“Anything missing from the desk?” Carella asked.
“May I open it?” she said. “Are your people through with it?”
“Go ahead,” Carella said.
She opened the drawer over the kneehole. A tray full of paper clips, rubber bands, and pencils. A staple remover. A box of key tags. A box of loose-leaf reinforcers. She closed that drawer and opened the file drawer to the right of the kneehole. It contained a sheaf of index folders lettered with names.
“Is that Craig’s handwriting?” Carella asked.
“Yes, shhhhh.”
“What are those names?”
“Ghosts,” she said, “shhhhhh,” and passed her hands lightly over the folders.
“He was searching here.”
“If he was,” Hawes said, “the lab boys’ll have prints.”
“Spirits do not leave fingerprints,” she said, and Carella thought, Nutty as a fruitcake.
“Those names…”
“Yes, ghosts,” she said. “Cases he planned to investigate for authenticity. Ever since he wrote Shades, he’s received calls and letters from all over the world, people reporting ghosts.”
“Anything missing that you can tell?” Hawes asked.
“No, but he was in here. I know he was in here.”
She closed the file drawer and opened the drawer above it. A ream of yellow Manila paper, nothing else. “Here, too,” she said. “Searching, seeking.”
“Did Mr. Craig ever keep anything of value in this desk?” Carella asked.
“His files are extremely valuable,” Hillary said, and abruptly opened her eyes.
“Maybe he was looking for something,” Hawes said. “Everything thrown around the room the way it was.”
“Yes, positively,” Hillary said.
“And found it,” Carella said.
Hillary looked at him.
“More than eighty-three thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry.”
“No, it wasn’t that. It was something else. I don’t know what,” she said, and passed her hands over the air as though trying to touch something the detectives could not see.
“Let’s check the kitchen,” Carella said. “I want you to tell us if any knives are missing.”
They checked the kitchen. On a magnetic wall rack, over the countertop, there were seven knives of varying sizes, one of them a ten-inch-long chef’s knife. According to Hillary, all the knives were there. They opened the cabinet drawers. She counted the table cutlery and the assortment of slicing and paring knives in the tray and told them nothing was missing.
“Then he came here with it,” Carella said.
Hillary closed her eyes again, and again spread her fingers wide, and pressed her palms against the empty air. “Looking for something,” she said. “Something.”
It was Cotton Hawes who caught the flak from Warren Esposito. The flak was perhaps well deserved; Hawes might have encountered the same indignation in any major city of the world, Peking and Moscow not excluded. Whatever the politics of a nation, the fact remained that if you knocked off somebody in the public eye, that murder was going to get more attention from the police than the murder of a wino or a scaly-legs hooker. Marian Esposito was neither a drunk nor a prostitute; she was, in fact, the secretary for a firm that specialized in selling gift items via direct mail. But there was no doubting the fact that she was somewhat less important than Gregory Craig, the best-selling writer. As her husband, Warren, paced the squadroom floor and raged at him, Hawes wondered whether they’d have given her case the same attention they were giving Craig’s had she been the one found with nineteen knife wounds in her and he’d been the one lying outside the building with a single stab wound. He decided the priorities would have been the same. Craig was “important”; Marian Esposito was only another corpse in a city that grew corpses like mushrooms.
“So what the hell are you doing?” Esposito shouted. He was a tall, hulking man with thick black hair and penetrating brown eyes. He was dressed on this Friday afternoon in blue jeans and a turtleneck sweater, a fleece-lined car coat open and flapping as he paced the floor. “There hasn’t even been a single cop to see me, for Christ’s sake! I had to make six phone calls before I discovered where they’d taken her! Is that what happens in this city? A woman is stabbed to death in front of her own apartment building and the police sweep her under the rug as if she never existed?”
“There’s a companion case,” Hawes said lamely.
“I don’t give a damn about your companion case!” Esposito shouted. “I want to know what you’re doing to find my wife’s murderer.”
“It’s our guess—”
“Guess?” Esposito said. “Is that what you’re doing up here? Guessing?”
“It’s our opinion—”
“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.”