He followed her for two blocks, to the corner of Hopper and Matthews. Then suddenly, without breaking her stride for an instant, without looking up at the numerals over the door — she was surely familiar with the address — she walked into one of the old buildings that had earlier been factories but which now housed tenants paying astronomical rents. He gave her a minute or two, checked out the hallway to make sure it was empty, and then entered the lobby. The walls were painted a dark green. There was no elevator in the building, only a set of iron-runged steps at the end of the lobby, reminiscent of the steps that climbed to the squadroom at the station house uptown. He listened, the way a good cop was taught to do, and heard the faint clatter of her heels somewhere on the iron rungs above. There was a directory of tenants in the lobby. He scanned it briefly, afraid Augusta might suddenly decide to reverse her direction and come down to discover him in the lobby.
He went outside again, and stood on the sidewalk. In addition to the street-level floor of the building, there were five floors above it. Four windows fronted the street on each of these upper stories, but he supposed most of the loft space was divided, and he couldn’t even guess how many apartments there might be. He jotted the address into his notebook — 641 Hopper Street — and then went into a luncheonette on the corner across the street, and sat eating a soggy hamburger and drinking a lukewarm egg cream while he watched the building. The clock on the grease-spattered wall read 12:40 p.m. He checked the time against his own watch.
It was one o’clock when he ordered another egg cream. It was one-thirty when he asked the counterman for an iced coffee. Augusta did not come out of the building until a quarter to two. She walked immediately to the curb and signaled to a cruising taxi. Kling finished his coffee, and then went into the building again and copied down all the names on the lobby directory. Six of them in all. Six suspects. There was no rush now; he suspected the damage had already been done. He took the subway uptown to Jefferson and Wyatt, where his wife had a two o’clock appointment at Fashion Flair. He waited outside on the sidewalk across the street from the building till she emerged at a little past five, and then followed her on foot crosstown to her agency on Carrington Street. He watched as she climbed the steps to the first floor of the narrow building.
Then he took the subway again, and went home.
Jonathan Newman was wearing only slacks when he admitted Carella and Genero to his penthouse suite at the Pierpont Hotel. He told them he had just taken a cold shower, and was still suffocating from the damn heat in this city. The air conditioner seemed to be set very low; the apartment was actually chilly. But Newman was sweating nonetheless, and Carella thought he understood why. He had never seen such a hairy man in his life. Newman was slightly taller than Carella himself, perhaps six-one or six-two, with a head of unruly red hair, a shaggy red beard covering his upper lip, jowls, and chin, and a mat of thick red hair on his chest, back, and arms. He rather resembled an orangutan, with the same dense fur and the same coloration. He shambled across the room to where a drink was in a glass of melting ice cubes, and then asked the detectives if they’d care to have anything. Both declined.
“When’s this heat supposed to break?” he asked.
“Next week sometime,” Carella said. “Maybe.”
“It was beautiful when I left San Fran,” he said. “We call it the air-conditioned city, you know. Good reason for that. Beautiful breezes all the time. How can anybody stand it here in the summer?”
“Well, you used to live here, didn’t you?” Carella said.
“Only till I got old enough to know better,” Newman said. “Actually, I got my Navy discharge out on the Coast, decided to stay there. Best decision I ever made in my life. You know what business I’m in out there?”
“No,” Genero said. “What?” He actually had an intelligent look on his face; Carella assumed he was fascinated by his first talking ape.
“Coffins,” Newman said.
“Coffins?” Genero said.
“Coffins,” Newman repeated. “I was in advertising when I joined the Navy, enlisted to get out of sleeping in the mud someplace, knew damn well I’d be drafted anyway if I didn’t make my move. Went in as an ensign, well, I was a graduate of Ramsey U here — do you know Ramsey U?”
“Yes,” Carella said.
“Yes,” Genero said, but he sounded doubtful.
“Got out of the Navy, and the first decision I made was to stay out there on the Coast. Then I asked myself what kind of business I wanted to go into. Advertising again? If I wanted to go back into advertising, I should’ve come back East, right? This is where advertising is. So I said No, not for me, not advertising again. So then I asked myself what it was that everybody sooner or later needed. You know what it was?”
“What was it?” Genero asked, even though he already knew the answer.
“Coffins,” Newman said. “Sooner or later, we all go to that great big ad agency in the sky, am I right? And we all need a coffin to ride when we make the big trip. That’s what I’m in out there. Coffins. I manufacture coffins.”
Carella said nothing.
“So here I am on business — well, part pleasure, I have to admit, you won’t tell Internal Revenue, will you? — and my damn-fool brother kills himself and ends up in a coffin I didn’t even make. Well, what’re you gonna do?” Newman said, and drained his glass and went to the wall bar for a refill. “Are you guys sure?” he asked.
“We’re on duty,” Genero said.
“So what?” Newman said.
Genero seemed tempted.
“No, thanks, we can’t,” Carella said. “When did you get here, Mr. Newman?”
“Twentieth of July. It was nice then, do you remember? Damn heat didn’t start till later. I can’t stand this heat. I really can’t stand it,” he said, and plopped four ice cubes into his glass.
“Been here since?”
“Yeah,” Newman said. He lifted a bottle of tonic water and splashed some of it over the gin and the cubes.
“Did you see your brother before his death?”
“Nope.”
“How come?”
“Didn’t like him very much.”
“Lots of people don’t like their brothers,” Genero said. He looked at Carella, and then shrugged.
“Not since he became a lush anyway,” Newman said.
“After your father died,” Carella said.
“Two years ago, right. Used to be a fairly decent guy before then, I mean if you can excuse what he did to Jessica.”
“What was that?”
“Well, you know. Married to her for such a short time, and then ditched her for Annie. Listen, Annie’s a better-looking broad, I’ll admit it. But you should never lose your head over a piece of tail, am I right? Jessica had it all over her, six ways from the middle. Have you met Jessica? She is some kind of woman, believe me. Captain in the Israeli Army — I think she’s got a kill record of seventeen Arabs. Great tits besides.”