“What?”
“She said—”
“Oh, that rotten little bitch!” Augusta said, and angrily stubbed out the cigarette she’d just lighted. “Seen me around, seen me—”
“One guy in particular,” Kling said.
“Oh, one guy in particular, uh-huh.”
“That’s what she said.”
“Which guy?”
“I don’t know. You tell me, Gussie.”
“This is ridiculous,” Augusta said.
“I’m only repeating what she said.”
“And you believed her.”
“I... listened to her. Let’s put it that way.”
“But she couldn’t tell you which guy, in particular, I’m supposed to have been seen around town with, is that it, Bert?”
“No. I asked her, but—”
“Oh, you asked her. So you did believe her, right?”
“I was listening, Gussie.”
“To a juvenile delinquent who’s only been laid by every photographer in the entire city, and who has the gall—”
“Calm down,” he said.
“—to suggest that I’m—”
“Come on, Gussie.”
“I’ll kill that little bitch. I swear to God, I’ll kill her!”
“Then it isn’t true, right?”
“Right, it isn’t true. Did you think it was?”
“I guess so.”
“Thanks a lot,” Augusta said.
They were silent for several moments. He was thinking he would have to ask her about 641 Hopper Street, about why she’d gone this afternoon to 641 Hopper Street. He was thinking he’d done what Carella had suggested he should do, but he still wasn’t satisfied, he still didn’t have the answers that would set his mind at ease. He had only opened the can of peas, and now he had to spill them all over the bed.
“Gussie...” he said.
“I love you, Bert,” she said, “you know that.”
“I thought you did.”
“I do.”
“But you keep going places without me...”
“That was your idea, Bert, you know it was. You hate those parties.”
“Yeah, but still...”
“I won’t go anywhere else without you, okay?”
“Well...”
What about during the day? he wondered. What about when I’m out chasing some cheap thief, what about then? What about when I have the Night Watch? What will you be doing then? he wondered. The parties don’t mean a damn, he thought, except when you tell me you had dinner at a Chinese restaurant with a whole bunch of people, and Mr. Ah Wong himself tells me there was no redhead in Miss Mercier’s party. You should have been a brunette, Gussie, they don’t stand out as much in a crowd.
“I promise,” she said. “No place else without you. Now lie down.”
“There are still some things...”
“Lie down,” she said. “On your back.”
She pulled the sheet off of him.
“Just lie still,” she said.
“Gussie...”
“Quiet.”
“Honey...”
“Shh,” she said. “Shh, baby. I’m gonna take care of you. Poor little neglected darling, Mama’s gonna take good care of you,” she said, and her mouth descended hungrily.
When you’re working a homicide, or what may turn out to be a homicide, the schedule doesn’t mean a damn. You go to the office, and you nag the thing to death, around the clock sometimes, because the killer has an edge you do not have, and time only hones that edge to razor-thin sharpness.
Carella wasn’t due back at the office till four that Tuesday afternoon, but he came in at ten in the morning, and nobody working the Day Tour was surprised. Carella had caught a suicide last Friday, and almost every cop on the squad was experienced enough to know that a suicide without a suicide note was like a pastrami sandwich without a pickle. Carella had briefed Lieutenant Byrnes on the persistent problem of the heat in that damn apartment, and Byrnes had filled in the other men on the squad, just in case any of them might come up with a brilliant idea about why an air conditioner had been turned off during the middle of the hottest week that summer. None of them had any brilliant ideas.
They did, however, have a great deal of sympathy for Carella, who was here at the office at 10:00 a.m. on a day when he wasn’t supposed to arrive till four. They had all been in his boots before. They had all worked cases that drove them bananas, catching a few hours’ sleep at night on one of the Swing Room cots, working the damn case like a terrier with a half-dead rat, shaking it and shaking it and shaking it till it lay still and lifeless and ready to be buried as closed. They talked softly to Carella, and offered to bring him coffee from the Clerical Office. They knew he was extremely troubled. They thought he was only troubled about the absence of a suicide note and the further absence of air conditioning in an apartment as hot as the Sahara. They did not know, because Carella had not yet told Byrnes, and Byrnes had not in turn briefed the others on it, that Carella was also troubled about an apparent suicide victim who was supposed to have swallowed twenty-nine Seconal capsules when the man wouldn’t have been caught dead within a hundred yards of an aspirin.
The first call Carella made that morning was to the Police Lab downtown on High Street. The man he spoke to there was the technician who’d been in charge of the team that had gone through the Newman apartment. He was a detective 3rd/grade and his name was John Owenby. He started Carella’s day with a bang by telling him they weren’t ready with their reports yet.
“What do you mean?” Carella said. “This is Tuesday, you were there Friday morning, what’s the delay?”
“The heat is the delay,” Owenby said.
“What’s the heat got to do with...?”
“What have you got here, Carella?” Owenby said. “What does it look like you’ve got here.”
“A suicide,” Carella said.
“Right, a suicide.”
“Although there are circumstances—”
“Don’t give me with circumstances,” Owenby said, “this ain’t a court of law. You’ve got what looks like a suicide, you’ve got an empty bottle of Seconal—”
“Almost empty,” Carella said.
“On my block,” Owenby said, “if there’s only a single capsule left in a bottle, and a guy swallowed the rest of them, then the bottle is empty.”
“So what’s taking you so long up there? The M.E.’s already given us a cause of death, he had to carve up a whole damn corpse to—”
“Priorities,” Owenby said. “Maybe the M.E.’s got different priorities than we got up here. Let me tell you something about priorities, Carella. When we get—”
“Instead, why don’t you tell me whether you found any wild prints in that apartment?”
“We found a great many latents, and they are now with the Fingerprint Section. I spoke to them just this morning, and they haven’t had a chance to compare them yet against the dead man’s and the ones you sent down for his wife. It’s priorities, Carella. A homicide takes precedence over a suicide, an armed robbery takes precedence over a burglary, an assault takes precedence over spitting on the sidewalk. You know how many damn homicides we’ve got with this heat? This heat is bringing them out of the woodwork. And there’s supposed to be a full moon this Friday night. You know what that’ll do, don’t you? It’ll bring out every bedbug in the city. We’ll be jammed up here with more shootings, knifings, axings, stranglings, and suffocations than you can shake a stick at. You know what you can do with your measly suicide, don’t you? I’ll call you when the report is ready.”