Frick knew, from his years of duty on the streets before he made desk sergeant and then lieutenant and then captain, that the 8:00-to-4:00 tour of duty ended at 3:45 P.M., when the relieving patrolmen stood roll call in the muster room, after which the preceding shift was supposed to be relieved on post. He further knew that any smart criminal in this city should have planned the commission of his crimes for the fifteen minutes preceding 8:00 A.M., 4:00 P.M., and 12:00 midnight, since it was then that an overlap took place between those patrolmen who were returning prematurely to the station house, and those patrolmen who were standing roll call prior to going out on the street to “relieve on post.” A tour of duty is a long eight hours, and one can perhaps forgive a bit of eagerness on the part of men who’ve been pounding a beat. Anyway, Frick knew it would be senseless to assign an off-going patrolman to the first watch on Harding’s apartment, so he called down to the desk and asked that the sergeant assign a man from the 4:00-to-midnight to the first segment of a round-the-clock that would continue through the next week at least, or certainly until further notice.
The first patrolman assigned to Harding’s apartment was a rookie named Conrad Lehmann. He was also the last patrolman assigned there, since when he got there, he found the door ajar and a black man lying dead on the kitchen floor with two neatly spaced bullet holes in his face.
11
Carella could not get used to thinking of Sam Grossman as Captain Sam Grossman, not after he’d been Lieutenant Sam Grossman for such a long time. High in a window in a tower to the east — or rather on the Police Laboratory floor of the new tower-like glass, steel, and stone Headquarters Building downtown on High Street — Grossman half sat upon, half leaned against a long white table bearing a row of black microscopes. He was wearing a white laboratory smock over a gray suit, and his eyeglasses reflected gray rain oozing along the window panes, gray sky stretching across a dull horizon, black pencil-line bridges sketched from the island to the distant gray reaches of the city. The effect was starkly modern, almost monochromatic — the whites, blacks, and grays broken only by the cool blue and green of the fleur-de-lis box and the hot pink of the orchid on the lab counter.
“Which do you want first?” Grossman asked. “The box or the flower?” There was in his voice a gentleness in direct contradiction to the coldness of the scientific knowledge he was expected to dispense. Listening to Grossman talk about the results of his various lab tests was rather like hearing a drawling New England turnip farmer explaining that contrary to Galilean or Newtonian concepts, time and space should be viewed as relative to moving systems or frames of reference.
“Let’s start with the box,” Carella said.
“I take it you don’t recognize the design.”
“I know it, but I don’t know it.”
“B. Renaud on Hall Avenue.”
“Right, that’s it.”
“Their standard gift box. They change the color scheme every now and then, but the fleur-de-lis pattern is always the same. You might check them on when they last changed colors.”
“I’ll do that. Anything else I should know?”
“Not a latent print on it, not a trace of anything but dust in it.”
“Anything special about the dust?”
“Not this time. Sorry, Steve.”
“How about the flower?”
“Well, it’s an orchid, as I’m sure you surmised.”
“Yes, I guessed that,” Carella said, smiling.
“Variety common to the North Temperate Zone,” Grossman said, “characterized by the pinkish flower and the slipper-shaped lip. You can buy it at any florist in the city. Just go in and ask for Calypso bulbosa.”
“You’re kidding,” Carella said.
“Am I?” Grossman said, surprised.
“Calypso bulbosa? Calypso?”
“That’s the name. Why? What’s the matter?”
Carella shook his head. “I’m sure Harding didn’t know the name of that damn flower, but it scared hell out of him anyway. Calypso bulbosa. The killer was saying ‘See the pretty flower — it means death.’ And Harding knew it instinctively.” He shook his head again.
“Meanings within meanings,” Grossman said.
“Wheels within wheels,” Carella said.
“Turning,” Grossman said.
The person Carella spoke to at B. Renaud was a woman named Betty Ungar. Her telephone voice was precise but pleasant, rather like the voice of a robot who’d been lubricated with treacle.
“Yes,” she said, “the fleur-de-lis pattern is ours exclusively. It is featured in all our newspaper and television advertisements, it is on our charge cards and our shopping bags, and of course it’s on all of our gift boxes.”
“I understand the colors change every so often.”
“Every Christmas, yes,” Miss Ungar said.
“The box I have here on my desk,” Carella said, “has a blue fleur-de-lis pattern on a green field. I wonder if you—”
“Oh, my,” Miss Ungar said.
“Is that a problem for you?”
“Blue and green. Oh, my, that’s considerably before my time, I’m afraid.”
“Are you saying the box is an old one?”
“I’ve been here for six years,” Miss Ungar said, “and I can remember every color variation we’ve used — the red on pink last Christmas, for example, the black on white the Christmas before, the brown on beige the Christmas before that—”
“Uh-huh,” Carella said. “But this blue on green...”
“Before my time.”
“Longer ago than six years, is that it?” Carella said.
“Yes.”
“Could you tell me exactly how long ago?”
“Well... is this awfully important to you?”
“It might be,” Carella said. “There’s no way of telling if a piece of new information is important, you see, until it suddenly becomes important.”
“Um,” Miss Ungar said, managing to convey in that monosyllabic grunt a sincere lack of conviction concerning the urgency of Carella’s mission, and a further suspicion of his homespun philosophy about the relative importance of clues and the theory of spontaneous celebrity. “Hold on, would you please?” she said.
Carella held on. While he held on, the store piped recorded music into the telephone. Carella listened to the music and wondered why Americans felt it necessary to fill every silence with sound of one kind or another — canned rock, canned schlock, canned schmaltz, canned pap, it was impossible to step into a taxi or an elevator or even a funeral home in America without speakers blaring, oozing, or dripping sound of one kind or another. Whatever happened to silent grassy hilltops? It seemed he could remember once going to his aunt’s farm in the state across the river, and sitting on a grassy hilltop where the world sloped away in utter silence at his feet. Occupied with such pastoral thoughts, a canned schlock-schmaltz arrangement of “Sunrise, Sunset” massaging his right ear, Carella almost fell asleep. Miss Ungar’s vaguely mechanical voice jarred him back to his senses.
“Mr. Coppola?” she said.
“Carella,” he said.
“Um,” she said, this time managing to convey doubt that Carella knew his own name. “I’ve checked with someone who’s been here longer than I,” she said, “and actually the blue on green was used the Christmas before I began my employment.”
“That would have made it Christmas seven years ago.”
“Yes,” Miss Ungar said. “If I began work here six years ago, and if the blue on green was used the Christmas before I began work, why then, yes, that would have been seven years ago.”
Carella had the feeling he’d just been called an idiot. He thanked Miss Ungar for her time, and hung up. Seven years ago, he thought. He stared at the box; all theories of police work to the contrary, the new piece of information refused to become suddenly important.