quiet cocktail lounge in one of the city’s oldest hotels, near the western end of Grover Park. Kling went into the bathroom to brush his teeth.

434 North Sixteenth Street was a brownstone within the precinct territory, between Ainsley and Culver avenues. Meyer and Carella found a listing for an L. Kantor in one of the mailboxes downstairs, tried the inner lobby door, found it unlocked, and started up to the fourth floor without ringing the downstairs bell. They had tried calling the number listed in Sarah’s address book, but the telephone company had reported it temporarily out of service. Whether this was true or not was a serious question for debate.

“The Telephone Blues” was a dirge still being sung by most residents of the city, and it was becoming increasingly more difficult these days to know if a phone was busy, out of order, disconnected, temporarily out of service, or stolen in the night by an international band of telephone thieves. The direct-dialing system had been a brilliant innovation, except that after directly dialing the digits necessary to place a call, the caller was more often than not greeted with: (a) silence; (b) a recording; (c) a busy signal, or (d) a series of strange beeps and boops. After trying to direct-dial the same number three or four times, the caller was inevitably reduced to dealing with one or more operators (all of whom sounded as if they were in a trainee program for people with ratings of less than 48 on the Standford-Binet scale of intelligence) and sometimes actually got to talk to the party he was calling. On too many occasions, Carella visualized someone in desperate trouble trying to reach a doctor, a policeman, or a fireman. The police had a number to call for emergency assistance—but what the hell good was the number if you could never get the phone to work? Such were Carella’s thoughts as he plodded up the four flights to the apartment of Lou Kantor, the third man listed in Sarah’s address book.

Meyer knocked on the door. Both men waited. He knocked again.

“Yes?” a woman’s voice said. “Who is it?”

“Police officers,” Meyer answered.

There was a short silence. Then the woman said, “Just a moment, please.”

“Think he’s home?” Meyer whispered.

Carella shrugged. They heard footsteps approaching the door. Through the closed door, the woman said, “What do you want?”

“We’re looking for Lou Kantor,” Meyer said.

“Why?”

“Routine investigation,” Meyer said.

The door opened a crack, held by a night-chain. “Let me see your badge,” the woman said. Whatever else they had learned, the citizens of this good city knew that you always asked a cop to show his badge because otherwise he might turn out to be a robber or a rapist or a murderer, and then where were you? Meyer held up his shield. The woman studied it through the narrow opening, and then closed the door again, slipped off the night-chain, and opened the door wide.

“Come in,” she said.

They went into the apartment. The woman closed and locked the door behind them. They were standing in a small, tidy kitchen. Through a doorless doorframe, they could see into the next room, obviously the living room, with two easy chairs, a sofa, a floor lamp, and a television set. The woman was perhaps thirty-five years old, five feet eight inches tall, with a solid frame, and a square face fringed with short dark hair. She was wearing a robe over pajamas, and she was barefoot. Her eyes were blue and suspicious. She looked from one cop to the other, waiting.

“Is he here?” Meyer asked.

“Is who here?”

“Mr. Kantor.”

The woman looked at him, puzzled. Understanding suddenly flashed in her blue eyes. A thin smile formed on her mouth. “I’m Lou Kantor,” she said. “Louise Kantor. What can I do for you?”

“Oh,” Meyer said, and studied her.

“What can I do for you?” Lou repeated. The smile had vanished from her mouth; she was frowning again.

Carella took the photostat from his notebook, and handed it to her. “Do you know this woman?” he asked.

“Yes,” Lou said.

“Do you know her name?”

“Yes,” Lou said wearily. “That’s Sadie Collins. What about her?”

Carella decided to play it straight. “She’s been murdered,” he said.

“Mmm,” Lou said, and handed the stat back to him. “I thought so.”

“What made you think so?”

“I saw her picture in the newspaper last week. Or at least a picture of somebody who looked a hell of a lot like her. The name was different, and I told myself, No, it isn’t her, but Jesus, there was her picture staring up at me, it had to be her.” Lou shrugged and then walked to the stove. “You want some coffee?” she asked. “I’ll get some going, if you like.”

“Thank you, no,” Carella said. “How well did you know her, Miss Kantor?”

Lou shrugged again. “I only knew her a short while. I met her in, I guess it was September. Saw her three or four times after that.”

“Where’d you meet her?” Carella asked.

“In a bar called The Purple Chairs,” Lou answered. “That’s right,” she added quickly, “that’s what I am.”

“Nobody asked,” Carella said.

“Your eyes asked.”

“What about Sadie Collins?”

“What about her? Spell it out, officer, I’m not going to help you.”

“Why not?”

“Mainly because I don’t like being hassled.”

“Nobody’s hassling you, Miss Kantor. You practice your religion and I’ll practice mine. We’re here to talk about a dead woman.”

“Then talk about her, spit it out. What do you want to know? Was she straight? Everybody’s straight until they’re not straight anymore, isn’t that right? She was willing to learn. I taught her.”

“Did you know she was married?”

“I knew. So what?”

“She told you?”

“She told me. Broke down in tears one night, lay in my arms all night crying. I knew she was married.”

“What’d she say about her husband?”

“Nothing that surprised me.”

“What, exactly?”

“She said he had another woman. Said he ran off to see her every weekend, told little Sadie he had out-of-town business. Every goddamn weekend, can you imagine that?”

“How long had it been going on?”

“Who knows? She found out about it just before Christmas last year.”

“How often did you say you saw her?”

“Three or four times. She used to come here on weekends, when he was away. Sauce for the goose.”

“What do you make of this?” Carella said, and handed her Sarah’s address book, opened to the MEMORANDA page.

“I don’t know any of these people,” Lou said.

“The initials under your name,” Carella said.

“Mmm. What about them?”

“TPC and then TG. Got any ideas?”

“Well, the TPC is obvious, isn’t it?”

“Obvious?” Carella said.

“Sure. I met her at The Purple Chairs,” Lou said. “What else could it mean?”

Carella suddenly felt very stupid. “Of course,” he said, “what else could it mean?”

“How about those other initials?” Meyer said.

“Haven’t the faintest,” Lou answered, and handed back the book. “Are you finished with me?”

“Yes, thank you very much,” Carella said.

“I miss her,” Lou said suddenly. “She was a wild one.”

Cracking a code is like learning to roller-skate; once you know how to do it, it’s easy. With a little help from Gerald Fletcher, who had provided a guided tour the night before, and with a lot of help from Lou Kantor, who had generously provided the key, Carella was able to study the list in Sarah’s book and crack the code wide open. Well, almost wide open.

Last night, Fletcher had taken him, in geographical rather than numerical order, to Paddy’s Bar & Grille (PB&G), Fanny’s (F), The Purple Chairs (TPC), and Quigley’s Rest (QR). For some reason, perhaps to avoid duplication, Sarah Fletcher had felt it necessary to list in code the places in which she had met her various bedmates. It seemed obvious to Carella, now that he knew how to roller-skate, that the TS beneath Michael Thornton’s telephone number was meant to indicate nothing more than The Saloon, where Thornton had admitted first meeting her. Gerald Fletcher had not taken Carella there last night, but perhaps the place had been on his itinerary, with the scheduled stop preempted by his own drunkenness and the fight in Quigley’s Rest.

But what the hell did TG mean?

By Carella’s own modest estimate, he had been in more damn bars in the past twenty-four hours than he had in the past twenty-four years. But he decided nonetheless to hit The Saloon that night. You never learned anything if you didn’t ask, and there were imponderables even in roller-skating.

Three wandering violinists moved from table to table playing a medley of “Ebb Tide,” “Strangers in the Night,” and “Where or When,” none of which seemed to move Nora as much as “Something” had. Fake potted palms dangled limpid plastic fronds while a small pool, honoring the name of the place, gushed before a painted backdrop of desert sand and sky.

“I’m glad you called,” Nora said. “I hate to go straight home after the end of a busy day. The apartment always feels so empty. And the meeting today was a disaster. The art director is a man who started in the stockroom forty years ago, after a correspondence course from one of those schools that advertise on matchbook covers. So he had the gall to tell me what was wrong with the girl’s hand.” She looked up from her drink and said, in explanation, “It was this drawing of a girl, with her hand sort of brushing a strand of hair away from her cheek.”

“I see,” Kling said.

“Do you have to put up with that kind of crap?” she asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Anyway, I’m glad you called. There’s nothing like a drink after a session with a moron.”

“How about the company?”

“What?”

“I’m glad you appreciate the drink . . .”

“Oh, stop it,” Nora said, “you know I like the company.”

“Since when?”

“Since always. Now just cut it out.”

“May I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Why are you here with me, instead of your boyfriend?”

“Well,” Nora said, and turned away preparatory to lying, “as I told you . . . oh, look, the violinists are coming over. Think of a request, quick.”

“Ask them to play ‘Something,’” Kling said, and Nora turned back toward him immediately, her eyes flashing.

“That isn’t funny, Bert,” she said.

“Tell me about your boyfriend.”

“There’s nothing to tell you. He’s a doctor and he spends a lot of time in his office and at the hospital. As a result, he’s not always free when I’d like him to be, and, therefore, I felt it perfectly all right to have a drink with you. In fact, if you wouldn’t be so smart all the time, saying I should request ‘Something’ when you know the song has particular meaning for me, you might ask me to have dinner with you, and I might possibly say ‘yes.’”

“Would you like to have dinner with me?” Kling asked, astonished.

“Yes,” Nora said.

“There isn’t a boyfriend at all, is there?” he said.

“Don’t make that mistake, Bert. There is one, and I love him. And I’m going to marry him as soon as . . .” She cut herself short, and turned away again.

“As soon as what?” Kling asked.

“Here are the violinists,” Nora said.

One storm had blown out to sea, but another was approaching, and this time it looked as though the forecasters would be right. The first flakes had not yet begun to fall as Carella walked up the street toward The Saloon, but snow was in the air, you could smell it, you could sense it, the goddamn city would be a frozen tundra by morning. Carella did not particularly like snow. His one brief romance with it had been, oh, several years ago, when some punk arsonists had set fire to him (talk about Dick Tracy!) and he had put out the flames by rolling in a bank of the stuff. But how long can any hot love affair last? Not very. Carella’s disaffection had begun again the very next week, when it again snowed, and he again slipped and slogged and sloshed along with ten million other winter-weary citizens of the city. He looked up at the sky now, pulled a sour face, and went inside.

The Saloon was just that: a saloon.

A cigarette-scarred bar behind which ran a mottled, flaking mirror. Wooden booths with patched leatherette seat cushions. Bowls of pretzels and potato chips. Jukebox bubbling and gurgling, rock music babbling and bursting, the smell of steamy bodies and steamy garments, the incessant rise and fall of too many voices talking too loud. He hung his coat on the sagging rack near the cigarette machine, found himself a relatively uncrowded spot at the far end of the bar, and ordered a beer. Because of the frantic activity behind and in front of the bar, he knew it would be quite some while before he could catch the bartender’s ear. As it turned out, he did not actually get to talk to him until eleven-thirty, at which time the business of drinking yielded to the more serious business of trying to make out.

