“Yes, but you see, Patricia, you were so insistent about the first identification, and it turned out to be a false identification. So the defense is going to try to make something out of that, I’m sure of it. Which is why I wanted to know whether you’d ever met Mr. Armstrong. Because then, you see, in trying to cover up for your brother, you might have unconsciously picked somebody who was in some way connected with Muriel. But you don’t know Mr. Armstrong.”
“No.”
“Your father mentioned that Muriel went out on dates, and the boys came to pick her up at the house. Do you remember any of those boys?”
“Some of them,” Patricia said.
“Would any of them have had black hair and blue eyes? I’m sorry to keep harping on this, Patricia, but I’m positive the identification will be challenged, and anything we can do to help the district attorney—”
“I don’t remember what any of those boys looked like,” Patricia said. “Some of them only went out with her once or twice. I didn’t even know their names, some of them.”
“Well, then that’s the end of that, I guess,” Carella said, and sighed. “There’s just one other thing. Your father mentioned that Muriel kept a diary, said she wrote in it faithfully every night. You shared a room with her, did you ever see her writing in a diary?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Would you describe it to me?”
“It was red leather, with a little strap that locked onto the front cover.”
“When did you last see that diary, Patricia?”
“I guess she was writing in it the night before she was killed.”
“Last Friday night?”
“Yes.”
“And what did she do with it afterward?”
“She locked it and put it back in her drawer. She used to carry the key on a chain around her neck.”
“Which drawer did she keep it in?”
“The top drawer of her dresser.”
“It’s not there now, Patricia. Would you have any idea where it might be?”
“No. That’s where she always kept it.”
“Well,” Carella said, and then shrugged. “Okay, I guess that’s it. Sorry to have bothered you. Thanks a lot, Patricia.”
The man thought of himself as royalty.
He thought of himself as the monarch of all he surveyed. This was his city, and as the reigning potentate he was entitled to his daily tithe. He would have sent menials to collect for him, except that he so enjoyed doing it himself. Especially at this time of year. He had been born in September, guessed that had something to do with it. Baby first sees the light of day in a certain season, why, that’s got to affect the way he feels about life from that minute on. Imagine being born in February or March, coming bare-ass naked into a world so cold, doctor slapping you, drawing that needle-sharp air into your lungs, enough to make even a prince shudder! He loved making the daily rounds in September, when the skies above were invariably blue and the air was like a maiden’s kiss. Oh, how they loved him! Oh, the things they put out for him each day, his loving subjects! Oh, the surprises! He never knew what the tithe would be, never could even hope to guess what gifts he would find in alleyways or mews, curbside container or back-lot carton.
And today — today he had found a mountain of treasure, he could not believe his eyes at first. It was not yet his birthday, and so the barbarian hordes from beyond the city walls were not required to bring a percentage of their plunder through the gates to lay at his feet. Nor was it yet Christmas, when those of the Christian faith who inhabited the lands to the south and to the west were required to bring to him in measure equal to his weight riches beyond imagination. And yet, here upon the Cos Corner plain, his subjects had strewn for his pleasure a carpet of gifts extending to the very horizon, causing him to widen his jaded old eyes in surprise and smack his toothless gums in delight. In the shadow of the bridge he danced upon the endless treasure trove, plucked a skeletal umbrella from one glittering mound, twirled it over his head, trailed a tattered pink boa on the fragrant breeze, poked and picked for trifles and fancies, tried on a pair of pale-blue gloves and a pendant with a broken stone, and then settled back into an easy chair with its stuffing showing, and in the late-afternoon light began to read a book bound in bright-red leather. On the front page of the book, he read the printed words:
THIS IS THE DIARY OF
And below that, written by hand on the appropriate blank line:
The name sounded familiar, one of his loyal subjects, no doubt — Muriel Stark. Had he read another book about her adventures? Was this a sequel? Muriel Stark. And then he remembered seeing her name in a newspaper he had plucked from a garbage can just a few days ago, and he remembered, too, that she’d been murdered. He got out of the chair and tucked the diary into the pocket of his long black coat. Then, tossing the pink boa back over his shoulder, twirling the stark umbrella over his head, he went looking for a policeman.
8
Carella had always believed that anyone who kept a diary did so only because he was hoping it would someday be read by another person. The lock would be picked, the strap would be cut, the pages would be opened, and the diarist would stand revealed to the prying eyes of a stranger. In all the diaries he had read during his years as a cop, he had never come across one in which the diarist seemed unaware of a potential audience. Some diarists plainly acknowledged the possibility of later readership by writing entire pages in code; presumably there were some entries they considered fit for broadcast but others they chose to keep secret. The codes were very often so simple, however, that they ceased to be codes at all — further indication that the diarist intended them to be understood all along. It did not take a mastermind, for example, to crack a code that moved each letter one letter forward in the alphabet, so that the world’s most famous epithet would appear as GVDL ZPV. Some of the codes were more complicated, but none of them were terribly difficult to decipher. Usually, the pages written in code dealt with specific sex episodes or wild fantasies. Never violence. It was rather strange. If a man committed an act of violence, the entry would appear in his diary in plain, undisguised English — “Today I broke Charlie’s head with a hammer.” But if he’d had an unusually heady sex experience, then the entry would appear in code — “In Carol’s room yesterday, I did DVOOJMJOHVT on her.” Dvoojmjohvt was neither Dutch nor Swedish. Nor was it a voodoo curse. It was merely brilliant code, the kind any diarist hoped would be licked in six seconds flat. Such was the way of all diarists. They pretended that the words they committed to the pages of their secret books were sacred and profane, but at the same time they were clearly writing for an audience.
Muriel Stark’s diary did nothing to change Carella’s mind.
He did not read it in the best of surroundings: a detective squadroom at ten past 5:00 on a Friday afternoon is not exactly the reading room of the public library. The diary had been delivered to him via radio motor patrol car direct from the 106th in Riverhead. The Riverhead patrolman to whom Crazy Tom had turned over the diary (“I suggest you take a look at this, my good man,” Tom had said) had checked out the first page and had been alert enough to recognize the name of a homicide victim. Suspecting a possible hoax, he had nonetheless given the diary to his sergeant, and the sergeant — also suspecting a hoax — had taken it back to the 106th, where he’d passed it on to the desk officer, who immediately sent it upstairs to the detective squadroom, where a detective/3rd named Di Angelis was at last smart enough not to add his fingerprints to the collection already there. Accepting the diary on a clean white handkerchief, he carried it into his lieutenant’s office, and the lieutenant checked out the name on the first page, and then called Homicide and was informed that the case was being handled by a Detective Stephen Louis Carella of the 87th Squad, who could be reached at Frederick 7-8024. The lieutenant from the 106th had called Carella at once, and then had offered to send the diary downtown in a radio motor patrol car. Carella had graciously accepted the offer. Now, wearing white cotton gloves and gingerly turning pages, Carella read Muriel Stark’s diary, and became more and more convinced that she (like other diarists he had known) was writing for posterity, each word chiseled on the granite of the page. It was difficult to tell whether Muriel was actually feeling anything at all, or feeling everything with the same unbearable intensity, or simply pretending to feel things for the benefit of her future unseen audience. She used no codes, unless one could consider flowery language or literary allusions codes of a sort. At times her prose was sickeningly sentimental. At other times it was morose and self-pitying. She wrote passionately of womanly yearnings and desires without the slightest indication that she understood either. Even in April, when she fell madly in love and began recording what she referred to as “the single most exciting experience in my life,” she seemed thoroughly aware of her phantom reader, and so her lover became a phantom as well, never named, never described except in language so ethereal that it vanished like mist.