“She told you. She didn’t go in his closet.”
“Didn’t see him carrying them into the house, either, huh?”
“You heard her, she’s out a lot. What are you saying, Bert? You saying she whacked him?”
“I’m saying opportunity .”
“What the fuck does that mean, opportunity?”
“Do you buy Wilkins as a writer?”
“Why not? Lots of guys lead peculiar lives.”
“A lawyer? Writing on walls ?”
“Lawyers especially are very peculiar,” Parker said.
“You don’t think it’s amazing she never noticed twenty-two cans of paint in her husband’s closet, huh?”
Parker let this sink in.
“You’re saying exactly what I said about the brother, right? She hears about this nut who killed…”
“Right, and opportunity knocks,” Kling said. “She whacks the husband and then makes him look like one of the victims.”
“You’re forgetting she’s the one who just now suggested a copycat, aren’t you?”
“Which, if she killed him, was very smart of her.”
Parker looked at him again.
“Okay,” he said at last, “let’s go find them fuckin cans.”
The handyman hadn’t thrown the paint cans into the garbage waiting for disposal because they looked brand-new and he figured that would be a tragic waste. At first he was reluctant to show the cans to the detectives because he was afraid they might take them away from him. Kling convinced him they only wanted to have a look at them.
On the bottom of each can, there was a little sticker that read:
They now knew where the paint had been purchased.
Trouble was, there were eight SavMor Hardware stores in Isola alone, and another twelve scattered all over the city.
AT THREE O’CLOCK that afternoon, Eileen went downtown to talk to Karin Lefkowitz. Karin was her shrink. She went to see her because she was feeling guilty about Georgia Mowbry. She told Karin that she was the one who’d been working the door and yet it was Georgia who’d been shot and killed. It didn’t seem fair, she said.
People kept telling Karin that she looked a lot like Barbra Streisand playing Lowenstein in Prince of Tides . Karin resented this because she didn’t know a single analyst who would have behaved as outrageously as that one had; in the picture, anyway; she hadn’t read the book. Besides, she didn’t think she looked or behaved at all like Barbra Streisand. Her nose was a trifle long, true, but she didn’t have long fingernails and she didn’t wear high heels to work and she didn’t hire any of her patients to give her son football lessons. As a matter of fact, she didn’t have any children, perhaps because she wasn’t married. And what she wore to work was tailored suits and Reeboks. Anyway,she’d been here first.
“Would you rather have been the one who got shot and killed?” she asked Eileen.
“Well, no. Of course not.”
“Then why do you feel guilty?”
Eileen told her all over again how Georgia had come to the door…
“Yes.”
…to see if she needed anything or wanted to use the ladies’ room…
“Yes.”
“And just that minute the goddamn door opened and he shot her.”
“So?”
“So I think he was firing at me . I think he opened that door and let loose thinking he’d be shooting me . Killing me . Because he’d already killed the girl in the apartment and I’d been the one talking to him, so maybe he figured I was the one responsible for what he’d done, who the hell knows what he was thinking, he was nuts.”
“That’s right, you have no way of…”
“But I was the target, I’m sure of that, not Georgia. He fired blind, he didn’t even know there were two of us out there when he opened that door. He was going for me , Karin. And Georgia got it instead. And now Georgia’s dead.”
“Eileen,” Karin said, “let me tell you something, okay?”
“Sure.”
“This one isn’t your freight.”
“He wanted to kill…”
“You don’t know what he wanted to do!”
“He couldn’t have known Georgia was…”
“Eileen, I won’t let you get away with this. Damn it, i won’t . You can blame yourself for getting raped…”
“i don’t blame myself for…”
“Not anymore you don’t! And you can blame yourself for shooting a man who was coming at you with a knife…”
“i don’t !”
“Well, good, maybe we’re making some progress, after all,” Karin said dryly. “But if you think I’m going to let you spend another century in here blaming yourself for this one, you’re wrong. I won’t do it. You can walk right out that door if you like, but i won’t do it.”
Eileen looked at her.
“Right,” Karin said, and nodded.
“I thought you were supposed to help me deal with guilt,” Eileen said.
“Only if it’s yours,” Karin said.
THE LIBRARY closest to the station house was on the corner of Liberty and Mason in an area that used to be called Whore Street but that now sported coffee-houses and boutiques and little shops that sold designer jewelry and antiques. The restoration attracted tourists to the Eight-Seven, and tourists attracted pickpockets and muggers. Carella and Brown liked it better when the short street was lined with houses of prostitution.
The librarian in the reference room told them that the way it worked with back newspapers, it usually took three weeks to a month to get them on microfilm. So if they wanted anything from February , for example, it would already be on microfilm, but if they were interested in March’s papers, chances are they’d still be in the reference room.
Sitting at a long table overhung with green shaded lamps, both men began poring over the newspapers for the past month, trying to zero in on any announced outdoor event that might qualify for whatever mischief the Deaf Man had in mind. This was still only April, and not many producers of alfresco extravaganzas were foolish enough to bank on the weather at this time of year, but…
The circus had arrived on March twenty-first for a two-week run that would end this Saturday. Did a crowd in a tent qualify as a crowd without boundaries? Concerning such a crowd, Rivera had written, “it cannot be restrained by walls .” Well, a tent didn’t have walls, did it? Was it possible that the circus was the Deaf Man’s target? If so, his proposed happening would take place all the way downtown in the Old City, where the huge tent had been pitched close to the battered seawall the Dutch had built centuries ago.Le Cirque Magnifique was the name of the troupe. Direct From Paris, the advertisement read. Carella was copying the information in his notebook when Brown said, “How about this one?”
Carella looked.
The ad was headlined:
There was a picture of Tony grinning out of the full-page ad, and beneath that the words:
FRI.& SAT.,APR.3 & 4 • 8PM
The location of the event was given as the Holly Hills Arena in Majesta.
“Is an arena an open space?” Brown asked.