Ten Plus One

1

Nobody thinks about death on a nice spring day.

Autumn is the time for dying, not spring. Autumn encourages macabre thoughts, invites the ghoulish imagination, tempts the death wish with sere and withered evidence of decay. Autumn is poetic as hell, brief, succinct, stinking of mold and ashes. People die a lot in autumn. Everything dies a lot in autumn.

Nothing is allowed to die in the spring. There’s a law that says so—Penal Law 5,006, DEATH IN THE SPRING: “Whosoever shall expire, or cause to expire, or conspire to expire, or harbor thoughts of expiring during the vernal equinox shall be guilty of a felony punishable by…” It goes on like that. It absolutely forbids death between March 21 and June 21, but there are lawbreakers everywhere, so what can you do?

The man who stepped out of the office building on Culver Avenue was about to become a lawbreaker. Normally, he was a good citizen, a hard-working man, a faithful husband, a devoted father, all that jazz. He had no intention of breaking the law. He didn’t know that death was forbidden by legislature, but even if he had known, it wouldn’t have concerned him, because death and dying were the furthest things from his mind on that bright spring day.

He was, in fact, thinking of life. He was thinking that next week was his birthday, that he would be forty-five years old, that he didn’t feel a day over thirty-five. He was thinking that the gray at his temples added a corny but distinguished touch to his noble head, that his shoulders were still broad, that his twice-weekly tennis sessions had eliminated an alarming little potbelly, and that he would lay his wife the moment he saw her, even if they’d never be allowed to eat at Schrafft’s again.

He was thinking all these things when the bullet sang across the open, fresh, spring air, spiraling wickedly, unglintingly, unerringly accurate as it traversed the area from the roof of the building across the street, high above the tops of the beetle cars and the heads of the ant people enjoying spring, fast, true, deadly, to the sidewalk opposite, to hit him between the eyes.

Only one thought flashed into his mind the second the bullet struck, and then all thought ceased. He felt a single sharp shattering blow between his eyes and he thought for a split instant that he had walked into the glass doors that separated the building from the street outside. The bullet splintered through bone, found the soft cushion of his brain, and then blew a hole the size of a baseball through the back of his head as it passed on through. Thought stopped, feeling stopped, there was suddenly nothing. The impact sent him reeling back three feet to collide with a young girl in a yellow cotton frock. He fell backward as the girl reflexively sidestepped, his body seemed to fold in on itself like a battered accordion, the tennis muscles relaxed, he was dead even before he hit the pavement. The large hole below his forehead leaked a tiny trickle of blood while the enormous exit hole at the base of his skull poured blood onto the sidewalk steadily, wetly, redly, a blinding, screaming red still hot with life, flowing swiftly to where the girl stood in shocked and dumb horror, watching the stream of blood as it rushed across the sidewalk.

She pulled back her foot just in time; in another moment, the blood would have touched the toe of her high-heeled pump.

Detective Steve Carella looked down at the body on the sidewalk, and wondered how it could be that ten minutes ago when he left the precinct there were no flies, it was too early in the season for flies, and that now, as he looked down at the dead man whose blood had stopped flowing, the pavement was covered with flies, there was a swarm of flies in the air, and another half-dozen flies were feeding at the open hole between the man’s eyes.

“Can’t you cover him up?” he snapped at one of the interns, and the intern shrugged and gestured innocently toward the police photographer who was putting another roll of film into his camera in the shade of the ambulance parked at the curb.

Without looking up, the photographer said, “Got to take his picture.”

Carella turned away from the body. He was a tall man with a fine-honed muscular appearance, high cheekbones, his brown hair cut sparingly, his brown eyes slanting peculiarly downward to give his face a pained and suffering oriental look as he turned into the sun, squinting, and walked to where the girl in the yellow frock was talking to several newspaper reporters.

“Later, boys,” he said, and the newspapermen, oddly quiescent in the presence of death, faded back into the circle of bystanders beyond the fringe of patrolmen.

“How do you feel?” Carella asked.

“All right. Gee,” she said. “Gee.”

“Do you feel like answering a few questions?”

“Sure. Gee, I never saw anything like this in my life before. Wait’ll I tell my husband.”

“What’s your name, ma’am?”

“Mrs. Irving Grant.”

“Your first name?”

“Lizanne. With a z.”

“And your address, Mrs. Grant?”

“1142 Grover.” She paused. “That’s below First.”

“Mmm,” Carella said, jotting the address into his book.

“I mean, in case you thought I lived in a Puerto Rican neighborhood.”

