“Better take a look at this,” Kling said. “Found it on the bathroom floor.”
“I was just about to tag it,” the tech said. He was wearing white cotton gloves, and holding a small plastic bottle in his right hand. There was only one gelatin capsule in the bottle. He held it up so that Carella could read the labeclass="underline"
Carella jotted down the name and telephone number of the dispensing pharmacy and beneath that the name of the doctor. He was putting his notebook back in his pocket when the M.E. came out of the apartment.
“You can ventilate whenever you want to,” he said.
“What’ve we got?” Carella asked.
“No visible wounds, cause of death’ll have to wait till we open him up.”
“Fucking temperature in there,” the tech said, “I wouldn’t be surprised he died of heat stroke.”
It was almost noon when they started back for the station house. In this city, homicides and suicides were treated in exactly the same way, and so — still lacking evidence of either — they had made their drawings of the scene, and talked to the other tenants on the sixth floor and the doorman on duty in the lobby, and had learned only that Anne Newman had indeed left for someplace on the first of August, and that no one had seen her husband, Jerry, for the past week or so. According to the tenants and the doorman, this wasn’t particularly unusuaclass="underline" Jerry Newman was a freelance commercial artist who worked out of his own apartment and who sometimes locked himself in for days while trying to meet an illustration deadline.
The car windows were open, the heat ballooned around the two men as Carella edged the vehicle through the heavy lunch-hour traffic. He glanced sidelong at Kling, who was staring straight ahead through the windshield, and then said, “Tell me.”
“I’m not sure I want to talk about it,” Kling said.
“Then why’d you bring it up?”
“’Cause it’s been driving me crazy for the past month.”
“Let’s start from the beginning, okay?” Carella said.
The beginning, as Kling painfully and haltingly told it, had been on the Fourth of July, when he and his wife, Augusta, were invited out to Sands Spit for the weekend. Their host was one of the photographers with whom Augusta had worked many times in the past. Carella, listening, remembered the throng of photographers, agents, and professional models, like Augusta, who had been guests at their wedding almost four years ago. He preferred not to dwell too often on that day because it had culminated in the abduction of Augusta by a lunatic who’d fanatically followed her career over the years and who had made a virtual shrine of the apartment in which he’d kept her captive for three days.
“...on the beach out there in Westphalia,” Kling was saying. “Beautiful house set on the dunes, two guest rooms. We went out on the third, and there was a big party the next day, models, photographers... well, you know the crowd Gussie likes to run with. That was when I got the first inkling, at the party.”
He had never felt too terribly close to his wife’s friends and associates, Kling said; they had, in fact, had some big arguments in the past over what he called her “Tinsel Crowd.” He supposed much of his discomfort had to do with the fact that as a detective/3rd he was earning $24,600 a year, whereas his wife was earning $100 an hour as a top fashion model; the joint IRS return they’d filed in April had listed their combined incomes as a bit more than $100,000 for the previous year. Moreover, most of Augusta’s friends were also earning that kind of money, and whereas she felt no qualms about inviting eight or ten of them for dinner at any of the city’s most expensive restaurants and signing for the tab afterward (“She keeps telling me they’re business associates, it’s all deductible,” Kling said), he always felt somewhat inadequate at such feasts, something like a poor relative visiting a rich city cousin, or — worse — something like a kept man. Kling himself preferred small dinner parties at their apartment with friends of his from the police force, people like Carella and his wife, Teddy, or Cotton Hawes and any one of his dozens of girlfriends, or Artie and Connie Brown, or Meyer Meyer and his wife, Sarah, people he knew and liked, people he could feel relaxed with.
The party out there on the beach in Westphalia, some hundred and thirty miles from the city in Sagamore County, was pretty much the same as all the parties Augusta dragged him to in the city. She’d get through with a modeling job at four, five in the afternoon, and if he’d been working the Day Tour, he’d be off at four and would get back to the apartment at about the same time she did, and she’d always have a cocktail party to go to, either at a photographer’s studio or the offices of some fashion magazine, or some other model’s apartment, or her agent’s — always someplace to go. There were times he’d be following some cheap hood all over the city, walking the pavements flat and getting home exhausted and wanting nothing more than a bottle of beer, and the place would be full of flitty photographers or gorgeous models talking about the latest spread in Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, drinking the booze Augusta paid for out of her earnings, and wanting to know all about how it felt to shoot somebody (“Have you ever actually killed a person, Bert?”), as if police work was the same kind of empty game modeling was. It irked him every time Augusta referred to herself as “a mannequin.” It made her seem as shallow as the work she did, a hollow store-window dummy draped in the latest Parisian fashions.
“Well, what the hell,” Kling said, “you make allowances, am I right? I’m a cop, she’s a model, we both knew that before we got married. So, okay, you compromise. If Gussie doesn’t like to cook, we’ll send out for Chink’s whenever anybody from the squad’s coming over with his wife. And if I’ve just been in a shootout with an armed robber, the way I was two weeks ago when that guy tried to hold up the bank on Culver and Third, then I can’t be expected to go to a gallery opening or a cocktail party, or a benefit, or whatever the hell, Gussie’ll just have to go alone, am I right?”
Which was just the way they’d been working it for the past few months now, Augusta running off to this or that glittering little party while Kling took off his shoes, and sat wearily in front of the television set drinking beer till she got home, when generally they’d go out for a bite to eat. That was if he was working the Day Tour. If he was working the Night Watch, he’d get home bone weary at nine-thirty in the morning, and maybe, if he was lucky, catch breakfast with her before she ran off to her first assignment. A hundred dollars an hour was not pumpkin seeds, and — as Augusta had told him time and again — in her business it was important to make hay while the sun was shining; how many more years of successful modeling could she count on? So off she’d run to this or that photographer’s studio, rushing out of the apartment with a kerchief on her head and her shoulder bag flying, leaving Kling to put the dishes in the dishwasher before going directly to bed, where he’d sleep till six that night and then go out to dinner with her when she got home from her usual cocktail party. After dinner, maybe, and nowadays less and less frequently, they’d make love before he had to leave for the station house again at twelve-thirty in the morning. But that was only on the two days a month he caught the Night Watch.
In fact, he’d been looking forward to going out to Sands Spit, not because he particularly cared for the photographer they’d be visiting (or any of Augusta’s friends, for that matter) but only because he was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to collapse on a beach for two full days — his days off. Nor was he due back at work till Saturday afternoon at 1600 — and that’s where the trouble started. Or, at least, that’s where the argument started. He didn’t think of it as trouble until later that night, when he got into a conversation with a twerpy little blonde model who opened his eyes for him while their photographer-host was running up and down the beach touching off the fireworks he’d bought illegally in Chinatown.