The streets and most of the sidewalks down here in the financial section had already been cleared of snow. But many of the people who worked down here lived in the outlying reaches of the city, where the plows would not be through for weeks, if then. This was a city in decline. The cabbie knew it because he drove all over this city, and saw every part of it. Saw the strewn garbage and the torn mattresses - and the plastic debris littering the grassy slopes of every highway, saw the bomb-crater potholes on distant streets, saw the black eyeless windows in the abandoned tenements, saw public phone booths without phones, saw public parks without benches, their slats torn up and carried away to burn, heard the homeless ranting or pleading or crying for mercy, heard the ambulance sirens and the police sirens day and night but never when you needed one, heard it all, and saw it all, and knew it all, and just rode on by.
The police also knew what was happening to this city.
The only difference was they couldn't just ride on by.
Bowles was heading uptown. Not too far uptown, as it turned out, because his cab made a left at the Collins Building with its spectacular curving glass front, and then continued crosstown for several more blocks before taking a right and then a left into a tree-lined street of snow-capped brownstones. The sign on the corner streetpost read JACOB's WAY.
Both detectives were familiar with the street. It was one of the city's block-long surprises, a little jewel pincered between two avenues narrowing toward an imminent intersection. Bowles's cab was stopping in the middle of the block.
"Pull in right here," Hawes said.
"Who you following?" the driver asked. "Jack the Ripper?”
"Yes," Hawes said.
Up ahead, Bowles was getting out of the cab, pulling on his gloves. He went up the steps of the three-story brownstone ahead of him, pulled off his right glove again, and pressed the bell button set in the doorjamb. A moment later, he reached for the doorknob and let himself into the building. Up the street, Hawes and Kling were just getting out of their taxi. The wind was sharp, their eyes were already beginning to water. Hatless, they stood on the sidewalk and waited. The taxi pulled away. The wind keened through the narrow little street.
"Give him a few minutes," Hawes said.
"Yeah.”
Breaths vaporizing on the air.
Hands in their pockets.
Hawes looked at his watch. "Should be settled in by now," he said, and both men walked quickly down the street. The address on the building Bowles had entered was 714.
Kling went swiftly up the steps, stooped to read the name under the doorbell, and came down again just as swiftly. The men began walking toward the opposite corner.
"What'd it say?" Hawes asked.
"Moorthy," Kling said.
"What?”
"Moorthy. More-O-O-Rather-That-Have-Y.”
"Is that a name?”
"I don't know.”
"I never heard of a name like that," Hawes said.
An hour and a half later-by which time both men were almost frozen solid to the sidewalk-Bowles came out of the building. He was not alone this time.
Clinging to his arm as they came down the front steps was a tall blonde wearing a dark fur coat.
"Enter the bimbo," Hawes said.
"Coming this way," Kling said, and both men ambled around the corner like two gents out for a stroll on a balmy afternoon. A moment later, Bowles and the blonde approached the corner, talking animatedly. The blonde laughed. Bowles hailed a taxi, opened the door for her, and then waved goodbye as the taxi pulled away from the curb. The detectives, facing the reflecting plate-glass window of a store selling handbags, watched Bowles flag a second taxi for himself and get into it. They turned from the window as the cab pulled away.
"I want to take another look at that doorbell," Hawes said.
"I'm telling you it said Moorthy," Kling said.
Which was what it did say.
"Well," Hawes said, and shook his head in disbelief.
"Let's get some coffee," Kling said.
He had put his mother into a taxi and sent her home, figuring there was only so much of this she could take in any one day, and now he sat with his sister and Henry Lowell, who was trying to explain to both of them what game plan he'd been following all during the past week.
The dining room at the Golden Lion was a faithful replica of what one might have found in an English coach house, circa 1637. Huge oaken beams crossed the room several feet below the vaulted ceiling, binding together the rough plastered walls. Here and there throughout the room there hung portraits of Elizabethan gentlemen and ladies, white-laced collars and cuffs discreetly echoing the whiteness of the walls, rich velvet robes or gowns adding muted touches of color to the pristine candlelit atmosphere. At a little past noon, the dining room was busy and bustling, the muted hum of voices and occasional laughter drifting into the adjacent bar where the three of them were sitting in a corner booth.
Carella had been in this place only once before, a long time ago, with an attorney named Gerald Fletcher, who'd been trying to tell him he'd killed his own wife. He'd felt uncomfortable that day because the place was too rich for his blood, and he hadn't known what the hell Fletcher was up to. Today he felt uncomfortable because he had the distinct impression that Assistant District Attorney Henry Lowell was hitting on his sister.
Angela.
His kid sister.
A married woman, albeit tentatively, in that the outcome of her husband's commitment to shake a deeply embedded cocaine habit could very well determine whether or not she stayed married to him.
Nonetheless, a married woman with three kids.
Sitting there beside Carella, same slanting brown eyes as her brother, giving her an exotic Oriental look, hair an inky black as opposed to his merely dark brown, hanging on every word Lowell said.
"What I tried to do was link the gun irrefutably to Cole," he said. "My first witness ...”
"Assanti," Angela said.
"Yes," he said, nodding, "Assanti. He told the jury he'd seen Cole coming out of your father's bakery with the gun in his hand. ...”
"Or a gun like it," Carella said.
"Exactly, but I think I got that point across, don't you?" he said directly to Angela. "That the gun he saw looked exactly like the gun I introduced in evidence?”
"What was that all about, by the way?" Angela said. - "Well, in the sidebar, Addison was trying to have the gun evidence excluded all over again.
No gun, no case. But Di Pasco refused to fall for that, he'd already ruled in the pretrial hearing. Which is why Addison came back later with all that garbage about a search warrant and an arrest warrant ...”
Angela nodding.
"... and firing his gun outside the guidelines, all that. Point is, I don't think that'll wash with the jury. Because I think I did show, through subsequent witnesses-the Ballistics expert, and the medical examiner, and Wade himself ...”
"Wade was important," Carella said.
"Enormously important," Lowell said to Angela. "He's the one who took the gun from Cole, he's the one who sent it to Ballistics for test-firing ...”
"That was very good, what you did," Angela said.
"Showing all the names on the tag ...”
"Yes, the Chain of Custody," Lowell said, smiling.
"Yes, that was very good. So there'd be no mistake about who got the gun and the bullets and all that.”
"Point is," Lowell said, again addressing all this to Angela, "we now have Assanti saying he heard the shots, and saw the ...”
"Three shots in rapid succession,”
Carella said.
"Exactly. To establish the gun as a semiautomatic," Lowell said to Angela.
"Yes," she said, nodding.
Was she flirting with him? Carella wondered.
His little sister?