The radio on Genero’s desk was silent, but that was only because Lieutenant Byrnes was back at work and in his office. The squadroom was thronged besides on that Monday morning with four other members of the squad who were at the moment planning a raid on a Culver Avenue shooting gallery. Ever since January, and on direct orders from the Commissioner himself, the cops of the Eight-Seven (and indeed every other precinct in the city) had been putting the heat on narcotics dealers; the gallery on Culver had been under surveillance since late February. It was now a known fact that junkies of every persuasion marched in and out of that doorway at 1124 Culver; the cops had parked a van purporting to be a bakery truck just across the street from the building, and they had home movies of virtually every known addict in the precinct. A bust would have been a simple thing. Trot up there to the third floor, round up all the junkies and the small-time pusher doling out the daily fixes, take them all to court, and get the meager sentences for what the cops were certain would be only small quantities of dope.
But at least once a month, the stream of junkies stopped entirely, the gallery upstairs apparently closed for business on those days. Or so the cops believed until their movies revealed certain foreign individuals of French extraction coming and going on the days the junkie traffic trickled off. It was their guess that on those days huge quantities of heroin or cocaine were exchanged for similarly huge quantities of dollars. In effect, the shooting gallery was a cover for a much bigger operation, the bad guys hoping the cops wouldn’t be interested in any penny-ante shit, and hoping further that the big-time dealing would go unnoticed in the rush of daily hand-to-mouth trade. Lieutenant Byrnes found it impossible to believe that a shooting gallery operating virtually in the open could be a cover for a multimillion-dollar narcotics operation. But Detective Meyer Meyer — who was in charge of the surveillance and the impending raid — figured the bad guys had only taken their cue from the CIA. Meyer maintained that no professional intelligence agency could be as blunderingly stupid as the CIA. The CIA had to be a cover for America’s real intelligence agency.
In much the same way, the guys buying narcotics from their Gallic cousins, must have figured that a small-time mom-and-pop dope store would be allowed to flourish unmolested when the cops had bigger fish to fry. The bigger fish, the cops now firmly believed, could be hooked on the third floor of 1124 Culver Avenue once a month, every month of the year. The raid was set for this Wednesday night, the thirteenth of August. The detectives were working out their strategy when the woman came up the iron-runged steps leading to the second floor of the station house, and paused just outside the slatted-rail divider that separated the squadroom from the corridor outside.
“Yes?” Carella said. “May I help you?”
She was a woman in her late thirties, he guessed, dressed entirely and suitably in summertime white — a white dress and white high-heeled pumps, a white shoulder-slung leather bag, a white carnation in her jet-black hair. She was tall and superbly tanned, her eyes the color of anthracite in a sharp-nosed Mediterranean face that could have belonged to a Spaniard or an Italian, a generous mouth with a beauty spot near the tapered corner of her lips.
“I am looking for the policeman investigating the death of Jeremiah Newman,” she said. She spoke with a distinctive foreign accent Carella couldn’t quite place. She appeared calm and unruffled, as though walking into a police station did not have the same disquieting effect on her that it had on most citizens, innocent or guilty.
“I’m Detective Carella,” he said. “I’m handling that case.”
“May I come in?” she asked.
“Yes, please,” he said, and rose from his desk, and came around the green filing cabinets to open the gate in the railing for her. Across the room, Genero looked up from where he was typing and scanned her head to toe, his eyes lingering on legs Carella now noticed were beautifully proportioned. She sat in the chair beside his desk, crossing her legs, and Genero could not resist a long low whistle. The woman seemed not to have heard it. At his own desk, surrounded by detectives listening to his game plan, Meyer looked up and glared at Genero, who shrugged and went back to his typing.
“I am Jessica Herzog,” the woman said. “I was once married to Jeremiah.”
“How do you do?” Carella said, and waited. Jessica looked around the squadroom, as though wanting to make certain of her surroundings before committing herself to anything further. Across the room, Genero looked up from his typing, studying her breasts this time, firm and full in the scoop-necked top of the white dress. A moment later, he picked up an eraser.
“I received a call from my brother on Saturday. He wanted to tell me about the funeral the next day,” Jessica said. “He thought I might want to attend. I could not, of course, attend. We have been divorced now for almost sixteen years it will be. I meant no disrespect, but clearly it would have been impossible.”
“Why do you say that, Miss Herzog?”
“Well, because of Anne, don’t you see?”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“It was for Anne that he left me all those years ago. I think it would have been an uncomfortable situation, don’t you think? To be there at his funeral? With his present wife, I mean?”
“Yes, I can see where—”
“So of course I said I could not go. I hope Martin understood.”
“Martin?” Carella said.
“Yes, my brother. He is the one who introduced me to Jeremiah when I first came here.”
“Excuse me, Miss Herzog, but where are you from originally?”
“Israel,” she said.
“Ah,” he said.
“I still have a terrible accent, I know.”
“No, no,” he said.
“Yes, I know, do not lie, please. I am here for nineteen years now and my English is still so bad. I came to sell bonds for my country, I was at the time a captain in the Israeli Army,” she said, and Carella remembered the way she had reconnoitered the squadroom just a few moments earlier, as though scouting for high ground. “Well, that was a long time ago, I was only twenty-two at the time. I have been living here since, but I go back every now and again to Tel Aviv. My mother still lives in Tel Aviv. All my friends are here now,” she said, “and of course my brother. It would be difficult to return there to live.”
“And you say you met Mr. Newman through your brother?”
“Yes, at a bond rally. And we fell in love and got married. Two years later, he met Anne, and he asked me for a divorce. Well, that is how it is sometimes, you know.”
“Yes,” Carella said, and wondered why she had come to the squadroom. He waited.
“My brother mentioned to me that Jeremiah had died of sleeping pills. He had taken too many sleeping pills.”
“Yes, that’s what the autopsy revealed.”
“Yes, but that is impossible, don’t you see?”
“Impossible? Why?”
“Well, I was only married to him for two years, you understand, but you come to know a person very well when you are living with him, and I can tell you Jeremiah would not have taken even one sleeping pill, never mind how many he is supposed to have taken.”
“Twenty-nine,” Carella said.
“Impossible,” she said. “Not Jeremiah.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“He had a terrible fear of drugs, do you see? He would not even take an aspirin if he had a headache. It was from when he was a teenager, and a doctor gave him penicillin tablets and he had a severe reaction and almost died. Believe me, Jeremiah would not have swallowed voluntarily any kind of pill. I know. I lived with him. Even an aspirin, believe me. He would rather have suffered through the night than take an aspirin. He told me it would make him throw up. So how can a man with such fear take so many pills to kill him?”