“No, I didn’t think that,” Carella said. He was suddenly very tired. There was a dead man covered with flies on the pavement, and a possible witness to the shooting was worried about whether or not he would think she lived in a Puerto Rican neighborhood. He wanted to explain that he didn’t give a damn whether she lived in a Puerto Rican neighborhood or a Czechoslovakian neighborhood, so long as she could tell him, with minimal emotion and maximal accuracy, what she had seen happen to the dead man, who no longer had a nationality. He gave her an over-the-pencil glance that he hoped was withering enough, and then he said, “Can you tell me what happened?”

“Who is he?” Mrs. Grant asked.

“We don’t know yet. We haven’t looked him over for identification. I’m waiting until the photographer is finished. Can you tell me what happened?”

“I was just walking along when he bumped into me.” She shrugged. “Then he fell down, and I looked at him, and he was bleeding. Gee, I’m telling you, I never…”

“What do you mean he bumped into you?”

“Well, he backed into me, really.”

“He’d been shot already, is that it? And he fell backward against you?”

“I don’t know if he’d been shot. I guess he had.”

“Well, did he stumble backward, or fall, or what?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t paying any attention. I was walking along, that’s all, when he bumped into me.”

“All right, Mrs. Grant, what happened then?”

“Then he just fell over backward. I moved away from him, and I looked down at him, and that was when I saw he was bleeding, and I knew he was hurt.”

“What’d you do?”

“I don’t know what I did. I just kept looking at him, I think.” She shook her head. “Wait’ll I tell my husband about this.”

“Did you hear the shot, Mrs. Grant?”

“No.”

“You’re certain you didn’t hear anything?”

“I was walking along thinking my own thoughts,” Mrs. Grant said. “I didn’t expect a thing like this to happen. I mean, maybe there was a shot, maybe there were six shots, I’m only saying I didn’t hear anything. He bumped into me all of a sudden, and then he fell down, and there was blood all over his face. Urghh.” Mrs. Grant grimaced at the memory.

“I don’t suppose you saw anyone with a gun?”

“A gun? No. A what? A gun? No, no.”

“I know you were busy thinking your own thoughts before the man got shot, but afterward, Mrs. Grant? Did you see anyone in one of the windows across the way, or perhaps on the roof of one of the buildings? Did you notice anything unusual?”

“I didn’t look around,” Mrs. Grant said. “I just kept staring at his face.”

“Did the man say anything to you before he fell to the sidewalk?”

“Not a word.”

“After he fell?”

“Nothing.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Grant,” Carella said. He smiled briefly but pleasantly and then closed his notebook.

“Is that all?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“But…” Mrs. Grant seemed disappointed. She gave a slight shrug.

“Yes, Mrs. Grant?”

“Well…won’t I have to come to the trial or anything?”

“I don’t think so, Mrs. Grant. Thank you very much.”

“Well…all right,” Mrs. Grant said, but she kept watching him in disappointment as he walked away from her and back to the body. The police photographer was dancing his intricate little jig around the corpse, snapping a picture, ejecting a flashbulb, inserting another flashbulb, and then twisting his body and bending his knees to get a shot from another angle. The two interns stood near the ambulance, casually smoking and chatting about an emergency tracheotomy one had performed the day before. Not three feet away from them, talking to a patrolman, stood detectives Monoghan and Monroe, who had been sent over as a matter of form from Homicide North. Carella watched the photographer for a moment, and then walked over to the two Homicide dicks.

“Well, well,” he said, “to what do we owe the honor?”

Monoghan, wearing a black topcoat and a black derby, looking like a Prohibition cop of the twenties, turned, looked at Carella, and then said to Monroe, “Why, it’s Carella of the Eight-Seven,” as though discovering him in great surprise.

“Upon my soul, I believe it is,” Monroe said, turning away from the patrolman. He, too, wore a black topcoat. A gray fedora was pushed onto the back of his head. He had a nervous tic near one eye that seemed to jerk magically whenever his partner spoke, as though a secret recording mechanism were at work behind his fleshy features.

“I hope we didn’t break in on your dinner or anything,” Carella said.

“What I like about the cops of the 87th,” Monoghan said while Monroe ticked, “is that they are always so concerned about their colleagues in the department.”

“Also, they are very funny,” Monroe observed.

“I am always amazed,” Monoghan said, putting his hands in his coat pockets, with the thumbs sticking out, the way he had seen it done by Sydney Greenstreet in a movie once, “by their concern and their good humor.”

“I am always amazed by it, too,” Monroe said.

“Who’s the stiff?” Monoghan asked.

“Don’t know yet,” Carella replied. “I’m waiting for the photographer to get finished there.”

“He takes a good picture,” Monroe said.

“He does portrait work on the side, I hear,” Monoghan said.

“You know what some of these guys are doing now?” Monroe asked.

“Which guys?” Monoghan said.

“The photographers. The ones they send out on homicides.”

