‘Yeah,’ Carella said.
‘If it is a real one ... where’d he get it?’ Miscolo asked.
‘Maybe I oughta check it out,’ Carella said. ‘Trouble is...’
‘Yeah, I know. You’d feel like a jerk.’
‘I mean, we’re getting these dumb letters...’
‘I know...’
‘I make a call to Personnel, ask if a cop lost a potsie with the number seventy-nine on it...’
‘You’d feel like a jerk.’
‘Which is how we’re supposed to feel,’ Carella said.
‘I don’t like this guy, I really don’t like him,’ Miscolo said, and looked at the picture of the four police hats again. ‘What’s he trying to tell us anyway?’
‘I don’t know,’ Carella said, and sighed heavily.
‘You want some coffee?’ Miscolo asked.
‘Thanks, not right now,’ Carella said.
‘Yeah, well,’ Miscolo said, and shrugged and left the squadroom.
The rain lashed the windows.
Carella wondered if he should call Personnel to run a check on shield number seventy-nine.
He looked at the D.D. form in his typewriter. Years ago you had to use carbon paper to make duplicate, triplicate, even quadruplicate copies. Now you just ran down the hall and asked Miscolo to run off Xerox copies for you. The way the Deaf Man—it had to be the Deaf Man—had Xeroxed the pictures he’d been sending them. The form—just as he’d typed it, errors, overscoring, and all—read:
That was as far as he’d got.
He was about to throw the Elizabeth Turner case into the Open File. Open. A euphemism for dead end. A case waiting for a miracle to happen. Open. In that years from now, by some impossible stroke of luck, they might arrest a man dropping another dead woman in yet another park, and he would confess to the first murder and perhaps a dozen murders before that one.
He looked at the form again.
He looked at the Deaf Man’s most recent message.
Four police hats.
No faces under them.
Anonymous hats.
The form in Carella’s typewriter was about to be thrown into the vast anonymity of the Open File, another piece of paper in a maze of information that confirmed the ineffectiveness of the police in a city where far too many murders were committed. The Open File was a gaping maw that swallowed victims. And in the process swallowed victimizers as well.
The proximity of the Deaf Man’s anonymous hats and the imminently anonymous form in the typewriter made him suddenly angry. It was entirely possible that there was no connection whatever between Elizabeth Turner and the Deaf Man. Seeking such a connection would most certainly be time-consuming and, in the long run, perhaps foolish. But she had been found dead in the park across the street. And there had been five letters from the Deaf Man to date, and if he wasn’t sticking his finger in their collective eye, then it certainly seemed that way. Throw Elizabeth Turner’s corpse into the Open File, and he’d be throwing the Deaf Man into it as well.
He ripped the D.D. report from his typewriter.
He carried the Deaf Man’s most recent greeting to the bulletin board and was about to tack it up with the others there, when it suddenly occurred to him that perhaps they were meant to be read in numerical rather than chronological order.
He began shifting them around, retacking them to the board in a single horizontal line.
Three pairs of handcuffs. Four police hats. Five walkie-talkies. Six police shields. Eight black horses.
So what? he thought.
They still meant nothing.
Not realizing how close he’d come to at least a beginning, he walked back to his desk, checked his book of police department phone listings, and then dialed Personnel downtown on High Street.
‘Personnel, Sergeant Mullaney,’ a voice answered.
‘Detective Carella at the Eight-Seven,’ he said. ‘I need a name and address for a possible police officer.’
‘A possible officer?’ Mullaney said.
‘Yes. All I’ve got is a shield number.’
‘What’s the number?’ Mullaney asked
‘Seventy-nine.’
‘You gotta be kidding,’ Mullaney said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Seventy-nine? You know what number we’re up to now? Don’t even ask. You know how many cops been through this system since the police department was started? Don’t ask.’
‘Check it anyway, okay?’
‘This guy’s got to be kidding,’ Mullaney said to no one. ‘Where’d you get this number?’
‘On a picture of a shield.’
‘A picture of a shield?’
‘Yes.’
‘And it says seventy-nine on it?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s your number, Coppola?’
‘Seven-one-four, five-six, three-two. And it’s Carella.’
‘That’ll give you some idea where we are now with the shield numbers. So you want me to check a shield some guy was a kid when the fuckin’ Dutch were still here?’
‘Just do me the favor, okay? This is a homicide we’re working.’
‘I ain’t surprised. A guy with shield number seventy-nine, he’s been dead for at least three centuries. Hold on, okay?’
Carella held on.
Mullaney came back onto the line some five minutes later.
‘No active shield number seventy-nine,’ he said. ‘Just like I figured.’
‘How about past records?’
‘We don’t go back to Henry Hudson,’ Mullaney said.
‘Check your past records,’ Carella said impatiently. ‘This is a goddamn homicide here.’
‘Don’t get your ass in an uproar, Coppola,’ Mullaney said, and left the phone again.
Carella waited.
When Mullaney came back, he said, ‘I got a badge number seventy-nine from 1858. There were eight-hundred thousand people in this city then, and we had a police force of fourteen hundred men. You’ll be interested in learning, no doubt, that in those days the police department was also charged with cleaning the streets.’
‘So what’s changed?’ Carella said.
‘Nothing,’ Mullaney said. ‘You want this guy’s name?’
‘Please,’ Carella said.
‘Angus McPherson,’ Mullaney said. ‘He died in 1872. You’ll be interested in learning, no doubt, that by then we had a population of a million-four and a police force of eighteen hundred men. Also, by then, there was a street cleaning department. Cops didn’t have to shovel horse manure anymore. All they had to worry about was getting shot. Which was what happened to this guy McPherson. Where’d you get a picture of his shield? In an antiques shop?’