"So is everybody all paired up nice now?" Parker asked. "You got Genero hellip;"
"Thanks very much," Brown said.
"Meyer's got Steve hellip;"
"I only stopped by for some coffee," Carella said.
"And I got Peaches Muldoon."
"Who's that?"
"A gorgeous registered nurse who's dying to see me."
"Sixty years old," Brown said.
"That's an oldlady !" Genero said, shocked.
"Tell him."
"You ever date a nurse?" Parker said.
"Me?" Genero said.
"You, you. You ever date a nurse?"
"No. And I never dated a sixty-year-old lady, either."
"Tell him," Brown said.
"There is nothing like a nurse," Parker said. "It's a fact that in the book business if you put the word nurse in a title, you sell a million more copies."
"Who told you that?"
"It's a fact. A publisher told me that. In this office where they stole all his typewriters, this was maybe a year ago. A nurse in the title sells a million more copies."
"I'm gonna write a book calledThe Naked and the Nurse ," Brown said.
"How aboutGone with the Nurse ?" Meyer said.
"OrNurse-22 ?" Carella said.
"Kid around, go ahead," Parker said. "You see me tomorrow morning, I'll be a wreck."
"I think you'd better stick around," Brown said. "Cotton's all alone out there."
"Bert can go hold his hand, soon as he finishes writing his book there."
"What book?" Kling asked, looking up from his typewriter.
"Me," Parker said, "I'm gonna go do a follow-up on a homicide investigation."
"Ten years old," Brown said.
"I thought you said eleven," Carella said, puzzled.
"The homicide. Ten years ago. He arrested a nut was killing priests. The nurse is his mother."
"Thekids are eleven years old," Meyer said. "The ones who did the liquor store guy. Or twelve."
"That's what I thought," Carella said. He still looked puzzled.
"Any further objections?" Parker asked.
They all looked at him sourly.
"In that case, gentlemen, I bid you a fond adoo."
"You gonna leave a number where we can reach you?" Brown asked.
"No," Parker said.
The phone rang as he went through the gate and out into the corridor.
Watching him go, Brown shook his head and then picked up the phone receiver.
"Eighty-Seventh Squad, Brown."
"Artie, this is Dave downstairs," Murchison said. "You're handling that body in the garbage can, ain't you?"
"Pieceof a body," Brown said.
"Well, we just got another piece," Murchison said.
CHAPTER 4
Hawes had to keep telling himself this was strictly business.
Bermuda had been one thing, Bermuda was a thousand miles away, and besides he'd asked Annie to go along with him. This was another thing. This was the big bad city, and Annie lived here and besides he had a date with her tomorrow night, and furthermore Marie Sebastiani was married.
As of the moment, anyway.
The possibility existed that her husband had run off on his own to get away from her, though why anyone would want to abandon a beautiful, leggy blonde was beyond Hawes. If that's what had happened, though mdash;Sebastian the Great tossing his junk all over the driveway and then taking off in the Citation mdash;then maybe he was gone forever, in which case Marie wasn't as married as she thought she was. Hawes had handled cases where a guy went out for a loaf of bread and never was heard from since. Probably living on some South Sea island painting naked natives. One case he had, the guy told his wife he was going down for aTV Guide. This was at eight o'clock. The wife sat through the eleven o'clock news, and then the Johnny Carson show, and then the late movie, and still no hubby with theTV Guide. Guy turned up in California six years later, living with two girls in Santa Monica. So maybe Sebastian the Great had pulled the biggest trick of his career, disappearing on his wife. Who knew?
On the other hand, maybe the lady's concern was well-founded. Maybe somebody had come across Frank Sebastiani while he was loading his goodies in the car, and maybe he'd zonked the magician and thrown his stuff out of the car and took off with the car and the magician both. Dump the magician later on, dead or alive, and sell the car to a chop shop. Easy pickings on a relatively quiet Halloween night. It was possible.