The light came from a naked bulb suspended from a thick wire cord. It hung absolutely motionless. It did not swing, it did not make the slightest movement, so that the wire cord seemed almost to have been frozen into a slender steel rod. An orange crate rested on the floor beneath the light bulb. There were four bottle caps on the crate. Genero pulled out his pocket flash and swung the arc around the room. There were pin-up pictures on one of the walls, pasted close together, breasts to buttocks, cramped for space. The opposite wall was bare. There was a cot at the far end of the room, and there was a barred window over it.
Genero swung the light a little to the left and then, startled, pulled back, the .38 jerking upward spasmodically.
A boy was sitting on the cot.
His face was blue. He was leaning forward. He was leaning forward at a most precarious angle, and when the first cold shock of discovery left Genero, he wondered why the boy didn't fall forward onto his face. That was when he saw the rope.
One end of the rope was fastened to the barred window. The other end was knotted around the boy's neck. The boy kept leaning forward expectantly as if he wanted to get up off the cot and break into a spring. His eyes were wide, and his mouth was open, and there seemed to be life coiled deep within his body, ready to unspring and catapult him into the room. Only the color of his face and the position of his arms betrayed the fact that he was dead. The blue of the face was a sickly hue; his arms lay like heavy sleepers at his sides, the hands turned palms upward. Several inches from one hand was an empty hypodermic syringe.
Tentatively, somewhat frightened, somewhat ashamed of his superstitious dread of a dead body, Genero took a step closer and studied the blue face in the beam of the flash. To prove he wasn't frightened at all, he stood looking into the blank eyes for a moment or two longer than he felt he had to.
Then he hurried from the room, trembling, and headed for the nearest call box.
Chapter Two
The word had gone out long before Kling and Carella arrived.
Death had silently invaded the night, and death—like Macbeth—had murdered sleep, and there were lights in the windows now, and people leaned out into the bitter cold of winter, staring down at the five patrolmen who clustered in an uneasy and somehow guilty-looking knot on the pavement. There were people in the streets, too, talking in hushed whispers, wearing overcoats thrown over pajamas. The Mercury sedan swung into the block, looking like any pleasure car except for the short radio aerial protruding from the center of the roof. The car carried MD license plates, hut the two men who stepped from it were not doctors; they were detectives.
Carella walked briskly to the patrolmen. He was a tall man, dressed now in a brown sharkskin suit and charcoal-brown overcoat. He was hatless, and his hair was clipped close to his head, and he walked with the athletic nonchalance of a baseball player. He gave an impression of tightness, tight skin drawn taut over hard muscle, tight skin over high cheekbones that gave his face a somewhat Oriental appearance.
"Who called in?" he asked the closest patrolman.
"Dick," the cop answered.
"Where is he?"
"Downstairs with the stiff."
"Come on, Bert," Carella said over his shoulder, and Kling followed obediently and silently. The patrolmen studied Kling with pretended aloofness, not quite able to hide their envy. Kling was a new detective, a twenty-four-year-old kid who'd come up from the ranks. "Come up," hell. "Shot up" was a better way to put it. "Streaked up" was, in fact, the best way to put it. Kling had cracked a homicide, and the other patrolmen called it dumb luck, but the Commissioner called it "unusual perceptiveness and tenacity," and since the Commissioner's opinion was somewhat more highly respected than the opinions of beat-walkers, a rookie patrolman had been promoted to 3rd Grade Detective in less time than it took to pronounce the rank.
So the patrolmen smiled bleakly at Kling as he climbed over the chain after Carella, and the greenish tint to their faces was not caused by the cold.
"What's the matter with him?" one of the patrolmen whispered. "Don't he say hello no more?"
If Kling heard him, he gave no sign. He followed Carella into the basement room. Dick Genero was standing under the light bulb, biting his lip.
"Hi, Dick," Carella said.
"Hello, Steve. Bert." Genero seemed very nervous.
"Dick," Kling acknowledged.
"When'd you find him?" Carella asked.
"Few minutes before I called in. He's over there." Genero did not turn to look at the body.
"You touch anything?"
"Jesus, no!"
"Good. Was he alone when you got here?"
"Yeah. Yeah, he was alone. Listen, Steve, you mind if I go upstairs for some air? It's a little… a little stuffy in here."
"In a minute," Carella said. "Was the light burning?"
"What? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was." Genero paused. "That's how I happened to come down. I figured maybe a burglar. When I come down, there he was." Genero flicked his eyes toward the body on the cot.
Carella walked to where the boy sat suspended by the rope. "How old can he be?" he asked of no one. "Fifteen, sixteen?" No one answered.
"It looks… it looks like he hung himself, don't it?" Genero asked. Studiously, he avoided looking at the boy.
"It looks that way," Carella said. He did not realize that he was unconsciously shaking his head, or that there was a pained expression on his face. He sighed and turned to Kling. "We'd better wait until the Homicide boys get here. They raise a stink if we leave them seconds. What time is it, Bert?"
Kling looked at his watch. "Two eleven," he said.
"Want to start keeping a timetable, Dick?"
"Sure," Genero said. He took a black pad from his hip pocket and began writing into it. Carella watched him.
"Let's go up and get that air," he said.
Most suicides don't realize the headaches they cause.
They slash their wrists, or turn on the gas jets, or shoot themselves, or bang a slew of parallel wounds into their skulls with a hatchet, or leap from the nearest window, or sometimes chew a little cyanide, oras seemed to be the case with the boy on the cotthey hang themselves. But they don't give a thought to the headaches of the law enforcers.
A suicide, you see, is initially treated exactly like a homicide. And in a homicide, there are a few people concerned with law enforcement who must be notified. These few people are:
The police commissioner.
The chief of detectives.
The district commander of the detective division.
Homicide North or Homicide South, depending upon where the body was found.
The squad and precinct commanding officers of the precinct in which the body was found.
The medical examiner.
The district attorney.
The telegraph, telephone and teletype bureau at headquarters.
The police laboratory.
The police photographers.
The police stenographers.
Not all of these people, of course, descend simultaneously upon the scene of a suicide. Some of them have no earthly reason for climbing out of bed at an ungodly hour, and some of them simply leave the job to lesser paid and highly trained subordinates. You can always count on a diehard contingent of night owls, however, and this group will include a few Homicide dicks, a photographer, an assistant medical examiner, a handful of patrolmen, a pair or more of dicks from the local precinct, and a few lab technicians. A stenographer may or may not come along for the show.