“Oh, now it’s an opinion.”
“Mr. Esposito,” Hawes said, “we think the person who killed Gregory Craig only accidentally killed your wife. We think he may have been—”
“Accidentally? Is it an accident when somebody sticks a knife in a woman’s heart? Jesus Christ!”
“Perhaps that was an unfortunate choice of words,” Hawes said.
“Yes, perhaps,” Esposito said icily. “My wife is dead. Somebody killed her. You have no real reason to believe it was the same person who killed that writer on the third floor. No real reason at all. But he’s a celebrity, right? So you’re concentrating all your efforts on him, and meanwhile, whoever killed Marian is running around loose someplace out there,” he said, and whirled and pointed toward the windows, and then swung around to face Hawes again, “and I can’t even find out where her body is so I can make funeral arrangements.”
“She’s at the Buena Vista Morgue,” Hawes said. “They’re finished with the autopsy. You can—”
“Yes, I know where she is. I know now, after six phone calls and a runaround from everybody in the Police Department. Who do you have answering your phones up here? Mongolian idiots? The first two times I called no one had even heard of my wife! Marian Esposito, sir? Who’s that, sir? Are you calling to report a crime, sir? You’d think somebody’s goddamn bicycle was stolen, instead of—”
“Most calls to the police are handled downtown at Communications,” Hawes said. “I can understand your anger, Mr. Esposito, but you can’t really expect a dispatcher, who handles hundreds of calls every hour, to know the intimate details of—”
“Okay, who does know the intimate details?” Esposito said. “Do you know them? They told me downstairs that you’re the detective handling my wife’s case. So, all right, what are you—?”
“My partner and I, yes,” Hawes said.
“So what the hell are you doing?” Esposito said. “She was killed yesterday. Have you got any leads, do you even know where to start?”
“We start the same way each time,” Hawes said. “We start the way you yourself would start, Mr. Esposito. We have a corpse—in this case, two corpses—and we don’t know who made it a corpse, and we try to find out. It’s not like in the movies or on television. We don’t ask trick questions, and we don’t get sudden flashes of insight. We do the legwork, we track down everything we’ve got, however unimportant it may seem, and we try to find out why. Not who, Mr. Esposito, we’re not in the whodunit business here. There are no mysteries in police work. There are only crimes and the person or persons who committed those crimes. With an armed robbery, we know the why even before we answer the telephone. With a murder, if we can find out why, we can often find out who—if we get lucky. We’ve got three hundred unsolved murders in the Open File right this minute. Next year we may crack a half dozen of them—if we get lucky. If not, the murderer will stay loose out there someplace”—and here he pointed to the windows, as Esposito had done earlier—“and we’ll never get him. Murder is a one-shot crime except where the killer is a lunatic or a criminal who kills in the commission of another felony. Your average murderer kills once, and never again. Either we catch him and put him away, and he never gets the chance to kill again, or else he folds his tent and disappears.”
Esposito was staring at him.
“I’m sorry,” Hawes said. “I didn’t mean to make a speech. We’re aware of your wife, Mr. Esposito, we are very much aware of her. But we feel the primary murder was the one in Apartment 304, and that’s where we’re starting. When we get Gregory Craig’s murderer, we’ll also have the person who killed your wife. That’s what we feel.”
“What if you’re wrong?” Esposito said. His anger was gone; he stood there with his hands in the pockets of the fleece-lined coat and searched Hawes’s face for some reassurance.
“If we’re wrong, we’ll start all over again. From the beginning,” Hawes said, and hoped to Christ they were not wrong.
The call from Jerry Mandel, the schussing security guard, came just as Carella and Hawes were getting ready to go home. They had by then had a fruitless meeting with Lieutenant Byrnes, who told them he positively could not double-team his men at Christmastime and advised that they conduct the door-to-door canvass of Harborview all by their lonesomes even if it took till St. Swithin’s Day, whenever that was. He informed them, besides, that he had received a call from the attorney of one Warren Esposito, who claimed the murder of Gregory Craig was receiving preferential consideration over the murder of his client’s wife, and if some people didn’t start shaking their asses, they’d be hearing from a friend of the lawyer, who only just happened to work downtown in the district attorney’s office. Byrnes reminded them that in this fair city murder was perhaps the one great equalizer and that regardless of race, religion, gender, or occupation, one corpse was to be treated exactly as the next corpse—an admonition both Carella and Hawes accepted with a bit of salt.
They had next received the autopsy reports on both Gregory Craig and Marian Esposito, but those learned medical treatises told them hardly anything they did not already know. They would have turned in their shields at once had they not at least suspected that the respective causes of death were multiple stab wounds in the case of Gregory Craig and a single stab wound in the case of Marian Esposito. The medical examiners were not paid to make guesses—not anywhere in the linked reports was there the slightest speculation that the same instrument might have been used in both murders. The reports did tell them that Gregory Craig had been drinking before his murder; the alcoholic concentration in the brain was 16 percent, and the milligrams of ethyl alcohol per milliliter of blood were 2.3. The brain analysis indicated that Craig had reached that stage of comparative intoxication in which “less sense of care” had been the physiologic effect. The blood analysis indicated that he had been “definitely intoxicated.” They made a note to check with the Spook—they had already begun calling her that—about whether Craig habitually drank while he worked. Carella remembered the two clean glasses alongside the decanter in the living room and wondered now whether the killer had washed them after the murder. The list of articles found in the bedroom did not include either a whiskey bottle or a glass.
The call from Jerry Mandel came at 6:20 P.M. Carella was just taking his .38 Chiefs Special from the file drawer of his desk, preparatory to clipping it to his belt, when the phone rang. He snatched the receiver from its cradle and glanced up at the clock. He had been working the case since 8:00 this morning, and there was nothing more he could do on it today, unless he felt like rapping on the sixty doors in Harborview, which he did not feel like doing till morning.
“87th Squad, Carella,” he said.
“May I please speak to the detective handling the murders at Harborview?” the voice said.
“I’m the detective,” Carella said.
“This is Jerry Mandel. I heard on the radio up here—”
“Yes, Mr. Mandel,” Carella said at once.
“Yes, that Mr. Craig was killed, so I called the building to find out what happened. I talked to Jimmy Karlson on the six to midnight, and he said you people were trying to locate me. So here I am.”
“Good, I’m glad you called, Mr. Mandel. Were you working the noon to six yesterday?”