For a moment Carella wondered whether he should step in and break up the near-riot at graveside. But finally Frank Lowery managed to pull his son off the coffin, and Mrs. Lowery clutched him to her in embrace and shouted, “We all loved her, oh, dear God, we all loved her!” and the priest concluded his Latin prayer with the words “Per eundem Christum, Dominum nostrum.” The gravediggers — who, like cops, had seen it all and heard it all — simply pressed the button that again sent the coffin descending and the soul hopefully ascending. The skies above were still as blue as though a jousting tournament were to take place that very afternoon, with banners and pennoncels flying, and shields ablaze with two lions gules on an azure field, and lovely maidens in long pointed hats with silken tassels and merry eyes — rather than eyes red with mourning, or squinched in embarrassment, or narrowed in pain.
“She came to live with us when her parents died,” Mrs. Lowery said. “She was fifteen at the time, they were both killed in an automobile accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike — my sister, Pauline, and my brother-in-law, Mike. Muriel came to live with us a month later. I never adopted her, but I was planning to. She always called me Aunt Lillian, but she was like a daughter to me. And certainly like a sister to Andy and Patricia.”
Lillian Lowery carried a bottle of whiskey to the kitchen table and set it down before the detectives. In the other room, her husband Frank was talking to well-wishers who had come back to the house after the funeral.
“I know you’re not allowed to drink on duty,” she said, “but I feel the need for one myself, and I’d appreciate it if you joined me.”
“Thank you,” Carella said.
She poured three shot glasses full to their brims. Carella and Kling waited for her to lift her glass, and then they lifted theirs as well. “Andy will miss her most,” Mrs. Lowery said, and tilted the glass, swallowing all the whiskey in it. Carella and Kling sipped at their drinks. When Carella put his glass down on the kitchen table, Kling put his down too. “They were really like brother and sister,” she said, pouring herself another shot from the bottle. “Except that brothers and sisters sometimes argue. Not Andy and Muriel.” She shook her head, lifted the glass, and downed the whiskey. “Never. I never heard a word of anger between them. Never even a raised voice. They got along beautifully. Well, you saw him at the cemetery, he was beside himself with grief. It’s going to take him a long time to get over this. He blames himself a little, I think.”
“Why do you say that, Mrs. Lowery?” Carella asked.
“Well, he was supposed to go with them to the party, you know. At Paul’s house. Paul Gaddis. He’s one of Andy’s friends. It was his birthday they were celebrating that night. But then at the last minute, Andy got a call from the restaurant, asking if he could come in, so he went to work instead of the party. Even so, he could maybe have saved her, if only he’d been a few minutes earlier.”
“I’m not sure I understand you,” Carella said.
“Well, he went to pick up the girls.”
“Who did? Your son?”
“Yes. Andy.”
“If he was working—”
“Well, he called here from the restaurant and asked if they were home yet. This was about ten-fifteen. I told him they weren’t here, and he said he was through at the restaurant, there’d been a very small crowd for a Saturday night, and he thought he’d head over to Paul’s and pick them up. So I said fine. But what happened, you see, Andy went over to Paul’s house, and the girls had already left.” She shook her head, and poured herself another shot glass full of whiskey.
“Mrs. Lowery,” Carella said, “what did Andy do when he got to the party and found out the girls had gone?”
“He went looking for them.”
“In the street?”
“Yes. But it began raining again, and he thought they might have gone back to the party, so he went back there. But they weren’t there, so he went out looking for them again, and he still couldn’t find them. He got here alone at about twelve-fifteen, which is when I called the police. He was soaking wet. You’d have thought he’d taken a shower with his clothes on.”
The detectives had gone to the funeral for two reasons. To begin with, they knew that killers sometimes attended the funeral services of their victims, and they wanted to make certain there were no dark-haired, blue-eyed strangers in the crowd. Second, they wanted to show the suspect knife to Patricia Lowery and ask her to identify it as the murder weapon. They had not had a chance to talk to her at the cemetery, so Carella asked Mrs. Lowery if they might speak to Patricia now. Mrs. Lowery left the kitchen to get her. Sitting at the kitchen table, Carella and Kling could hear voices whispering in the other room. They felt curiously removed from the tragedy that had shaken this house, and yet intimately involved in it. They sat listening.
When Patricia came into the room, her face was tear-streaked. They expressed their sympathies to her, as they had to her mother, and then Carella put a manila envelope on the kitchen table and unwound the string from the cardboard button on the tie flap. He pulled the knife out by the tag attached to its handle and placed it on the kitchen table in front of Patricia.
“Have you ever seen this before?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said.
“Where?”
“It’s the knife that killed Muriel,” Patricia said. “It’s the knife the murderer used.”
They went to see Paul Gaddis because there were some things they wanted to know about his party guests. They did not expect to learn what they learned there, and they probably wouldn’t have learned it if Gaddis hadn’t suddenly become hungry. Gaddis was a good-looking young man who’d obviously begun lifting weights at an early age, and who’d just as obviously quit before he’d turned into a muscle-bound clod. He was sinewy and lean, with a firm, almost overpowering handshake, and an eager, helpful expression on his face. He led the detectives into the living room, and they sat there talking in the golden afternoon light. On Carella’s lap was the manila envelope with the tagged murder weapon inside it.
“We want to know who was here at the party,” Carella said.
“Not all the guests,” Kling said.
“Just the ones who were strangers to Patricia.”
“Guys she didn’t know, you mean?” Gaddis asked.
“Yes,” Carella said.
They were, in all honesty, clutching at straws. Muriel Stark had been murdered on Saturday night, and the case was now almost four days old. A homicide case usually begins to cool after the first twenty-four hours. If you haven’t got a lead by then, chances are the case won’t be solved except by accident. (Pick up a guy accused of rape sometime next Christmas, and during the course of the questioning he’d tell you that back in September he knocked off a little girl in an abandoned tenement on Harding.) This particular homicide looked more difficult than most because it was the result of random violence. Two girls trying to make their way home through the rain. They stop for shelter in an abandoned tenement, and are suddenly facing a man with a knife. Pure chance. So how do you solve a chance homicide except by getting a few lucky breaks of your own? Thus far, their breaks had been limited to the accidental finding of the murder weapon, but the knife told them nothing they hadn’t already known. They were here now to explore a possibility that would eliminate chance and give them at least some hope of pursuing the case along lines of logical deduction.