Carella’s perplexity was monumental.
He sat at his desk and read the memo again, and then he read it a third time, and tried to decide what he should do about it. His deductive reasoning went something like this:
(1) The commissioner’s memo had been signed with a rubber stamp.
(2) Therefore, the commissioner’s memo was to be ignored.
(3) If the memo was to be ignored, then the use of a rubber stamp signature on official correspondence was still permitted.
(4) And if the rubber stamp signature was still permitted, then any orders or instructions signed with such a signature were not to be ignored.
(5) Therefore, the commissioner’s memo was not to be ignored.
(6) But if the commissioner’s memo was not to be ignored, then it outlawed all rubber stamp signatures, and since the memo had been signed with a rubber stamp, it clearly was to be ignored.
(7) Therefore, the commissioner’s memo was to be ignored and was also not to be ignored.
Carella blinked, and looked up at the clock. Only two minutes had passed since the commissioner started causing him heartburn. He decided to go out to lunch.
Until the moment Patricia Lowery made her accusatory statement to the police, they had been looking for a stranger. They were now working directly for the district attorney’s office, and looking for evidence to bolster the case against Andrew Lowery. No one doubted in the slightest that the grand jury would, on the basis of Patricia’s statement, indict her brother Andrew. In this city a grand jury consisted of twenty-three men, and their purpose was to hear evidence, determine whether a crime or crimes had in fact been committed, whether it was reasonable to assume that the defendant had committed the crime or crimes, and exactly what the nature and extent of the crimes were, for the purposes of indictment. If and when they indicted, the Bureau of Indictment would then make out a list of charges, and two days after that the case would be set for General Sessions, Part I, where the defendant would be arraigned for pleading. The plea in a homicide case was an automatic plea of Not Guilty. At that hearing, clerks from the DA’s office would assign the case to a particular judge and a particular part of General Sessions, and a date for the trial would be set. The case against Andrew Lowery was a strong one, even without additional evidence; a sister accusing her own brother of murder was hardly something to be taken lightly. But the DA would be grateful nonetheless for whatever else the police could come up with before the case went before a jury. It was for this reason that Carella had tried to get a search warrant while he was downtown at the Criminal Courts Building that morning.
A search warrant is an order in writing, in the name of the people, signed by a magistrate, directed to a peace officer, commanding him to search for personal property and to bring it before the magistrate. The warrant is usually quite specific. The peace officer requesting the warrant must show probable cause and must support this by affidavit, naming or describing the person and particularly describing the property, and the place to be searched. A detective, for example, after being duly sworn and deposed, would state in writing that he had information based upon his personal knowledge and belief and/or facts disclosed to him that an armed robbery had been committed, and then would disclose the results of his investigation before requesting that he be granted permission to search for a suspect revolver that he now believed was hidden in the bread box of the man arrested for the crime.
Neither Carella nor Assistant DA Locke felt they had the slightest chance of getting a warrant allowing them to search Andrew Lowery’s room in the apartment on Fourteenth Street and St. John’s Road. But hope springs eternal, and besides, Carella was downtown anyway, so he took a whack at it, boldly stating in his affidavit that there was probable cause to believe that if there existed in Andrew Lowery’s room any clothes bearing bloodstains of the O group or of the A group, then these might constitute evidence of the crime of murder. The magistrate had read the affidavit, and then had fixed Carella with a baleful eye and asked point-blank, “What do you mean by if? Do you have any personal knowledge of the existence of such clothing?” Carella had been forced to admit that No, your Honor, he had no personal knowledge of the existence of such evidence, but it was reasonable to assume that perhaps Andrew Lowery — and the magistrate had interrupted to say he was denying the warrant on the grounds that Carella was about to conduct a fishing expedition that would clearly constitute an illegal search. So Carella had gone back to the squadroom, disappointed but not surprised, only to find the Commissioner’s baffling memo on his desk.
After lunch he went over to the Lowery apartment without a search warrant. The situation here was an interesting one in that the victim and the accused had both lived in the same apartment, and whereas Carella would have needed a warrant to conduct a search of Lowery’s room, he did not need a warrant to search Muriel Stark’s room — no more than he would have needed a warrant, for example, to look for bloodstains or a murder weapon at the scene of a crime. Lillian Lowery opened the door for him, and when he told her why he was there, she asked him to come in. He had been in this apartment before, on the day of Muriel’s funeral, but on that occasion he had been concerned solely with positive identification of the murder weapon. He was here today in search of evidence, and he looked at the place differently now, his trained observer’s eye automatically summarizing and editorializing.
The apartment was in a fairly decent neighborhood, not quite as good as Silvermine Oval, and nowhere near as elegant as Smoke Rise, but certainly not bad for the 87th Precinct. You wouldn’t find any buildings with doormen on St. John’s Road, but neither would you find a row of broken mailboxes or hallways stinking of urine. Nor was the Lowery apartment the sort of railroad flat you found in the ghetto sections of the precinct, one room leading directly into another, without benefit of corridor, rather like a string of boxcars following behind a locomotive. Instead, the apartment was arranged like a nest of different-sized boxes, the entrance hall serving as a small receiving chamber off of which one entered the kitchen on the right and living room on the left. The kitchen was a dead-end room, leading nowhere, its two windows opening on the rear brick wall of the building opposite. Curtains on the windows, white nylon sheer; not quite lacecurtain Irish, the Lowerys, nor were they shanty, either. A door directly opposite the entrance door led to what Carella supposed was the bathroom Andrew Lowery had mentioned the night before. In the living room on the left of the entrance foyer, there was a three-piece suite — sofa and two large easy chairs — upholstered in a floral-patterned fabric. Television set against the far wall, framed picture of Jesus above it: one of those trick pictures where the eyes followed you all around the room. Television set was a color console, Carella noticed. On another wall, a picture of a farmer looking up at the sky, possibly hoping for rain.
Mrs. Lowery sat on the sofa under this picture and asked Carella if he’d care for something to drink. He wondered now if she’d been drinking before his arrival. He had not smelled whiskey on her breath, but she’d knocked back three fast ones in a row on the day of the funeral, and he suspected it did not take much to encourage her. She was, and he had not noticed this before, a woman who could be considered attractive, with her daughter’s dark-brown eyes and black hair, an abundance of hip and bosom, a rather sensuous mouth. Her eyes were red-rimmed; he guessed she’d been crying. He did not want to chat with her, the afternoon was getting on. But she had already poured herself a shot glass full of whiskey, and had put the bottle down on the coffee table in front of the sofa, and she urged Carella again to have a drink. When he refused, she downed her own drink with one quick toss and swiftly poured herself another.