“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.
They struck out with Jerry Mandel as well. A call to the Three Oaks Lodge in Mount Semanee informed them that he had checked out that morning, looking for better skiing conditions elsewhere. Carella told the desk clerk that if Mandel wanted snow, they were up to their eyeballs in it right here in the city. By then six inches had fallen, and it was still coming down. The clerk said, “Ship some of it up here, we can use it.”
Carella hung up.
4
The first of the crank calls came at 2:30 that afternoon, proving to Carella’s satisfaction that not only every author on the face of the earth received them, but perhaps every cop as well. The caller was a woman who said her name was Miss Betty Aldershot, and she said she lived at 782 Jackson, just across the street from the Harborview complex. She said that at exactly twenty-five minutes to 7:00 on Thursday night, she’d been looking through her window at the street below when she saw a man and a woman struggling in the snow. Carella did not know this was a crank call; not just yet he didn’t. He shoved a pad into place on his desk and picked up a pencil.
“Yes, Miss Aldershot, I’m listening,” he said. “Can you describe the man to me?”
“He was Superman,” she said.
“Superman?”
“Yes. He was wearing blue underwear and a red cape.”
“I see,” Carella said.
“He took out a big red penis and stuck it in her.”
“I see.”
“A superman penis,” she said.
“Uh-huh. Well, Mrs. Aldershot, thank you for—”
“Then he flew away.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Up over the buildings. It was still hanging out.”
“Uh-huh. Well, fine, thanks a lot.”
“You’ll never get him,” she said, and began cackling. “He can go faster than a speeding bullet,” and she hung up.
“Who was that?” Meyer Meyer said from his desk. He was wearing the hat he had taken to wearing indoors and out, a checked deerstalker that hid his bald head and made him feel like Sherlock Holmes. The men in the squadroom had been speculating only a week ago about whether or not he wore it to bed. Hal Willis suggested that Meyer’s wife, Sarah, liked to get shtupped by baldheaded men wearing deerstalker hats. Deerstalker hats and black garters, Bert Kling said. Nothing else. Just the deerstalker hat and the black garters. And a big hard-on, Hawes said. Very funny, Meyer said.
“That was Superman’s mother,” Carella said.
“Yeah? How’s she doing?”
“Terrific. I’ve been trying to reach Danny Gimp. Has he changed his number or something?”
“Not that I know of,” Meyer said. “Listen, what are we going to do about Monday?”
“I expect to crack this case by midnight tonight,” Carella said.
“Sure, you and Superman. Seriously. If you plan to be schlepping all over the city, then let me have Hanukkah.”
“Give me till midnight,” Carella said, and tried Danny Gimp’s number again. Still no answer. He disliked doing business with Fats Donner, but there was more than eighty-three thousand dollars’ worth of hot jewels floating around out there in the city, and such a haul might not have gone unnoticed in the underworld. He dialed Donner’s home number and listened to it ringing on the other end.
“Donner,” a voice said.
“Fats, this is Detective Carella.”
“Hey, how are you?” Donner said. “What’s up?” His voice was unctuous and oily; it conjured for Carella the mountainous, blubbery man who was Hal Willis’s favorite informer—but that was only because Willis had enough on him to send him away for the next twenty years. Fats Donner had a penchant for young girls, a charming obsession that caused him constantly to skirt the thin ice outside the law. Carella visualized his thick fingers holding the telephone receiver; he imagined those same fingers on the budding breasts of a thirteen-year-old. The man revolted him, but murder revolted him more.
“Something like eighty-three thousand dollars in jewelry was stolen Thursday night during the commission of a homicide,” Carella said. “Hear anything about it?”
Donner whistled softly. Or perhaps it was only a wheeze. “What kind of stuff?” he asked.
“A mixed bag, I’ll read you the list in a minute. In the meantime, has there been any rumble on it?”
“Nothing I heard,” Donner said. “Thursday night, you say?”
“The twenty-first.”
“This is Saturday. Could be it’s already been fenced.”
“Could be.”
“Let me go on the earie,” Donner said. “This’ll cost you, though.”
“You can discuss price with Willis,” Carella said.
“Willis is a tightwad. This is Christmastime, I got presents to buy. I’m human, too, you know. You’re asking me to go out in the snow and listen around when I should be home instead, putting up my tree.”