She lifted her own glass. "Here's to golden days and purple nights," she said, and clinked the glass against his.
He nodded, said nothing.
"That was my father's favorite toast," she said. "How old are you, Hal?"
"Thirty-four," he said.
"How old were you when it happened?"
He took a swallow of scotch and then said, "Twenty-two." He shook his head. "He'd just killed three people inside that liquor store. The owner and two ladies."
"I would have done just what you did," Marilyn said.
"Well…" Willis said, and shrugged again. "If only he'd put down the gun…"
"But he didn't…"
"I told him to put it down, I warned him…" He shook his head again. "He just kept coming at me."
"So you shot him."
"Yes."
"How many times?"
"Three times," Willis said.
"That's a lot of times."
"Yes."
They both fell silent. Willis sipped at the scotch. Marilyn kept watching him.
"You're small for a cop," she said.
"I know. Five eight."
"Most cops are bigger. Detectives especially. Not that I ever met a detective before now. I mean in the movies. Most of them are very big."
"Well, the movies," Willis said.
"You never killed anybody before that, huh?"
"No."
"Wow," she said, and fell silent for several moments. At last, she said, "What time is it?"
He looked at his watch. "Almost nine," he said.
"I really have to call Mickey," she said. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to rush you out."
"That's okay," he said, "I've taken enough of your time."
"Well, finish your drink," she said. "And if you want my advice, you'll put the whole thing out of your mind, really. You killed a man, okay, but that's not such a big deal. Really. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
He nodded and said nothing.
He was thinking Not a man, a boy.
He drained the scotch. He was feeling warm and a bit light-headed. He put the empty glass down on the coffee table.
"Thanks for the drink," he said. "Drinks."
"So where do you go now?" she asked.
"Back to the office, type up the reports."
"Will I see you again?"
Still sitting, looking up at him, pale eyes studying his. He hesitated.
"I didn't kill Jerry," she said.
Eyes fastened to his.
"Call me," she said.
He said nothing.
"Will you?"
"If you want me to," he said.
"I want you to."
"Then I will," he said, and shrugged.
"Let me get your coat," she said, and rose, sleek knees flashing.
"I can find my way out," he said, "I know you're in a hurry."
"Don't be silly," she said.
She took his coat from the rack and helped him into it. Just before he went out, she said, "Call me, don't forget."
"I'll call," he said.
The wind hit him the minute he stepped outside, dispelling alcohol and cozy fire, yanking him back to reality. He walked across to where he'd parked the car, struggled with a frozen lock, held a match under the key and finally managed to open the door. He started the car and turned on the heater. He wiped his gloved hand over the frost-rimed windshield.
He did not know why he decided to sit there in the car, watching her building across the street.
Maybe he'd just been a detective for too long a time.
Twenty minutes later, a black 560 SL Mercedes-Benz pulled up to the curb in front of Marilyn's building. Willis watched as the door on the curb side opened.
Her girlfriend Mickey, he thought.
Better late than never.
Mickey—if that's who it was—locked the car door, walked the few steps to Marilyn's building, took off a glove, and pressed the bell button.
A moment later, Mickey—if that's who it was—opened the door and went inside.
Mickey—if that's who it was—was a six feet three inch tall, two-hundred-and-twenty-pound male white Caucasian wearing a bulky raccoon coat that made him look even bigger than he was.
Honesty, the lady had said.
Bullshit, Willis thought, and jotted down the license plate number and then drove back to the station house to type up his reports in triplicate.
CHAPTER 5
April that year came in with a suddenness that took the breath away. There had been in the city a sense of seige, the winds of March blowing like war trumpets, troop-trampled soot-blackened snow underfoot, a gunpowder sky unrelieved by sunshine. The citizenry hurried along the streets, bundled inside bulky garments, faces pinched and tempers short.The cold was something that attacked incessantly, turning even more inward a populace never noted for its generosity of spirit. Willis despised the cold. He felt disembodied in time and space, the victim of a relentless foe attacking without provocation, determined to level the city and devour its dead. Relief seemed only a distant dream. The forecasters kept promising warm fronts from Georgia but the warm fronts never materialized. Day by day, the gloomy greyness of March persisted, the cold a penetrating, remorseless, vengeful adversary bent on abject surrender.
But all at once, it was April.
Balmy breezes wafted in unexpectedly off the Old Seawall downtown. Heads bowed too long by the enemy lifted tentatively toward the clearing sky, numbed noses sniffed suspiciously of the warming air, watery eyes blinked in surprise and disbelief. The coats came off. Strangers in this city of strangers smiled at each other in the streets. Uptown, along the stone walls bordering Grover Park, forsythia bushes and cornelian cherry shrubs burst into shy, tentative yellow and pink bloom against the soiled and melting patches of snow.
It was April at last.
And in April, two days after Easter, a corpse turned up in the Twelfth Precinct.
The dead man's neighbor, perhaps remembering Sweeney Todd, complained to the building superintendant that it smelled like somebody was baking human meat pies in apartment 401. The Emergency-911 cops who responded recognized the stench of decomposing flesh at once. They cursed the suddenly balmy weather and unrolled a body bag before they took two steps inside the apartment.
The dead man was identified as Basil Hollander, who was an accountant with the firm of Kiley, Benson, Marx and Rudolph.
The Twelfth Squad detectives investigating the case were named Sam Kaufman and Jimmy (The Lark) Larkin. Neither of them knew that a pair of detectives uptown were investigating a poisoning case. In fact, neither of them knew Carella or Willis at all. The two Homicide detectives who put in a mandatory appearance at the scene of the crime were named Mastroiano and Manzini. They worked out of Homicide West and knew Monoghan and Monroe—who worked out of Homicide East—only casually.
Monoghan and Monroe had read most of the 87th Squad D.D. reports on the McKennon case, and presumably knew that among the men questioned was an accountant named Basil Hollander. But they had nothing to do with the case down there in the Twelfth; this was a big city. As a matter of fact, they might not have made the connection even if they'd been called in on the case, which they could not have been, the police department guarding its geographic territories as jealously as it guarded its spotless reputation. Anyway, Monoghan and Monroe were very busy cops with a lot of scatological jokes to tell.
It was therefore not until the next day, April 2, that Willis happened to read about the downtown corpse.
He'd been busy until then trying to get a handle on the black Mercedes-Benz that had driven up to Marilyn Hollis's townhouse on the twenty-seventh of March and deposited a great big raccoon on her doorstep. A check with Motor Vehicles had advised Willis that the license plate on the car he'd seen was affixed to a new model Mercedes-Benz registered to the president of a dress firm called Lily Fashions, Inc. with offices on Burke Street downtown. The president's name was Abraham Lilienthal, hence (Motor Vehicles guessed) the Lily Fashions.