“Talk to you a minute?” he said.
Reardon followed him through the arch and into the entryway. The photographer was already snapping his Polaroid pictures. The lab technician was looking at the corpse’s hands.
“We’re backed up at the morgue just now,” Norris said. “All the bedbugs coming out of the woodwork for Christmas. You may not get your autopsy report for a few days. Meanwhile, the cause of death is obvious. You can put it down as gunshot wounds.”
“Right, thanks,” Reardon said.
Norris nodded, seemed about to say something else, and then simply drew on his gloves and went out. A sharp wind blew into the room before he closed the door behind him. Reardon walked back into the dining room again. Mrs. D’Annunzio was sobbing into her handkerchief. Mark D’Annunzio still had the stunned look on his face.
“What was that all about?” Hoffman asked.
“The autopsy report,” Reardon said. “It may take a little longer than...”
“What do you mean autopsy?” D’Annunzio said. “Who said you could...?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. D’Annunzio,” Reardon said, “but it’s mandatory in any trauma death.”
“I don’t want them cutting up my father,” D’Annunzio said. He looked first at Reardon and then at Hoffman. “Who do I talk to about this?”
“I know how you feel,” Reardon said, “but...”
“You know what killed him, why do you have to cut him up?”
“I’m sorry,” Reardon said.
Their eyes met. D’Annunzio was holding back tears. Reardon put his hand on D’Annunzio’s shoulder, gently, briefly. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “Believe me.”
D’Annunzio nodded, and then turned away to hide his tears. There was a brief, awkward silence. Hoffman cleared his throat.
“Mr. D’Annunzio,” he said, “can you tell us what these men sounded like?”
“Sounded?”
“Yes. Were they speaking English?”
“Yes, they were. Yes.” D’Annunzio said.
“Any regional accent or dialect?”
“Yes, but... I’m not sure what it was.”
“Was it Hispanic?”
“No, I don’t think so. No, it wasn’t a Spanish accent.”
“How about Chinese?”
“I... I don’t know. It all happened so fast.”
“Could it have been Chinese?”
“Maybe. No. I don’t think so. I really don’t know. You see, they...”
“What are you doing?” Mrs. D’Annunzio shrieked.
Her eyes were wide, fastened on the archway behind Reardon. He turned at once. The lab technician was still crouched over the body. In one hand he held a spoon-shaped piece of wood. In the other, he held an ink roller.
“Leave him alone!” Mrs. D’Annunzio shouted, and came out of her chair at once, rushing past Reardon and into the entryway. “Get away from him!” she screamed, grabbing for the technician’s shoulder, almost knocking him off balance.
The technician, still crouching, flailed his arms to keep from toppling over backwards. Reardon was coming into the bar area now\ immediately behind Mrs. D’Annunzio. The technician turned to him as the officer in charge.
“I’m only...” he started to say.
“Let it go,” Reardon said.
“I gotta take his prints,” the technician said. “This is a homicide.”
“But let it go,” Reardon said gently.
The technician shrugged. “Okay, pal,” he said, “you explain it later, okay?”
“I’ll explain it,” Reardon said.
Mrs. D’Annunzio burst into tears again, and turned away from her husband’s corpse. Reardon awkwardly put his arm around her. Hoffman was standing in the archway to the dining room now. Reardon glanced at him. Hoffman nodded.
“Signora,” Reardon said, “we’ll come back another time, okay? Why don’t you go home now? Mr. D’Annunzio, could you take your mother home, please? We’ll talk to you later, all right?”
D’Annunzio stared at him, as if wondering whether he could trust his father’s body alone with him.
“All right?” Reardon said.
D’Annunzio nodded.
2
Homicides were rare in the Fifth Precinct.
By Reardon’s count, there had been only eighteen of them this year, and the average was about twenty annually. That suited him just fine. He liked working down here; transfer him to an A-House like the Four-One in the Bronx or the Ninth right next door in Manhattan South, and he might have quit the force altogether. The Fifth was definitely not a high-crime area. This past year, there’d been something over a hundred burglaries, some eighty-five robberies, and forty-six arrests for grand larceny. In fact, the Chinese youth gangs here — involved as they were with extortion and felonious assault — constituted the most serious criminal threat. Fancy names, the gangs all had — Ghost Shadows, and Flying Dragons, Eagles, and Ching Yee. All punks in Reardon’s estimation. But the activities of the gangs were limited to Chinatown, and that was only a small corner of the entire precinct territory.
Most people in the department referred to the detective unit at the Fifth as the “Chinatown Squad.” Well, that was to be expected; the station house was smack in the center of Chinatown, on Elizabeth and Canal, sandwiched between a Chinese restaurant named Y.S. and a dime store. But the precinct territory was bordered on the east by Allen Street, on the west by Broadway, on the south by the East River and on the north by Houston Street, and the ethnic boil here was a volatile one. From Pearl to Canal, you had your Chinese. Bowery to Allen was largely Hispanic and black. From Spring to Houston, the streets were filled with Dominicans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans. The Bowery was populated with vagrants of every stripe and color. And in Little Italy, which ran from Canal to Houston, an Italian restaurant owner had been shot dead at seven-thirty tonight — in a precinct where murders were rare.
Still, it was the “Chinatown Squad” and all the detectives at the Fifth carried a blue card printed in both English and Chinese. Reardon’s card was a duplicate of the one Chick Hoffman carried:
It was almost ten o’clock when they got back to the station house. They had started the evening tour at four that afternoon, expecting the usual run of occurrences great and small, but nothing so great as a homicide. There had been eighteen already this year, hadn’t there? Well, now there were nineteen. As they mounted the low flat steps leading to the front door of the precinct, both men were thinking they didn’t need this.
The black wooden numerals 1881 — for the date the station house was completed and occupied — were set into the arched pediment over the entrance door. The Fifth had celebrated its centennial five years ago, the detectives opening a bottle of champagne (against departmental regulations, but what the hell) in the rec room on the third floor of the ancient building. Lieutenant Farmer hadn’t known about the midnight celebration; they tried to keep as much as they possibly could from Lieutenant Farmer. Beneath the arched pediment was a wooden panel with the words “5th Precinct” on it. Beneath that, another date: 1921. Reardon guessed that was the last time the precinct had been painted. Over the door itself was a brown sign lettered in yellow with the words:
The door was set with a glass panel, odd for a police station, but no one down here expected anybody to try forcible entry. A sign in the lower half of the glass panel read ALL PERSONS MUST STOP AT DESK. The same words were repeated below this in Chinese. And below that in Spanish.