“Why tomorrow?” Brown asked.
“Because the crews’ll be finished setting up tonight, and the fire department’ll do their inspection early tomorrow morning to make sure none of the wires or the portable toilets are fire hazards, and they’ll give me a certificate I can show you.That’s why tomorrow,” Ackerman said.
“What time tomorrow?” Carella asked.
“You guys are really worried about this, aren’t you?” Ackerman said.
He didn’t know the Deaf Man.
JEFF COLBERT seemed surprised to see them.
“You made good time,” he said.
“Huh?” Parker said.
Colbert was standing in front of the big window in his office, the city’s spectacular downtown skyline behind him.
“I called your office twenty minutes ago,” he said. “Left a message with a detective named Genero?”
“We’ve been in the field,” Kling said.
“We didn’t get your message,” Parker said.
“I was just calling to say Mrs. Wilkins filed Peter’s will early this morning. You can have a look at it anytime you’d like.”
“We already know what’s in it,” Kling said. “We spoke to Mrs. Wilkins yesterday.”
“I wasn’t aware of that,” Colbert said.
“I’ll bet you weren’t,” Parker said.
Colbert looked at him.
“Mr. Colbert,” Kling said, “do you remember where you happened to be at around twelve, twelve-thirty on the afternoon of March twenty-fifth?”
“No, I don’t, offhand,” Colbert said. “Why do you ask?”
“Would you happen to have an appointment calendar, anything like that, could maybe tell you where you were?” Parker said.
“Yes, I’m sure I can check my…”
“Because where we think you were,” he said, “is in the SavMor Hardware store on River and Marsh, is where we think you were at that time.”
“Buying twenty-two cans of spray paint,” Kling said.
“What makes you think that?” Colbert asked, and smiled.
“A girl who can identify you,” Kling said.
“Want to meet her?” Parker asked.
HE COULD remember a time when the chief of detectives would run a lineup downtown at headquarters every Monday through Thursday of the week. This was not for identification purposes, the way the lineup today was. Back then, two detectives from every precinct in the city would pull lineup duty on one of those four days, and they’d trot dutifully downtown to sit on folding wooden chairs in the big gymnasium while felony offenders arrested the day before were trotted onto the stage and questioned by the chief.
The chief stood behind a microphone on a podium at the back of the gym, and he reeled off the charges against the person standing on the stage, and gave the circumstances of the arrest and then kept him or her up there for five, ten minutes, however much time he thought the offender was worth. This allowed his rotating detectives the opportunity to see everyone who’d committed a felony in this fair city, the theory being that if somebody seriously broke the law once he’d seriously break it again, and next time the cops would be able to recognize a troublemaker on sight. This was when law enforcement was a personal sort of thing. Some detectives actually looked forward to pulling lineup duty every other week. It gave them a day away from the squadroom and it made them feel noble, seeing all those scumbags up there on the stage.
Nowadays, you didn’t have these formal lineups anymore. The only lineups you had were like the ones they were holding today for the benefit of Miriam Hartman, the black girl who’d been working SavMor’s counter number six when Jeffry Colbert presumably checked out twenty-two cans of spray paint on a rainy Wednesday in March.
The lineup room at the Eight-Seven—or the showup room as it was sometimes called—wasn’t half so elaborate as the ones in some of the newer, flashier precincts. Relocated in the basement of the building, where there’d been space to build a larger stage and to install seating for twelve behind the large sheet of oneway plate glass, the room lacked an efficient airconditioning system and was sometimes suffocatingly hot during the summer months. But this was still the beginning of April, and Miriam Hartman seemed comfortable enough as she sat looking at the lighted stage beyond the glass, waiting for the action to begin. If she wasn’t, then fuck her, Parker thought.
For the lineup today, they had rounded up three other men with mustaches, two of them offenders they’d brought up from the holding cells, and one of them a patrolman they’d asked to change back into his street clothes. In addition, they had three men without mustaches, one of them from the clerical office, the other two street patrolmen, all of them wearing civvies. Including Colbert, this made seven men, four of them with mustaches, three without. Moreover, two of the men wearing mustaches were about the same height as Colbert—five-eleven, in there. All of the men were white. There would be no later opportunity for some slippery shyster to come in and say the identification process had been loaded against Colbert. This wasn’t a case of him being the only tall white guy with a mustache. Miriam Hartman had her choice of three of them.
The seven men walked out onto the stage. With the possible exception of Colbert, all of them had been through this drill before. The two offenders they’d drafted from the holding cell came out first, followed by three policemen, and then Colbert, and then the other policeman. There were height markers on the wall behind them. The stage was well lighted, but the illumination was not blinding. None of the men had to squint into the darkened room beyond.
Parker pulled the microphone to him.
One by one, he ordered each of the men to take a step forward, to smile, and to say “Some weather, huh?” which Miriam Hartman had said were the words spoken to her by the man who’d purchased the paint. One by one, they stepped forward, smiled—somewhat ghoulishly in the case of one of the offenders—and said, “Some weather, huh?”
“Thank you, step back, please,” Parker said after each man had done his little turn.
He figured later that Miriam Hartman had picked out Colbert the moment he stepped onto the stage. He was not at all surprised when she said, “That’s him.”
“Second from the left?” Parker asked, confirming it.
“Second from the left,” she said, and nodded emphatically.
IN THE interrogation room upstairs, Meyer and Hawes were talking to William Harris Hamilton, which—according to his driver’s license—was the shelter guard’s full name.
This was going to be a tough one, and they knew it.
All they had so far was Margaret Shanks’s word that she’d hired Hamilton to pick up her husband and drop him off somewhere, preferably out of her life forever. They hadn’t yet been able to identify either the man known only as Charlie, or the woman who’d died of cardiac arrest after someone had left her as helpess as an infant, alone and untended in a deserted railroad station. If Hamilton was the person who’d dumped her there, they felt they could reasonably charge him with Murder in the Second Degree, a Class-A felony defined in §125.5 with the words “A person is guilty of murder in the second degree when, under circumstances evincing a depraved indifference to human life, he recklessly engages in conduct which creates a grave risk of death to another person, and thereby causes the death of another person.” Failing this, they were positive a charge of Manslaughter Two—a mere Class-C—would stick. Manslaughter in the Second Degree was defined in §125.15 as “Recklessly causing the death of another person.”