“They come in here,” the bartender said, “at all hours of the night, each and every one of them looking for the same thing. Relentless. You know what that word means? Relentless? That’s what the action is here.”

“Yeah, it is kind of frantic,” Carella said.

“Frantic? That’s the word, all right. Frantic. Men and women both. Mostly men. The women come for the same thing, you understand? But it takes a lot more fortitude for a woman to go in a bar alone, even if it’s this kind of place where the only reason anybody comes at all is to meet people, you understand? Fortitude. You know what that word means? Fortitude?”

“Yeah,” Carella said, and nodded.

“Take yourself,” the bartender said. “You’re here to meet a girl, am I right?”

“I’m here mostly to have a few beers and relax,” Carella said.

“Relax? With that music? You could just as easy relax in World War II, on the battlefield. Were you in World War II?”

“Yes, I was,” Carella said.

“That was some war,” the bartender said. “The wars they got nowadays are bullshit wars. But World War II?” He grinned fondly and appreciatively. “That was a glorious war! You know what that word means? Glorious?”

“Yeah,” Carella said.

“Excuse me, I got a customer down the other end,” the bartender said, and walked off. Carella sipped at his beer. Through the plate-glass window facing the side street, he could see the first snowflakes beginning to fall. Great, he thought, and looked at his watch.

The bartender mixed and served the drink, and then came back. “What’d you do in the war?” he asked.

“Goof off, mostly,” Carella said, and smiled.

“No, seriously. Be serious.”

“I was in the Infantry,” Carella said.

“Who wasn’t? Did you get overseas?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Italy.”

“See any action?”

“A little,” Carella said. “Listen . . . getting back to the idea of meeting somebody . . .”

“In here, it always gets back to that.”

“There was someone I was hoping to see.”

“Who?” the bartender said.

“A girl named Sadie Collins.”

“Yeah,” the bartender said, and nodded.

“Do you know her?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you seen her around lately?”

“No. She used to come in a lot, but I ain’t seen her in months. What do you want to fool around with her for?”

“Why? What’s the matter with her?”

“You want to know something?” the bartender said. “I thought she was a hooker at first. I almost had her thrown out. The boss don’t like hookers hanging around here.”

“What made you think she was a hooker?”

“Aggressive. You know what that word means? Aggressive? She used to come dressed down to here and up to here, which is pretty far out, even compared to some of the things they’re wearing today. She was ready for action, you understand? She was selling everything she had.”

“Well, most women try to . . .”

“No, no, this wasn’t like most women, don’t give me that most women crap. She’d come in here, pick out a guy she wanted, and go after him like the world was gonna end at midnight. All business, just like a hooker, except she wasn’t charging. Knew just what she wanted, and went straight for it, bam. And I could always tell exactly who she was gonna end up with, even before she knew it herself.”

“How could you tell?”

“Always the same type.”

“What type?”

“Big guys, first of all. You wouldn’t stand a chance with her, you’re lucky she ain’t here. Not that you ain’t big, don’t misunderstand me. But Sadie liked them gigantic. You know what that word means? Gigantic? That was Sadie’s type. Gigantic and mean. All I had to do was look around the room and pick out the biggest, meanest son of a bitch in the place, and that’s who Sadie would end up with. You want to know something?”

“What?”

“I’m glad she don’t come in here anymore. She used to make me nervous. There was something about her . . . don’t know.” The bartender shook his head. “Like she was compulsive. You know what that word means? Compulsive?”

He had left Nora at the door to her apartment, where she had given him her customary handshake and her now-expected “Thank you, I had a very nice time,” and rode down in the elevator now, wondering what his next move should be. He did not believe her doctor-boyfriend existed (he seemed to be having a lot of trouble lately with girls and their goddamn doctor-boyfriends) but at the same time he accepted the fact that there was a man in her life, a flesh-and-blood person whose identity, for some bewildering reason, Nora chose not to reveal. Kling did not appreciate anonymous competition. He wondered if a blitz might not be in order, telephone call when he got back to his apartment, another call in the morning, a dozen roses, a telegram, another dozen calls, another dozen roses, the whole stupid adolescent barrage, all of it designed to convince a girl that somebody out there was madly in love with her.

He wondered if he was madly in love with her.

He decided he was not.

Then why was he expending all this energy? He recalled reading someplace that when a man and a woman got divorced, it was usually the man who remarried first. He supposed that what he had shared with Cindy was a marriage, of sorts, and the sudden termination of it . . . well, it was silly to think of it in terms of a marriage. But he supposed the end of it (and it certainly seemed to have ended) could be considered a divorce, of sorts. In which case, his frantic pursuit of Nora was merely a part of the reaction syndrome, and . . .

Damn it, he thought. Hang around with a psychologist long enough and you begin to sound like one.

He stepped out of the elevator, walked swiftly through the lobby, and came out of the building into a blinding snowstorm. It had not been this bad ten minutes ago, when the taxi had dropped them off. The snow was thick and fast now, the wind blowing it in angry swirls that lashed his face and flicked away, successively, incessantly. He ducked his head, and began walking up toward the lighted avenue at the end of the block, his hands in his pockets. He was on the verge of deciding that he would not try to see Nora Simonov again, would not even call her again, when three men stepped out of a doorway, directly into his path.

He looked up too late.

A fist came out of the flying snow, smashing him full in the face. He staggered back, his hands still in his pockets. Two of the men seized him from behind, grabbing both his arms, his hands still trapped in his pockets. The one standing in front of him smashed a fist into his face again. His head snapped back. He felt blood gushing from his nose. “Keep away from Nora,” the man whispered, and then began pounding his fists into Kling’s abdomen and chest, blow after blow while Kling fought to free his arms and his hands, his strength ebbing, his struggle weakening, slumping as the men behind him held his arms, and the man in front battered relentlessly with short hard jabs until Kling wanted to scream aloud, and then wanted only to die, and then felt the welcome oblivion of unconsciousness and did not know when they released him at last and allowed him to fall face forward into the white snow, bleeding.

12

“A ll right,” Byrnes said, “I’ve got a cop in the hospital, now what the hell happened?”

Tuesday morning sunshine assaulted the lieutenant’s corner window. The storm had ended, and the snowplows had come through, and mile-high snowbanks lined the streets, piled against the curb. It was four days before Christmas, and the temperature was below freezing, and unless the city’s soot triumphed, the twenty-fifth would still be white.

Arthur Brown was black. Six feet four inches tall, weighing 220 pounds, with the huge frame and powerful muscles of a heavyweight fighter, he stood before the lieutenant’s desk, his eyes squinted against the sunshine.

“I thought you were tailing Fletcher,” Byrnes said.

“I was,” Brown answered.

“All right. Fletcher and this girl live in the same goddamn building. Kling was jumped leaving the building. If you were on Fletcher . . .”

“I was on him from five o’clock yesterday afternoon, when he left his office downtown.” Brown reached into his inside jacket pocket. “Here’s the timetable,” he said. “I didn’t get back to Silvermine Oval till after midnight. By that time, they’d already taken Bert to the hospital.”

“Let me see it,” Byrnes said, and took the typewritten sheet from Brown’s hand, and silently studied it:

SURVEILLANCE GERALD FLETCHER Monday, December 20

4:55 P.M.–Relieved Detective Kapek outside office bldg 4400 Butler. Suspect emerged 5:10 P.M., went to his car parked in local garage, and drove to home at 721 Silvermine Oval, entered bldg at 5:27 P. M.

7:26 P.M.–Suspect emerged from building, started to walk south, came back, talked to doorman, and waited for his car. Drove to 812 North Crane, parked. Suspect entered apartment building there at 8:04 P.M.

8:46 P.M.–Suspect emerged from 812 North Crane in company of redheaded woman wearing fur coat (black) and green dress, green shoes, approx height and weight five-six, 120, approx age thirty. Drove to Rudolph’s Restaurant, 127 Harrow. Surveillant (black) tried to get table, was told he needed reservations, went outside to wait in sedan. 9:05 P.M.

Byrnes looked up. “What’s this crap about needing a reservation? Was the place crowded?”

“No, but . . .”

“Anything we can nail them on, Artie?”

“Just try to prove anything,” Brown said.

“Stupid pricks,” Byrnes said, and went back to the timetable.

10:20 P.M.–Suspect and redheaded woman came out of Rudolph’s, drove back to 812 Crane, arrived 10:35 P.M., went into building. No doorman, surveillant entered unobserved, elevator indicator stopped at eleventh floor. Check of lobby mailboxes showed eight apartments on eleventh floor (names of occupants not marked as to color of hair).

Byrnes looked up again, sharply this time. Brown grinned. Byrnes went back to the report, sighing.

11:40 P.M.–Suspect came out of building, walked north to Glade, where he had parked car, and drove directly home, arriving there ten minutes past midnight. 721 Silvermine scene of great activity, two RMP cars in street, patrolman questioning doorman. Suspect said few words to doorman, then went inside. Detective Bob O’Brien already on scene and waiting to relieve, reported Kling had been assaulted half hour ago and taken to Culver Avenue Hospital. Relieved by O’Brien at 12:15 A.M.

“When did O’Brien get there?” Byrnes asked.

“I radioed in when I was leaving the woman’s building, told O’Brien the suspect was probably heading home, and asked him to relieve me there. He said he arrived a little after midnight. The ambulance had already come and gone.”

“How’s Bert?” Byrnes asked.

“I checked a few minutes ago. He’s conscious, but they’re holding him for observation.”

“He say anything?”

“Three guys jumped him,” Brown said.

“Sons of bitches,” Byrnes said.

Carella had not yet spoken to either Sal Decotto or Richard Fenner, the two remaining people listed in Sarah’s book, but he saw no reason to pursue that trail any further. He had been taken to the bars where Sarah (or rather Sadie) had picked them up, and whereas he was not the type of person who ordinarily judged a book by its cover, he had a fair idea of what the men themselves would be like. Big and mean, according to the bartender at The Saloon.

The hardest thing Carella had ever had to learn in his entire life was that there actually were mean people in the world. As a young man, he had always believed that people behaved badly only because they’d experienced unhappy childhoods or unfortunate love affairs or deaths in the family or any one of a hundred assorted traumas. He changed his mind about that when he began working for the Police Department. He learned then that there were good people doing bad things, and there were also mean rotten bastards doing bad things. The good ones ended in jail just as easily as the mean ones, but the mean ones were the ones to beware. Why Sarah Fletcher had sought out big, mean men (and apparently one mean woman as well) was anybody’s guess. If the place-listings in her book could be considered chronological, she’d gone from bad to worse in her search for partners, throwing in a solitary dyke for good measure (or was Sal Decotto a woman, too?), and ending up at Quigley’s Rest, which was no afternoon tea party.

