“I’m Martin Kissman,” he said. “Narcotics.”
“Cotton Hawes, 87th,” Hawes said, and reached for Kissman’s extended hand.
“Oh,” Kissman said, surprised. “So you’re Hawes, huh?”
“What do you mean?” Hawes said, puzzled.
“I was going to call you later today, soon as I got relieved. We’ve got the apartment bugged, I’ve been sitting the wire.”
“Oh,” Hawes said. “You got my message, huh?”
“Loud and clear. And I got the conversation you had with her later, after Harrod was killed. They knew the joint was wired, huh? I should have realized it. We thought the phone mike went dead, but that didn’t explain the waterfall whenever anybody was talking in the kitchen. I told the lieutenant they’d tipped, that the only time they said anything they didn’t want us to hear was in the kitchen. Everything else was either phony leads or routine garbage, like where they planned to go that night, or what they were buying for dinner. I also got some very sexy tapes from the bedroom mike, if you know anybody who’s interested.” Kissman grinned, pulled a pipe and tobacco pouch from the pocket of his sweater, and began filling the pipe.
For the first time, Hawes noticed the holes burned in Kissman’s sweater. Hawes’s father had smoked a pipe, and there were always burn holes in his sweater, not to mention the carpet, the furniture, and on several occasions the drapes. To make matters worse, the Hawes family had owned a Siamese cat with a penchant for eating wool. There had been no valid excuse for that animal’s appetite; she was not pregnant, she had no vitamin deficiencies of which Hawes was aware, she was simply a voracious wool-eating beast. What the coals from his father’s pipe did not accomplish, the cat did. Hawes’s mother once said to his father, “You look moth-eaten all the time.” His father had looked up in surprise and said, “What do you mean, Abby?”
Hawes realized he was smiling only when Kissman, still loading the pipe, said, “Something?”
“No, no,” Hawes said, and shook his head. “Why’s the place wired?” he asked.
“We knew Harrod was a junkie, and we suspected he was a pusher as well. We were trying to get a line on the big boys.”
“Any luck?”
“Not so far. Harrod sent us on wild-goose chases all over town. That’s one of the reasons I figured he’d tipped to the bug. But the lieutenant said no, so who’s going to argue with a lieutenant?”
Kissman struck a match and began puffing great clouds of smoke into the kitchen. Neither of the two men so much as glanced at the unconscious girl. They both knew an ambulance was on the way, and there was nothing they could do for Elizabeth right now — except try to discover who was responsible for her present condition. Besides, there is a curious detachment about police officers confronted with the results of bloody mayhem. Like surgeons performing an operation — the hole in the surgical sheet circumscribing the area of surgery, the rest of the body covered, the lung or the liver or the brain becoming a part somehow isolated from and unrelated to the whole — detectives will often dissociate the victim from the crime itself, throw a sheet over the body, so to speak, so that they can concentrate completely on the specific part requiring their full attention. Elizabeth Benjamin lay hurt and bleeding on the kitchen floor, and the ambulance was on the way, and now the detectives discussed the who’s and why’s and wherefore’s with all the detachment of surgeons peering into an open heart.
“The first I heard of Harrod’s murder,” Kissman said, “was when I picked up the conversation with you and the girl earlier today. You know what I thought? I thought, Great, there goes a lot of hard work up the chimney.”
“Were you listening when the girl called me later?”
“Picked it up on the bug there under the cabinet. Just her side of the conversation, you understand. Then I picked up the glass smashing, and I heard these guys busting in on her, and her screaming, and I rushed right over. I’m staked out in an apartment in the next building; we ran our wires up over the roof and then down the back side. Took me maybe five minutes to get here. I found the girl just the way she is. Whoever broke in had gone out again, probably the same way. At least, I didn’t meet anybody coming down the stairs on my way up. The cars got here maybe two minutes after I did. You the one who sent them?”
“Yeah,” Hawes said. “I didn’t think I could...”
“There she is,” someone at the door said, and Hawes turned to see two ambulance attendants and what he assumed was an intern coming into the room.
The intern bent quickly over Elizabeth, his eyes darting from her bruised and bleeding face to the hanging jaw, over the ripped front of her jersey top and the purple marks on her exposed breasts, and then down to the obviously broken legs. The ambulance attendants put down their stretcher and lifted her gently onto it. Elizabeth moaned, and the intern said, “It’s all right, dear.” He was perhaps twenty-five years old, but he sounded like a man who’d been practicing medicine for sixty years. One of the attendants nodded to his partner, and they picked up the stretcher again.
“How does it look?” Kissman asked.
“Not so great,” the intern replied. “If you want to check in later, I’m Dr. Mendez, Diamondback Hospital.”
“Think we’ll be able to talk to her?” Hawes asked.
“I doubt it, that jaw looks broken,” Mendez said. “Give me a ring in an hour or so.” The attendants had already left the apartment. Mendez nodded curtly and followed them out.
“The girl said you’d been in here a few times,” Hawes said. “Was she right?”
“Right as rain,” Kissman said. “Came in six times altogether.”
“She said four.”
“Shows how careful we can be when we want to,” Kissman said. “We were all playing a little footsie here. Harrod knew the place was bugged and gave us false leads, and we came in four times that we let him know about, but two more times without letting him know.”
“Find anything?”
“Nothing. Took off all the switch plates, searched the toilet tank, the bedsprings, the ceiling fixtures, you name it. Only place he could have hidden any dope was up his rear end.”
“How about those locked file cabinets in the darkroom?”
“What file cabinets?”
“Under the counter in there.”
“Those must be new.”
“When were you in here last?”
“About a month ago.”
“Let’s bust them open now,” Hawes said.
“I’ll see if the guys downstairs have a crowbar,” Kissman said, and went out.
Hawes walked over to the window. The glass had been completely smashed out and the box of geraniums had been overturned, the soil scattered over the windowsill, the uprooted flowers knocked into the room and onto the floor. Not four feet from the broken window, Elizabeth Benjamin’s blood stained the linoleum. Hawes stared at the blood for a long while, and then went to the phone and dialed the squadroom.
Carella picked up on the third ring. “Where the hell are you?” he said. “I go down the hall for a minute, and the next thing I know you’ve vanished.”