“Sanit men,” George said. George was one of the men who’d been walking behind the truck. He was glad to be on the front seat now, being driven to the stretch of land the city was filling in near the bridge. A man could get tired of walking behind a garbage truck and lifting garbage cans and smacking them gleefully against the rim of the conveyor. He was certainly glad to be sitting for a while. Moss sat alongside him. Moss was the truck’s other walker, the only black man on the team. They worked well together, these three, despite their racial differences. They liked to believe, and perhaps it was true, that there was no room for prejudice in the sanitation game.
“That’s exactly what we are, George,” Henry said. “Sanit men.”
“And entitled to respect,” Moss said.
“And the same damn pay the cops and the firemen get,” George said.
“Now that’s the issue,” Henry said. “That’s the issue exactly. And that’s why I think we’ve got to strike again.”
“Do firemen have to handle the waste of an entire city?” George asked.
“All that shit they put in the garbage there?” Moss asked.
“Firemen don’t have to handle that shit,” George said, answering himself.
“Neither do policemen,” Henry said.
“All that slimy shit,” Moss said. “We ought to get paid a fortune for handling all that smelly shit.”
“But every time we ask the city for a raise, you know who gets on their high horse?” Henry said. “The cops. They get on their high horse because they want the city to think they’re the only ones risking their lives on the line out there every day. Well, I ask you, my friends, when’s the last time you heard of a cop getting garbage dumped on his head by the superintendent of a building where Murphy’s been collecting the garbage there for fifteen years! Fifteen years, mind you, and the animal who runs that building turns on him. Like an animal! Dumps a full can of garbage on his head! Murphy still stinks from it.”
“All that slimy shit,” Moss said.
“Should pay us a fortune,” George said.
In the distance they could see the slender lines of the Cos Corner Bridge, and to the left the area the city was filling in with refuse. Gulls winged against the September sky, dipping and wheeling over the garbage dump. Down on the flats, there were several other sanitation trucks unloading. Henry cut off the main highway and let the truck roll down the dirt road to the flats. The gulls were shrieking and cawing and making a terrible racket.
“Do cops have to deal with sea gulls?” George asked.
The traffic manager, standing knee-deep in garbage, signaled for Henry to pull the truck over to the left, which he did. The traffic manager then jerked his thumb skyward, signaling Henry to dump the load. Henry pulled a lever inside the truck, and the back of the truck began tilting, and the refuse from some 150 apartment buildings began tumbling onto the ground, joining the bottles and newspapers and orange rinds and coffee grounds and meat bones and soggy string beans and mashed potatoes and empty cartons and old shoes and cigar butts that had been collected from all over the city in the past weeks and months. Included in the garbage that had been collected that very day at 1604 St. John’s Road was a diary bound in red leather. The strap holding the diary’s clasp to the lock on the cover had been cut.
Fresh garbage kept falling onto it.
Not twelve miles from the Cos Corner Bridge, in another section of Riverhead, Carella was trying to talk an adamant old lady into letting him see her granddaughter. The woman was Matilda Lowery, and she was eighty-four years old, and she insisted that Patricia had had enough to do with policemen. Her parents had sent her here to keep her away from reporters and policemen, in fact, and if Carella didn’t get away from the door, he would get hit on the head with a broom.
Carella explained that he was working for the district attorney’s office, gathering evidence that would help in the prosecution, and there were several questions he wanted to ask Patricia, questions he was certain would be brought up at the trial, when the case finally came to trial. The old lady was seriously raising her broom and seemed ready to crown Carella with it when Patricia called from the other room and said it was all right to let him in. Matilda Lowery shook her head, and went muttering into the kitchen to make herself a pot of tea.
This was still just a little past noon on Friday, September 12. Patricia was wearing blue jeans and a white sweater. Her dark hair was braided into pigtails on either side of her head. She looked much younger than her fifteen years, and seemed quite calm now that the ordeal of accusation was behind her. Her hands were still bandaged, and a piece of adhesive plaster still clung to her right cheek. She asked Carella to sit, and then immediately said, “Do you think I’m doing the right thing? Not going back to school yet?”
“Yes, I think that’s the right thing,” Carella said.
“I’m not sure. I don’t want the kids to think I’m a coward.”
“I’m sure they won’t think that,” Carella said.
“They already think I’m a rat,” Patricia said.
“What makes you say that?”
“I got some phone calls. Before I came here to Grandma’s. And also, I received a letter.”
“Have you still got the letter?”
“I threw it away. It frightened me.”
“What did it say?”
“Oh, it just called me all sorts of horrible names for having ratted on my own brother. The phone calls were the same. One man said he would kill me if he ever saw me on the street.”
“Well, I wouldn’t worry about that happening,” Carella said.
“No, I realize a person has to be a little crazy to make a call like that. But—”
“Yes?”
“Do you think I did the right thing? Would you have done it? If you’d seen your brother committing a crime... committing murder... would you have told on him? Do you have a brother?”
“I have a sister,” Carella said.
“Would you have told on her?”
“Yes.”
“I keep wondering,” Patricia said, and sighed heavily. “Anyway, it’s too late, I’ve already done it. There’s no changing anything now.” She sighed again, and then said, “What did you want to ask me?”
“Just a few things, Patricia. First, when we talked to you on the night of the murder, you said a dark-haired, blue-eyed man—”
“I was lying,” Patricia said immediately.
“Yes, I know that. To protect your brother.”
“Yes.”
“But why’d you pick on that particular combination, Patricia? Dark hair and blue eyes? Was there any reason for that?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Do you know a man named Jack Armstrong?”
“No.”
“He was Muriel’s boss,” Carella said. “He has brown hair and blue eyes.”
“I don’t know him,” Patricia said.
“You see, I might as well tell you this, the identification is going to be challenged,” Carella said. “Your brother’s attorneys are certainly going to challenge the identification.”
“Why? I ought to know my own brother,” Patricia said.