But why? To give it back to her husband in spades? If he was playing around with someone each and every weekend, maybe Sarah decided to beat him at his own game, become not only Sadie, but a Sadie who was, in the words of her various admirers, “a crazy bitch,” “a stupid twat,” and “a wild one.” It seemed entirely possible that the only thing Carella would learn from Richard Fenner or Sal Decotto was that they shared identical opinions of the woman they had similarly used and abused. And affirmation of a conclusion leading nowhere was a waste of time. Carella tossed Sarah’s little black book into the manila folder bearing the various reports on the case, and turned his attention to the information Artie Brown had brought in last night.

Cherchez la femme was a handy little dictum perhaps used more often by the Sûreté than by the 87th. But without trying to cherche any femme, Brown had inadvertently come across one anyway, a thirty-year-old redhead who lived on the eleventh floor at 812 North Crane and with whom Gerald Fletcher had spent almost four hours the night before. It would have been a simple matter to hit the redhead’s building and find out exactly who she was, but Carella decided against such a course of action. A chat with the superintendent, however quiet, a questioning of neighbors, however discreet, might get back to the woman herself, and serve to alert Fletcher. Fletcher was the suspect. Carella sometimes had to remind himself of that fact. Sarah had been playing around with an odd assortment of men and women, five according to her own record (and God knew how many more she had not listed, and God knew what the “TG” after four of the names meant); her blatant infidelity provided Fletcher with a strong motive, despite his own weekend sorties into realms as yet uncharted. So why take Carella to his wife’s unhappy haunts, why show Carella that he had good and sufficient reason to rip that knife across her belly? And why the hell offer to get a good defense attorney for the boy who had already been indicted for the slaying and who, unless somebody came up with something concrete damn soon, might very well be convicted of the crime?

Sometimes Carella wondered who was doing what to whom.

At five o’clock that evening, he relieved Detective Hal Willis outside Fletcher’s office building downtown, and then followed Fletcher to a department store in midtown Isola. Carella did not normally go in for cops-and-robbers disguises, but Fletcher knew exactly what he looked like and so he was wearing a false mustache stuck to his upper lip with spirit gum, a wig with longer hair than his own and of a different color (a dirty blond whereas his own was brown), and a pair of sunglasses. The disguise, he was certain, would not have fooled Fletcher at close range. But he did not intend to get that close, and he felt pretty secure he would not be made. He was, in fact, more nervous about losing Fletcher than about being spotted by him.

The store was thronged with late shoppers. This was Tuesday, December 21, four days to the big one, only three more days of shopping once the stores closed tonight at nine. Hot desperation flowed beneath the cool white plastic icicles that hung from the ceiling, panic in wonderland, the American anxiety syndrome never more evident than at Christmas, when the entire nation became a ruthless jackpot—Two Hundred Million Neediest gifting and getting, with a gigantic hangover waiting just around the new year’s corner. Gerald Fletcher shoved through the crowd of holiday shoppers like a quarterback moving the ball downfield without benefit of blockers. Carella, like a reticent tackler, followed some twenty feet behind.

The elevator would be a danger spot. Carella saw the elevator bank at the far end of the store, and knew that Fletcher was heading directly for it, and weighed the chances of being spotted in a crowded car against the chances of losing Fletcher if he did not follow immediately on his heels. He did not know how many thousands of people were in the store at that moment; he did know that if he allowed Fletcher to get into an elevator without him, the surveillance was blown. The elevator would stop at every floor, the way most department-store elevators did, and Fletcher could get out at any one of them, then try to find him again.

An elevator arrived. Its door opened, and Fletcher waited while the passengers disembarked and then stepped into the car together with half a dozen shoppers. Carella ungentlemanly shoved his way past a woman in a leopard coat and got into the car with his back to Fletcher, who was standing against the rear wall. The car, as Carella had surmised, stopped at every floor. He studiously kept his back to the rear of the car, moving aside whenever anyone wanted to get out. On the fifth floor, he heard Fletcher call, “Getting out, please,” and then felt him coming toward the front of the car, and saw him stepping out, and waited for the count of three before he, himself, moved forward, much to the annoyance of the elevator operator, who was starting to close the door.

Fletcher had walked off to the left. Carella spotted him moving swiftly up one of the aisles, looking about at the signs identifying each of the various departments, and stopping at one marked INTIMATE APPAREL . Carella walked into the next aisle over, pausing to look at women’s robes and kimonos, keeping one eye on Fletcher, who was in conversation with the lingerie salesgirl. The girl nodded, smiled, and showed him what appeared to be either a slip or a short nightgown, holding the garment up against her ample bosom to model it for Fletcher, who nodded, and said something else to her. The girl disappeared under the counter, to reappear several moments later, her hands overflowing with gossamer undergarments, which she spread on the counter before Fletcher, awaiting his further choice.

“May I help you, sir?” a voice said, and Carella turned to find a stocky woman at his elbow, gray hair, black-rimmed spectacles, wearing army shoes and a black dress with a small white collar. She looked exactly like a prison matron, right down to the suspicious smile that silently accused him of being a junkie shoplifter or worse.

“Thank you, no,” Carella said. “I’m just looking.”

Fletcher was making his selections, pointing now to this garment, now to another. The salesgirl wrote up the order, and Fletcher reached into his wallet to give her either cash or a credit card, it was difficult to tell from this distance. He chatted with the girl a moment longer, and then walked off toward the elevator bank.

“Are you sure I can’t assist you?” the prison matron said, and Carella immediately answered, “I’m positive,” and moved swiftly toward the lingerie counter. Fletcher had left the counter without a package in his arms, which meant he was sending his purchases. You did not send dainty underthings to a prize fighter, and Carella wanted very much to know exactly which woman was to be the recipient of the “intimate apparel.” The salesgirl was already gathering up Fletcher’s selections—a black half-slip, a wildly patterned Pucci chemise, a peach-colored baby-doll nightgown with matching bikini panties, and four other pairs of panties, blue, black, white, and beige, each trimmed with lace around the leg-holes. The girl looked up.

“Yes, sir,” she said, “may I help you?”

Carella opened his wallet and produced his shield. “Police officer,” he said. “I’m interested in the order you just wrote up.”

The girl was perhaps nineteen years old, a college girl working in the store for the Christmas rush. The most exciting thing that had happened on the job, until this very moment, was an elderly Frenchman asking her if she would like to spend the month of February on his yacht in the Mediterranean. Speechlessly, the girl studied the shield, her eyes bugging. It suddenly occurred to Carella that Fletcher might have had the purchases sent to his home address, in which case all this undercover work was merely a waste of time. Well, he thought, you win some, you lose some.

“Are these items being sent?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” the girl said. Her eyes were still wide behind her glasses. She wet her lips and stood up a little straighter, prepared to be a perfect witness.

“Can you tell me where?” Carella asked.

“Yes, sir,” she said, and turned the sales slip toward him. “He wanted them wrapped separately, but they’re all going to the same address. Miss Arlene Orton, 812 Crane Street, right here in the city.”

“Thank you very much,” Carella said.

It felt like Christmas Day already.

Bert Kling was sitting up in bed and polishing off his dinner when Carella got to the hospital at close to 7 P . M . The men shook hands, and Carella took a seat by the bed.

“This stuff tastes awful,” Kling said, “but I’ve been hungry as hell, ever since I got in here. I could almost eat the tray.”

“When are you getting out?”

“Tomorrow morning. I’ve got a broken rib, nice, huh?”

“Very nice,” Carella said.

“I’m lucky they didn’t mess up my insides,” Kling said. “That’s what the doctors were afraid of, internal hemorrhaging. But I’m okay, it seems. They taped up the rib, and whereas I won’t be able to do my famous trapeze act for a while, I should be able to get around.”

“Who did it, Bert?”

“Three locomotives, it felt like.”

“Why?”

“A warning to stay away from Nora Simonov.”

“Were you seeing a lot of her?”

“I saw her twice. Apparently someone saw me seeing her. And decided to put me in the hospital. Little did they know I’m a minion of the law, huh?”

“Little did they know,” Carella said.

“I’ll have to ask Nora a few questions when I get out of here. How’s the case going?”

“I’ve located Fletcher’s girlfriend.”

“I didn’t know he had one.”

“Brown tailed them last night, got an address for her, but no name. Fletcher just sent her some underwear.”

“Nice,” Kling said.

“Very nice. I’m getting a court order to put a wire in the apartment.”

“What do you expect them to talk about?”

“Bloody murder maybe,” Carella said, and shrugged. Both men were silent for several moments.

“You know what I want for Christmas?” Kling asked suddenly.

“What?”

“I want to find those guys who beat me up.”

13

T he man who picked the lock on Arlene Orton’s front door, ten minutes after she left her apartment on Wednesday morning, was better at it than any burglar in the city, and he happened to work for the Police Department. He had the door open in three minutes flat, at which time a technician went in and wired the joint. It took the technician longer to set up his equipment than it had taken his partner to open the door, but both were artists in their own right, and the sound man had a lot more work to do.

The telephone was the easiest of his jobs. He unscrewed the carbon mike in the mouthpiece of the phone, replaced it with his own mike, attached his wires, screwed the mouthpiece back on, and was instantly in business—or almost in business. The tap would not become operative until the telephone company supplied the police with a list of so-called bridging points that located the pairs and cables for Arlene Orton’s phone. The monitoring equipment would be hooked into these, and whenever a call went out of or came into the apartment, a recorder would automatically tape both ends of the conversation. In addition, whenever a call was made from the apartment, a dial indicator would ink out a series of dots that signified the number being called. The police listener would be monitoring the equipment from wherever the bridging point happened to be; in Arlene Orton’s case, the location index was seven blocks away.

The technician, while he had Arlene’s phone apart, could just as easily have installed a bug that would have picked up any voices in the living room and would also have recorded Arlene’s half of any telephone conversations. He chose instead to place his bug in the bookcase on the opposite side of the room. The bug was a small FM transmitter with a battery-powered mike that needed to be changed every twenty-four hours. It operated on the same frequency as the recording machine locked into it, a machine that was voice-actuated and that would begin taping whenever anyone began speaking in the apartment. The technician would have preferred running his own wires, rather than having to worry about changing a battery every twenty-four hours. But running wires meant that you had to pick a place to run them to, usually following electrical or telephone circuits to an empty apartment or closet or what-have-you where a policeman would monitor the recording equipment. If a tap was being set up in a hotel room, it was usually possible to rent the room next door, put your listener into it, and go about your messy business without anyone being the wiser. But in this city, empty apartments were about as scarce as working telephones, and whereas the wire was being installed by court order, the technician dared not ask the building superintendent for an empty closet or a workroom in which to hide his listener. Building supers are perhaps not as garrulous as barbers, but the effectiveness of a wiretap is directly proportionate to the secrecy surrounding it, and a blabbermouth superintendent can kill an investigation more quickly than a squad of gangland goons.

