Looking at it, Carella thought it resembled some sort of gift box from one of the city’s larger department stores. In fact, the box looked instantly recognizable to him, though he couldn’t yet pinpoint the name of the department store. The box was perhaps five inches long by three inches wide by four inches deep. It was imprinted with an overall fleur-de-lis design in blue against a green field. The corsage inside the box was a pink orchid.
“Why does it scare you?” Carella asked.
“Because first of all,” Harding said, “who the fuck would want to send me an orchid?”
He was sitting in an easy chair in his own living room, the window behind him lashed now with rain that seemed determined to set the city afloat. The time was only a little past noon, but the sky outside looked more like the 5:00 P.M. sky of a winter’s day. The pink orchid sat on the coffee table in front of him, inside the box with the blue and green fleur-de-lis design. It looked innocuous enough. Carella could not understand why it seemed to terrify Harding.
“Any number of people might want to send you flowers,” Carella said. “You were hurt, after all, they knew you were in the hospital...”
“Flowers, yeah,” Harding said, “a bouquet of flowers. But not a corsage. I’m a man. Why would anyone want to send me a corsage?”
“Well, maybe... well, I don’t know,” Carella said. “Maybe the florist made a mistake.”
“Which is another thing,” Harding said. “If somebody’s gone to all the trouble of buying me a corsage — an orchid, no less — how come it’s delivered by somebody who vanishes before I can open the door? How come it isn’t in a florist’s box? How come there’s no card with it? How come the corsage just arrives like that — knock, knock on the door, ‘Who is it?’ and no answer, and there’s the box sitting outside the door. How come is what I’d like to know.”
“Well... what do you think it is?” Carella asked.
“A warning,” Harding said.
“How do you read a warning into... a... well... a... a corsage?”
“There’s a pin stuck in it,” Harding said. “Maybe somebody’s tryin to tell me I’m gonna get somethin stuck in me, too, man. Maybe somebody’s tryin to tell me I’m gonna end up like Georgie did.”
“I can understand how you might feel that way—”
“You’re damn right, considerin somebody tried to empty a pistol in my head...”
“But a flower,” Carella said, “a corsage...” and let the sentence trail, and shrugged.
“You take that thing with you,” Harding said.
“What for?”
“Give it to your lab people. See if it’s poisoned or anything.”
“I’ll do that, sure,” Carella said, “but I really don’t think—”
“Somebody tried damn hard to kill me, Mr. Carella,” Harding said. “And missed out. Cause the gun was empty. Okay. Maybe that same party is sendin me flowers before the funeral, Mr. Carella, you understand me? I’m scared. I’m out of the hospital now, where I ain’t protected no more by nurses and doctors and people all around me. I’m home now, all by my little lonesome, and all at once I get a pink orchid left outside my door, and I can tell you it scares the shit out of me.”
“Let me talk to the lieutenant,” Carella said. “Maybe we can get a man up here.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Harding said. “And have somebody look at that flower.”
“I will,” Carella said. “Meanwhile, there are some questions I want to ask you.”
“Go ahead,” Harding said.
“Do you know anyone named Clara Jean Hawkins?”
“No. Who is she?”
“Someone who knew George Chadderton. Did you know all of his business associates?”
“I did.”
“But not Clara Jean Hawkins.”
“Is she a business associate?”
“Apparently she was talking to George about doing some kind of album.”
“Is she in the record business?”
“No, she was a hooker.”
“A hooker? And she was talking to George about doing an album?”
“George never mentioned it to you?”
“Never. What kind of an album?”
“Based on her experiences as a prostitute,” Carella said.
“I can just see that in the top forty, can’t you?” Harding said, and shook his head.
“The girl seemed convinced the album would be made.”
“By who?”
“By someone who was going to charge her three thousand dollars for the privilege.”
“Ah,” Harding said, and nodded. “Vanity recording.”
“What’s that?” Carella asked.
“It’s where a company charges you anywhere from two to three hundred dollars for what they call a test pressing, or some such bullshit. After that, they—”
“A test pressing, did you say?”
“Yeah. If the company’s so-called judges like what they hear, they’ll recommend a major pressing.”
“For more money?”
“No, no, all included in the fee. There’s still plenty of profit, believe me. The major pressing is usually an album, okay? Eight or nine songs on each side of it, all by suckers like yourself. That’s eighteen songs at two, sometimes three hundred bucks a throw, that comes to four, five thousand dollars. So they’ll press fifteen hundred albums — which in a legit operation might cost you twenty-five hundred bucks — and they’ll give ten each to the eighteen ‘songwriters’ on the album, and the rest they’ll send to disc jockeys, who’ll throw them in the garbage, or to record stores around the country, who won’t even open the package. A racket, pure and simple. This was sposed to be an album, huh?”
“Yes.”
“And George was involved in it? I can’t believe George would’ve got himself involved in a vanity operation. Lots of these houses supply the suckers with lyricists or composers free of charge, all part of the hype. But George? Are you sure about this?”
“He met with the girl four times in the past month. The words ‘In the Life’ were doodled in his notebook. It’s our guess they planned to use that as the title.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. He never mentioned it to me. I know he was itchin for bigger money than he’d been gettin lately, be a way for him to get Chloe to quit that job of hers. So maybe he got this girl involved with some vanity label, and maybe... I just don’t know. If George was gettin a kickback, it might still have been worth the company’s while. Stead of havin to scrounge around for eighteen separate suckers, they’d have one sucker puttin up a full three grand, give George some of that, still make a profit. Yeah, maybe. I just can’t say for sure.”
Carella took out his notebook, and opened it to the page of names he had copied from Chadderton’s appointment calendar. “I’ve got two names here that Chloe couldn’t identify,” he said. “Would either of them be connected with vanity labels?”
“Let me hear them,” Harding said.
“Jimmy Talbot?”