“I didn’t kill him,” she said.
Neither of the detectives said anything.
“If you’re done here, I wish you’d leave,” she said.
“May I take the notebook with me?” Carella asked.
“Take it. Just go.”
“I’ll give you a receipt, ma’am, if you—”
“I don’t need a receipt,” she said, and burst into fresh tears.
“Ma’am...”
“Would you please go?” she said. “Would you please get the hell out of here?”
They left silently.
In the hallway outside, Meyer said, “We were clumsy.”
“We were worse than that,” Carella said.
4
In the silence of the 3:00 A.M. squadroom, he sat alone at his desk and wondered what the hell was happening to him. He would have to call her in the morning, apologize to her, tell her it had been a long day and a longer night, tell her that sometimes in this business you began looking for murderers under every rock, explain — shit. He had treated a grieving widow like a goddamn assassin. There was no excuse. He was tired, but that was no excuse. He had listened to Monoghan and Monroe making jokes about death and dying, and he had been irritated by their banter, but that was no excuse, either. Nor was the rain an excuse. Nothing could excuse his having played cop with a woman who’d been feeling only intense grief over the death of her husband. He sometimes believed that if he stayed at this job long enough, he would forget entirely what it meant to feel anything at all.
“This is your case,” the manual advised, “stick with the investigation.” Stick with it in the pouring rain where a man lay with his open skull seeping his brains onto the sidewalk, stick with it in a hospital room reeking of antiseptic, stick with it in a tenement apartment at 2:00 in the morning, the clock throwing minutes into the empty hours of the night while a woman wept tears for her man who was dead. Search her closet for the clothes the killer wore. Get her to talk about her husband’s possible infidelities. Be a fucking cop.
He should have gone home. The squadroom clock read ten minutes to 3:00 now. Technically, it was already Saturday morning, though it still felt like Friday night, and it was still raining. Technically, his tour had ended at midnight, and he’d have gone home then if the Chadderton squeal hadn’t come in at a quarter to 12:00, just when Parker and Willis were supposed to relieve. He was exhausted and irritable, and feeling hugely like a horse’s ass for his handling of the Chadderton woman, feeling not a little self-pity besides, poor public servant forced to deal with the more violent side of life, low pay and long hours, lousy working conditions and departmental pressures for swift arrests and convictions — he should have gone home to bed. But the notebook was here on his desk, sitting with its frayed blue cover and its pages of lyrics written by the dead man, urging scrutiny. He rose, stretched, went to the water cooler, drank a paper cup full of water, and then went back to the desk. The clock on the wall read 3:05 A.M. The squadroom was silent, a poorly lighted mausoleum of empty desks and stilled typewriters. Beyond the slatted wooden railing that separated the squadroom from the corridor outside, he could see a light burning behind the frosted glass door to the locker room, and beyond that the banister post for the iron-runged steps that led to the muster room on the first floor of the building. Downstairs, a telephone rang. He heard a patrolman greeting another patrolman coming in off the street. Alone in the squadroom, Carella opened the notebook.
He had never been to Trinidad, had never witnessed the monumental calypso contests that took place in the carnival tents at Port of Spain each year before Ash Wednesday. But as he leafed through the pages of the notebook now, the words scribbled in pencil seemed suddenly to pulse with the Afro-Spanish rhythms that had been their base, and he might have been there at Mardi Gras, swaying to the music that swelled from the corrugated-iron and palm-leaf tents, the men and women in the audience snapping their fingers and shouting the call-and-response, the performers ingeniously twisting their rhythms and rhymes, singing out their sarcasm, their protest, their indignation:
Smiling, Carella wondered if he should go look up the mayor. A song like that was reason enough for murder, ridiculing as it did the mayor’s obese wife, Louise, and the highly touted Champagne Ball she’d sponsored last April. He shook his head, washed his hand over his face, and told himself again that it was time to go home. Instead, he turned to the next page in the notebook.
The rhyme scheme and rhythm in the next song seemed similar to that of the first, but he detected almost at once — before he’d come through the first several lines, in fact — that it was written to be sung at a much slower tempo. He tried to imagine the dead George Chadderton singing the words he’d jotted into his notebook. He imagined there would be no smile on his face; he imagined there would be pain in his eyes. Recognizing the intent of the song, Carella went back and began reading the lyrics again from the top:
The white man who approached her was holding an umbrella over his head. She stood just across the street from the city’s main railroad terminal, a long-legged, good-looking black girl in her early twenties, wearing a blond wig, a beige coat, and black high-heeled patent-leather pumps. She stood in the doorway of a closed delicatessen, her coat open over a scoop-necked pink blouse and a short black skirt. She wore no bra under the blouse; the chill wetness of the September night puckered her nipples against the thin satin fabric. It was ten minutes past 3:00 A.M., and she had turned eight tricks since beginning work at ten. She was bone weary and wanted nothing more than to go home to her own bed. But the night was young — as Joey often reminded her — and if she didn’t bring home no more bread than she already had in her bag, he’d more’n likely throw her out naked in the rain. As the white man approached, she pursed her lips and made a kissing sound.
“Want a date?” she whispered.
“How much?” the man said. He was in his late fifties, she supposed, short little man with almost no hair, wearing eyeglasses that were spattered with rain despite the umbrella over his head. He looked her up and down.