So the technician settled upon the battery-powered mike and resigned himself to the fact that every twenty-four hours he and his partner would have to get into the apartment somehow to change the goddamn batteries. In all, there would be four sets of batteries to change because the technician was planting four bugs in the apartment: one in the kitchen, one in the bedroom, one in the bathroom, and one in the living room. While he worked, his partner was down in the lobby with a walkie-talkie in his coat pocket, ready to let him know the moment Arlene Orton came back to the building, and ready to detain her by ruse if necessary. Watching the clock, the technician worked swiftly and silently, hoping the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt would not erupt with his partner’s warning voice. He was not worried about legal action against the city; the court order, in effect, gave him permission to break and enter. He worried only about blowing the surveillance.

In the rear of a panel truck parked at the curb some twelve feet south of the entrance to 812 Crane, Steve Carella sat behind the recording equipment that was locked into the frequency of the four bugs. He knew that in some neighborhoods a phony truck was as readily recognizable as the cop on the beat. Put a man in the back of a fake delivery truck, park the truck on the street and start taking pictures of people going in and out of a candy store suspected of being a numbers drop, and all of a sudden the neighborhood was full of budding stars and starlets, all of whom knew there was a cop-photographer in the back of the truck, all of whom mugged and pranced and emoted shamelessly for the movie camera, while managing to conduct not an iota of business that had anything at all to do with the policy racket. It got discouraging. But Crane Street was in one of the city’s better neighborhoods, where perhaps the citizens were not as wary of cops hiding in the backs of panel trucks doing their dirty watching and listening. Carella sat hopefully with a tuna-fish sandwich and a bottle of beer, prepared to hear and record any sounds that emanated from Arlene’s apartment.

At the bridging point seven blocks away and thirty minutes later, Arthur Brown sat behind equipment that was hooked into the telephone mike, and waited for Arlene Orton’s phone to ring. He was in radio contact with Carella in the back of his phony panel truck and could apprise him of any new development at once.

The first call came at 12:17 P . M . The equipment tripped in automatically, and the spools of tape began recording the conversation while Brown simultaneously monitored it through his headphones.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Arlene?”

“Yes, who’s this?”

“Nan.”

“Nan? You sound so different. Do you have a cold or something?”

“Every year at this time. Just before the holidays. Arlene, I’m terribly rushed, I’ll make this short. Do you know Beth’s dress size?”

“A ten, I would guess. Or an eight.”

“Well, which?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you give Danny a ring?”

“Do you have his office number?”

“No, but he’s listed. It’s Reynolds and Abelman. In Calm’s Point.”

“Thank you, darling. Let’s have lunch after the holidays sometime, okay?”

“Love to.”

“I’ll call you. Bye-bye.”

Arlene Orton spoke to three more girlfriends in succession. The first one was intent on discussing, among other things, a new birth-control pill she was trying. Arlene told her that she, herself, had stopped taking the pill after her divorce. In the beginning, the very thought of sex was abhorrent to her, and since she had no intention of even looking at another man for as long as she lived, she saw no reason to be taking the pill. Later on, when she revised her estimate of the opposite sex, her doctor asked her to stay off the pill for a while. Her friend wanted to know what Arlene was using now, and they went into a long and detailed conversation about the effectiveness of diaphragms, condoms, and intrauterine coils. Brown never did find out what Arlene was using now. Arlene’s second girlfriend had just returned from Granada, and she gave a long and breathless report on the hotel at which she’d stayed, mentioning in passing that the tennis pro had great legs. Arlene said that she had not played tennis in three years because tennis had been her former husband’s sport, and anything that reminded her of him caused her to throw up violently. Arlene’s third girlfriend talked exclusively about a nude stage show she had seen downtown the night before, stating flatly that it was the filthiest thing she had ever seen in her life, and you know me, Arlene, I’m certainly no prude.

Arlene then called the local supermarket to order the week’s groceries (including a turkey, which Brown assumed was for Christmas Day), and then called the credit department of one of the city’s bigger department stores to complain that she had left a valise with the superintendent for return to the store, but that the new man they had doing pickups and delivery was an absolute idiot, and the valise had been sitting there in the super’s apartment for the past three weeks, and thank God she hadn’t planned on taking a trip or anything because the suitcase she ordered to replace the one she was returning still hadn’t been delivered, and she felt this was disgraceful in view of the fact that she had spent something like $2000 at the store this year and was now reduced to arguing with a goddamn computer.

She had a fine voice, Arlene Orton, deep and forceful, punctuated every so often (when she was talking to her girlfriends) with a delightful giggle that seemed to bubble up from some adolescent spring. Brown enjoyed listening to her.

At 4 P . M . the telephone in Arlene’s apartment rang again.

“Hello?”

“Arlene, this is Gerry.”

“Hello, darling.”

“I’m leaving here a little early, I thought I’d come right over.”

“Good.”

“Miss me?”

“Mmm-huh.”

“Love me?”

“Mmm-huh.”

“Someone there with you?”

“No.”

“Then why don’t you say it?”

“I love you.”

“Good. I’ll be there in, oh, half an hour, forty minutes.”

“Hurry.”

Brown radioed Carella at once. Carella thanked him, and sat back to wait.

Standing in the hallway outside Nora Simonov’s apartment, Kling wondered what his approach should be. It seemed to him that, where Nora was concerned, he was always working out elaborate strategies. It further seemed to him that any girl for whom you had to draw up detailed battle plans was a girl well worth dropping. He reminded himself that he was not here today on matters of the heart, but rather on matters of the rib—the third rib on the right-hand side of his chest, to be exact. He rang the doorbell and waited. He heard no sound from within the apartment, no footsteps approaching the door, but suddenly the peephole flap was thrown back, and he knew Nora was looking out at him; he raised his right hand, waggled the fingers on it, and grinned. The peephole flap closed again. He heard her unlocking the door. The door opened wide.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi. I happened to be in the building, checking out some things, and thought I’d stop by to say hello.”

“Come in,” Nora said.

“You’re not busy, are you?”

“I’m always busy, but come in, anyway.”

It was the first time he had been allowed entrance to her apartment; maybe she figured he was safe with a broken rib, if indeed she knew one of his ribs was broken. There was a spacious entrance foyer opening onto a wide living room. What appeared to be an operative fireplace was on the wall opposite the windows. The room was done in bright, rich colors, the fabric on the easy chairs and sofa subtly echoing the color of the rug and drapes. It was a warm and pleasant room; he would have enjoyed being in it as a person rather than a cop. He thought it supremely ironic that she had let him in too late, and was now wasting hospitality on nothing but a policeman investigating an assault.

“Can I fix you a drink?” she asked. “Or is it too early for you?”

“I’d love a drink.”

“Name it.”

“What are you having?”

“I thought I’d whip up a pitcherful of martinis, and light the cannel coal, and we could sit toasting Christmas.”

“Good idea.” He watched her as she moved toward the bar in the corner of the room. She was wearing work clothes, a paint-smeared white smock over blue jeans. Her dark hair was pulled back, away from her exquisite profile. She moved gracefully and fluidly, walking erect, the way most tall girls did, as though in rebuttal for the years when they’d been forced to slump in order to appear shorter than the tallest boys in the class. She turned and saw him watching her. She smiled, obviously pleased, and said, “Gin or vodka?”

“Gin.”

He waited until she had taken the gin bottle from behind the bar, and then he said, “Where’s the bathroom, Nora?”

“Down the hall. The very end of it. You mean to tell me cops go to the bathroom, too, the same as mortals?”

He smiled and went out of the room, leaving her busy at the bar. He walked down the long hallway, glancing into the small studio room—drawing board overhung with a fluorescent light, painting of a man jumping up for something, arms stretched over his head, chest muscles rippling, tubes of acrylic paint twisting on a worktable near an empty easel—and continued walking. The bedroom door was open. He looked back toward the living room, closed the bathroom door rather more noisily than was necessary, and stepped quickly into the bedroom.

He went to the dresser first. A silver-framed photograph of a man was on the right-hand end of it. It was inscribed “To Sweet Nora, with all my love, Frankie.” He studied the man’s face, trying to relate it to any of the three men who had jumped him on Monday night. The street had been dark; he had really seen only the one who’d stood in front of him, pounding his fists into his chest and his gut. The man in the photograph was not his attacker. He quickly opened the top drawer of the dresser—panties, nylons, handkerchiefs, brassieres. He closed it, opened the middle drawer, found it full of sweaters and blouses, and then searched the bottom drawer, where Nora kept an odd assortment of gloves, nightgowns, panty-hose, and slips. He closed the drawer and moved rapidly to the night table on the left of the bed, the one upon which the telephone rested. He opened the top drawer, found Nora’s address book, and quickly scanned it. There was only one listing for a man named Frank—Frank Richmond in Calm’s Point. Kling closed the book, went to the door, looked down the hallway, and wondered how much more time he had. He stepped across the hall, eased open the bathroom door, closed it behind him, flushed the toilet, and then turned on the cold water tap. He went into the hallway again, closed the door gently behind him, and crossed swiftly into the bedroom again.

He found what he wanted in the night table on the other side of the bed—a stack of some two dozen letters, all on the same stationery, bound together with a thick rubber band. The top envelope in the pile was addressed to Nora at 721 Silvermine Oval. The return address in the left-hand corner of the envelope read:

Frank Richmond, 80-17-42

Castleview State Penitentiary

Castleview-on-Rawley, 23751

Whatever else Frank Richmond was, he was also a convict. Kling debated putting the letters back into the night-table drawer, decided he wanted to read them, and stuck them instead into the right-hand pocket of his jacket. He closed the drawer, went across the hall to the bathroom, turned off the water tap, and went back into the living room, where Nora had started a decent fire and was pouring the drinks.

“Find it?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

14

O n Thursday morning, two days before Christmas, Carella sat at his desk in the squadroom and looked over the transcripts Miscolo’s clerical staff had typed up for him. He had taped five reels the night before, beginning at 4:55, when Fletcher had entered Arlene Orton’s apartment, and ending at 7:30, when they left to go out to dinner. The reel that interested him most was the second one. The conversation on that reel had at one point changed abruptly in tone and content; Carella thought he knew why, but he wanted to confirm his suspicion by carefully reading the typewritten record:

The following is a transcript of a conversation between Gerald Fletcher and Arlene Orton which took place in Miss Orton’s apartment (11D) at 812 Crane Street on Wednesday, December 22. Conversation on this reel took place commencing at approximately 5:21 P.M. and ended at approximately 5:45 P.M. on that date.

Fletcher:

I meant after the holidays.

Miss Orton:

I thought you meant after the trial.

Fletcher:

No, the holidays.

Miss Orton:

I may be able to get away, I’m not sure. I’ll have to check with my shrink.

Fletcher:

What’s he got to do with it?

Miss Orton:

Well, I have to pay whether I’m there or not, you know.

Fletcher:

You mean, oh, I see.

Miss Orton:

Sure.

Fletcher:

It would be best if we could . . .

Miss Orton:

Sure, coordinate it if we can.

Fletcher:

Is he taking a vacation?

Miss Orton:

He went in February last time.

Fletcher:

February, right.

Miss Orton:

Two weeks.

Fletcher:

In February, right, I remember.

Miss Orton:

I’ll ask him.

