'Are your parents alive, Miss Kingsley?' Carella asked.
'No. They were killed in an automobile accident in France, seven years ago. It was the first time they'd been to Europe. My mother had wanted to go all her life, and they'd finally saved enough money.' She shook her head and fell silent
'Do you have any other brothers or sisters?'
'No. I'm alone now,' she said.
Andrew Kingsley's room contained a dresser and a bed. There were very few articles of clothing in the dresser, and even fewer in the closet. There were no diaries, notebooks, appointment books, or calendars. A package of cheap stationery was in the top drawer of his dresser. One sheet of paper had been pulled from the others and a letter had been started. The beginning of the unfinished letter read:
Dear Lisa,
How are you, Golden Girl? I am enjoying every minute of being here. The only sad part is that you're not with me and I hope you've been giving some serious
'Is this your brother's handwriting?' Carella asked.
'Let me see,' Phyllis said, and looked at the page he extended. 'Yes.'
'Any idea who Lisa might be?'
'No.'
'Are these all his personal belongings?'
'Yes, he… didn't have very much.'
'Miss Kingsley,' Carella said, 'I don't wish to compound your grief, but if you could find it in yourself to go over to the hospital and identify your brother…'
'Yes, but… do I have to do it today? I'm not feeling too well. That's why I'm home from work.'
'What kind of work do you do?'
'I'm a bookkeeper. I felt something coming on last night, and I took some cold pills, and I'd probably have been all right if the heat hadn't gone on the fritz. I felt absolutely awful this morning. In fact, I was still in bed when my neighbor came in to show me the newspaper. And my brother's picture.'
'You can go over there tomorrow, if you like. If you're feeling better,' Carella said.
'Yes. Which hospital is it?'
'Buena Vista. On Culver Avenue.'
'Yes, all right,' she said. 'Was there anything else?'
'No. Thank you, Miss Kingsley, you've been very helpful.' As she led them to the front door, she said, 'He was a good boy. He hadn't found himself yet, but he was trying. I loved him a lot. I'm going to miss him. It's not that I saw him that often…' She began weeping then. She fumbled with the door lock, managed at last to twist it open, and then covered her nose and her mouth with one hand, the tears spilling from her eyes, and let them out of the apartment, and locked the door behind them. As they went down the steps they could hear her still weeping behind the locked door of the apartment in which she lived alone again.
The Isola telephone directory listed one David Harris on South Philby, and another on Avenue Y in the Quarter. A look at a street map of the city showed that Avenue Y crossed Audibon at one point, and they assumed that this was the address they wanted. They hit the apartment at close to noon. They knocked five times in succession before they got an answer, and then the voice was muffled, as though it were coming from someplace deep inside the apartment. They knocked again.
'Okay, okay,' a voice shouted.
They heard footsteps approaching the door.
'Who is it?' the voice asked.
'Police,' Kling said. 'Want to open up, please?'
They were totally unprepared for what happened next.
If they considered Harris a possible suspect, it was only because Phyllis had described him as a violent person. Other than that, they had no reason to believe that he had killed six people. They were here to ask questions about the extent of his relationship with Kingsley. They were here, too, because Harris was the only link to the life Andrew Kingsley was living outside his sister's apartment. They wanted to know what, if anything, Harris could tell them about that life, in the hope that the information would shed some light on how or why Kingsley had ended up dead in a ditch with five other people. Their intentions were peaceful.
They changed their minds in the next ten seconds.
In the next ten seconds, or eight seconds, or six seconds, or however long it took the person behind the door to squeeze the trigger of a gun three times in rapid succession, they changed their minds about peaceful intentions, suspects, and laws that prohibited the kicking-in of doors. The explosions were shockingly loud, the wood paneling on the door shattered, the bullets struck the plaster wall opposite and began ricocheting wildly in the narrow corridor. Kling and Carella were already on the floor. Carella's pistol was in his hand, and Kling's was coming out of its holster. Three more shots splintered the wooden door, buzzed overhead, whistled in ricochet.
'That's six,' Carella said.
He scrambled to one side of the door and got to his feet. Kling, following his suit, crawled to the other side of the door and stood up. They looked across the door at each other, and hesitated, only because the decision they made in the next several seconds could cost either one of them his life. Six shots had been fired. Had the man inside exhausted the ammunition in a six-shot revolver, and was he now reloading? Or was he armed with an automatic, some of which had a capacity of eleven cartridges? Carella heard his watch ticking. If he waited any longer, the man would have reloaded even if he were toting a revolver. He made his move instantly, and Kling picked up on it like a quarterback following his blocker. Carella moved swiftly to the wall opposite the door, put his back against it for support and leverage, lifted his knee like a piston, and kicked out flat-footed at the lock. The lock sprang on the first kick, and Carella rushed forward at once, following the door as it opened into the room, Kling peeling off immediately behind him as he passed the doorjamb.
A huge and hugely handsome man was inserting a cartridge into the cylinder of what looked like a Colt .38. He was standing about five feet from the door, and he was wearing only pajama bottoms, and the moment Carella and Kling burst into the room, he dropped the cartridges he was holding in the palm of his left hand and swung the gun hand into position. Carella, because he had learned over the years that yelling had more effect than whispering, shouted 'Drop it!' and right behind him Kling yelled 'Drop the gun!' and the man, who they assumed was Harris, hesitated a moment, and looked from one to the other of them, and made his own decision in the nick of time because each of the cops would have given him only another second before they shot him down where he stood. He dropped the gun. It clattered to the floor. He was wearing only pajama bottoms, but they threw him up against the wall anyway, and tossed him, and then slapped him into handcuffs.
They were both breathing very hard.
Chapter Three
I don't read nothing.
I don't have to read nothing. The clique has been mentioned a couple of times in the papers, and there's always reporters up here nosing around. But I don't talk to reporters, and I don't read what they write. That way I can keep cool. Whenever we have a meeting, I'm the coolest man in the room. That's because my head ain't cluttered. I hardly ever go to the flicks or watch television, either, except for football. I like football. I like to figure out the plays. It's like figuring out life, you know what I mean? Those guys down there on the field are thinking every minute, and they're alert to danger, and they react automatically. Before I graduated from Whitman, which is the high school over on Crestview, I was on the football team. That's the only decent thing I ever got out of that school, being on the team. I wasn't the quarterback or nothing, I was just in the line. I'm a big guy, you know, and I was even huskier then, when I was a kid. That always stuck with me, my experience on the football team. Watching the games on television relaxes me and helps me make decisions. Reading only gets me confused. A person has got to keep a clear head all the time.