“If that’s how you wish to put it.”
“How do you wish to put it, Mr. Corbett?”
“It’s casual, yes.”
“How was your relationship with Craig?” Carella asked.
“Professional.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning he sent me a book, and I liked it and recommended a buy. I worked on it with him, and Harlow published it.”
“When was this?”
“We published it a year and a half ago. It was on our summer list.”
“When did the book come in?”
“About ten months before that.”
“Through an agent?”
“He has no agent. It came in addressed to an editor who was no longer with us. I recognized the name at once, of course, I’d read a couple of his novels in college.”
“But this was nonfiction.”
“Yes. A change of pace. Quite unlike anything he’d ever done before. I fell in love with it at once.”
“When you say you worked on it with him…”
“It didn’t require very much editing. Memory lapses—blue eyes on page twelve, green eyes on page thirty—some minor cutting here and there, but for the most part it was clean. I wish all my books were that clean.”
“And that was the extent of your relationship?”
“No, he was working on another book when…when he was killed. We’d had correspondence about it, and many, many phone calls. He was having a difficult time.”
“How about personal meetings?”
“Lunches, yes.”
“When was the last time?”
“Oh, two weeks ago, I would imagine.”
“Did he mention he was having difficulty with the new book?”
“Yes, that was why we met.”
“What did you advise him?”
“What can an editor advise? He’d had a dry spell before, between his last novel and Shades. I told him this one would pass, too.”
“Did he believe you?”
“He seemed to believe me.”
“Mr. Corbett,” Carella said, “there was a sheet of paper in Craig’s typewriter, and it seemed to me—I’m not an editor, I don’t know about such things—but it seemed like the beginning of a book. The opening paragraph, in fact.”
“I don’t think so, no,” Corbett said, shaking his head.
“I don’t remember it exactly, but I’m sure he wrote something about coming into a house for the first time…”
“Oh, yes. But you see, Greg was compiling a dossier of individual cases. About supposedly true supernatural happenings.”
“Supposedly true?”
“Well…you know,” Corbett said, and smiled. “What you saw in his typewriter may have been the beginning of just one chapter in the book.”
“How long had he been working on it?”
“For the past year or so.”
“How many chapters did he have?”
“Four.”
“In a year?”
“I told you he was having difficulty. He kept rewriting it over and over again. It simply wasn’t coming the way he wanted it to. Shades was a difficult act to follow, believe me. Greg wasn’t as familiar with the nonfiction form as he was with novels. Not as sure of his ground, do you know what I mean? Not even sure Shades wasn’t a fluke.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“He didn’t have to. The man was a quivering mass of insecurity.”
“Did he mention anything else that was troubling him?”
“Nothing.”
“No threatening letters or telephone calls?”
“Nothing.”
“Crank calls?”
“Every author on the face of the earth gets crank calls.”
“Did he mention any?”
“Not specifically, no. But I know he had his telephone number changed last month, so I’m assuming that was the case.”
“Okay, thanks,” Carella said. “Mr. Corbett, we may want to get in touch with you again, so…”
“Don’t leave town, huh?” Corbett said, and smiled. “I used to edit mysteries on my first job in publishing.”
“I wasn’t about to say that,” Carella said.
“What were you about to say?”
“I was about to say…” Carella hesitated. “That’s what I was about to say,” he said.
In the street outside, as they walked to where Carella had parked the car, Hawes said, “You weren’t really about to say that, were you?”
“Yeah, I was.”
“Don’t leave town?”
“Words to that effect.”
It was beginning to snow again. When they reached the car, Carella unlocked the door on the curb side and then went around to the driver’s side. Hawes leaned over to pull up the lock-release button. Carella got in behind the wheel, shoved up the visor with its hand-lettered city detective on duty sign, and then started the car. They sat waiting for the heater to throw some warmth into it.
“What do you think?” Hawes asked.
“I think we’ll have to check further with some of the other people at Harlow. I don’t like having only her word for where he was, do you?”
“No, but on the other hand, she’s a married woman who was getting laid in her own office, so it’s not likely she was lying, is it?”
“Unless this is something more than the casual fling he says it is, in which case she could have been lying to protect him.”
“Maybe,” Hawes said. “But I’ll tell you, Steve, it sounded casual to me.”
“How so?”
“If it isn’t casual, you don’t say you were fucking somebody. You say you were making love, or you were alone together, or you were intimate, or whatever. But you don’t say you were fucking somebody on her couch. That’s casual, Steve. Take it from me, that’s casual.”
“Okay, it’s casual.”
“And besides, if he went up there to kill Craig, why would he announce himself to the security guard? Why didn’t he say he was somebody from Time or Newsweek or Saturday Review? Why give his own name?”
“So Craig would let him in.”
“And so the security guard would remember it later on? No way.”
“Maybe he didn’t go up there with the specific purpose of killing him. Maybe they got into an argument…”
“The killer brought the knife with him,” Hawes said.
“Yeah,” Carella said.
“So?”
“So what the hell do I know?” Carella said, and wiped at the misting windshield with his gloved hand. He was thoughtful for a moment. The wipers snicked at the sticking snowflakes. “All right,” he said, “here’s what I think. I think we ought to call Jerry Mandel up there in Mount Semanee and get him back to the city right away. I want to run a lineup on Daniel Corbett. Meanwhile, since we’re so close to the courthouses down here, I think we ought to try for an order to toss his apartment. More than eighty-three thousand bucks’ worth of jewelry was stolen from Craig’s place, and that isn’t the kind of stuff you can get rid of in a minute, especially if you’re an editor and not familiar with fences. What do you say?”
“I say I’m hungry,” Hawes said.
They stopped for a quick lunch in a Chinese restaurant on Cowper Street and then drove over to the Criminal Courts Building on High Street. The Supreme Court judge to whom they presented their written request sounded dubious about granting them the order solely on the basis of a telephone conversation with a security guard, but Carella pointed out that there was reasonable cause to believe that someone who’d announced himself as Daniel Corbett had been at the scene during the hours the crime was committed and that time was of the essence in locating the stolen jewelry before it was disposed of. They argued it back and forth for perhaps fifteen minutes. At the end of that time the judge said, “Officer, I simply cannot agree that you have reasonable cause to conduct a search. Were I to grant this order, it would only be disputed later, when your case comes to trial. Application denied.” Carella mumbled to himself all the way out to the elevators and all the way down to the street. Hawes commented that one of the nice things about living in a democracy was that a citizen’s rights were so carefully protected, and Carella said, “A criminal’s rights, too,” and that was that.