Carella secretly agreed that Endicott might very well be a candidate for termination with extreme prejudice, but he said only that he would take the matter under advisement (his language automatically emulating the lawyer's somewhat curlicued style) with the lieutenant and get back to him as soon as a decision had been made.
Lieutenant Byrnes said, "Where the hell is Willis?"
"He's not due in till four," Carella said.
"So what the hell are you doing here?"
"I want your job," Carella said, and smiled.
"You're welcome to it," Byrnes said.
"What do I tell Endicott? And Riley?"
"They're worried, huh?"
"Wouldn't you be?"
Byrnes shrugged. "I've been around too long," he said. "You start worrying about a safe falling out of a ten-story window and hitting you on the head, you go crazy. What are the odds on this guy trying to nail the other two? I'd say one in a million."
"Which are heavy odds if you happen to be one of the other two."
"What are they asking for? Round-the-clocks? Three shifts?"
"They didn't specify."
"That'd mean taking six men away from where they should be. I can't spare six detectives, that's for sure. Not with the weather turning nice and all the bedbugs coming out of the woodwork."
"We can use patrolmen."
"In plainclothes, if they're going to serve our needs. He spots a blue uniform, he'll run like hell."
"That's the idea, isn't it?"
"No. The idea is if we're going to divert manpower, it has to serve some purpose other than protecting two guys who are running scared. If we sent policemen around to protect everybody in this city who thinks somebody's gonna kill him, we'd have no cops left to do anything else. I'm in favor of the round-the-clocks only because if our man does try another hit, we'll have somebody there to nab him. Let me see if Captain Frick can spare six blues. Put Endicott and Riley on hold till then."
It was determined within an hour, and over Captain Frick's objections, that six patrolmen could indeed be diverted from their usual posts in order to set into motion the undercover round-the-clocks on Endicott and Riley. Frick (because the bedbugs were coming out of the woodwork not only for detectives but for the uniformed force as well) chose six men he could most afford to lose, a half-dozen fuck-ups who looked upon the surveillance job as a welcome break from the tedium and danger of streetwork—until they were told a murderer might put in an appearance. All at once, the job didn't look like a paid vacation in the country anymore. They began arguing among themselves about who would have the Graveyard Shift, the choice shift in that Endicott and Riley presumably would be asleep during the empty hours of the night and morning, and their protectors might also get a chance to do a bit of cooping. Frick settled the quibbling at once by assigning the shifts himself, you for the day shift, you for the evening shift, you for the night shift. Period. Reluctantly, at two o'clock that afternoon, two of the six fuck-ups trotted off in opposite directions, one to Nelson Riley's loft downtown on Carlson Street, the other to Endicott's law office midtown on Jefferson Avenue.
For now, both men were protected.
Sort of.
Willis came to work at a quarter to four that afternoon.
He was whistling.
Carella, who'd been on the job since nine that morning, nonetheless worked through the shift till a quarter to twelve that night. During the shift, the men caught an armed robbery in progress, an attempted rape, three assaults, and a burglary. Nobody tried to kill either Endicott or Riley, much to the joy of the two fuck-ups who had been relieved on post at a quarter to four that afternoon. At a quarter to twelve, the third pair of fuck-ups reported for duty and were respectively told that Endicott and Riley had been tucked in for the night. Carella and Willis were relieved at that same time.
Both men had the weekend off. Carella went directly home to his wife and kids in Riverhead.
Willis went directly to the house on Harborside Lane.
One wing of the house had been closed off—"To save on the heating bill," she told him—and served as a storeroom for a collection of junk she could find no place for in the rest of the house. A brightly colored, hand painted vase, for example, sat on what Willis thought was a low coffee table covered with a red shawl. Marilyn told him that the vase was hand-painted by a man who'd been sitting on the sidewalk downtown in the Quarter, with all these ugly little clay things all around him, except for this one, which she thought was really beautiful, although she suspected the colors might wear off one day. The vase used to contain artificial flowers, but she'd thrown those out when she discovered there was a leak in the ceiling, after which she'd moved the box with the shawl and the vase on it under the leak because if you had to have something for a leak, the vase was more esthetic than a kitchen pot, wasn't it?
What Willis had thought was a coffee table under the vase and the shawl was instead the "box" to which she'd referred. She had bought the shawl in Buenos Aires, where she'd gone after running out on Joseph Seward. The box was a Sunkist orange crate she'd found behind a grocery store when she first got here to the city. She had planned to soak off the label on the end panel and then have it framed in a little shop she knew on the Stem, where they did absolutely marvelous work and could make even a crumby little pencil sketch look like a Picasso. She'd taken the crate here when she bought the house, but she'd never got around to soaking off the label, and finally she moved it into the storeroom where she'd covered it with the shawl and put the vase with the artificial flowers on it, until the ceiling developed a leak.
There were four dog leashes hanging on the wall in the storeroom.
She'd once had a dog, this was after she'd bought the house, a huge Lab named Iceberg because he was black, but she couldn't take him to the park for the exercise he needed because she was always running here and there to interior decorators and showrooms when she was furnishing the house. So she gave the dog to this man who was a friend of hers—
"A friend or an acquaintance?" Willis asked.
"Well, he was a friend, I thought," she said.
—but the dog got run over by an automobile, which could have been the end of their friendship right then and there, the man being so careless and all. Instead she kept seeing him until she learned that he had a wife and four kids in Las Vegas, at which point she told him she didn't care for either philanderers or liars, especially philandering liars who let a dog run out loose in the street where he could get run over by a Caddy. She kept the leashes because she'd really loved that dog, and also because one day she might decide to buy another dog, although that was only a remote possibility.
The storeroom was packed from floor to ceiling with cartons. Some of the cartons contained letters she'd saved, mostly from friends here in the city when she was living on the Coast and later in Houston when she was in Seward's stable. She didn't want to go into detail about how she'd got in the life—"The usual story, Hal, a guy turned me out, and that was that"—but she did say that she'd drifted to Houston after she walked out on the Malibu beach bum who used to smack her around. No, her mother never contacted her there in California. No, her mother never married an oil millionaire. As he already knew, those were lies. Because if she'd started telling him the truth about what had happened after she left California, she'd have had to go into Houston and all the rest, Buenos Aires, all that, and she might have lost him right there on the spot.
Most of the cartons contained newspaper and magazine clippings.
There were articles on breast cancer…