Both detectives looked at him.
‘I was a very good Santa,’ Drits said with dignity.
‘And you never heard of anyone named Elizabeth Turner? Never met her?’
‘Never.’
‘Or Dennis Dove?’
‘Never.’
‘Did you hand Charlie Henkins a gun in the men’s room at Gruber’s?’
‘I didn’t hand him anything. I didn’t even know he was Henkins till you told me. I was surprised to see another guy in a Santa Claus suit, is all. He looked surprised, too. He just ran out.’
‘What’d you do?’
‘I dried my face, I put on my beard again, and I left the store.’
‘To go where?’
‘Home.’
‘Which is where?’
‘I live in a hotel on Waverly.’
‘Were you outside the store when Henkins got shot?’
‘I didn’t know Henkins got shot.’
‘Didn’t see the shooting, huh?’
‘No.’
‘What did you see? When you came out of the store?’
‘Who remembers what I saw? People. I saw people.’
‘Who? What people?’
‘People. Some guy selling watches, another guy selling scarves, some nutty Salvation Army guy...’
‘What do you mean by “nutty”?’
‘Nuts, you know? He told me, “Here.”’
‘He told you what?’
‘Here.’
‘H-e-a-r?’
‘No, h-e-r-e. I think. Who knows with nuts?’
‘Here? What’d he mean?’
‘I don’t know what he meant.’
‘What’d you think he meant?’
‘I think he was nuts. He asked me where the bag was.’
‘What’d he look like?’ Carella asked at once.
‘Tall guy in a Salvation Army uniform. Nuts.’
‘What color was his hair?’
‘I don’t know. He was wearing a hat.’
‘Was he wearing a hearing aid?’
‘He had ear muffs on.’
Carella sighed. Brown sighed, too.
‘All right, keep your nose clean,’ Brown said.
‘I can go?’ Drits said.
‘Why?’ Brown said. ‘Did you do something?’
‘No, no, hey,’ Drits said.
‘See that you don’t,’ Carella said.
* * * *
That afternoon three pairs of handcuffs arrived.
They had already questioned George Di Fiore, the proprietor of Di Fiore Florists, about the man who’d ordered the pear tree, and he’d told them first of all that it wasn’t a real pear tree, it was in fact a Ficus Benjamina, but they were all out of pear trees when the man came in asking for one. Di More had also told them that the man had personally picked out the little wooden pears to fasten to the tree, and then had personally affixed the card and the little wrapped package to the tree. Di Fiore hadn’t known what was in the little wrapped package, and did not consider it his business to ask. Carella wanted to ask if Di Fiore—which meant ‘of the flowers’ in Italian—had chosen his profession because of his name. He knew an anesthesiologist named Dr. Sleepe—although he pronounced it Slehpuh—and a chiropractor named Hands. Instead he asked what Di Fiore’s pear-tree customer had looked like.
‘Tall blond man wearing a hearing aid,’ Di Fiore told him.
So now the three pairs of handcuffs.
They all looked brand-new.
They could have been purchased, as Kling again suggested, at any police-supply store in town.
December 27, the third day of Christmas, and three pairs of handcuffs.
Tomorrow, Carella knew for certain, four police hats would arrive.
* * * *
And they did.
Arrived by United Parcel delivery, all boxed and wrapped in festive Christmas paper.
The hats were definitely not new.
Their sweat bands were greasy, and their leather peaks were cracked with age. Moreover, they had police shields pinned to them. And unlike the pictures they’d received earlier, these shields had numbers on them.
There were four different numbers on the shields.
Carella called Mullaney at Personnel and asked him to identify the shields for him.
‘This Coppola again?’ Mullaney said.
When he came back onto the line, he told Carella that those shields, and presumably the hats to which they were pinned, belonged to four different police officers at four different precincts. He asked Carella if he wanted the patrolmen’s names—one of them, actually, was a female cop, but in Mullaney’s world all police officers were patrolmen. Carella took down the names and then called each precinct. The desk sergeant on duty at each precinct told Carella that yes, indeed, such and such an officer worked out of this precinct, but he—or, in the case of the woman, she—had not reported having lost his, or her, hat. One of the sergeants asked Carella if this was a joke. Carella told him he guessed it wasn’t a joke.
But if it wasn’t a joke, then what the hell was it?
Carella grunted and picked up one of the police hats.
The man or woman who’d worn it had dandruff.
* * * *
‘Those are police walkie-talkies,’ Miscolo said. ‘Standard issue.’
Miscolo was a clerk and not a detective, but it didn’t take a detective to see that each of the walkie-talkies that arrived by United Parcel delivery on the fifth day of Christmas, December 29, were marked with plastic labeling tape of the sort you printed up yourself with a lettering gun. Each of the walkie-talkies had two strips of tape on it. The first strip was identical in each case. It read:
RETURN TO CHARGING RACK
The second strips differed. One read:
PROPERTY OF 21ST PRECINCT
Another read:
PROPERTY OF 12TH PRECINCT
And so on:
PROPERTY OF 61ST PRECINCT
PROPERTY OF MIDTOWN EAST
PROPERTY OF 83RD PRECINCT
Five different walkie-talkies from five different precincts.
‘Those were stolen from five different precincts,’ Miscolo said. ‘This man is entering police precincts all over town.’
* * * *
The six police shields that arrived on December 30, a Friday and the sixth day of Christmas, similarly belonged to police officers from six different precincts. None of the officers had reported his shield missing or stolen; a cop does not like to admit that somebody ripped off his goddamn potsie. Moreover, the six precincts from which the shields had been stolen—Carella was sure by now that they’d been stolen—were not any of the precincts from which the walkie-talkies or the police hats were stolen. In short, fifteen precincts had been entered—four police hats, five walkie-talkies, and six shields for a total of fifteen—and police equipment had been removed from them under the very eyes of the police themselves. There were twenty precincts in Isola alone. Some of the police equipment had been stolen from precincts in Calm’s Point and Majesta. None had been stolen from either Bethtown or Riverhead. But someone had been very busy indeed, even assuming that neither the nightsticks nor the handcuffs were similarly stolen, which would have brought to twenty-four the number of precincts whose security had been breached.