“It looks very much like a suicide, Cotton”
“I know it does.”
“Sure.” Carella nodded. “But, of course, we can’t be positive, can we? So we have to bully and con and bluff and…”
“Come on!” Hawes said sharply, and in the next instant he almost added, “Why the hell don’t you go back to the office and hand in your resignation?” But he looked across the table at Carella and saw that his eyes were troubled, and he remembered what had happened only yesterday when Carella had angrily told a young girl to jump. He caught the words before they left his mouth; he did not tell Carella to resign, he did not tell him to jump. Instead, and with great effort, he smiled and said, “Tell you what we’ll do. Let’s hold up a bank and then go down to South America and live on the beach like millionaires, okay? Then we won’t have to worry about asking questions, only answering them. Okay?”
“I’ll ask Teddy,” Carella said, and he smiled thinly.
“Think about it,” Hawes said. “Meanwhile, I’ll call the squad.”
He left the table and went to the phone booth at the far end of the diner. When he returned, he said, “Good news.”
“What?” Carella asked.
“They just picked up Fred Hassler.”
* * * *
4
Fred Hassler was enjoying himself immensely. He was a rotund little man wearing a plaid jacket and a bright blue Italian sports shirt. His eyes were bright and blue, too, and they flashed around the squadroom in obvious enjoyment, his feet jiggling in excitement.
“This is the first time in my life I’ve ever been in a police station,” he said. “Jesus, what color! What atmosphere!”
The color and atmosphere at the moment consisted of a man who was bleeding profusely from a knife wound on his left arm which Detective Meyer Meyer was patiently trying to dress while Detective Bert Kling was calling for an ambulance. In addition, the color and atmosphere included a sixty-year-old man who was gripping the meshed wire of the cage-a small locked enclosure in one corner of the squadroom-and shouting, “Let me kill the bastard! Let me kill him!” while alternately spitting at anyone who came anywhere near the compact mesh prison. And the color and atmosphere included, too, a fat woman in a flowered house dress who was complaining to Hal Willis about a stickball game outside her ground-floor apartment, and it included several ringing telephones, and several clattering typewriters, and the contained smell of the squadroom, a delicate aroma compounded of seven-tenths essence of human sweat, one-tenth percolating coffee, one-tenth stench of urine from the old man in the cage, and one-tenth cheap perfume from the fat lady in the flowered house dress.
Carella and Hawes walked into all this atmosphere and color by negotiating the iron-runged steps that led from the ground floor of the old building, coming down the corridor past the Interrogation Room, the Men’s Room, and the Clerical Office, pushing through the gate in the slatted rail divider, spotting Andy Parker talking to a rotund little man in a straight-backed chair, assuming the man was Fred Hassler, and going directly to him.
“It stinks in here,” Carella said immediately. “Can’t someone open a window?”
“The windows are open,” Meyer said. His hands were covered with blood. He turned to Kling and asked, “Are they on the way?”
“Yeah,” Kling answered. “Why didn’t a patrolman handle this, Meyer? He should have got a meat wagon right on the beat. What the hell does he think this is? An emergency ward?”
“Don’t ask me about patrolmen,” Meyer said. “I’ll never understand patrolmen as long as I live.”
“He brings a guy up here with his arm all cut to ribbons,” Kling said to Carella. “Somebody ought to talk to the captain about that. We got enough headaches without blood all over the floor.”
“What happened?” Carella asked
“The old cockuh in the cage stabbed him,” Meyer said.
“Why?”
“They were playing cards. The old man says he was cheating.”
“Let me out of here!” the old man screamed suddenly from the cage. “Let me kill the bastard!”
“They got to stop playing ball outside my window,” the fat lady said to Willis.
“You’re absolutely right,” Willis told her. “I’ll send a patrolman over right away. He’ll get them to go to a playground.”
“There ain’t no playground!” the fat lady protested.
“He’ll send them to the park. Don’t worry, lady, we’ll take care of it.”
“You said you’d take care of it last time. So they’re still playing stickball right outside my window. And using dirty language!”
“Where the hell’s that ambulance?” Meyer asked.
“They said they’d be right over,” Kling told him.
“Turn on that fan, will you, Cotton?” Carella said.
“It smells like a Chinese whorehouse, don’t it?” Parker said. “The old man peed his pants when Genero made the collar. He’s sixty years old, you know that? But he sure done a job on that arm.”
“Who’s going to question him, that’s what I’d like to know,” Hawes said. “That cage smells like the zoo.”
“Genero brought him in,” Parker said, “we’ll get Genero to do the questioning.” He laughed heartily at his own outrageous suggestion, and then abruptly said, “This is Fred Hassler. Mr. Hassler, Detectives Carella and Hawes. They’re working on that suicide.”
“How do you do?” Hassler said, rising immediately and grasping Carella’s hand. This is mar-velous,” he said, “just mar-velous!”
“Yeah, it’s marvelous,” Parker said, “I’m getting out of this madhouse. If the boss asks for me, tell him I’m in the candy store on Culver and Sixth.”
“Doing what?” Carella asked.
“Having an egg cream,” Parker answered.
“Why don’t you stick around until the ambulance gets here,” Kling suggests “We’ve got our hands full.”
“You’ve got more cops in this room than they got at the Academy,” Parker said, and he left. The fat lady followed him down the corridor, muttering under her breath about the “lousy police in this lousy city.” A patrolman came upstairs to take the old man from the cage to the detention cells on the ground floor. The old man swung at him the moment they unlocked the cage door, and the patrolman instantly clubbed him with his billet and dragged him limp and un-protesting from the squadroom. The ambulance arrived not five minutes later. The man with the slashed arm told the ambulance attendants that he could walk down the steps and out to the waiting ambulance, but they insisted on putting him onto a stretcher. Meyer washed his hands at the corner sink and sat down wearily at his desk. Kling poured himself a cup of coffee. Carella took off his holster, put it into the top drawer of his desk, and sat down beside Fred Kassler. Hawes sat on the edge of the desk.
“Is it like this all the time?” Hassler asked, his eyes bright.