No.
Saw the word United, thought it might be United Airlines, which would’ve meant the lady had taken a trip someplace. But it was only a charge to something called United Neighbors, which he guessed was some kind of Upper East Side Do-Gooder association to which she’d contributed twenty-five bucks which she should’ve spent on a cleaning lady instead, get rid of the tiger piss. He gave the bill another run-through, and then put it back into its envelope.
There was a drawer over the kneehole.
He opened it.
One of those Month At A Glance calendars. He guessed the One-Nine had gone through that, too, and found nothing significant in it, otherwise it wouldn’t be sitting here like a lox. He looked through it, anyway, comparing the month of June to the month of May to see if the lady had done anything special or unusual that might have led to her murder on the twenty-sixth. He found nothing extraordinary. Well, two calendar entries for appointments at a place called SeaCoast, which he guessed was a restaurant, one for twelve-thirty on the twenty-third of June and the other for the same time the following day. Eating in the same restaurant on two successive days seemed a bit odd to him, especially since the lady didn’t seem to dine out all that often. He found a Yellow Pages directory in the bottom drawer to the right of the kneehole, and looked up SeaCoast under restaurants. There was no restaurant named SeaCoast in the city of New York.
He looked in the lady’s personal telephone directory, which the One-Nine again had left behind, or perhaps brought back after they were done with it, such courtesies were not unknown in the NYPD, although exceedingly rare in cases where the owner of the property was no longer alive to complain. Either way, the directory was here to be studied, but there was no SeaCoast listed in it, so Hogan figured the hell with it. His eyes were beginning to smart from the stink of tiger piss in here.
In the middle drawer on the right-hand side of the desk, he found three little books with green covers.
He lifted the topmost book from the drawer, and opened it.
There was some kind of funny squiggly writing in it.
“Federal Bureau of Investigation,” a woman’s voice said.
“Agent Grant, please,” Hogan said.
“Special Agent Michael Grant, yes, sir,” the woman said, subtly correcting his error; in the FBI, all agents were special agents.
Grant came on the line thirty seconds later. Hogan introduced himself, told him what he was working, told him he’d found some kind of little green books with foreign writing in them, and wondered if Santorini had discussed these when he called.
“If this is the Green Book,” Grant said, “then we...”
“Three of them. Three green books,” Hogan said.
“Collectively, I mean,” Grant said.
“Uh-huh.”
“If this is what I think it is, then yes, we discussed it. In connection with the scimitar tattoos. Apparently he had some victims with scimitar tattoos...”
“Yeah, the green swords.”
“Yes. And he wanted to know if I knew anything about an Iranian terrorist group that called itself Scimitar.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I told him our current thinking was that they’d been inactive since the JFK bombing...”
“Uh-huh.”
“... back in 1989. So we sort of eliminated them as...”
“He was considering them as possibles, huh?”
“Well, I think he was looking for a place to hang his hat.”
“Uh-huh. So where’d you go from there?”
“We talked about Libya a little. Because the tattoos were green, you know...”
“Uh-huh.”
“... kicking around the idea that this might be something Libyan, those crazy bastards. He wears women’s dresses and makeup, you know...”
“Who?”
“Quaddafi. And goes to sleep with a teddy bear.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah. Totally weird. Sends his people out to buy new bedsheets whenever he checks into a hotel room. Nuts.”
“Uh-huh. So what’d you tell him?”
“Your guy? I said I didn’t have anything new on Libyan intelligence, the whole thing sort of died down after the big scare six years ago, when everybody thought Reagan was on a hit list.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I told him he’d do better contacting the CIA. They’d be the ones with any current stuff. He said he might do that.”
“I don’t see any indication he did,” Hogan said.
“Well,” Grant said.
They were both thinking he’d been murdered before he’d got around to it.
“Have you got a number for them?” Hogan asked.
“Sure, hold a sec.”
Hogan waited.
When Grant came back on the line, he gave him the number of the New York Field Office of the CIA, and told him the man he usually dealt with there was a man named Conrad Templeton. Hogan thanked him for his time, hung up, and checked through Santorini’s files again, to see if he’d missed anything about a call to the CIA. There was nothing. He dialed 755-0027, got a woman’s voice saying, “Central Intelligence,” and asked for Agent Templeton.
“One moment, please,” the woman said.
Hogan waited, wondering how a nice Irish kid from Staten Island had grown up to be a man phoning secret agents all over the fuckin’ city. He was hoping this really was some kind of crazy green spy shit from Libya; you could always unite New Yorkers by telling them some lunatic foreigner was running around hurting innocent people. Though, tell you the truth, most people in this city thought cops deserved to get stabbed in the eye. He kept waiting. He was just about to light a cigar, when a man came on the line.
“Alex Nichols,” the man said.
“This is Detective-Lieutenant Peter Hogan,” Hogan said. “Homicide North.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I was trying to reach Agent Templeton...”
“In the field just now. I’m his superior, maybe I can help you.”
“I hope so,” Hogan said. “One of my people was killed during a double-homicide investigation. The victims were tattooed with green scimitars, and I just now found three little green books that the Feds tell me...”
“Where are you?” Nichols asked at once.
She sat at the desk just to the left of the windows facing the beach, thumbing through her mother’s telephone directory, sorting out city people from beach people. The next beach name she recognized was McNulty, James and Amanda. She dialed the number and waited.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice said.
“Mrs. McNulty?”
“No, this is Helga,” the woman said. “Who’s calling, please?”
“Elita Randall.”
“Hold on, please.”
“Tell her it’s Caro...”
But she was gone.
Another woman came onto the line.
“Hello?”
“Mrs. McNulty?”
“Yes?”
“This is Elita Randall, Carolyn Fremont’s daughter?”
“Hello, Elita, how are you?”
“Fine, thanks, Mrs. McNulty. I’m sorry to bother you...”
“No bother at all.”
“But I’m trying to locate my moth...”
“Helga! What is that dog doing? Excuse me, darling. Helga!”
Elita waited. In the background, she could hear voices and barking. At last Mrs. McNulty came back onto the line.
“I’m sorry, darling,” she said, “we’re getting ready for a Fourth of July party, and the caterers are here, and the dog decides at this very moment... well, never mind, it’s been taken care of. You were saying?”