Fletcher:

Yes, ask him. Because I’d really like to get away.

Miss Orton:

Ummm. When do you think the case [Inaudible]

Fletcher:

In March sometime. No sooner than that. He’s got a new lawyer, you know.

Miss Orton:

Do you want some more of this?

Fletcher:

Just a little.

Miss Orton:

On the cracker or the toast?

Fletcher:

What did I have it on?

Miss Orton:

The cracker.

Fletcher:

Let me try the toast. Mmmm. Did you make this yourself?

Miss Orton:

No, I got it at the deli. What does that mean, a new lawyer?

Fletcher:

Nothing. He’ll be convicted anyway.

Miss Orton:

[Inaudible]

Fletcher:

Well.

Miss Orton:

You making another drink?

Fletcher:

I thought . . .

Miss Orton:

What time is the reservation?

Fletcher:

A quarter to eight.

Miss Orton:

Sure, there’s time.

Fletcher:

Do you want another one?

Miss Orton:

Just some ice. One ice cube.

Fletcher:

Okay: Is there any more [Inaudible]

Miss Orton:

Underneath. Did you look underneath?

Fletcher:

[Inaudible]

Miss Orton:

There should be some.

Fletcher:

Yeah, here it is.

Miss Orton:

Thank you.

Fletcher:

Because the trial’s going to take a lot out of me.

Miss Orton:

Ummmm.

Fletcher:

I’d like to rest up beforehand.

Miss Orton:

I’ll ask him.

Fletcher:

When do you see him again?

Miss Orton:

What’s today?

Fletcher:

Wednesday.

Miss Orton:

Tomorrow. I’ll ask him then.

Fletcher:

Will he know so far in advance?

Miss Orton:

Well, he’ll have some idea.

Fletcher:

Yes, if he can give you at least an approximation . . .

Miss Orton:

Sure, we can plan from there.

Fletcher:

Yes.

Miss Orton:

The trial will be . . . when did you say?

Fletcher:

March. I’m guessing. I think March.

Miss Orton:

How soon after the trial . . .

Fletcher:

I don’t know.

Miss Orton:

She’s dead, Gerry, I don’t see . . .

Fletcher:

Yes, but . . .

Miss Orton:

I don’t see any reason to wait, do you?

Fletcher:

No.

Miss Orton:

Then why don’t we decide?

Fletcher:

After the trial.

Miss Orton:

Decide after the . . . ?

Fletcher:

No, get married after the trial.

Miss Orton:

Yes. But shouldn’t we in the meantime . . .

Fletcher:

Have you read this?

Miss Orton:

What is it?

Fletcher:

This.

Miss Orton:

No. I don’t like his stuff.

Fletcher:

Then why’d you buy it?

Miss Orton:

I didn’t. Maria gave it to me for my birthday. What I was saying, Gerry, is that we ought to set a date now. A provisional date. Depending on when the trial is.

Fletcher:

Mmmm.

Miss Orton:

Allowing ourselves enough time, you know. It’ll probably be a long trial, don’t you think? Gerry?

Fletcher:

Mmmm?

Miss Orton:

Do you think it’ll be a long trial?

Fletcher:

What?

Miss Orton:

Gerry?

Fletcher:

Yes?

Miss Orton:

Where are you?

Fletcher:

I was just looking over some of these books.

Miss Orton:

Do you think you can tear yourself away? So we can discuss . . .

Fletcher:

Forgive me, darling.

Miss Orton:

. . . a matter of some small importance. Like our wedding.

Fletcher:

I’m sorry.

Miss Orton:

If the trial starts in March . . .

Fletcher:

It may or it may not. I told you I was only guessing.

Miss Orton:

Well, say it does start in March.

Fletcher:

If it starts in March . . .

Miss Orton:

How long could it run? At the outside?

Fletcher:

Not very long. A week?

Miss Orton:

I thought murder cases . . .

Fletcher:

Well, they have a confession, the boy’s admitted killing her. And there won’t be a parade of witnesses, they’ll probably call just me and the boy. If it runs longer than a week, I’ll be very much surprised.

Miss Orton:

Then if we planned on April . . .

Fletcher:

Unless they come up with something unexpected, of course.

Miss Orton:

Like what?

Fletcher:

Oh, I don’t know. They’ve got some pretty sharp people on this case.

Miss Orton:

In the district attorney’s office?

Fletcher:

Investigating it, I mean.

Miss Orton:

What’s there to investigate?

Fletcher:

There is always the possibility he didn’t do it.

Miss Orton:

Who?

Fletcher:

Corwin. The boy.

Miss Orton:

[Inaudible] a signed confession?

Fletcher:

I thought you didn’t want another one?

Miss Orton:

I’ve changed my mind. [Inaudible] the end of April?

Fletcher:

I guess that would be safe.

Miss Orton:

[Inaudible]

Fletcher:

No, this is fine, thanks.

Miss Orton:

[Inaudible] forget about getting away in February. That’s when they have hurricanes down there, anyway, isn’t it?

Fletcher:

September, I thought. Or October. Isn’t that the hurricane season?

Miss Orton:

Go after the trial instead. For our honeymoon.

Fletcher:

They may give me a rough time during the trial.

Miss Orton:

Why should they?

Fletcher:

One of the cops thinks I killed her.

Miss Orton:

You’re not serious.

Fletcher:

I am.

Miss Orton:

Who?

Fletcher:

A detective named Carella.

Miss Orton:

Why would he think that?

Fletcher:

Well, he probably knows about us by now . . .

Miss Orton:

How could he?

Fletcher:

He’s a very thorough cop. I have a great deal of admiration for him. I wonder if he realizes that.

Miss Orton:

Admiration!

Fletcher:

Yes.

Miss Orton:

Admiration for a man who suspects . . .

Fletcher:

He’d have a hell of a time proving anything, though.

Miss Orton:

Where’d he even get such an idea?

Fletcher:

Well, he knows I hated her.

Miss Orton:

How does he know?

Fletcher:

I told him.

Miss Orton:

What? Gerry, why the hell did you do that?

Fletcher:

Why not?

Miss Orton:

Oh, Gerry.

Fletcher:

He’d have found out anyway. I told you, he’s a very thorough cop. He probably knows by now that Sarah was sleeping around with half the men in this city. And he probably knows I knew it, too.

Miss Orton:

That doesn’t mean . . .

Fletcher:

If he’s also found out about us . . .

Miss Orton:

Who cares what he’s found out? Corwin’s already confessed. I don’t understand you, Gerry.

Fletcher:

I’m only trying to follow his reasoning. Carella’s.

Miss Orton:

Is he Italian?

Fletcher:

I would guess so. Why?

Miss Orton:

Italians are the most suspicious people in the world.

Fletcher:

I can understand his reasoning. I’m just not sure he can understand mine.

Miss Orton:

Some reasoning, all right. Why the hell would you kill her? If you were going to kill her, you’d have done it ages ago.

Fletcher:

Of course.

Miss Orton:

When she refused to sign the separation papers.

Fletcher:

Sure.

Miss Orton:

So let him investigate, who cares? You want to know something, Gerry?

Fletcher:

Mmm?

Miss Orton:

Wishing your wife is dead isn’t the same thing as killing her. Tell that to Detective Coppola.

Fletcher:

Carella.

Miss Orton:

Carella. Tell him that.

Fletcher:

[Laughs]

Miss Orton:

What’s so funny?

Fletcher:

I’ll tell him, darling.

Miss Orton:

Good. Meanwhile, the hell with him.

Fletcher:

[Laughs] Do you have to change?

Miss Orton:

I thought I’d go this way. Is it a very dressy place?

Fletcher:

I’ve never been there.

Miss Orton:

Call them and ask if pants are okay, will you darling?

According to the technician who had wired the Orton apartment, the living-room bug was in the bookcase on the wall opposite the bar. Carella leafed back through the typewritten pages and came upon the section he wanted:

Fletcher:

Have you read this?

Miss Orton:

What is it?

Fletcher:

This.

Miss Orton:

No. I don’t like his stuff.

Fletcher:

Then why’d you buy it?

Miss Orton:

I didn’t. Maria gave it to me for my birthday. What I was saying, Gerry, is that we ought to set a date now. A provisional date. Depending on when the trial is.

Fletcher:

Mmmm.

Miss Orton:

Allowing ourselves enough time, you know. It’ll probably be a long trial, don’t you think? Gerry?

Fletcher:

Mmmm?

Miss Orton:

Do you think it’ll be a long trial?

Fletcher:

What?

Miss Orton:

Gerry?

Fletcher:

Yes?

Miss Orton:

Where are you?

Fletcher:

I was just looking over some of these books.

It was Carella’s guess that Fletcher had discovered the bookcase bug some nine speeches back, the first time he uttered a thoughtful “Mmmm.” That was when his attention began to wander, so that he was unable to give any concentration at all to two matters of enormous importance to him and Arlene: the impending trial and their marriage plans. What interested Carella more, however, was what Fletcher had said after he knew the place was wired. Certain of an audience now, knowing that whichever cop was actually monitoring the equipment, the tape or transcript would eventually get back to the investigating officer, Fletcher had:

1. Suggested the possibility that Corwin was not guilty of the murder.

2. Flatly stated that a cop named Carella suspected him of having killed his own wife.

3. Expressed the admiration he felt for Carella while wondering if Carella was aware of it.

4. Speculated that Carella, as a thorough cop, had already doped out the purpose of the bar-crawling last Sunday night, was cognizant of Sarah’s promiscuity and knew that Fletcher was aware of it as well.

5. Made a little joke about “telling” Carella, when in fact he had already told him through the surveillance equipment in the apartment.

Carella felt as eerie as he had when lunching with Fletcher and later when drinking with him. Fletcher seemed to be playing a dangerous game, in which he taunted Carella with bits and pieces of knowledge, and dared him to fit them together into a meaningful whole that would prove he had slain Sarah. On the tape, Fletcher had said in an oddly gentle voice, “I can understand his reasoning. I’m just not sure he can understand mine.” He had spoken these words after be knew the place was wired, and it could be assumed he was speaking them directly to Carella. But what was he trying to say? And why?

Carella wanted very much to hear what Fletcher would say when he didn’t know he was being overheard. He asked Lieutenant Byrnes for permission to request a court order putting a bug in Fletcher’s automobile. Byrnes granted permission, and the court issued the order. Carella called the Police Laboratory again, and was told that a technician would be assigned to him as soon as he found out where Fletcher parked his automobile.

Reading another man’s love letters is like eating Chinese food alone.

In the comparative stillness of the squadroom, Kling joylessly picked over each of Richmond’s separate tasty dishes, unable to share them, unable to comment on their flavor or texture. That they were interesting at all was a tribute to Richmond’s cleverness; his letters were being censored before they left the prison, to make sure they did not contain requests for a file inside a birthday cake, and censorship can somewhat inhibit a man’s ardor. As a result, Richmond could write only indirectly about his intense need for Nora, and his longing to rejoin her once he had served his sentence, which he fully expected to be reduced once he went before the parole board.

