The young man who lay on his back in the alley was wearing black, as if in mourning. But over the black, in contradiction, was a fine silken shawl, fringed at both ends. He seemed dressed for spring, but this was the fool’s day, and Death could not resist the temptation.
The black was punctuated with red and blue and white. The cobbled floor of the alley followed the same decorative scheme, red and blue and white, splashed about in gay spring abandon. Two overturned buckets of paint, one white, one blue, seemed to have ricocheted off the wall of the building and come to disorderly rest on the alley floor. The man’s shoes were spattered with paint. His black garment was covered with paint. His hands were drenched in paint. Blue and white, white and blue, his black garment, his silken shawl, the floor of the alley, the brick wall of the building before which he lay — all were splashed with blue and white.
The third color did not mix well with the others.
The third color was red, a little too primary, a little too bright.
The third color had not come from a paint can. The third color still spilled freely from two dozen open wounds on the man’s chest and stomach and neck and face and hands, staining the black, staining the silken shawl, spreading in a bright red pool on the alley floor, suffusing the paint with sunset, mingling with the paint but not mixing well, spreading until it touched the foot of the ladder lying crookedly along the wall, encircling the paintbrush lying at the wall’s base. The bristles of the brush were still wet with white paint. The man’s blood touched the bristles, and then trickled to the cement line where brick wall touched cobbled alley, flowed in an inching stream downward toward the street.
Someone had signed the wall.
On the wall, someone had painted, in bright, white paint, the single letter. J. Nothing more — only J.
The blood trickled down the alley to the city street.
Night was coming.
Detective Cotton Hawes was a tea drinker. He had picked up the habit from his minister father, the man who’d named him after Cotton Mather, the last of the red-hot Puritans. In the afternoons, the good Reverend Jeremiah Hawes had entertained members of his congregation, serving tea and cakes which his wife Matilda baked in the old, iron, kitchen oven. The boy, Cotton Hawes, had been allowed to join the tea-drinking congregation, thus developing a habit which had continued to this day.
At eight o’clock on the night of April first, while a young man lay in an alleyway with two dozen bleeding wounds shrieking in silence to the passersby on the street below, Hawes sat drinking tea. As a boy, he had downed the hot beverage in the book-lined study at the rear of the parish house, a mixture of Oolong and Pekoe which his mother brewed in the kitchen and served in English bone-china cups she had inherited from her grandmother. Tonight, he sat in the grubby, shopworn comfort of the 87th Precinct squadroom and drank, from a cardboard container, the tea Alf Miscolo has prepared in the clerical office. It was hot tea. That was about the most he could say for it.
The open, mesh-covered windows of the squadroom admitted a mild spring breeze from Grover Park across the way, a warm seductive breeze which made him wish he were outside on the street. It was criminal to be catching on a night like this. It was also boring. Aside from one wife-beating squeal, which Steve Carella was out checking this very minute, the telephone had been ominously quiet. In the silence of the squadroom, Hawes had managed to type up three overdue D.D. reports, two chits for gasoline and a bulletin-board notice to the men of the squad reminding them that this was the first of the month and time for them to cough up fifty cents each for the maintenance of Alf Miscolo’s improvised kitchen. He had also read a half-dozen FBI flyers, and listed in his little black memo book the license-plate numbers of two more stolen vehicles.
Now he sat drinking insipid tea and wondering why it was so quiet. He supposed the lull had something to do with Easter. Maybe there was going to be an egg-rolling ceremony down South Twelfth Street tomorrow. Maybe all the criminals and potential criminals in the 87th were home dyeing. Eggs, that is. He smiled and took another sip of the tea. From the clerical office beyond the slattered rail divider which separated the squadroom from the corridor, he could hear the rattling of Miscolo’s typewriter. Above that, and beyond it, coming from the iron-runged steps which led upstairs, he could hear the ring of footsteps. He turned toward the corridor just as Steve Carella entered it from the opposite end.
Carella walked easily and nonchalantly toward the railing, a big man who moved with fine-honed athletic precision. He shoved open the gate in the railing, walked to his desk, took off his jacket, pulled down his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt.
“What happened?” Hawes asked.
“The same thing that always happens,” Carella said. He sighed heavily and rubbed his hand over his face. “Is there any more coffee?” he asked.
“I’m drinking tea.”
“Hey, Miscolo!” Carella yelled. “Any coffee in there?”
“I’ll put on some more water!” Miscolo yelled back.
“So what happened?” Hawes asked.
“Oh, the same old jazz,” Carella said. “It’s a waste of time to even go out on these wife-beating squeals. I’ve never answered one yet that netted anything.”
“She wouldn’t press charges,” Hawes said knowingly.
“Charges, hell. There wasn’t even any beating, according to her. She’s got blood running out of her nose, and a shiner the size of a half-dollar, and she’s the one who screamed for the patrolman — but the minute I get there, everything’s calm and peaceful.” Carella shook his head. “‘A beating, officer?’“ he mimicked in a high, shrill voice. “‘You must be mistaken, officer. Why, my husband is a good, kind, sweet man. We’ve been married for twenty years, and he never lifted a finger to me. You must be mistaken, sir.’“
“Then who yelled for the cop?” Hawes asked.
“That’s just what I said to her.”
“What’d she answer?”
“She said, ‘Oh, we were just having a friendly little family argument.’ The guy almost knocked three teeth out of her mouth, but that’s just a friendly little family argument. So I asked her how she happened to have a bloody nose and a mouse under her eye and — catch this, Cotton — she said she got them ironing.”
“What?”
“Ironing.”
“She said the ironing board collapsed and the iron jumped up and hit her in the eye, and one of the ironing board legs clipped her in the nose. By the time I left, she and her husband were ready to go on a second honeymoon. She was hugging him all over the place, and he was sneaking his hand under her dress, so I figured I’d come back here where it isn’t so sexy.”
“Good idea,” Hawes said.
“Hey, Miscolo!” Carella shouted. “Where’s that coffee?”
“A watched pot never boils!” Miscolo shouted back cleverly.
“We’ve got George Bernard Shaw in the clerical office,” Carella said. “Anything happen since I left?”
“Nothing. Not a peep.”
“The streets are quiet, too,” Carella said, suddenly thoughtful.
“Before the storm,” Hawes said.
“Mmmm.”
The squadroom was silent again. Beyond the meshed window, they could hear the myriad sounds of the city, the auto horns, the muffled cries, the belching of buses, a little girl singing as she walked past the station house.
“Well, I suppose I ought to type up some overdue reports,” Carella said.
He wheeled over a typing cart, took three Detective Division reports from his desk, inserted carbon between two of the sheets and began typing.