The cops out there were somewhat more paramilitary than the cops in the city; even the detectives had ranks like sergeant and corporal. The two men assigned to the Wilbur Matthews homicide were Detective Sergeant Andrew (Buddy) Budd, and Detective Corporal Louis Dellarosa. They crouched in the rain outside the bedroom window of the old man’s house, looking for shell casings. The lab technicians weren’t there yet; the lab technicians had to come all the way from the county seat in Elsinore. Budd and Dellarosa searched but found nothing. Inside the house, a man from the Medical Examiner’s Office was looking down at the dead man where he lay in his bed. There were two bullet holes in the wall behind the bed and another bullet hole in the pillow just to the left of Wilbur Matthews’s head, and two more in Wilbur Matthews’s head itself, one drilled through his left eye and the other through his forehead. The assistant medical examiner turned to look toward the window because it seemed to him the trajectory had originated there, but he wasn’t a Ballistics cop, and it would probably take the man from Ballistics just as long to get here as it would the lab technicians, both of them having to come all the way from Headquarters in Elsinore. The assistant ME figured he’d best pronounce the man dead, and further figured he’d be absolutely safe in stating that the cause of death had been multiple gunshot wounds. He was beginning to write up his report when a flash of lightning illuminated the window he’d been glancing at not a moment before, followed by a thunderclap that scared him the way he’d once been scared on a vill sweep in Vietnam. He went out into the hallway at once, and asked a uniformed cop there if it was all right for him to use the bathroom.
The cop said, “No, this is a crime scene.”
After forty-eight hours, you begin to get a little desperate. After seventy-two, you start praying for a break; it is amazing how many cops get religion after putting in seventy-two hours on a cold homicide case. After four days, you’re sure you’ll never solve the damn thing. When you hit the six-day mark, you begin getting desperate all over again. It is a different sort of desperation. It is a desperation bordering on obsession; you begin to see murderers under every rock. If your grandmother looks at you cock-eyed, you begin to suspect her. You go over your typed reports again and again, you study your crime-scene drawings, you read homicide reports from other precincts, you search through the files looking for homicide cases in which the weapon was a .38 or the victim was a hooker or a singer or a business manager, you hash over homicide cases involving frauds or semifrauds like Harry Caine’s vanity-house caper, you rehash homicide cases involving missing or kidnapped persons — and eventually you become an expert on all such homicides committed in the goddamn city during the past ten years but you still don’t know who the hell killed three people in the immediate past, never mind ten years ago.
It was now 9:40 A.M. on Friday morning, September 22, only fourteen hours short of 11:40 P.M., when exactly one week ago a concerned citizen dialed Emergency 911 to report two men bleeding on the sidewalk at Culver and South Eleventh. Fourteen hours short of a week. Fourteen short hours short. At twenty minutes to midnight tonight, George C. Chadderton would have been dead a full week. At 3:30 A.M. tomorrow morning, Clara Jean Hawkins would likewise have been dead a full week. Ambrose Harding, who was at present lying in a coffin at the Monroe Funeral Home on St. Sebastian Avenue, would be buried tomorrow morning at 9:00 A.M., by which time he’d have been dead almost four days. And the case continued to lie there like a lox without a bagel.
At 9:40 that morning, Carella went to see Chloe Chadderton at her apartment in Diamondback. He had called from home first, and was therefore somewhat surprised to find her wearing the same long pink robe she’d worn on that night almost a week ago, when he and Meyer had knocked on her door at two in the morning. It occurred to him, as she let him into the apartment, that he had never seen Chloe in street clothes. She was always either in a nightgown with a robe over it, as she was now, or else strutting half-naked on a bar top, or else sitting at a table and wearing only a flimsy nylon wrapper over her dancing costume. He could understand why George Chadderton wanted his wife to get out of “show biz,” considering what she seemed intent on showing day and night to any interested viewer. Sitting opposite her in the living room now, Carella looked across at the long length of leg revealed in the opening of her robe and silently admitted that he himself was an interested viewer. Embarrassed, recalling Chloe’s total exposure on the bar top at the Flamingo, he quickly took out his notebook and busied himself leafing through its pages.
“Would you like some coffee?” she asked. “I have some on the stove.”
“No, thanks,” Carella said. “I just want to ask you some questions, and then I’ll be on my way.”
“No hurry,” she said, and smiled.
“Mrs. Chadderton,” he said, “I tried to fill you in a little on the phone about what we believe is the connection between your husband and C.J. Hawkins, the fact that they’d been talking about doing an album together.”
“Yes, but George never mentioned that to me,” Chloe said.
“Something called ‘In the Life.’ Do you remember in his notebook...”
“Yes...”
“The night we were here...”
“Yes, I remember.”
“That’s what we think the title of the album was going to be.”
“Mm-huh,” Chloe said.
“But he never mentioned this album to you.”
“No.”
“Or Miss Hawkins. He never mentioned anyone named Clara Jean Hawkins or C.J. Hawkins.”
“Never,” Chloe said, and shifted her weight on the sofa.
Carella looked at his notebook again. “Mrs. Chadderton...” he said.
“I wish you’d call me Chloe,” she said.
“Well... uh... yes, fine,” he said, but instead skirted the name the way he might have a puddle on the sidewalk. “In the appointment calendar you let me have, the name Hawkins and the initials C.J. appeared on the following dates: August tenth, August twenty-fourth, August thirty-first, and September seventh. Those are all Thursdays. We know that Miss Hawkins’s day off was Thursday—”
“Just like a cleaning woman,” Chloe said, and smiled.
“What?” Carella said.
“Thursdays and every other Sunday,” Chloe said.
“Oh. Well, I hadn’t made that connection,” Carella said.
“Don’t worry, I’m not about to start another racial hassle,” Chloe said.
“I didn’t think you were.”
“I was wrong about you that night,” she said. “That first night.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s—”
“Do you know when I realized you were okay?”
“No, when was that?”
“At the Flamingo. You were checking names and dates in your little notebook, same as you’re doing now, and you asked me who Lou Davis was and I told you he was the man who owned the hall my husband...”
“Yes, I remember.”
“And you said ‘How dumb,’ or something like that. About yourself, I mean. You were calling yourself dumb.”