…and so on.
Corey groped along the wall for a light switch, found none, and decided there must be a hanging light with a pull cord. He swung his arms over his head, hitting the bulb with his hand, steadying it, finding the cord, and turning on the light.
The basement was still.
He had seen Lasser making entries in that book at his workbench. That was where he headed now.
He had been a cop for too long a time not to know that there was something very peculiar in this basement. Something warned him of this peculiarity almost at once; something caused the hackles to rise on the back of his neck, and he did not know what the something was until he approached the workbench. One glance told him that a can, or a container of some kind, had been removed from the neatly lined-up cans and jars on the middle shelf, and he wondered if that can—or whatever it had been—was the one in which George Lasser had kept his little black book. The hackles on the back of his neck continued to stand out like a porcupine’s quills. Ralph Corey was smelling danger, he was smelling death, and he thought he was smelling only possible suspension from the force. He thought the strong odor in his nostrils was the odor of that goddamn Jew Grossman down at the lab who would by now be pawing over that black book and its notations of payments to somebody named Corey. It wouldn’t take that wop Carella long to put two and two together from that.
Corey backed away from the bench. His mouth was suddenly dry. From the corner of his eye he spotted the sink in the farther circle of light, turned, and walked rapidly toward it. As he approached the sink, the toe of his shoe caught the edge of the drain cover, and he nearly stumbled.
“What the hell…” he said aloud, and then looked down to see what it was he’d tripped over. Through the metal bars of the drain he could see something lying on the flat section of the concrete well. It caught the light and glittered. For an instant Corey thought it was money. He had spent half his life on the police force taking money, and this sure as hell looked like more money. If he had reached for this as speedily as he had reached for rakeoffs throughout the course of his career, if he had begun to stoop a moment sooner, his head would have been four inches lower by the time the monkey wrench lashed out. But it took him just a moment to react to the glittering metal caught on the flat portion of the drain, and he was just beginning to bend for it when the wrench moved out of the shadows. The wrench moved swiftly, soundlessly, and powerfully. It cracked Corey’s skull wide open and lodged itself in the pulpy brain matter that had two minutes before been concerning itself with possible suspension from the force.
The man who had wielded the wrench pulled it from Corey’s open skull and walked with it toward the trash barrel near the coal bin, dripping blood as he walked. He fished a newspaper from the barrel and wiped the head of the wrench clean of blood. There was no blood on the handle, but he was certain he had left some fingerprints there. He reversed the position of the wrench, holding the jaws with one sheet of newspaper and wiping the bloodless handle clean with another sheet. He looked down and saw that some blood had dripped onto his shoes when he carried the wrench to the barrel, so he took another clean sheet of newspaper and wiped off the few droplets and then carried all of the soiled newspapers to the furnace door, which he opened. He threw the papers inside and waited for them to catch fire before he closed the furnace door.
He threw the cleaned wrench into the trash barrel and walked back to the sink. Stooping, he lifted the drain cover and picked up the object that had cost Ralph Corey his life.
The object was a brass button.
Well, now a cop was dead.
Before this only a janitor was dead.
But now a cop was dead.
There was a big difference.
In order to understand what it is like when a cop gets killed, you must first realize that only two kinds of people kill cops: maniacs and dopes. A maniac is not responsible for anything he does, and a dope is too dumb to know what he is doing. Anybody in his right mind does not go around killing cops. Anybody who can add two and two does not go around killing cops. It is not done. It is crazy and it is stupid. Besides, it is useless. If you kill one cop, there is always some other cop who will take his place, so what’s the use? All it does is get everybody all riled up, and it puts the heat on for no good reason, especially in January when you should be under the covers with some nice warm broad, dreaming about going down to Miami. Who needs a dead cop in January to stink up the place and get everybody excited?
Live cops are bad enough.
Dead cops are the world’s worst.
There wasn’t a single cop in the 87th Precinct who liked, admired, respected, or trusted the dead cop who had once been Sergeant Ralph Corey.
That didn’t matter.
The way most of them figured it, somebody had been inconsiderate enough to shove a monkey wrench into Corey’s head when probably all he was doing was a little investigating into the murder of that janitor a while back. If a poor, hard-working civil servant couldn’t go down into a basement to do a little investigation on his own time, they figured, without getting his head bashed in, well, this goddamn city was sure coming to a pretty pass. If you allowed everybody in this goddamn city to go around bashing in a cop’s head whenever he got the urge to, they figured, just whenever he got the goddamn urge to go bashing some cop’s head in, well, things were sure getting pretty dangerous for civil servants. And if you just sat back and allowed this goddamn city to fall to pieces that way, people picking up monkey wrenches on every street corner and letting the nearest traffic cop have it right in the eye, well, boy, that was some state of affairs. You just couldn’t let hordes of people run wild in the streets, waving monkey wrenches over their heads and slaughtering anything in a blue uniform; you simply couldn’t let that happen because chaos would ensue. No, sir, you couldn’t have chaos.
That’s the way most of the cops of the 87th figured it.
Also, it was a little scary. Who the hell wants a job where you can get killed?
So almost every cop in the precinct, and hundreds of others throughout the city, filled with righteous indignation, justifiable anger, and a little honest fear, began a personal manhunt for a cop killer. Carella and Hawes didn’t know just how this legion of vengeance-seeking men in blue were going to proceed with their search, since hardly any of them knew the facts of the case and only a few of them connected Corey’s murder with the murder of George Lasser some ten days before. The detectives supposed that since a cop had been killed, the man who’d murdered him was technically a cop killer. But they rather imagined that Corey’s death was simply an extension of the earlier murder and had nothing whatever to do with the fact that he was a cop. This being the case, they couldn’t understand what all the goddamn shouting was about. They had been doggedly walking the ass off this homicide since January 3, and all of a sudden everyone was getting excited because a crooked cop stopped a monkey wrench.
The only thing that bothered them about Corey’s death was the Why of it.
If he had stumbled upon something in that basement, what was it?
Or, discounting the possibility that he had discovered something about the case that was threatening to the killer, what other reason could there have been for his murder? Had he arranged a meeting with someone in that basement? Had he known who the killer was? Was he angling for another payoff, this time one involving homicide?