“You get lynchings up here, huh?” Monoghan said to Carella.
“Yeah, we get all kinds of shit up here,” Carella said.
He was looking up at the dead body slowly twisting on the end of the rope. As always, but only for the briefest tick of an instant, he felt a sharp dagger of pain behind his eyes. The waste, he thought.
“You get the French Revolution up here,” Monoghan said.
“You get the Wild West up here,” Monroe said.
They both stood in the street, their hands in their coat pockets, looking up at the dead body.
“Nice white panties,” Monoghan said, looking up under her skirt.
One of the dead girl’s shoes had fallen to the pavement. A purple French-heeled shoe, the color of her blouse. Her skirt was the color of wheat, the color of her hair. Her panties, as Monroe had already observed, were white. She hung dangling above the detectives, slowly twisting at the end of the rope, a purple shoe on one foot.
“Looks how old, would you say?” Monoghan asked.
“Hard to tell from here,” Monroe said.
“Let’s cut her down,” Monoghan said.
“No,” Carella said. “Not till the M.E. gets here.”
“And the P.U.,” Genero said.
He was referring to the Photographic Unit. The men stood under the lamppost, looking up at the dead girl. A crowd had gathered. It was now 3:15 in the morning, but a crowd had gathered from nowhere, filtering in from the side streets onto this deserted street with its abandoned buildings and its construction site. Any hour of the day or night, there were people awake in this city. Genero thought it was a conspiracy, everybody being awake day or night. The four patrolmen, who’d responded in two separate r.m.p. cars when Carella called in the 10–29, were busily erecting barricades and trying to keep the crowd back. Somebody in the crowd thought it wasn’t a real girl hanging there. He commented that it was a dummy or something. They were probably shooting a movie or something. A television show. They were always shooting movies or television shows in this city. It was a very photogenic city. The girl kept twisting at the end of the rope.
“How do you hang somebody on a city street,” Monroe said, “without nobody seeing you?”
Carella was wondering the same thing.
“Maybe she hung herself,” Monoghan said.
“So then where’s the ladder or whatever?” Monroe said.
“Up here in the Eight-Seven,” Monoghan said, “she coulda hung herself and somebody coulda stole the ladder later.”
“Anyway, it’s hanged,” Monroe said.
“Whattya mean it’s hanged?” Monoghan said.
“A person hangs himself, you say he got hanged. Not hung.”
“Who told you that?”
“It’s common knowledge.”
“Hanged?”
“Right.”
“That don’t sound right. Hanged.”
“It’s right, though.”
“You see a guy with a big dork,” Monoghan said, “you don’t say he’s well-hanged, you say he’s well-hung.”
“That’s a different thing entirely,” Monroe said. “We’re talking here about a different thing entirely.”
“When you hang up your suit on a hanger, you don’t say I hanged up my suit,” Monoghan said. “You say I hung up my suit.”
“That’s also different,” Monroe said.
“How is it different?”
“It’s different because when you hang somebody then the person has been hanged, he has not been hung.”
Genero didn’t know which one of them was right, but he was enjoying the conversation. Carella was walking around the lamppost, hatless, looking at the sidewalk and the street. Genero was wondering what Carella expected to find. There was just the usual shit in the gutter — cigarette butts, gum wrappers, crumpled paper cups, like that. The debris of the city.
“So what do we do here?” Monoghan asked. “Stand around all night waiting for the M.E.?” He looked at his watch. “What time did you call this in, Carella?”
“Three-oh-six,” Carella said.
“And how many seconds?” Monroe asked, and Monoghan burst out laughing.
Genero looked at his watch. “Twelve minutes ago,” he said.
“So where’s the M.E.?” Monoghan said.
A man in the crowd stepped out boldly from behind the barricade when one of the patrolmen turned his back. He walked over to where the detectives were gathered in a knot under the lamppost. He had obviously been appointed spokesman for the spectators. He assumed the polite, deferential air most citizens of this city affected when they were asking information of policemen.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said to Monoghan, “but can you tell me what happened here?”
“Fuck off,” Monoghan said politely.
“Get over there behind the barricade,” Monroe said.
“Is the young lady dead?” the man said.
“No, she’s learning how to fly,” Monoghan said.
“She’s wearing a safety rope and learning how to fly,” Monroe said.
“Shell be flapping her arms any minute,” Monoghan said.
“Get back there behind the barricade and you can watch her,” Monroe said.
The man looked up at the dead girl twisting at the end of the rope. He did not think the girl was learning to fly. But he went back behind the barricade anyway, and reported to the others what he’d just been told.
“You ever get anybody hung before?” Monoghan asked Carella.
“Hanged,” Monroe said.
“Few hanging suicides,” Carella said. “Nothing like this, though.”
“A real hanging, you need a good drop,” Monroe said. “Most of your hanging suicides, they get up on a chair, put the rope around their neck, and then jump off the chair. You don’t hang that way, you suffocate. You need a good drop for a hanging.”
“Why’s that?” Genero asked. He was interested. His mother had advised him to listen carefully all the time because that was the way you learned things.
“’Cause what happens in a real hanging, the rope... the knot up there...”
“Regular hangman’s knot up there,” Monoghan said, looking up. “The drop snaps the knot up against the back of the guy’s neck, and it breaks his neck, that’s what happens. But you need a good drop, six feet or more, otherwise the rope just suffocates the guy. You get a lot of amateurs trying to hang themselves, they just choke to death. Guy wants to kill himself, he ought to learn how to do it right.”
“I had a suicide once, he stabbed himself in the heart,” Monoghan said.
“So?” Monroe said.
“I’m just saying.”
“Well, you get all kinds,” Genero said, trying to sound worldly and experienced.
“For sure, kid,” Monoghan said, solemnly agreeing with him.
“Here’s the M.E.,” Monroe said.
“About time,” Monoghan said, and looked at his watch again.
The assistant medical examiner was a man named Paul Blaney. He had been at an all-night poker game when he’d been summoned to the scene. He was angry because he’d been sitting with a full boat, kings over threes, when the phone rang. He’d insisted on playing out the hand before he’d left, and had lost the pot to four jacks. Blaney was a short man with a scraggly black mustache, eyes that looked violet in a certain light, and a bald head that looked very shiny under the sodium vapors. He greeted the men curtly, and then looked up at the hanging girl.