“Yes,” Genero said.
Carella looked at him.
“So my brother ditches the only good thing that ever happened to him and settles for the Great American Snow Queen instead. You probably met Annie. I’m sure you had to talk to her about my brother, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Genero said, and quickly looked at Carella to see if he’d said the wrong thing again. “Well, Detective Carella did,” he added.
“Coolest cucumber in the Western Hemisphere,” Newman said. “Ice in her veins. She may be great in bed — or so my brother told me when he first fell head over heels — but you’d never know it just looking at her. Anyway, let’s say she’s the greatest lay in the world, so what? My brother was a fool to give up what he had for two inches of real estate slit vertically up the middle.”
Genero looked as though he were trying to dope out the metaphor.
“Anyway, all water under the bridge. He’s dead now, God rest him merry,” Newman said, and raised his glass in a toast.
“I understand you saw Miss Herzog last week,” Carella said.
“Yeah, last Wednesday. We had lunch together.”
“And you were reminiscing about your brother’s aversion to pills.”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t like to take pills of any kind, is that it?”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“What do you make of his having swallowed twenty-nine of them?”
“Bullshit is what I make of it.”
“You don’t think he could’ve done it, huh?”
“No way.”
“When did you learn about his death, Mr. Newman?”
“Mom called me. Friday, it must’ve been. There was a message when I got back to the hotel — call Susan Newman, urgent. I knew right off it was my brother. It had to be dumb fucking Jerry falling out the window or something, dead-drunk. What else could be urgent in my mother’s life?”
“So what happened when you called her back?” Carella asked.
“She told me my brother was dead.”
“Did she mention that he’d died of an overdose of Seconal?”
“No, she didn’t learn that till the next day. I guess they hadn’t done the autopsy yet.”
“What was your reaction?”
“When I found out he was dead? You want the truth?”
“Please.”
“I thought good riddance.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He’d been nothing but a pain in the ass to all of us for the past two years. Me, my mother, Annie, all of us. Lorded it over all of us because he was the one who inherited that big chunk of money when my father died, thought he was better than—”
“What chunk of money?” Carella asked at once.
“Well, not money as such, not immediately after his death. But all those paintings, you know. He left all of them to Jerry. My father was one of the best abstract expressionists around. There had to be at least two hundred paintings stored in that big studio he used to work in. Jerry got all of them. That’s why he could afford to piss away his life.”
“What did he leave to your mother?”
“A farewell note,” Newman said, and smiled grimly.
“And you?”
“Zilch. I was the black sheep. I was the son who left home to manufacture coffins. My dear brother, Jerry, was the artiste, you know, following in our father’s footsteps. Churning out utter crap, as it was, but that didn’t disturb my father, oh no. Jerry was carrying on the great family tradition.”
“When you say a large chunk of money—”
“Millions,” Newman said.
“Who gets that now, would you know?”
“What do you mean?”
“All that money. Now that your brother’s dead.”
“I have no idea.”
“Did he leave a will?”
“I don’t know, you’d have to ask Annie.”
“I will. Thank you, Mr. Newman, you’ve been very helpful. When will you be going back to California?”
“In a day or so, few things here I’ve still got to wrap up.”
“Here’s my card, in case you need to get in touch with me,” Carella said.
“Why would I need to get in touch with you?” Newman asked, but he accepted the card.
In the street outside, as they walked toward where Carella had parked the unmarked sedan, he wished this wasn’t Kling’s day off. The way the squadroom schedule broke down, a man often found himself partnered with different detectives at any given time of the month. Carella would have settled for any one of them today. Even Parker, who was not Carella’s notion of an ideal cop, had years of experience, and could bring to any case the kind of street smarts often necessary to break it.
Police lore held that a good partner was a man you could count on in a shootout. That was why so many uniformed motor-patrol cops objected to having a woman officer riding with them; they figured she couldn’t be depended on if it came to going up against a heavy with a shotgun in his hands. But Carella had seen women on the range who could dot an i with a .38-caliber pistol. Sheer brute strength didn’t amount to a hill of beans in a shootout. Jessica Herzog had been a captain in the Israeli Army and, according to her brother-in-law, had killed seventeen men in combat. Would any cop on the force have objected to Jessica as a partner? He doubted it. But a partner was more than that, much more.
Genero — whose value in a shootout was debatable anyway; the man had once accidentally put a bullet in his own foot — simply did not provide the necessary “bounce” essential to an investigatory give-and-take. The bounce, Carella thought. That’s what I miss. The bounce.
“He noticed, too,” Genero said.
“What’s that?” Carella said.
“Her tits,” Genero said.
“Yeah,” Carella said.
He was thinking about the millions of dollars Jeremiah Newman had realized when he’d sold the paintings he’d inherited from his father. He was wondering whether a will had been filed with Probate, and was wondering further what the directives of that will might be. He was thinking a partner was somebody off whom you could bounce the facts, back and forth, mulling them, gnawing at them till they yielded a meaningful picture of what might have happened. He was thinking a partner was someone you could trust not only with your life but also with your wildest speculation. He was thinking a partner was someone who could risk telling you he suspected his wife was playing around. He was thinking a partner was someone who could openly sob in your presence, without fear you would laugh at him. He was wishing Kling was with him on this third day after the body of Jeremiah Newman had been found by his wife in an apartment as hot and as stinking as the corridors of Hell.
At dinner that night with Meyer and his wife, Kling and Augusta listened to Meyer telling two jokes, both of them about immigrants to this city. The first one was about a Russian immigrant who changed his name almost immediately after he arrived here. One day, he ran into a friend from his old village, and the man was surprised to learn that his former countryman was no longer Boris Rybinski but was now C. R. Stampler. “So from vhere did you gat this new name?” he asked. The newly arrived immigrant shrugged and said, “Tzimple. I am liffink now on Stampler Stritt, so dot’s from vhere I got the name.” His friend thought about this for a moment, and then said, “So vot does it stend for the C. R.?” The immigrant smiled broadly and said, “Corner Robertson.”