“Do you feel any resentment about Josie getting the part? An understudy? Taking over the starring role? While you — an actress in an important supporting role…”
“Of course,” Andrea said.
“You resent it,” Carella said, and nodded.
“Sure, wouldn’t you?” she asked Kling.
“I guess,” he said. “Miss Packer,” he said, “there are questions we have to ask, I hope you understand this doesn’t mean we suspect you in any way of having killed Michelle Cassidy. But there are certain routine questions…”
“You sound like Mark.”
“Who’s Mark?”
“Riganti. He plays the Detective. In the play. That’s the sort of thing he would say.”
“Well, it’s the sort of thing we do say.”
“I understand,” she said softly, and lowered her eyes again.
“So maybe you’d like to tell us where you were on Tuesday night between seven and eight o’clock,” Carella said.
“I was wondering when you’d get to that,” she said, the brown eyes snapping up to his face. “All that business about knowing the part, and resenting Josie….”
“As my partner explained…”
“I know, I’m not a suspect. Especially when I tell you where I was.”
“Where were you?”
“Aerobics class.”
“Where?” Kling asked.
“Which one of you is Mutt?” she asked. “In the play, Freddie writes all about Good Cop, Bad Cop. Mutt and Jeff, isn’t that what you call them?”
“Where’s your aerobics class?” Kling asked.
“You must be Jeff.”
“I’m Bert. Can you tell us…?”
“Hello, Bert. It’s on Swift. I’ll give you a card. Would you like a card?”
“Yes, please.”
“I was there on Tuesday night from six-thirty to seven forty-five. Then I went home. Check it out.”
She turned toward the dressing-table mirror, reached for her handbag where it sat among a dozen or more makeup jars and powder puffs and brushes and liner pencils, snapped open the bag, rummaged in it for a moment, and handed Kling a card.
“The instructor on Tuesday was a woman named Carol Gorman. You’d better call first, she’s not there all the time.”
“We will. Thanks for your…”
“Andy?”
They all turned to where a strapping young man in watch cap and overalls was standing in the doorway.
“Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t realize…”
“Come in, Chuck,” she said. “Have you met Mutt and Jeff?”
Madden looked puzzled.
“Good Cop/Bad Cop,” she said. “Detectives Carella and Kling.”
“Saw you the other day,” Madden said. “How are you?” Turning to Andrea again, he said, “Ash wants to run the Understudy/Detective scene ten minutes from now.”
“We just ran it,” Andrea said dryly.
Once upon a time, a detective named Roger Havilland worked out of the Eight-Seven. He abruptly stopped working there when someone tossed him through a plate-glass window. But before his untimely demise, he’d once remarked, “I love this city when the coats come off.”
He’d been referring to women, of course. Women taking off their coats, hell with the men. He and Carella had been strolling along Hall Avenue in the sunshine, and Havilland had been admiring the girls prancing by. Girls back then, not women. Nobody was quite as ready to take offense back then. Except Havilland, perhaps, who’d been a hater of monumental proportions. No one missed him. Enough police department bigots had risen to take his place. Oddly, though, on a beautiful spring day like today, Carella remembered the one memorable thing Havilland had ever said.
I love this city when the coats come off
Today, the women had taken off their coats. Even the women who were only sixteen years old were prancing by in celebration of spring. The skirts were even shorter now than when Havilland had made his immortal remark, and the girls, the women, the persons of contrasting sex were now wearing thigh-high black stockings, some of them exposing garter belts, below the hems of their teeny-weeny skirts. It was a nice time of the year to take the air, especially down here in the Quarter.
Carella had always felt this part of the city was the most vital, a self-contained enclave of the eccentric and the eclectic, a city within the city proper, honoring its own established morals and mores, its own rules of acceptable behavior, most of it outrageous. A girl walked by wearing…
Well, she really was a girl, if twelve counted, anymore.
… what appeared to be a caftan, white with black trim at the hem and the long flowing sleeves. Over this, she wore an assortment of dangling, clanging chains, and a black fez beneath which her blond hair cascaded. She was barefooted, her feet caked with the grime of the city. She smiled at him as she went past. He wondered if his own daughter would one day dress like a camel driver and smile blissfully at every passing stranger.
The sun felt good on his shoulders and head.
He did not want to go indoors, he did not want to work on a day like today.
But Frederick Peter Corbin III was waiting.
Bodies by Rhoda was on the second floor of a red brick building on Swift Avenue, not far from the old Federal Bank Building. Kling had got there a half hour earlier and had been told by a woman with frizzy black hair and leotard and tights to match that Carol’s Step-and-Stretch class was still in progress and wouldn’t break till eleven. It was now ten minutes to the hour, and he sat patiently on a bench in the reception area, looking through a plate-glass window at a wide variety of women jumping and bouncing in the air. He could not hear any music behind the glass, but he suspected some was being played, otherwise the sight would have been entirely bizarre.
The women began pouring out of the room at about five past the hour, all of them sweating, all of them looking flushed and invigorated. He asked a somewhat beefy blonde who Carol might be, and she pointed out a trim brunette wearing a shocking-pink leotard and black tights, rewinding a tape at the player across the room. The room smelled vaguely of female perspiration. He caught his own reflection in what seemed a dozen mirrors as he crossed to the far corner.
“Miss Gorman?” he asked tentatively.
She turned. Faint surprised look on her freckled face. Green eyes wide. Lips slightly parted. No makeup on her cheeks, eyes or mouth. Fresh-faced kid of twenty-one, twenty-two, he guessed.
“Yes?” she said.
“Detective Kling,” he said, “Eighty-seventh Squad,” and showed her the shield. She seemed impressed. Nodded. Waited.
“I wonder if you can give me some information about this past Tuesday night…”
“Yes?”
“… that would’ve been the seventh of April.”
“Yes?”
“Were you here that night?”
“I think so. Tuesday? Yes, I’m sure I was. Why? What happened?”
“Were you teaching a class from six-thirty to seven forty-five that night?”
“Yes. Well, from six-thirty to seven-thirty, actually. Gee, you sound stern. Something terrible must have happened.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to…”
“I mean, you don’t look stern, but you sure do sound stern. Very.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
“What is it that happened?”
“Nothing,” he said. “This is a routine inquiry.”
“Into what?”
“Do you know a woman named Andrea Packer?”
“Yes?”
“Was she in that class on Tuesday night?”