They were hampered in that both the victims were blind. They found none of the address books they might have found in the apartment of a sighted victim, no calendar jottings, no shopping lists or notes. Whatever correspondence they found had been punched out in Braille. They collected this for translation downtown, but it told them nothing immediately. There was an old standard typewriter in the apartment; it had already been dusted for prints by the lab technicians, and neither Carella nor Meyer could see what other information might be garnered from it. They found a bank passbook for the local branch of First Federal on Yates Avenue. The Harrises had two hundred and twelve dollars in their joint account. They found a photograph album covered with dust. It had obviously not been opened in years. It contained pictures of Jimmy Harris as a boy and a young man. Most of the people in the album were black. Even the pictures of Jimmy in uniform were mostly posed with black soldiers. Toward the end of the album was an eight-by-ten glossy photograph.
There were five men in the obviously posed picture. Two of them were white, three of them black. The picture had been taken in front of a tentlike structure with a wooden-frame lower half and a screened upper half. All of the men were smiling. One of them, crouching in the first row, had his hand on a crudely lettered sign. The sign read:
Among some documents scattered on the bedroom floor, they found the dog’s papers. He was a full-blooded Labrador retriever and his name was Stanley. He and his master had been trained at the Guiding Eye School on South Perry. The other documents on the floor were a marriage certificate — the two witnesses who’d signed it were named Angela Coombes and Richard Gerard — a certificate of honorable discharge from the United States Army and an insurance policy with American Heritage, Inc. The insured was James Harris. The primary beneficiary was Isabel Harris. In the event of her death, the contingent beneficiary was Mrs. Sophie Harris, mother of the insured. The face amount of the policy was twenty-five thousand dollars.
That was all they found.
The phone on Carella’s desk was ringing when he and Meyer got back to the squadroom at twenty minutes past four. He pushed through the gate in the slatted wooden railing and snatched the receiver from its cradle.
“87th Squad, Carella,” he said.
“This is Maloney, Canine Unit.”
“Yes, Maloney.”
“What are we supposed to do with this dog?”
“What dog?”
“This black Labrador somebody sent us.”
“Is he okay?”
“He’s fine, but what’s his purpose, can you tell me?”
“He belonged to a homicide victim,” Carella said.
“That’s very interesting,” Maloney said, “but what’s that got to do with Canine?”
“Nothing. We didn’t know what to do about him last night—”
“So you sent him here.”
“No, no. The desk sergeant called for a vet.”
“Yeah, our vet. So now we got ourselves a dog we don’t know what to do with.”
“Why don’t you train him?”
“You know how much it costs to train one of these dogs? Also, how do we know he has any aptitude?”
“Well,” Carella said, and sighed.
“So what do you want me to do with him?”
“I’ll get back to you on it.”
“When? He ain’t out of here by Monday morning, I’m calling the shelter.”
“What are you worried about? You haven’t got a mad dog on your hands there. He’s a seeing-eye dog, he looked perfectly healthy to me.”
“Yeah, that ain’t it, Carella. He’s got more fuckin tags and crap hanging from his collar than all the dogs in this city put together. That ain’t it. It’s what are we supposed to do with him? This ain’t a zoo here, this is an arm of the police force and we got work to do, same as you. You want this fuckin dog in your office? You want him up there fuckin up your operation?”
“No, but—”
“Well, we don’t want him here either fuckin up ours. So what I’m telling you is we don’t hear from you first thing Monday morning about what disposition is to be taken with this dog here, then he goes to the shelter and may God have mercy on his soul.”
“Got you, Maloney.”
“Yeah,” Maloney said, and hung up.
The squadroom on any given Friday looked much as it did on any other day of the week, weekends and holidays included. A bit shabby, a bit run-down at the heels, tired from overwork and over-use, but comfortable and familiar and really the only game in town when you got right down to it. To those who knew it, there were no other squadrooms anywhere else in the world. Plunk Carella down in Peoria or Perth, in Amsterdam or Amherst and he wouldn’t know what to do with himself. Transfer him, in fact, to any one of the new and shining precincts in this very city, and he would have felt suddenly transported to Mars. He could not imagine being a cop anyplace else. Being a cop meant being a cop in the Eight-Seven. It was that simple. As far as Carella was concerned, this was where it was at. All other precincts and all other cops had to be measured against this precinct and these cops. Territorial imperative. Pride of place. This was it.
This was a room on the second floor of the building, separated from the corridor by a slatted wooden railing with a swinging gate. In that corridor, there were two doors with frosted glass panels, one of them marked CLERICAL, the other marked Men’s Lavatory. If a lady had to pee, she was invited downstairs to the first floor of the building, where a door on the wall opposite the muster desk was marked Women’s Lavatory. There was once a Southern cop in the station house, up there to extradite a man on an armed robbery warrant. He saw the doors marked LAVATORY and knew this was where you were supposed to wash your hands, but he wondered aloud where the commodes were. In this precinct, a toilet was a lavatory.
In all of America, a toilet was something other than what it was supposed to be. It was a bathroom or a powder room or a rest room, but it was never a toilet. Americans did not like the word toilet. It denoted waste product. Americans, the most wasteful humans on the face of the earth, did not like to discuss waste products or bodily functions. Your average polite American abroad would rather wet his pants than ask where the toilet was. In the Eight-Seven, only criminals asked where the toilet was. “Hey, where’s die terlet?” they said. Get a clutch of muggers up there, a snatch of hookers, a stealth of burglars, they all wanted to know where the toilet was. Criminals had to go to the toilet on the average of three, four times a minute. That’s because criminals had weak bladders. But they knew what to call a toilet, all right.
There were only two criminals in the squadroom at that moment, which was a bit below par for a Friday afternoon. One of those criminals was in the detention cage across the room. He was pacing the cage, but he was not muttering about his rights. This was strange. Most criminals muttered about their rights. That was a sure way of telling a criminal from your ordinary citizen accused of a crime. Your criminal always muttered about his rights. “I know my rights,” he said, and then invariably said, “Hey, where’s the terlet?” The second criminal in the squadroom was being interrogated by Detective Cotton Hawes at one of the desks just inside the row of filing cabinets on the divider side of the room. Looking at Hawes and looking at the man he was interrogating, it was difficult to tell who was the good guy and who was the bad.