"See you, Torp," she said, and offered her cheek for his kiss.
Robinson gave Larry a brief, meaningful nod, and then did his cool pimp shuffle over to the door and out to the white Cadillac at the curb.
From the other end of the bar, Annie said, "I wishI had a man like that."
The third liquor-store holdup took place while Alvin Robinson was doing his little dog-and-pony act for the owner of Larry's Bar, but the blues didn't respond till nine-thirty, and Carella and Meyer didn't arrive at the scene till nine thirty-five, by which time Robinson was already driving back toward the Seventy-Third Precinct.
This time, nobody had been killed mdash;but not for lack of trying. Martha Frey, the forty-year-old woman who owned and operated the store on Culver and Twentieth, told them that four of them mdash;wearing clown suits, and pointed pom-pommed clown hats, and white clown masks with bulbous red noses and wide grinning red mouths mdash;had started shooting the minute they walked in. She'd grabbed for her heart and fallen down behind the counter in what she hoped was a very good imitation of someone who'd been mortally wounded. It had occurred to her, while they were cleaning out the cash register, that one of them might decide to put a "coop dee gracie," as she called it, in her head while she was lying there playing possum. None of them had. She considered it a miracle that she was still alive, four little guns opening up that way, all of them at the same time. She wondered if maybe they'd hit her after all. Was it possible she was now in shock and didn't know she'd been hit? Did the detectives see any blood on her?
Meyer assured her that she was still in one piece.
"I can't believe they missed me," she said, and made the sign or the cross. "God must have been watching over me."
Either that, or they were nervous this time around, Carella thought. Three times in the space of four hours, even your seasoned pro could spook. No less a handful of grade-schoolers.
"Did you see who was driving the car?" Carella asked.
"No," Martha said. "I was tallying the register for the night. I usually close at nine on Fridays, but this is Halloween, there's lots of parties going on, people run short of booze, they make a last-minute run to the store. This was maybe twenty after when they came in."
The Mobile Lab van was pulling up outside the store.
"Techs'll be here a while," Carella said. "They'll want to see if there's anything on that register."
"There ain't anythingin it, that's for sure," Martha said mournfully.
"Did they say anything to you?" Meyer asked. "When they came in?"
"Just 'Trick or Treat!' Then they started shooting."
"Didn't say, 'This is a stickup,' anything like that?"
"Nothing."
"Hello, boys," one of the techs said. "Kiddy time again?"
"School let out again?" the other tech said.
"How about when they were cleaning out the register?" Meyer asked, ignoring them.
"One of them said, 'Hold it open, Alice.' I guess he meant the shopping bag."
"Alice?" Carella said. "A girl?"
"A woman, yes," Martha said.
Carella thought this was carrying feminism a bit too far.
"Well, this little girl hellip;" he started to say, but Martha broke in at once.
"Awoman ," she said. "Not a little girl. These weren'tchildren , Detective Carella, they weremidgets ."
He looked at her.
"I used to work the high-wire with Ringling," she said. "Broke my hip in a fall, quit for good. But I still know midgets when I see them. These weremidgets ."
"What'd I tell you, Baz?" one of the techs said. "I shoulda taken your bet."
"Midgets," the other tech said. "I'll be a son of a bitch."
Me, too, Carella thought.
But now they knew what they were looking for.
And now they had a pattern.
Peaches and Parker were the only ones not in costume.
"What are you supposed to be?" a man dressed like a cowboy asked.
"I'm a cop," Parker said.
"I'm a victim," Peaches said.
"I'll be damned," the cowboy said.
Parker showed his shield to everyone he met.
"Looks like the real McCoy," a pirate said.
Peaches lifted her skirt and showed a silent-movie director a black-and-blue mark on her thigh.
"I'm a victim," she said.
She had got the black-and-blue mark banging against a table on her way to the bathroom one night.
The silent-movie director, who was wearing jodhpurs and carrying a megaphone, said, "That's some leg, honey. You wanna be in pictures?"
The girl with him was dressed as Theda Bara. "That's an anagram for Arab Death," she said.