“No. What are they doing?”

“They’re using these Polaroid cameras to take their pictures.”

“Yeah? What’s their hurry?”

“It ain’t that they’re in a hurry,” Monroe said, “it’s just that when you’re working with a stiff, like if the picture don’t turn out, you can’t call him back for another sitting, you know? By that time, the morgue’s got him all cut up. So this way, the photographers can see what they got right off.”

“Boy, what they won’t think of next, huh?” Monoghan said, properly awed. “So what’s new, Carella? How’s the skipper? How’re the boys?”

“Everybody’s fine,” Carella said.

“You working on anything interesting?”

“This ought to be an interesting one,” Carella said.

“Yeah, snipers are always interesting,” Monoghan agreed.

“We had a sniper once,” Monroe said, “when I was just made detective, working out of the Three-Nine. He used to shoot only old ladies. That was his specialty, little old ladies. He used to pick them off with a .45. He was a damn good shot, too. You remember Mickey Dunhill?”

“Yeah, I remember him,” Monoghan said.

“You remember Mickey Dunhill?” Monroe asked Carella.

“No. Who’s Mickey Dunhill?”

“Detective/first working out of the Three-Nine. Little tiny guy, he could knock you flat on your ass, strong as an ox. We dressed him up like a little old lady. That’s how we got the guy. He took a shot at Dunhill, and Dunhill pulled up his skirts and chased him up the roof and nearly beat him to death.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Monoghan said.

“We get the guy downtown, you know? The sniper? We put him in a chair, we try to find out how come he’s killing little old ladies. We figure maybe he’s got an Oedipus thing, you know? But…”

“A what?” Monoghan asked.

“Oedipus,” Monroe said. “He was this Greek king. He slept with his old lady.”

“That’s against the law,” Monoghan said.

“I know. Anyway, we figured maybe this sniper was nuts, you know? So we kept asking him how come little old ladies? Why don’t he pick on little old men? Or anybody, for that matter? How come he only plugs sweet little old ladies?”

“How come?” Monoghan asked.

Monroe shrugged. “He wouldn’t tell us.”

“What do you mean?”

“He wouldn’t tell us.”

“So what’s the point of your story?”

“What do you mean, what’s the point? Here was a guy, he used to go around shooting little old ladies!” Monroe said indignantly.

“Yeah? So?”

“So? So, what do you mean, what’s the point? That’s the point.”

“What about the other guy?”

“What guy?”

“The Greek guy,” Monoghan said impatiently.

“What Greek guy?”

“The king, the king. Didn’t you say there was a Greek king?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, he had nothing to do with it,” Monroe said.

“You shoulda looked him up, anyway,” Monoghan insisted. “You never know.”

“How could we look him up? He was legendary.”

“He was what?” Monoghan asked.

“Legendary. Legendary.”

Monoghan nodded knowingly. “Well, that could make a difference,” he said. “Still, it always pays to cover all the angles.”

“I think the photographer’s through,” Carella said.

“You need us?” Monroe asked.

“I don’t think so. I’ll send you a copy of the report.”

“You know what you should do?” Monroe said.

“What?”

“Dress up that big redhead you got up there, what’s his name?”

“Cotton Hawes?”

“Yeah, him. Dress him up like a little old lady. Maybe your sniper’ll take a crack at him.”

“He seems to favor middle-aged men,” Carella said.

Monoghan turned to look at the corpse. “He can’t be more than forty,” he said, slightly miffed. “Since when is forty middle-aged?”

“Mature, I meant,” Carella said.

“Yeah, that’s better,” Monoghan answered. “Send us two copies, we got a new regulation.”

“Come on, have a heart,” Carella said.

“Do I make the regulations?”

“You mean you don’t?” Carella said, looking surprised.

“There he goes again. See what I mean? You could wet your pants laughing. Send the two copies, Carella. See who gets the last laugh.”

“You think maybe the Greek guy did it?” Carella asked.

“What Greek guy?”

“I don’t know, the one Monroe was talking about.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Monoghan said. “A guy who’d sleep with his own mother is capable of anything.”

Smiling, Carella walked to where the photographer was packing his equipment. “You all finished here?” he asked.

“Be my guest,” the photographer said.

“I’ll want some of those pictures.”

“Sure. What precinct is this, anyway?”

“The Eight-Seven.”

“Right,” the photographer said. “And your name?”

“Carella. Steve Carella.”

“You’ll have them tomorrow.” He glanced at the sedan that pulled to the curb and then grinned and said, “Uh-oh.”

“What’s the matter?”

“The lab boys. Now you’ll have to wait till they get through.”

“All I want to do is find out who the hell the guy is,” Carella said, and then he turned toward the two technicians who stepped out of the automobile.