Hawes was six feet two inches tall and weighed a hundred and ninety pounds. He had blue eyes and a square jaw and a cleft chin. His hair was red, except for a streak over his left temple where he had once been knifed and the hair had curiously grown in white after the wound healed. He had a straight unbroken nose and a good mouth with a wide lower lip. He looked somehow fierce, like a prophet who’d been struck by lightning and survived. The man sitting opposite him was almost as tall as Hawes, somewhat heavier and strikingly handsome. Black hair and dark brown eyes as soulful as a poet’s. A Barrymore profile and a Valentino widow’s peak — both before our time, Gertie, but not before the gentleman’s. He was sixty-five years old if he was a day, and he had been caught burglarizing an apartment that afternoon. Caught right on the premises, burglar’s tools on the floor at his feet. Working on a wall safe when the doorman walked in with a passkey and a cop. There was nothing he could say. He listened quietly to Hawes’s questions, and answered them in a low, exhausted voice. This was his third fall. The rap was Burglary Two — he’d been caught inside a dwelling, during the day, and he’d been unarmed. But they’d throw the key away nonetheless. He was not too happy a burglar on that Friday afternoon as dusk seeped into the squadroom.
Meyer turned on the overhead lights. Hawes looked up as if a mortar had exploded over his head. His prisoner kept staring at his own hands folded in his lap. But at a desk just inside the windows facing the street, Detective Richard Genero also looked up. Genero was typing a report. He hated typing reports. That was because he did not know how to spell. He especially did not know how to spell “perpetrator,” a word essential to advancement in the Police Department. Genero invariably spelled it “perpatrator,” which was exactly how he pronounced it. He also pronounced toilet “terlet.” That was because Genero came from Calm’s Point, a part of the city that spoke American the way the people in Liverpool spoke English. Genero was a relatively new detective. He had achieved this lofty rung on the ladder of police succession by shooting himself accidentally in the foot. Or at least that had been the opening gun, so to speak, in a series of events that brought him to the attention of the departmental brass and earned for him the coveted gold shield. He was not much liked in the squadroom. He was adored, however, by his mother.
He signaled to Carella now, and Carella walked over to his desk.
“P-e-r,” Carella said.
“Yeah, I know,” Genero said, and indicated the word on his report. He had spelled it correctly. This meant that he would ask for promotion to lieutenant next week. “Steve,” he said, “there was a call for you while you were out. Captain Grossman from the lab. Something about nail scrapings.”
“Okay, I’ll get right back to him.”
Genero looked up at the wall clock. “He said if it was after five, you’d have to call him Monday.”
“Did he find anything?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who’s that in the cage?”
“That’s my prisoner.”
“What’d he do?”
“He was fornicating in the park.”
“Is that a crime?”
“Public Lewdness,” Genero said, naming the appropriate section of the State’s Criminal Law. “PL 245, a Class B Misdemeanor. “In a public place, intentionally exposing the private or intimate parts of one’s body in a lewd manner or committing any other lewd act’ Caught him cold.”
Carella looked at the cage. “Where’s the woman?” he asked.
“She escaped,” Genero said. “I’ve got her panties, though.”
“Good,” Carella said. “Good evidence. Very good, Genero.”
“I thought so,” Genero said proudly. “He can go to jail for three months, you know.”
“That’ll teach him,” Carella said, and went back to his desk. The offender in the cage looked to be about twenty years old. He’d probably been picked up by one of the hookers cruising Grover Park, figured he’d spend a pleasant half-hour on a bright November afternoon, thinking his only risk would be frostbite, but not counting on the ever-alert protectors of the Law, as represented by Richard Genero. The offender in the cage looked as if he was more worried by what his mother would say than by the possible jail sentence he was facing. Carella sighed, opened his book of personal telephone listings, and dialed the Police Laboratory. Grossman answered the phone on the sixth ring. He sounded out of breath.
“Police Lab, Grossman,” he said.
“Sam, this is Steve.”
“I was down the hall, let me get the folder,” Grossman said. “Hold on.”
Carella waited. He visualized Grossman in the glass-walled silence of the Headquarters Building downtown. Grossman was tall and angular, a man who’d have looked more at home on a New England farm than in the sterile orderliness of the lab. He wore glasses, his eyes a guileless blue behind them. There was a gentility to his manner, a quiet warmth reminiscent of a long-lost era, even though his speech rapped out scientific facts with staccato authority. He had just been promoted to captain last month. Carella had gone all the way downtown to Police Headquarters to buy him lunch in celebration.
“Hello, Steve?”
“Yeah.”
“Here it is. James Randolph Harris, five feet ten inches tall, weight a hundred and—”
“Where’d you get this, Sam?”
“Identification sent it over. I thought you’d requested it.”
“No.”
“Maybe somebody here did.”
“Has he got a record?”
“No, no, this is Army stuff. It’s ten years old, Steve, the picture may have changed.”
“It’s changed in one respect for sure, Sam. He wasn’t blind then.”
“Do you want me to read the rest of this? I’m sure they’ll be sending a copy to you. They know it’s your case, don’t they?”
“They should know, yes. I had a man at the morgue this morning when Photo was taking prints. Wait a minute, here it is on my desk.”
“So you don’t need me to fill you in.”
“No, just tell me about the nail scrapings.”
“Your man was a gardener.”
“How come?”
“Soil under his fingernails.”
“Dirt?”
“Soil. Big difference, Steve. Dirt is what you and I have under our fingernails, right?”
“Right,” Carella said, and smiled.
“And all refined people like us,” Grossman said.
“Yes, to be sure.”
“But soil is what James Harris had under his fingernails. Combination of one-third topsoil, one-third sand and one-third humus. Good rich potting soil.”
“Where do you garden in this city?” Carella said.
“On the window sill,” Grossman said.
“Mm,” Carella said.
“Help you any?”
“I don’t know. Sam, his wife’s been killed, too, did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Your boys were there this afternoon. Fd appreciate it if you got back to me with anything they found.”
“I’ll have Davies call you in the morning.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“Will you be in the office?”
“Tomorrow’s supposed to be my day off,” Carella said. “Have him try me at home.”
“Okay. That it?”
“That’s it, Sam. Thank you.”
Carella hung up, started to open the manila envelope from the I.S., looked up at the clock, and instead opened his personal telephone directory again. It was now ten minutes to five, but he dialed the number anyway.