One letter, however, contained a short paragraph that read somewhat like an open threat:

I hope you are being true to me. Pete tells me he is sure this is so. He is there if you need him for anything, so don’t hesitate to call. In any case, he will be watching over you.

Kling read the sentence yet another time, and was reaching for the telephone when it rang. He lifted the receiver.

“Eighty-seventh Squad, Kling.”

“Bert, this is Cindy.”

“Hi,” he said.

“Are you busy?” she asked.

“I was just about to call the I.S.”

“Oh.”

“But go ahead. It can wait.”

Cindy hesitated. Then, her voice very low, she said, “Bert, can I see you tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?” he said.

“Yes.” She hesitated again. “Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve.”

“I know.”

“I bought something for you.”

“Why’d you do that, Cindy?”

“Habit,” she said, and he suspected she was smiling.

“I’d love to see you, Cindy,” he said.

“I’ll be working till five.”

“No Christmas party?”

“At a hospital? Bert, my dear, we deal here daily with life and death.”

“Don’t we all,” Kling said, and smiled. “Shall I meet you at the hospital?”

“All right. The side entrance. That’s near the emergency . . .”

“Yes, I know where it is. At five o’clock?”

“Well, five-fifteen.”

“Okay, five-fifteen.”

“You’ll like what I got you,” she said, and then hung up. He was still smiling when he put his call through to the Identification Section. A man named Reilly listened to his request, and promised to call back with the information in ten minutes. He called back in eight.

“Kling?” he said.

“Yes?”

“Reilly at the I.S. I’ve got that packet on Frank Richmond. You want me to duplicate it or what?”

“Can you just read me his yellow sheet?”

“Well,” Reilly said, “it’s a pretty long one. The guy’s been in trouble with the law since he was sixteen.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Minor crap mostly. Except for the latest one.”

“When?”

“Two months ago.”

“What was the charge?”

“Armed robbery.”

Kling whistled, and then said, “Have you got the details there, Reilly?”

“Not on his B-sheet. Let me see if there’s a copy of the arrest report.”

Kling waited. On the other end, he could hear papers being shuffled. At last, Reilly said, “Yeah, here it is. Him and another guy went into a supermarket along about closing time, ripped off the day’s receipts. Got caught on the way out by an off-duty detective who lived in the neighborhood.”

“Who was the other guy?”

“Man named Jack Yancy. He’s doing time too. You want me to pull his folder?”

“No, that’s not necessary.”

“Third guy got off scot-free.”

“I thought you said there were only two of them.”

“No, there was an alleged wheel-man on the job, waiting in the parking lot near the delivery entrance. Caught him in the car with the engine running, but he claimed he didn’t know anything about what was going on inside. Richmond and Yancy backed him, said they’d never seen him before in their lives.”

“Honor among thieves?” Kling said. “I don’t believe it.”

“Stranger things happen,” Reilly said.

“What’s his name?”

“The wheel-man? Peter Brice.”

“Got an address for him?”

“Not on the report. You want me to hit the file again?”

“Would you?”

“I’ll get back,” Reilly said, and hung up.

When the phone rang ten minutes later, Kling thought it would be Reilly again. Instead, it was Arthur Brown.

“Bert,” he said, “the Orton woman just called Fletcher. Can you get in touch with Steve?”

“I’ll try. What’s up?”

“They made a date for tomorrow night. They’re going across the river to a place named The Chandeliers. Fletcher’s picking her up at seven-thirty.”

“Right,” Kling said.

“Bert?”

“Yeah?”

“Does Steve want me on this phone tap while they’re out eating? Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve, you know.”

“I’ll ask him.”

“Also, Hal wants to know if he’s supposed to sit in the truck all the while they’re out.”

“Steve’ll be in touch.”

“Because after all, Bert, if they’re over in the next state eating, what’s there to listen to in the apartment?”

“Right, I’m sure Steve’ll agree.”

“Okay. How’s everything up there?”

“Quiet.”

“Really?” Brown asked, and hung up.

15

T he detective who engaged the garage attendant in a bullshit conversation about a hit-and-run accident was Steve Carella. The lab technician who posed as a mechanic sent by the Automobile Club to charge a faulty battery was the same man who had wired Arlene Orton’s apartment.

Fletcher’s car was parked in a garage four blocks from his office, a fact determined simply by following him to work that morning of December 24. (Carella had already figured that Fletcher would park the car where he finally did park it because the pattern had been established in the earlier surveillance; a man who drove to work each day generally parked his car in the same garage or lot.)

On the sidewalk outside the garage, Carella asked invented questions about a damaged left fender and headlight on a fictitious 1968 Dodge, while upstairs the lab technician was installing his bug in Fletcher’s 1972 Oldsmobile. It would have been simpler and faster to put in a battery-powered FM transmitter similar to those he had installed in Arlene Orton’s apartment, but since batteries needed constant changing, and since access to any given automobile was infinitely more difficult than access to an apartment, he decided on wiring his bug into the car’s electrical system instead. With the hood open, with charge cables going to Fletcher’s battery from his own tow-truck battery, he busily spliced and taped, tucked and tacked. He did not want to put the bug under the dashboard (the easiest spot) because this was wintertime, and the car heater would undoubtedly be in use, and the sensitive microphone would pick up every rattle and rumble of the heater instead of the conversation in the car. So he wedged the microphone into the front cushion, between seat and back, and then ran his wires under the car rug, and up under the dashboard, and finally into the electrical system. Within the city limits, the microphone would effectively broadcast any sound in the car for a distance of little more than a block, which meant that Fletcher’s Oldsmobile would have to be closely followed by the monitoring unmarked police sedan. If Fletcher left the city, as he planned to do tonight when he took Arlene to The Chandeliers, the effective range of the transmitter on the open road would be about a quarter of a mile. In either case, the listener-pursuer had his work cut out for him.

On the sidewalk, Carella saw the technician drive out in his battered tow truck, abruptly thanked the garage attendant for his time, and headed back to the squadroom.

The holiday was starting in earnest and so, in keeping with the conventions of that festive season, the boys of the 87th Squad held their annual Christmas party at 4 P . M . that afternoon. The starting time for the party was entirely arbitrary, since it depended on when the squad’s guests began dropping in. The guests, unlike those to be found at most other Christmas parties in the city, were in the crime business, mainly because the hosts were in that same business. Most of the guests were shoplifters. Some of them were pickpockets. A few of them were drunks. One of them was a murderer.

The shoplifters had been arrested in department stores scattered throughout the precinct, the Christmas shopping season being a good time to lift merchandise, Christmas Eve being the last possible day to practice the art in stores still jammed to the rafters. The shoplifters plied their trade in various ways. A skinny lady shoplifter named Hester Brady, for example, came into the squadroom looking like a pregnant lady. Her pregnancy had been caused by stuffing some two hundred dollars worth of merchandise into the overlarge bloomers she wore under her dress, a risky procedure unless one is skilled at lift, grab, stuff, drop the skirt, move to the next aisle, advance in the space of twenty minutes from a sweet Irish virgin to a lady eight months along; such are the vagaries of birth control.

A man named Felix Hopkins dressed for his annual shopping spree in a trenchcoat lined with dozens of pockets to accommodate the small and quite expensive pieces of jewelry he lifted from counters here and there. A tall, thin distinguished-looking black man with a tidy mustache and gold-rimmed spectacles, he would generally approach the counter and ask to see a cigarette lighter, indicating the one he wanted, and then rip off five or six fountain pens while the clerk was busy getting the lighter out of the display case. His hands worked as swiftly as a magician’s; he had been at the job such a long time now that he didn’t even have to unbutton the coat anymore. And though the pockets inside the coat now contained a gold fountain pen, a platinum watch, a gold money clip, a rhinestone necklace, an assortment of matched gold earrings, a leather-bound traveling clock, and a monogrammed ring with a black onyx stone, he still protested to the arresting officer that he had bought all these items elsewhere, had thrown away the sales slips, and was taking them home to wrap them himself because he didn’t like the shitty job the stores did.

Most of the other shoplifters were junkies, desperate in their need, unmindful of store detectives and city detectives, sorely tempted by the glittering display of goods in what was surely the world’s largest marketplace, knowing only that whatever chances they took might net them a bag or two of heroin before nightfall, guarantee them a Christmas Day free from the pangs of drug-hunger and the pains of withdrawal. They were the pitiful ones, pacing the detention cage at the rear of the squadroom, ready to scream or vomit, knowing that being busted meant cold turkey for Christmas Day, with the only hope being methadone instead—maybe. They were looked upon with disdain by the haughty professionals like Hester Brady of the pregnant bloomers, Felix Hopkins of the pocketed raincoat, and Junius Cooper of the paper-stuffed packages.

Junius Cooper had figured out his dodge all by himself. He was a man of about forty-three, well-dressed, looking somewhat like a harried advertising executive who was rushing around picking up last-minute gifts his secretary had neglected to buy. He came into each department store carrying several shopping bags brimming with gift wrapped parcels. His modus operandi worked in two ways, both equally effective. In either instance, he would stand next to a man or woman who was legitimately shopping and who had momentarily put his own shopping bag on the floor or on the counter top. Junius would immediately: (a) transfer one of the legitimate shopper’s gift-wrapped packages into his own shopping bag or (b) pick up the legitimate shopper’s bag and leave his own bag behind in its place. The beautifully wrapped boxes in Junius’ bag contained nothing but last Sunday’s newspapers. His system was a bit potluckish, but it provided the advantage of being able to walk innocently past department-store cops, carrying packages actually paid for by bona-fide customers and wrapped by department-store clerks. It was almost impossible to catch Junius unless you saw him making the actual exchange. That was how he had been caught today.

This mixed bag of shoplifters mingled in the squadroom with their first cousins, the pickpockets, who similarly looked upon the frantic shopping days before Christmas as their busiest time of the year. A pickpocket enjoys nothing better than a crowd, and the approaching holiday brought the crowds out like cockroaches from under the bathroom sink: crowds in stores, crowds in the streets, crowds in the buses and subways. They worked in pairs or alone, these light-fingered artists, a nudge or a bump, an “Oh, excuse me,” and a purse delicately lifted from a handbag, a hip pocket slit with a razor blade to release the bulging wallet within. There was not a detective in the city who did not carry his wallet in the left-hand pocket of his trousers, close to his balls, rather than in the sucker hip pocket; cops are not immune to pickpockets. They were surrounded by them that afternoon, all of them innocent, naturally, all of them protesting that they knew their rights.

The drunks did not know their rights, and did not particularly care about them. They had all begun celebrating a bit early and had in their exuberance done one thing or another considered illegal in this fair city—things like throwing a bus driver out onto the sidewalk when he refused to make change for a ten-dollar bill, or smashing the window of a taxicab when the driver said he couldn’t possibly make a call to Calm’s Point on the busiest day of the year, or kicking a Salvation Army lady who refused to allow her trombone to be played by a stranger, or pouring a quart of scotch into a mailbox, or urinating on the front steps of the city’s biggest cathedral. Things like that. Minor things like that.

