“Get your fuckin’ hands off me, you cocksucker!” Carella looked up from the diary. Meyer Meyer was shoving a husky white man toward the detention cage across the room. The man’s hands were cuffed behind his back, but he kept trying to butt Meyer with his head as Meyer shoved him along. Meyer would shove at him, and the man would stumble forward a few feet and then turn and lower his head like a goat and try to butt Meyer all over again. As he rushed forward, Meyer would put his hands out to stop the thrust, and then he would spin the man around and give him another shove toward the detention cage. At the cage, Hal Willis was waiting with the door open. There was an amused expression on his face. He was thinking that Meyer would have made a good bullfighter.
“Leave me the fuck alone!” the man shouted, and lowered his head again, and started running forward again. This time Meyer didn’t shove him. This time he brought the hard edge of his right hand down on the back of the man’s neck, and then brought his knee up into his chest. Then he dragged the man over to the cage and pushed him into it, and angrily slammed the door shut.
“You son of a bitch,” the man said.
“Shut up!” Meyer said.
“What’d he do?” Willis asked.
“Stuck an icepick in his father’s eye,” Meyer said, and took out his handkerchief, and wiped his face, and then blew his nose, and glared at the man in the cage.
Carella turned his attention back to the diary.
On a Saturday afternoon in May, Muriel’s lover had taken her to a movie, and had kissed her for the first time. She described the kiss as being “sweet as falling rain,” and wrote that her “heart stopped dead.” Two days later her lover had met her downtown, after work. She explained to the diary again (although this information had appeared in an earlier entry) her reasons for having dropped out of high school. And she explained again, to the diary (or to her spectral audience), just how much she liked her job as a bookkeeper at the bank, and how good it made her feel to be able to contribute money to the house, though Uncle Frank and Aunt Lillian practically had to have the money forced upon them, but still they accepted it, and this made her feel good, to know she was independent and self-sufficient. But what made her feel better than anything in the world was knowing that she was loved, knowing that when he touched her she soared “to a sunrise of expectation. How long will it be before he wants from me the ultimate ecstasy? I will give him whatever he wishes,” she had written. “I will open myself fully unto him, for he is my love.”
The telephone on Kling’s desk rang, and Carella looked up. Kling snatched the receiver from its cradle, and said, “87th Squad, Kling. Yeah, just a minute, I’ve got that right here on my desk someplace. Genero? Can you hold just a minute? Right, hold on. Okay, here it is, have you got a pencil? We’ve got a problem here because it could have been fired from two different guns. That’s right, Genero. Look, I’m telling you what Ballistics told me. You want an argument, call them. Guy I spoke to there is named Firbisher. Firbisher. F-I-R-B-I-S-H-E-R. He said the twist was sixteen inches left, and the groove diameter was .402 inches. Now this is what that means, Genero. That means it could’ve been either a .38–4 °Colt or a .41 Colt, because both those revolvers have the same rate of twist and groove diameters. How can that be? What do you mean, how can that be? It is, that’s how it can be. Look, Genero, how do I know how he made his tests? Am I a Ballistics expert? He probably put the thing under a microscope, how the hell do I know what he did? You asked me to take a message if he called, and he called, and that’s what he told me, and that’s what I’m giving you. This is not my case, Genero, this is your case. That’s right, it is your case. I just said that, didn’t I? It’s your case, yes. Who’s sticking his nose into it? Genero, you want to know something? You’re a pain in the ass, Genero. How you ever got promoted into this squadroom is beyond me. That’s right. That’s what I said. Right. Sure, remember it. I hope you remember it. I hope you never forget it, Genero. I hope, in fact, you never ask me to do another favor for you, Genero, because you know what I’ll say? I’ll say no. That’s right. That’s what I’ll say. I’ll say no. Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do. Good-bye, Genero.”
He slammed the receiver down onto the cradle, muttered, “You no-good bastard,” and then realized that Carella — sitting at his own desk not three feet away — was watching him. “Genero,” Kling said in explanation, and went back to his typing.
Carella went back to reading Muriel’s diary.
The “sunrise of expectation” continued all through the month of May. As Carella waited patiently for Muriel’s defloration, the suspense became almost unbearable. He followed the girl’s panting declarations of undying love with bated breath, wondering when her anonymous lover would make the move that would at once rob her of her virginity and at the same time satisfy a sunrise that was becoming increasingly more purple as the summer approached. By the end of May, Carella began to think her lover didn’t exist at all. Muriel had invented him, he was a figment of her imagination, a true phantom, a character created only to add a little zip to the diary. Or, if he did exist, he was certainly a shy and cautious soul whose explorations thus far had been limited to touching her breasts “naked beneath the bra,” as she put it. In the first few weeks of June, Muriel began wondering when he would “move below the waist.”
Carella, by this time, was hoping the lover would move to Alaska. He kept turning the pages of the diary, though, trapped in a pornographic treatise that lacked not only socially redeeming value but also specific gravity. As Carella read about all the various “aches,” “tingles,” “throbs,” and “tremors” Muriel was feeling above the waist (and below), he couldn’t help thinking that if only her nameless lover had been treated to a prepublication glimpse of her diary, he’d have leapt upon her in broad daylight and violated her in public, even if it frightened the horses. But through most of June her mysterious lover remained blithely unaware that Muriel was longing to be “taken in passionate delight,” as she put it, a ripe blossom waiting to be plucked, so to speak. Carella lived through the agonizing details of a stealthy finger-walk up the inside of Muriel’s thigh, a trembling hand sliding into her panties to probe at last “the aching mound where my sweet womanhood lies.” This was on the twenty-eighth of June, a Saturday. On the Fourth of July, while fireworks exploded overhead (symbolically and cinematically, and perhaps realistically as well), Muriel Stark lost her virginity on a deserted Sands Spit beach. The entry concerning this gala event had been made on July 4, but immediately beneath the printed date on that page, Muriel had written, “Really July 5, since it’s now 3:00 A.M., and I’ve just returned from Sands Spit.” There followed a passage describing in detail the steamy adolescent intensity that had led to the sandy seduction anticipated for months by thousands of breathless fans. Reading the diary with a critical eye, Carella had to admit that the big seduction scene was given all the space it required, spilling over from the page allotted to July 4 and onto the pages for NOTES at the back of the diary. Nor had Muriel ever written better. What with the fireworks and all, the big seduction scene was a critical and commercial smash.