He knew you couldn’t run a case by intuition alone. He’d known too damn many cops who — obsessively following a wrong lead because they’d felt something about a case — were left holding an empty bag. Maybe it was only intuition that caused him to discount the fragile gallery owner and the former Israeli captain as suspects in a murder that may or may not have been committed, maybe he should have put a team of men on them, have them followed day and night now that the barn door was open and the horse was loose, maybe he was giving up on them too soon. But whereas in this line of work you didn’t always know who was lying, you always knew who was telling the truth. The truth had a ring like an ax hitting an oak. He felt intuitively — yes, felt, yes, intuitively — that both Louis Kern and Jessica Herzog had told him the complete and unblemished truth, and he thought it would be a waste of precious time to hassle them any further. Nonetheless, and because he wanted to make certain he’d touched all the bases, he made the obligatory call to Rollie Chabrier in the DA’s office.
Chabrier was used to all sorts of odd calls from the detectives of the Eight-Seven. Today, with the temperature outside stubbornly refusing to budge from the ninety-nine-degree mark, the air conditioning in the Criminal Courts Building had decided to quit, and Chabrier was sitting behind his desk in his shirtsleeves when the telephone rang. The moment Carella identified himself, he expected the worst. Bad things always came in threes: the heat, the busted air conditioning, and now a call from one of the dicks up there on Grover Park.
“What can I do for you, Steve?” he asked warily.
“I’m investigating a suspicious death,” Carella said, “and I’d like some information.”
“This is a homicide?” Chabrier asked.
“An apparent suicide.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But there’s a two-million-dollar will involved, and I want to know something about the laws of inheritance in this state.”
“Like what?”
“Like if I kill a guy because I’m going to inherit two million bucks from him, do I get the money anyway?”
“There are no statutes regarding such instances,” Chabrier said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means the law relies solely on judicial decision. Historically, anyone who slays a decedent has been barred from taking under the will or intestacy of the person slain.”
“Decedent means—”
“Dead man.”
“And taking under the will?”
“Inheriting. You know what intestacy means, don’t you?”
“Yes. Dying without a will.”
“Right. So to answer your question, if you decided to kill me because you know I’m leaving you a whole barrel of money, and if later it’s proved that you did indeed kill me, you wouldn’t stand a chance of inheriting.”
“Okay,” Carella said.
“Do you need chapter and verse on this? Try Riggs versus Palmer, Citation 115—”
“No, that’s okay,” Carella said. “Thanks a lot.”
He put the phone back on the cradle. It rang while his hand was still on the receiver, startling him. He picked it up again.
“Carella,” he said.
“This is Dorfsman, at Ballistics,” the voice said. “Is Kling there?”
“He’s out just now,” Carella said.
“Well, you can save me another call if you’ll take this down and pass it on to him,” Dorfsman said. “I promised I’d get back to him by noon.”
“What’s it on?” Carella asked.
“A bullet he brought down here this morning.”
“Fast turnaround.”
“Priorities,” Dorfsman said. “This is an attempted murder. You got a pencil?”
“Go,” Carella said.
“Nice easy one this time. Tell him it’s a Remington .44-caliber Magnum, soft point. I won’t bore you — that’s a pun, Carella — with all the sordid details regarding lands, twist, groove diameter, and so on, but it’s my learned opinion that the slug was fired from a Ruger .44-caliber Magnum Blackhawk. If you want to dress it up a little, you can tell Kling the average velocity of such a bullet is something like seventeen hundred feet, with a resulting paper energy of almost fourteen hundred foot-pounds. That’s enough to stop a grizzly dead in his tracks.”
“I’ll tell him. Listen, can you transfer me to Grossman’s office?”
“He’s still in court,” Dorfsman said.
“Then how about Owenby?”
“Just a second.”
There was a clicking on the line. As Carella waited for the call to be transferred, he tried to recall any recent attempted murder Kling was working. As far as he knew—
“Owenby.”
“Hello,” Carella said, “how’s my report coming along?”
“Should be on the captain’s desk by the end of the day.”
“So when will he get to it?”
“He’s in court, I don’t know when he’ll be back. He’s supposed to be finished over there today.”
“Will he see the report today?”
“If he gets to it.”
“Why don’t you send me a copy at the same time?”
“Against regs,” Owenby said.
“Then tell me what’s in it, will you?”
“I can’t do that. We’ve had too many foul-ups on verbal—”
“Okay, I’ll come down there to look at it.”
“It isn’t typed yet. I told you it’d be on his desk the end of the day. Why don’t you call him around four, four-thirty?”
“Thanks a lot,” Carella said, and hung up.
He had deliberately chosen Ah Wong’s downtown on Boone Street for three reasons: first, Augusta had told him she’d be working that morning at Tru-Vue, a photography studio close to the restaurant; second, it was here that she was supposed to have been last Saturday night, and when he baited his trap he wanted her to remember, if only unconsciously, that she was a woman involved in an affair, a woman searching for opportunities to deceive; and, lastly, the restaurant was close to the various courthouses downtown, where he hoped to go for his search warrant the moment he got Dorfsman’s promised quick report on the bullet.
They met at a little after noon.
She looked so radiantly beautiful that he almost forgot his resolve.
She complained about having to work all morning under the hot lights, and he told her all about what a hard day it had been in court all morning, where’d he’d been testifying on a burglary arrest he’d made two months back; he did not mention that he had gone to the lab first, to drop off the bullet that had been fired at him the night before. Gingerly, he approached the trap he had carefully constructed.
“Damn thing is,” he said, “I’ve got Night Watch again tonight.”
Every cop on the squad drew Night Watch once a month, for two nights running, the first night from 1600 to 0100, the second from 0100 to 0900, followed by two days off. Augusta knew this. She also knew that he’d drawn the duty not two weeks ago.
“How come?” she asked.
“Parker’s sick,” he said.
He had deliberately chosen Parker because he was one of the few cops they did not see socially; he did not want to risk using Meyer or Brown or any of the other cops Augusta knew; a call from a wife or a girlfriend could blow the whole scheme.
“He had the sixteen-hundred yesterday,” Kling said, “and came down with a cold. I think he’s faking, but who can tell with Parker? Anyway, Pete asked me to sub for him tonight.”
“So what does that mean?”
“One to nine in the morning.”