Real meat or not, at 8:00 the next morning Andrew Lowery was taken by police van to the Headquarters building downtown on High Street, where he was photographed again — this time with a number on his chest — and where the lieutenant assigned checked the fingerprint record that had been forwarded from the Identification Section. The fingerprints were on a mimeographed yellow form, and had been copied by the IS from the originals Kling had sent down the night before. Andrew Lowery had never had one before, but he now possessed what the police called a “yellow sheet” or a “B-sheet,” and it would follow him for the rest of his life. It followed him to the Criminal Courts Building now, where his name was entered in yet another book before he was turned over to the Department of Corrections. At 9:45 A.M. both Stephen Louis Carella and Gerrold R. Harris were waiting in the Complaint Room of Felony Court when Andrew Lowery was brought in. A clerk drew up a short-form complaint listing the charges against Lowery, and some ten minutes later he was in court with two dozen other defendants, all of whom were waiting to be arraigned. The bridge — the court attendant sitting in front of the judge’s bench — read off a defendant’s name and the charge against him, and the judge disposed of the case and then the bridge read off another name and another charge. It took quite a while to get to Lowery, because the names were being read in alphabetical order. When Lowery’s name was finally called, he stepped up to the bench, and Harris and Carella joined him there immediately. The bridge read off the charges and asked Carella if they were correct as read. Carella said that they were. The judge then said to Lowery exactly what he had said to the ten or twelve defendants who’d been called before him.
“You may have a hearing in this court, or an adjournment for the purpose of obtaining a lawyer or witnesses, or you may waive that hearing and let the case go to a grand jury. Do you have a lawyer?”
“I am representing the defendant, your Honor,” Harris said.
“How does the defendant plead?” the judge asked.
“Not guilty,” Lowery said.
“The defendant pleads not guilty, your Honor,” Harris said, “and requests that the case be held over for a grand jury.”
“Very well,” the judge said. “The defendant will be held without bail in the House of Corrections until such time as the Homicide Bureau of the district attorney’s office shall prepare and submit its case to the grand jury.”
And that was it.
6
Cops know crime statistics.
Which is why hardly anything surprises a cop. Shocks him, yes. He is capable of being shocked. Surprised, rarely. Not where it concerns crime. Carella was shocked when he saw the torn and mutilated body of Muriel Stark in the hallway on Fourteenth and Harding, but he was not surprised that a knife had been the murder weapon. He was not surprised because he knew that 40 percent of the annual murders in this city were caused by the use of knives or other sharp instruments, whereas only 27 percent were caused by the use of firearms. He suspected this was due to the city’s stringent gun laws; in the United States as a whole, a staggering 54 percent of all murders were committed with firearms, the most lethal weapon used in assaults to kill, seven times more deadly than all other weapons combined. Despite whatever the National Rifle Association had to say about man’s inherent right to bear arms and to go romping in the woods in search of game, Carella (and every other cop in the city) would have liked nothing better than a law forbidding private citizens to own or carry a gun of any kind for any purpose whatever. But police officers did not have a powerful lobby in Washington, even though they were the ones who daily reaped the whirlwind while the gun manufacturers reaped the profits.
Statistics.
It shocked Carella, too, that Andrew Lowery had most probably killed his own cousin. It shocked Carella, but it did not surprise him, because he knew that whereas 20 percent of all homicides stemmed from lovers’ quarrels, an overwhelming 30 percent resulted from family conflicts of one sort or another. In real life, you rarely got anyone planning a brilliant murder for months and months, and then executing it in painstaking detail. What you got instead was your brother-in-law hitting you over the head with a beer bottle because he was losing at poker. Your brilliant murders were for television, where the smart cop always tripped up the dumb crook who thought the cop was dumb but who was really dumb himself, heh-heh. Bullshit. Carella always turned off the television set whenever a cop show came on. He sometimes wondered if doctors turned off the set when a doctor show came on. Or lawyers. Or forest rangers. Or private eyes. Carella didn’t know any private eyes. He knew a lot of cops, though, and hardly any of them behaved the way television cops did. But a lot of them watched television cop shows. Probably gave them ideas on how to deal with the good guys and the bad guys. Television cop shoves a pistol at a thief, tells him, “This ain’t a pastrami on rye, sonny,” gives the real-life cop an idea. Next time the real-life cop makes an arrest, he remembers what the television cop said. So he shoves his piece at the thief, and he says, “This ain’t a pastrami on rye, sonny,” and the thief hits the real-life cop on the ear with a lead pipe and rams the pistol down his throat and makes him eat it, proving if it’s not a pastrami on rye, it’s at least a baloney on whole wheat with mayonnaise. Television cops were dangerous. They made real-life cops feel like heroes instead of hard-working slobs. Carella did not feel like a hero when he got back from the Criminal Courts Building that afternoon. He had left the down-town area at 11:45, and it was now almost 12:30, and he still hadn’t had lunch, and the first thing he saw on his desk when he walked into the squadroom was a memo from the Police Commissioner. The memo may not have disturbed Carella had he not just been thinking about life imitating art imitating life and so on. But it disturbed him now. It very definitely disturbed him. This is what the memo read:
1] EFFECTIVE THIS DATE, RUBBER STAMP SIGNATURES MAY NOT BE USED ON ANY OFFICIAL CORRESPONDENCE.
2] EFFECTIVE THIS DATE, ANY ORDERS OR INSTRUCTIONS SIGNED WITH A RUBBER STAMP SIGNATURE ARE TO BE IGNORED.
The memo was signed by the Police Commissioner, Alfred James Dougherty. There was only one trouble with the memo. In signing it, the commissioner, or his secretary, or one of his aides had used a rubber stamp.
Carella looked at the memo and at the rubber stamp signature.
The commissioner had clearly ordered that effective this date rubber stamp signatures could not be used on any official correspondence. The memo also stated that any orders or instructions signed with a rubber stamp signature were to be ignored.