One of the drunks had killed someone.

He was unquestionably the star of the 87th’s little Christmas celebration, a small man with vivid blue eyes and the hands of a violinist, beetling black brows, a mane of black hair, stinking of alcohol and vomit, demanding over and again to know just what the hell he was doing in a police station, even though there was blood all over his white shirt front and speckled on his pale face and staining his long thin, delicate fingers.

The person he had killed was his sixteen-year-old daughter.

He seemed to have no knowledge that she was dead. He seemed not to remember at all that he had come into his apartment at three o’clock that afternoon, little more than an hour ago, having begun his Christmas celebrating at the office shortly after lunch, and had found his daughter making love with a boy on the living-room sofa, the television casting unseen pictures into the darkened room, television voices whispering, whispering, and his daughter locked in embrace with a strange boy, skirts up over belly and thighs, buttocks pumping, ecstatic moans mingling with the whisper of television shadows, not hearing her father when he came into the room, not hearing him when he went into the kitchen and searched in the table drawer for a weapon formidable enough, punishing enough, found only a paring knife and discarded that as unequal to the task, discovered a hammer in the shoebox under the sink, hefted it on the palm of his hand, and, thin-lipped, went into the living room where his daughter still moaned beneath the weight of her young lover, and seized the boy by the shoulder and pulled him off her, and then struck her repeatedly with the hammer until the girl’s face and head were gristle and pulp and the boy screamed until he fainted from exhaustion and shock and the woman next door ran in and found her neighbor still wielding the hammer in terrible dark vengeance for the unpardonable sin his daughter had committed on the day before Christmas. “George,” she had whispered, and he had turned to her with blank eyes, and she had said, “Oh, George, what have you done?” and he had dropped the hammer, and could not remember from that moment on what he had done.

It was a nice little Christmas party the boys of the 87th had.

He had forgotten, almost, what she looked like.

She came through the hospital’s chrome and glass revolving doors, and he saw at first only a tall blond girl, full-breasted and wide-hipped, honey blond hair clipped close to her head, cornflower-blue eyes, shoving through the doors and out onto the low, flat stoop, and he reacted to her the way he might react to any beautiful stranger stepping into the crisp December twilight, and then he realized it was Cindy, and his heart lurched.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

She took his arm. They walked in silence for several moments.

“You look beautiful,” he said.

“Thank you. So do you.”

He was, in fact, quite aware of the way they looked together, and fell immediately into the Young Lovers syndrome, positive that everyone they passed on the windswept street knew instantly that they were mad about each other. Each stranger (or so he thought) cased them quickly, remarking silently on their oneness, envying their youth and strength and glowing health, longing to be these two on Christmas Eve, Cindy and Bert, American Lovers, who had met cute, and loved long, and fought hard, and parted sadly, and were now together again in the great tradition of the season, radiating love like flashing Christmas bulbs on a sixty-foot-high tree.

They found a cocktail lounge near the hospital, one they had never been to before, either together or separately, Kling sensing that a “first” was necessary to their rediscovery of each other. They sat at a small round table in a corner of the room. The crowd noises were comforting. He suspected an English pub might be like this on Christmas Eve, the voice cadences lulling and soft, the room itself warm and protective, a good place for nurturing a love that had almost died and was now about to redeclare itself.

“Where’s my present?” he said, and grinned in mock, evil greediness.

She reached behind her to where she had hung her coat on a wall peg, and dug into the pocket, and placed a small package in the exact center of the table. The package was wrapped in bright blue paper and tied with a green ribbon and bow. He felt a little embarrassed; he always did when receiving a gift. He went into the pocket of his own coat, and placed his gift on the table beside hers, a slightly larger package wrapped in jingle-bells paper, red and gold, no bow.

“So,” she said.

“So,” he said.

“Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.”

They hesitated. They looked at each other. They both smiled.

“You first,” he said.

“All right.”

She slipped her fingernail under the Scotch Tape and broke open the wrapping without tearing the paper, and then eased the box out, and moved the wrapping aside, intact, and centered the box before her, and opened its lid. He had bought her a plump gold heart, seemingly bursting with an inner life of its own, the antiqued gold chain a tether that kept it from ballooning ecstatically into space. She looked at the heart, and then glanced quickly into his expectant face and nodded briefly and said, “Thank you, it’s beautiful.”

“It’s not Valentine’s Day . . .”

“Yes.” She was still nodding. She was looking down at the heart again, and nodding.

“But I thought . . .” He shrugged.

“Yes, it’s beautiful,” she said again. “Thank you, Bert.”

“Well,” he said, and shrugged again, feeling vaguely uncomfortable and suspecting it was because he hated the ritual of opening presents. He ripped off the bow on her gift, tore open the paper, and lifted the lid off the tiny box. She had bought him a gold tie-tack in the form of miniature handcuffs, and he read meaning into the gift immediately, significance beyond the fact that he was a cop whose tools of the trade included real handcuffs hanging from his belt. His gift had told her something about the way he felt, and he was certain that her gift was telling him the very same thing—they were together again, she was binding herself to him again.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Do you like it, Bert?”

“I love it.”

“I thought . . .”

“Yes, I love it.”

“Good.”

They had not yet ordered drinks. Kling signaled for the waiter, and they sat in curious silence until he came to the table. The waiter left, and the silence lengthened, and it was then that Kling began to suspect something was wrong, something was terribly wrong. She had closed the lid on his gift, and was staring at the closed box.

“What is it?” Kling asked.

“Bert . . .”

“Tell me, Cindy.”

“I didn’t come here to . . .”

He knew already, there was no need for her to elaborate. He knew, and the noises of the room were suddenly too loud, the room itself too hot.

“Bert, I’m going to marry him,” she said.

“I see.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, no,” he said. “No, Cindy, please.”

“Bert, what you and I had together was very good . . .”

“I know that, honey.”

“And I just couldn’t end it the way . . . the way we were ending it. I had to see you again, and tell you how much you’d meant to me. I had to be sure you knew that.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Bert?”

“Yes, Cindy. Okay,” he said. He smiled and touched her hand reassuringly. “Okay,” he said again.

They spent a half hour together, drinking only the single round, and then they went out into the cold, and they shook hands briefly, and Cindy said, “Good-bye, Bert,” and he said, “Good-bye, Cindy,” and they walked off in opposite directions.

Peter Brice lived on the third floor of a brownstone on the city’s South Side. Kling reached the building at a little past six-thirty, went upstairs, listened outside the door for several moments, drew his service revolver, and knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again, waited, holstered his revolver, and was starting down the hall when a door at the opposite end opened. A blond-headed kid of about eight looked into the hallway and said, “Oh.”

“Hello,” Kling said, and started down the steps.

“I thought it might be Santa Claus,” the kid said.

“Little early,” Kling said over his shoulder.

“What time does he come?” the kid asked.

“After midnight.”

“When’s that?” the kid shouted after him.

“Later,” Kling shouted back, and went down to the ground floor. He found the super’s door alongside the stairwell, near where the garbage cans were stacked for the night. He knocked on the door and waited. A black man wearing a red flannel robe opened the door and peered into the dim hallway.

“Who is it?” he said, squinting up into Kling’s face.

“Police officer,” Kling said. “I’m looking for a man named Peter Brice. Know where I can find him?”

“Third-floor front,” the super said. “Don’t do no shootin’ in the building.”

“He’s not home,” Kling said. “Got any idea where he might be?”

“He hangs out on the corner sometimes.”

“What corner?”

“Barbecue joint on the corner. Brice’s brother works there.”

“Up the street here?”

“Yeah,” the super said. “What’d he do?”

“Routine investigation,” Kling answered. “Thanks a lot.”

The streets were dark. Last-minute shoppers, afternoon party-goers, clerks and shopgirls, workingmen and housewives, all of whom had been rushing toward tomorrow since the day after Thanksgiving, now moved homeward to embrace it, put the final fillip on the tree, drink a bit of nog, spend the last quiet hours in peaceful contemplation before the onslaught of relatives and friends in the morning, the attendant frenzied business of gifting and getting. A sense of serenity was in the air. This is what Christmas is all about, Kling thought, this peaceful time of quiet footfalls, and suddenly wondered why the day before Christmas had somehow become more meaningful to him than Christmas Day itself.

Skewered, browning chickens turned slowly on spits, their savory aroma filling the shop as Kling opened the door and stepped inside. A burly man in a white chef’s apron and hat was behind the counter preparing to skewer four more plump white birds. He glanced up as Kling came in. Another man was at the cigarette machine, his back to the door. He was even bigger than the one behind the counter, with wide shoulders and a thick bull’s neck. He turned from the machine as Kling closed the door, and the recognition between them was simultaneous. Kling knew at once that this was the man who’d beaten him senseless last Monday night, and the man knew that Kling had been his victim. A grin cracked across his face. “Well, well,” he said, “look who’s here, Al.”

“Are you Peter Brice?” Kling asked.

“Why, yes, so I am,” Brice said, and took a step toward Kling, his fists already clenched.

Kling had no intention of getting into a brawl with a man as big as Brice. His shoulder still ached (Meyer’s copper bracelet wasn’t worth a damn) and he had a broken rib and a broken heart besides (which can also hurt). The third button of his overcoat was still unbuttoned. He reached into the coat with his right hand, seized the butt of his revolver, drew it swiftly and effortlessly, and pointed it directly at Brice’s gut.

“Police officer,” he said. “I want to ask you some questions about . . .”

The greasy skewer struck his gun hand like a sword, whipping down fiercely across the knuckles. He whirled toward the counter as the skewer came down again, striking him hard across the wrist, knocking the gun to the floor. In that instant Brice threw the full weight of his shoulder and arm into a punch that caught Kling close to his Adam’s apple. Three things flashed through his mind in the next three seconds. First, he realized that if Brice’s punch had landed an inch to the right, he would now be dead. Which meant that Brice had no compunctions about sending him home in a basket. Next he realized, too late, that Brice had asked the man behind the counter to “look who’s here, Al.” And then he realized, also too late, that the super had said, “Brice’s brother works there.” His right wrist aching, the three brilliant flashes sputtering out by the time the fourth desperate second ticked by, he backed toward the door and prepared to defend himself with his one good hand, that one being the left and not too terribly good at all. Five seconds gone since Al had hit him on the hand (probably breaking something, the son of a bitch) and Pete had hit him in the throat. Al was now lifting the counter top and coming out front to assist his brother, the idea probably having occurred to both of them that, whereas it was not bad sport to kick around a jerk who was chasing after Frank Richmond’s girl, it was bad news to discover that the jerk was a cop, and worse news to let him out of here alive.

The chances of getting out of here alive seemed exceedingly slim to Detective Bert Kling. Seven seconds gone now, ticking by with amazing swiftness as they closed in on him. This was a neighborhood where people got stomped into the sidewalk every day of the week and nary a soul ever paused to tip his hat or mutter a “how-de-do” to the bleeding victim. Pete and Al could with immunity take Kling apart in the next seven seconds, put him on one of their chicken skewers, hang him on the spit, turn him and baste him in his own juices, and sell him later for sixty-nine cents a pound. Unless he could think of something clever.

