“A residue on the bottom of the bag. Not enough to run as many tests as I’d have liked.”
“How many did you run?”
“Four. Which in the process of elimination — you should pardon the expression — isn’t a hell of a lot. But I knew what you were looking for, so I deliberately chose my color tests for the most dramatic reactions. For example, cocaine shows colorless on both the Mercke and the Marquis, so I avoided those. Instead, I went with nitrosylsulfuric acid for my first color test. I got a pale yellow reaction, with no change when ammonia was added, and with a change to colorless when water was added. That’s a cocaine reaction. For the second color test — am I boring you?”
“No, no, go on,” Carella said. He considered himself a scientific nitwit and was in fact fascinated whenever Grossman began spewing formulas and such.
“For the second color test, I used tetranitromethane, which again — if we’re looking for cocaine — would give us a more dramatic reaction than some of the other tests. Sure enough, we initially got yellow with an orange cast to it, turning eventually to full yellow. Cocaine,” Grossman said.
“Cocaine,” Carella repeated.
“And when I ran my tests for precipitation and crystallization, I got virtually the same results. With platinum chloride as my reagent and normal acetic acid as my solvent, I got an immediate cocaine reaction — thousands of aggregate crystalline blade forms, arranged in bizarre fashion, moderate birefringence, predominantly—”
“You’re losing me, Sam,” Carella said.
“No matter. It was typically cocaine. When I used gold chloride with the acid, I got ruler-edged crystals forming from amorphous... again, no matter. It, too, was typically cocaine.”
“So... are you saying the substance you found at the bottom of her bag is cocaine?”
“I’m saying there’s a very strong likelihood it’s cocaine. I can’t say positively, Steve, without having run a great many more tests, but I simply ran out of available substance before I could. If it makes you any happier... you are looking for a drug connection here, I assume.”
“I am.”
“Well, we found shreds of marijuana, as well as marijuana seeds at the bottom of the bag. Ladies’ handbags are wonderful receptacles for all kinds of crap.”
“Okay, thanks, Sam.”
“Would it help further to know that the girl chewed sugarless gum?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“In that case, I won’t mention that she chewed sugarless gum. Good luck, Steve, I have bullets here from seven people who were shot by cops today.”
“What?” Carella said, but Grossman had hung up.
Smiling, Grossman stood with his hand on the cradled receiver for a moment, and then looked up when he heard the door opening. He was surprised to see Bert Kling coming into the room, not because Kling never visited the lab, but only because Grossman had not ten seconds earlier been talking to another cop from the Eight-Seven. Considering the laws of probability, Grossman would have guessed... well, no matter.
“Come in, Bert,” he said. “How’s it going?”
He knew how it was going. Everyone in the department knew how it was going. Bert Kling had found his wife in bed with another man last August, that’s how it was going. He knew that Kling and his wife were now divorced. He knew that Carella was concerned about him because Carella had expressed that concern to Grossman, who had suggested that he talk to one of the department psychologists, who in turn had advised Carella to try to get Kling to come in personally, which Carella had not been able to convince Kling to do. Grossman liked Kling. There were not many cops in the Eight-Seven he disliked, as a matter of fact — well, yes, Parker, he guessed. Parker very definitely. Parker was mean-spirited and lazy and altogether a person to dislike passionately. Grossman liked Kling and he hated seeing him looking this way, like a man who’d just been released from the state penitentiary at Castleview and was still wearing the ill-fitting civilian threads the state gave him gratis with his parole papers and his minimum-wage check. Like a man who needed a shave, even though the blond stubble on Kling’s cheeks and jaws was less noticeable than it might have been on a man with a heavier beard. Like a man carrying an enormous weight on his shoulders. Like a man whose eyes appeared a trifle too moist, a bit too precariously poised on the edge of tears. Grossman looked into those eyes as the men shook hands. Was Carella’s concern a legitimate one? Did Kling look like a man who might one day decide to chew on the barrel of his gun?
“So,” Grossman said, smiling, “what brings you down here?”
“Some bullets,” Kling said.
“More bullets? We had the Valentine’s Day Massacre all over again this morning,” Grossman said. “Seven guys killed in a garage down on the Lower Platform. Guys who did it were dressed like cops. I have to admit it took style, but I don’t like the extra work it’s given us on a weekend. What bullets?”
“We caught a homicide last night on Silvermine Road,” Kling said. “Man named Marvin Edelman, gunshot victim. I asked the morgue to send whatever they recover over to you. I thought I might mention it.”
“You came all the way down here to tell me some bullets are on the way?” Grossman said.
“No, no, I was in the area, anyway.”
Grossman knew that the Criminal Court Building was right next door, and at first he figured Kling might be down here on court business. There was only one court open on Sunday, though, and that strictly for the arraignment of anyone arrested the day before. And then Grossman remembered that the Psychological Counseling Unit had recently moved into new quarters on the third floor of the building. Had Carella finally convinced Kling to see someone about his obvious depression?
“So what did bring you down here on a Sunday?” Grossman asked in what he hoped was a casual way.
“I had a lady in yesterday, her husband... well, it’s a long story,” Kling said.
“Let me hear it,” Grossman said.
“No, you’ve got bullets to worry about,” Kling said. “Anyway, keep an eye out for whatever comes from the morgue, will you? The guy’s name is Edelman.”
“A landsman,” Grossman said, smiling, but Kling did not return the smile.
“See you,” Kling said, and walked out of the lab and into the marble corridor outside. The story he’d been about to tell was about this woman who’d come to see him yesterday because her husband’s former girlfriend had accosted him on the street and slashed his arm from the shoulder to the wrist with a bread knife she’d pulled from her handbag. In describing the former girlfriend, the woman used the words “black as that telephone there” and then went on to describe her further as an extremely thin woman whose name was Annie — she didn’t know Annie what, and neither did her husband. Her husband, according to the woman’s story, was a Dutch seaman who came into this city’s port every other month or so and who, until they’d met and married, used to spend his wages on various prostitutes either uptown on La Vía de Putas or else downtown on the stretch of hooker-packed turf known as Slit City. The wife had been witness to the knifing, and had heard the girl Annie say, “I’m goan juke you good,” and it was perhaps the use of the word juke that rang a bell for Kling.
A working cop doesn’t always know how he remembers the myriad little details of the numberless criminal transgressions that cross his desk and his path every day of the week. To remember them is enough. The fact that the knife wielder had been black had not been enough to trigger recall. Neither had the name Annie, or the knowledge that the girl was extremely thin and a working prostitute. But the first time Kling had ever heard the word juke in his life was on Mason Avenue, when an anorectic black whore who’d slashed a customer’s face later claimed, “I di’n juke that dumb trick.” Cotton Hawes, who had answered the squeal with him, informed Kling that he himself had first heard the expression in New Orleans, and that it meant, of course, “to stab.” The hooker’s name had been Annie Holmes. The moment the victim’s wife repeated what Annie had said as she carved up her former playmate’s arm, Kling snapped his fingers.