Anyway, so it shouldn’t be a total loss, Hawes decided to stick around until Georgie Whatever-His-Name-Was showed up. The day was half shot anyway, so he figured he might as well make a narcotics pinch, thereby helping out the much-overworked men in the city’s Narcotics Division. The only trouble was that everyone in the building knew there was fuzz on the third floor, in Bobby the Junkie’s apartment to be exact. Which might have explained why Georgie never showed up that afternoon.
Hawes hung around waiting for Georgie until almost 3:00. He kept asking Fontana what Georgie’s last name was, but Fontana kept telling him to go to hell. Hawes searched the apartment and, as he’d expected, found nothing but a lot of dirty socks. At 2:30, the girl woke up. Hawes asked her what her name was, and she said Betty O’Connor. He asked her how old she was, and she said twenty-two, which meant he couldn’t even get Fontana on a morals charge. At 2:35 the girl asked Hawes if he had a cigarette, and Hawes gave her one and then she asked him if Georgie had arrived yet. Fontana quickly informed the girl that Hawes was a cop. The girl looked Hawes over, figured she was in some kind of trouble, not sure just which kind yet because she had just come back from a long journey over soft white hills on the backs of giant purple swans; but cops meant trouble, and when you’re in trouble you do what your mother taught you to do.
“Would you like to get laid?” she asked Hawes very sweetly.
It was the best offer he’d had all day, that was for sure. But he turned it down, anyway. Instead, he left the apartment, questioned the rest of the people in the building, and got back to his own place at 7:35 that night.
He called Carella to tell him he had found two dusty shelves and a clean one.
6
Neither Carella nor Hawes so much as thought about the Lasser case until Friday of that week, when Danny Gimp called the office and asked Carella to meet him. Up to that time they had been separately involved in handling a few other pressing matters that had come up.
There was, for example, a man in the precinct who kept making obscene phone calls to various and sundry ladies, explaining just what he would like to do to them, and apparently using language that even the boldest of the ladies refused to repeat to the police. In the short period of time between Tuesday and Friday mornings, Carella listened to the complaints of fourteen women who had been so abused on the telephone. At the same time he answered twenty-two outside squeals, catching in tandem with Hawes who answered twenty-seven. These complaints ranged from simple idiotic things like wife-beating (well, not so idiotic to the wife who was being clobbered, true, but annoying to a detective who had homicide to worry about) to burglary to unlawful assembly to stickups to prostitution (even though there was a Vice Squad) to auto thefts (even though there was an Automobile Squad) to a cat who had climbed a television antenna and refused to come down (the beat cop had tried to remove her and had his face and his right hand clawed) to several other pretty and not-so-pretty happenings.
One of the prettier happenings was a girl who had stripped down to her bra and panties in forty-degree January weather and gone for a swim in the Grover Park Lake. Since the lake fell well within the 87th Precinct territory, and since an ugly crowd had begun threatening the patrolman who tried to arrest the halfnaked girl as she came out of the water, the precinct was called and a detective requested, so Carella got to see a pretty girl shivering in her underwear.
One of the not-so-pretty happenings was a January rumble between two street gangs, rare for January; most gangs save their rumbles for the good old summertime when tempers are hot and body odor is an additional secret weapon. A seventeen-year-old boy was left lying and bleeding beside a lamppost, trying to hold his intestines inside his body, embarrassed because all these people—including the teenage girl who had caused the rumble—were looking at him with his insides exposed. The intern had pulled a sheet up over the boy, but his blood had stained through the sheet almost instantly, and then a yellow pus-like slime had spread out onto the asphalt and Carella had wanted to puke. That was one of the not-so-pretty happenings.
Hawes had witnessed a man dying and had tried to get a dying statement from him, valid in court, but the man kept spitting blood onto his pillow because there were four ice-pick punctures in his chest, and then he sat up straight and stared at Hawes and said “Papa, Papa,” and pulled Hawes close to him in a dying grip, spitting blood onto the shoulders of Hawes’s sports jacket. Hawes washed the blood off in the kitchen of the small apartment and watched the lab boys dusting for prints.
An hour later he questioned a bewildered and frightened jeweler named Morris Seigel who had owned a store on Ainsley Avenue for the past twenty years and who had been held up three times a year like clockwork for fifteen out of those twenty. This time the stickup man had come in at 12:30 in the afternoon and stuffed everything he could find into a big canvas bag he was carrying and then, not liking the way Seigel’s head sat on his shoulders, had pistol-whipped him so that Hawes now spoke to a man whose shattered eyeglasses hung askew on his bleeding face, the tears mingling with the blood on his cheeks.
He had gone out on a squeal involving a man who’d fallen onto the subway tracks at Seventeenth and Harris; he had answered a call from the owner of an ice-cream parlor who claimed that someone had ripped his pay telephone out of the booth and run off with it; he had answered three squeals for missing children and one from a man who shouted hysterically, “My wife’s in bed with another man! My wife’s in bed with another man!”
It had been a busy few days.
On Friday morning, January 10, Danny Gimp called and asked to talk to Steve Carella, who was on his way out to investigate, in order, a call from a literary agency where two typewriters had been stolen, a call from a woman who complained of a peeping Tom, and a call from a supermarket manager who believed someone was dipping into the till.
“I think I may have something,” Danny said.
“Can you meet me right now?” Carella asked.
“I’m still in bed.”
“When then?”
“This afternoon.”
“What time?”
“Four,” Danny said. “The corner of Fiftieth and Warren.”
At 9:27 A.M. Carella left the squadroom to begin answering his squeals, hoping he’d be finished by 4:00 in the afternoon. He said goodbye to Hawes who had decided to visit the Lasser family doctor in New Essex and who was on the phone at the moment arguing with Dave Murchison downstairs about the use of a police sedan.
“Hey,” Carella said. “I said goodbye.”
“Okay, I’ll see you later.”
“Let’s hope Danny comes up with something.”
“Let’s hope,” Hawes said, and he waved at Carella as he walked through the gate in the railing, and then he turned his attention back to the phone and began yelling at Murchison again. Murchison wasn’t buying any, thanks. Hawes told him his own car was in the garage with alignment trouble, but Murchison steadfastly maintained that each of the precinct’s sedans was either in use or about to be used that morning, and he couldn’t let Hawes have one even if Hawes brought in the commissioner personally, or perhaps even the mayor. Hawes told him to go to hell. As he was leaving the precinct on the way to the train station, he pointedly walked past the muster desk without saying a word to Murchison. Murchison, busy with the switchboard, didn’t even notice Hawes going by.