“Mr. Kern,” he said, “we’re investigating the suicide of Jeremiah Newman, I wonder if you can spare us a little of your time.”
“Yes, certainly,” Kern said.
He had the thick, rasping voice of a heavy smoker. An ashtray on his desk was brimming with butts, and he reached for a package of unfiltered cigarettes now, and offered them to Carella and Kling — who both shook their heads — before lighting one himself. A cloud of smoke, the color of the wisps of hair around his ears, hovered above his head.
“Mr. Kern, do you know that you’re the beneficiary of Mr. Newman’s will?” Carella asked.
“I do,” Kern said.
“When did you learn that, sir?”
“Yesterday. I got a call from the bank.”
“Did they tell you how much you might expect to inherit?”
“Yes. Something more than two million dollars.”
“Were you surprised?”
“By the sum? No, I knew Jerry was well-off.”
“By the fact that you were named as sole beneficiary.”
Kern hesitated.
“Well, no,” he said at last. “I can’t truthfully say I was surprised.”
“Then you knew about it before the bank called.”
“Yes, I knew.”
“Would you have found out about the will from Jessica Herzog?”
Kern looked startled.
“Mr. Kern?”
“Yes,” he said, and nodded. “Jessica told me about it last week.”
“How would you define your relationship with her, sir?”
Again Kern hesitated. Then he sighed and said, “We have been keeping steady company for the past five years now.”
The expression “steady company,” in this day and age, sounded singularly old-fashioned to Carella, a term the elderly Kern might have used when there were still horses and buggies in the streets of Isola. But there was nothing old-fashioned about two million dollars in a city where murder was often done for a couple of bucks, the contents of a mugging victim’s wallet. Two million dollars was definitely not popcorn. Jerry Newman had signed his new will on the eighteenth of July, and Louis Kern had known about it on the Thursday before Newman was found dead.
“Mr. Kern,” Carella said, “I wonder if you can give me a rundown on your whereabouts for Thursday, the seventh of August.”
“What?”
“I said I wonder if you can—”
“I heard what you said, but why should I provide you with such information?”
“Because I’m a police officer diligently pursuing an investigation, and I would appreciate your cooperation.”
“You’re suggesting, aren’t you, that since I knew I was to inherit a large sum of money...”
“No, sir, I’m not.”
Kern shrugged. “I have nothing to hide,” he said, and shrugged again.
“Fine, sir. Then can you tell me...?”
“I’ll get my calendar,” Kern said.
In the afternoon stillness of the stark white office, Carella and Kling pored over Kern’s appointment calendar for the week preceding the discovery of the body, zeroing in on Thursday, the seventh of August, when Jerry Newman had made a phone call to California at 6:21 p.m.
Kern’s calendar for that day showed appointments at ten, eleven, and twenty. He identified the people in chronological order as a painter, a gallery-owner from Palm Beach, and the trustee of a private art collection in Boston. His luncheon date, at twelve-thirty that afternoon, was with someone identified on his calendar only as J. H., who Kern now admitted was Jessica Herzog. He had gone back to her apartment after lunch, there to enjoy — among other things — the good news that he would inherit two million dollars when Jerry Newman died. At four that afternoon, he’d met with a man wanting to sell a vast collection of pre-Columbian art to the gallery.
Drinks at six that night and dinner at six-thirty had been with his wife and a few friends whom Kern identified by name, after which they’d all gone on to the opening of a musical titled Caper, another hopeless attempt — according to the review the next morning — to weld music with mystery. As they looked at the calendar entry now, Kern gave his own capsule review: music terrific, book rotten. He also mentioned that he had gone afterward to the opening-night party at Baffin’s, a midtown restaurant catering to theatrical people, and had remained there until close to one in the morning, by which time all the newspaper reviews were in; the television critics had already been heard from, and the show seemed doomed.
“My wife was with me,” he said. “So were five hundred other people.”
“Where’d you go when you left Baffin’s?” Kling asked.
“Directly home.”
“And where’s that, Mr. Kern?”
“1241 South McCormick.”
“Is there a doorman there?”
“There is. He saw my wife and me when we got back to the apartment.”
“What time would that have been?”
“One-thirty or thereabouts.”
“What time did you leave the next morning?”
“Nine-thirty.”
“And went where?”
“I came directly here to the gallery.”
Kern looked as clean as the baldpate that glistened between the bookend fringes of his hair. The detectives thanked him for his time, and went downstairs to the cauldron of the street again. Carella had forgotten to turn down the visor with its POLICE DEPARTMENT VEHICLE placard clipped to it. An overzealous patrolman had stuck a parking ticket under the windshield wiper on the driver’s side of the car.
“Great,” he said, and unlocked the door, and then leaned into the car to yank up the lock-button on the passenger side. As he started the engine, he asked, “Have you talked to Augusta yet?”
“Yeah,” Kling said. “Last night.”
“And?”
“We worked it out.” He hesitated. “It was nothing.”
Carella looked at him. “Well, good,” he said.
“Nothing at all, like you said.”
“Good,” Carella said, but he glanced again at Kling before easing the car out into the steady stream of traffic.
At ten minutes to nine that night, Kling stood outside the building on Hopper Street and looked at its facade. Ground floor, first floor, second, third, fourth, fifth. Four windows on each of the stories above the street-level floor. The windows on the third and fourth floors were dark now. Businesses, he thought. Maybe she’d been there on a business appointment, after all. But why had none of the six names he’d copied from the directory sounded like business firms? He went to the front door of the building and shook the knob. Locked. He found a bell button marked service in the doorjamb, and pressed it. A loud ringing sounded inside someplace. He rang the bell again.
He heard footsteps within, approaching the door, and then a man’s voice saying, “I’m coming, I’m coming.”
He waited.
“Who is it?” the man asked from behind the door.
“Police,” Kling said.
He heard a lock being turned, the tumblers falling. Good secure lock, he thought, looking at the keyway. The door opened a crack. An eye and a narrow slice of face appeared in the wedge.
“Let’s see it,” the man said.
Kling held up his shield. “Detective Atchison,” he said.
There was no Detective Atchison on the Eight-Seven. He had not used his own name because Augusta’s phantom lover would undoubtedly know it, nor had he used the name of any other detective on the squad, on the assumption that Augusta may have dropped it in her casual pillow talk with the son of a bitch she was seeing. He had no intention of showing his I.D. card. His name was not on his shield. Beneath the Police Department legend and the city’s seal, there was only the word detective and his serial number.