Many of the cops Carella knew were non-discriminating. This did not mean they were unprejudiced. In fact, they were sometimes too overly democratic when it came to deciding exactly which citizen was in possession of a glassine bag of heroin lying on a sawdust-covered floor. If you were a black or a tan slum dweller, and a white cop entered the joint, the odds were six-to-five that he suspected all non-whites of using narcotics, and you could only pray to God that a nearby junkie (of whatever color) would not panic and dispose of his dope by dropping it at your feet. You also realized that, God forbid, you might just possibly bear a slight resemblance to a man who’d held up a liquor store or mugged an old lady in the park (white cops sometimes finding it difficult to distinguish one black man or one Puerto Rican from another) and end up at the old station house being advised of your rights and subjected to a strictly by-the-book interrogation that would crack Jesus Christ himself.
If you happened to be white, you were in even worse trouble. In the city for which Carella worked, most of the cops were white. They naturally resented all criminals (and slum dwellers were often automatically equated with criminals), but they especially resented white criminals, who were expected to know better than to run around making the life of a white cop difficult. The best thing a slum dweller could do when he smelled a cop approaching was get the hell out fast. Which is exactly what everybody in the bar did the moment Carella walked in. This did not surprise him; it had happened too often before. But it did leave him feeling somewhat weary, and resigned, and angry, and self-pitying, and sorrowful. In short, it left him feeling human — like the slum dwellers who had fled at his approach.
A white man and a black man were sitting together in a booth near the jukebox. With the exception of the bartender and a hooker in hot pants (who wasn’t worried about a bust, probably because her pimp had a fix in with the cop on the beat), they were the only two people who didn’t immediately down their drinks and disappear. Carella figured them to be Lockhart and Barnes. He went over to the booth, introduced himself, and ordered a fresh round of drinks for them. Aside from their coloration, Lockhart and Barnes were similar in almost every other respect. Each man was in his early seventies, each was going bald, each had the veined nose and rheumy eyes of the habitual drinker, each had work-worn hands, each had a face furrowed with deep wrinkles and stamped indelibly with weariness and defeat, the permanent stigmata of a lifetime of grinding poverty and meaningless labor. Carella told them he was investigating the Grimm case and wanted to know everything they could remember about the night of the fire. Lockhart, the white man, looked at Barnes.
“Yes?” Carella said.
“Well, there’s not much to tell,” Lockhart said.
“Nothing to tell, in fact,” Barnes said.
“As I understand it, you were both drugged.”
“That’s right,” Lockhart said.
“That’s right,” Barnes said.
“Want to tell me about that?”
“Well, there’s not much to tell,” Lockhart said again.
“Nothing to tell, in fact,” Barnes said.
“We just passed out, that’s all.”
“What time was that?”
“Little after ten, must’ve been. Isn’t that right, Lenny?”
“That’s right,” Barnes said.
“And you both got to work at eight, is that right?”
“Eight on the dot. Always try to relieve Frank right on time,” Lockhart said. “It’s a long enough day without having to wait for your relief.”
“Anybody come to the factory between eight and ten?”
“Not a soul,” Barnes said.
“None of those coffee-and-sandwich wagons, nothing like that?”
“Nothing,” Lockhart said. “We make our own coffee. We got a little hot plate in the room just off the entrance door there. Near where the wall phone is hanging.”
“And did you make coffee last Wednesday night?”
“We did.”
“Who made it?”
“Me,” Lockhart said.
“What time was that?”
“Well, we had a cup must’ve been about nine. Wasn’t it about nine, Lenny?”
“Yeah, must’ve been about nine,” Barnes said, and nodded.
“Did you have another cup along about ten?”
“No, just that one cup,” Lockhart said.
“Just that one cup,” Barnes said.
“Then what?”
“Well, I went back outside again,” Lockhart said, “and Lenny here went inside to make the rounds. Takes a good hour to go through the whole place, you know. There’s four floors to the building.”
“So you had a cup of coffee at about nine, and then you went your separate ways, and you didn’t see each other again until after the fire. Is that about it?”
“Well, we saw each other again,” Barnes said, and glanced at Lockhart.
“When was that?”
“When I finished my rounds, I came down and chatted awhile with Jim here.”
“What time was that?”
“Well, like Jim said, it takes about an hour to go through the building, so I guess it was about ten or a little before.”
“But you didn’t have another cup of coffee at that time?”
“No, no,” Lockhart said.
“No,” Barnes said, and shook his head.
“What did you have?” Carella asked.
“Nothing,” Lockhart said.
“Nothing,” Barnes said.
“A shot of whiskey, maybe?”
“Oh, no,” Lockhart said.
“Ain’t allowed to drink on the job,” Barnes said.
“But you do enjoy a little drink every now and then, don’t you?”
“Oh, sure,” Lockhart said. “Everybody enjoys a little drink every now and then.”
“But not on the job.”
“No, never on the job.”
“Well, it’s a mystery to me,” Carella said. “Chloral hydrate works very fast, you see...”
“Yeah, it’s a mystery to us, too,” Lockhart said.
“Yeah,” Barnes said.
“If you both passed out at ten o’clock...”
“Well, ten or a little after.”
“Are you sure you didn’t have another cup of coffee? Try to remember.”
“Well, maybe we did,” Lockhart said.
“Yeah, maybe,” Barnes said.
“Be easy to forget a second cup of coffee,” Carella said.
“I think we must’ve had a second cup. What do you think, Lenny?”
“I think so. I think we must’ve.”
“But nobody came to the warehouse, you said.”
“That’s right.”
“Then who put the knockout drops in your coffee?”
“Well, we don’t know who could’ve done it,” Lockhart said.
“That’s the mystery,” Barnes said.
“Unless you did it yourselves,” Carella said.
“What?” Lockhart said.
“Why would we do that?” Barnes said.
“Maybe somebody paid you to do it.”
“No, no,” Lockhart said.
“Nobody gave us a penny,” Barnes said.
“Then why’d you do it?”