He could not seem to think of a single clever thing.

Except maybe you shouldn’t leave your undefended gun hand within striking distance of a brother with a greased skewer.

His gun was on the floor in the corner now, too far to reach.

(Eight seconds.)

The skewers were behind the counter, impossible to grab.

(Nine seconds.)

Pete was directly ahead of him, maneuvering for a punch that would knock Kling’s head into the gutter outside. Al was closing in on the right, fists bunched.

(With a mighty leap, Detective Bert Kling sprang out of the pit.)

He wished he could spring out of the goddamn pit. He braced himself, feinted toward Pete, and then whirled suddenly to the right, where Al was moving in fast, and hit him with his left, hard and low, inches below the belt. Pete swung, and Kling dodged the blow, and then swiftly stepped behind the doubled-over Al, bringing his bunched fist down across the back of his neck in a rabbit punch that sent him sprawling flat across his own sawdust-covered floor.

One down, he thought, and turned just as Pete unleashed a haymaker that caught him on the side opposite the broken rib, thank God for small favors. He lurched back against the counter in pain, brought up his knee in an attempt to groin Pete, who was hip to the ways of the street and sidestepped gingerly while managing at the same time to clobber Kling on the cheek, bringing his fist straight down from above his head, as though he were holding a mallet in it.

I am going to get killed, Kling thought.

“Your brother’s dead,” he said.

He said the words suddenly and spontaneously, the first good idea he’d had all week. They stopped Pete cold in his tracks, with his fist pulled back for the blow that could have ended it all in the next thirty seconds, smashing either the bridge of Kling’s nose or his windpipe. Pete turned swiftly to look at his brother where he lay motionless in the sawdust. Kling knew a good thing when he saw one. He didn’t try to hit Pete again, he didn’t even try to kick him; he knew that any further attempts at trying to overpower him physically were doomed to end only one way, and he did not desire a little tag on his big toe. He dove headlong for his gun in the corner of the room, scooped it up in his left hand, the butt awkward and uncomfortable, rolled over, sat up, and curled his finger around the trigger as Pete turned toward him once again.

“Hold it, you son of a bitch!” Kling said.

Pete lunged across the room.

Kling squeezed the trigger once, and then again, aiming for Pete’s trunk, just as he had done on the police range so many times, the big target up there at the end of the range, the parts of the body marked with numerals for maximum lethal reward, five points for the head and throat, chest and abdomen, four for the shoulders, three for the arms, two for the legs. He scored a ten with Peter Brice, because both slugs caught him in the chest, one of them going directly through his heart and the other piercing his left lung.

Kling lowered his gun.

He sat on the floor in the corner of the room, and watched Pete’s blood oozing into the sawdust, and wiped sweat from his lip, and blinked, and then began crying because this was one hell of a fucking Christmas Eve, all right.

Carella had been parked across the street from The Chandeliers for close to two hours, waiting for Fletcher and Arlene to finish their dinner. It was now ten minutes to ten, and he was drowsy and discouraged and beginning to think the bug in the car wasn’t such a hot idea after all. On the way out to the restaurant, Fletcher and Arlene had not once mentioned Sarah or the plans for their impending marriage. The only remotely intimate thing they had discussed was receipt of the lingerie Fletcher had sent, which Arlene just adored, and which she planned to model for him later that night.

It was now later that night, and Carella was anxious to put them both to bed and get home to his family. When they finally came out of the restaurant and began walking toward Fletcher’s Oldsmobile, Carella actually uttered an audible “At last” and started his car. Fletcher started the Olds in silence, and then apparently waited in silence for the engine to warm before pulling out of the parking lot. Carella followed close behind, listening intently. Neither Fletcher nor Arlene had spoken a word since they entered the automobile. They proceeded east on Route 701 now, heading for the bridge, and still they said nothing. Carella thought at first that something was wrong with the equipment, and then he thought that Fletcher had tipped to this bug, too, and was deliberately maintaining silence, and then finally Arlene spoke and Carella knew just what had happened. The pair had argued in the restuarant, and Arlene had been smoldering until this moment when she could no longer contain her anger. The words burst into the stillness of Carella’s car as he followed close behind, Arlene shouting, Maybe you don’t want to marry me at all!

That’s ridiculous, Fletcher said.

Then why won’t you set a date? Arlene said.

I have set a date, Fletcher said.

You haven’t set a date. All you’ve done is say after the trial, after the trial. When after the trial?

I don’t know yet.

When the hell will you know, Gerry?

Don’t yell.

Maybe this whole damn thing has been a stall. Maybe you never planned to marry me.

You know that isn’t true, Arlene.

How do I know there really were separation papers?

There were. I told you there were.

Then why wouldn’t she sign them?

Because she loved me.

Bullshit.

She said she loved me.

If she loved you . . .

She did.

Then why did she do those horrible things?

I don’t know.

Because she was a whore, that’s why.

To make me pay, I think.

Is that why she showed you her little black book?

Yes, to make me pay.

No. Because she was a whore.

I guess. I guess that’s what she became.

Putting a little TG in her book every time she told you about a new one.

Yes.

A new one she’d fucked.

Yes.

Told Gerry, and marked a little TG in her book.

Yes, to make me pay.

A whore. You should have gone after her with detectives. Gotten pictures, threatened her, forced her to sign those damn . . .

No, I couldn’t have done that. It would have ruined me, Arl.

Your precious career.

Yes, my precious career.

They both fell silent again. They were approaching the bridge now. The silence persisted. Fletcher paid the toll, and then drove onto the River Highway, Carella following. They did not speak again until they were well into the city. Carella tried to stay close behind them, but on occasion the distance between the two cars lengthened and he lost some words in the conversation.

You know she had me in a bind, Fletcher said. You know that, Arlene.

I thought so. But now I’m not so sure anymore.

She wouldn’t sign the papers, and I ( ) adultery because ( ) have come out.

All right.

I thought ( ) perfectly clear, Arl.

And I thought ( )

I did everything I possibly could.

Yes, Gerry, but now she’s dead. So what’s your excuse now?

I have reasons for wanting to wait.

What reasons?

I told you.

I don’t recall your telling me . . .

I’m suspected of having killed her, goddamn it!

(Silence. Carella waited. Up ahead, Fletcher was making a left turn, off the highway. Carella stepped on the accelerator, not wanting to lose voice contact now.)

What difference does that make? Arlene asked.

None at all, I’m sure, Fletcher said. I’m sure you wouldn’t at all mind being married to a convicted murderer.

What are you talking about?

I’m talking about the possibility . . . never mind.

Let me hear it.

I said never mind.

I want to hear it.

All, right, Arlene. I’m talking about the possibility of someone accusing me of murder. And of having to stand trial for it.

That’s the most paranoid . . .

It’s not paranoid.

Then what is it? They’ve caught the murderer, they . . .

I’m only saying suppose. How could we get married if I killed her, if someone says I killed her?

No one has said it, Gerry.

Well, if someone should.

(Silence. Carella was dangerously close to Fletcher’s car now, and risking discovery. But he could not afford to miss a word at this point, even if he had to follow bumper-to-bumper. On the floor of his own car, the unwinding reel of tape recorded each word of the dialogue between Fletcher and Arlene, admissible evidence if ever Fletcher were charged and brought to trial. Carella held his breath and stayed glued to the car ahead. When Arlene spoke again, her voice was very low.)

You sound as if you really did do it.

You know Corwin did it.

Yes, I know that. That’s what . . . Gerry, I don’t understand this.

There’s nothing to understand.

Then why . . . if you didn’t kill her, why are you so worried about being accused and standing trial and . . .

Someone could make a good case for it.

For what?

Someone could say I killed her.

Why would anyone do that? They know that Corwin . . .

They could say I came into the apartment and . . . they could say she was still alive when I came into the apartment.

Was she?

They could say it.

But who cares what they . . . ?

They could say the knife was still in her and I . . . I came in and found her that way and . . . finished her off.

Why would you do that?

To end it.

You wouldn’t kill anyone, Gerry.

No.

Then why are you even suggesting such a terrible thing?

If she wanted it . . . if someone accused me . . . if someone said I’d done it . . . that I’d finished the job, pulled the knife across her belly . . . they could claim she asked me to do it.

What are you saying, Gerry?

Don’t you see?

No. I don’t.

I’m trying to explain that Sarah might have . . .

Gerry, I don’t think I want to know.

I’m trying to tell you . . .

No, I don’t want to know. Please, Gerry, you’re frightening me, I really don’t want to . . .

Listen to me, goddamn it! I’m trying to explain what might have happened, is that so fucking hard to accept? That she might have asked me to kill her?

Gerry, please, I . . .

I wanted to call the hospital, I was ready to call the hospital, don’t you think I could see she wasn’t fatally stabbed?

Gerry, Gerry, please . . .

She begged me to kill her, Arlene, she begged me to end it for her, she . . . damn it, can’t either of you understand that? I tried to show him, I took him to all the places, I thought he was a man who’d understand. For Christ’s sake, is it that difficult?

Oh my God, my God, did you kill her?

What?

Did you kill Sarah?

No. Not Sarah. Only the woman she’d become, the slut I’d forced her to become. She was Sadie, you see. When I killed her. When she died.

Oh my God, Arlene said, and Carella nodded in weary acceptance. He felt neither elated nor triumphant. As he followed Fletcher’s car into the curb before Arlene’s building, he experienced only a familiar nagging sense of repetition and despair. Fletcher was coming out of his car now, walking around to the curb side, opening the door for Arlene, who took his hand and stepped onto the sidewalk, weeping. Carella intercepted them before they reached the front door of the building. Quietly, he charged Fletcher with the murder of his wife, and made the arrest without resistance.

Fletcher did not seem at all surprised.

And so it was finished, or at least Carella thought it was.

In the silence of his living room, the children already asleep, Teddy wearing a long white hostess gown that reflected the colored lights of the Christmas tree, he put his arm around her and relaxed for the first time that day. The telephone rang at a quarter past one. He went into the kitchen, catching the phone on the third ring, hoping the children had not been awakened.

“Hello?” he said.

“Steve?”

He recognized the lieutenant’s voice at once. “Yes, Pete,” he said.

“I just got a call from Calcutta,” Byrnes said.

“Mmm?”

“Ralph Corwin hanged himself in his cell, just after midnight. Must have done it while we were still taking Fletcher’s confession in the squadroom.”

Carella was silent.

“Steve?”

“Yeah, Pete.”

“Nothing,” Byrnes said, and hung up.

Carella stood with the dead phone in his hand for several seconds, and then replaced it on the hook. He looked into the living room, where the lights of the tree glowed warmly, and he thought of a despairing junkie in a prison cell, who had taken his own life without ever having known he had not taken the life of another.

It was Christmas Day.

Sometimes, none of it made any goddamn sense at all.

The End