“They should promote you.”
“They should,” Genero said.
“I will call your boss,” Genero’s mother said.
“No, I don’t think you should, Mama.”
“Perche no?”
“Perchè … Mama, please don’t talk Italian, you know I don’t understand Italian so well.”
“Vergogna,” his mother said, “an Italian doesn’t understand his own tongue. I will call your boss.”
“No, Mama, that isn’t the way it’s done.”
“Then how is it done?” his father asked.
“Well, you’ve got to hint around.”
“Hint? To who?”
“Well, to people.”
“Which people?”
“Well, Carella’s upstairs in this same hospital, maybe …”
“Ma chi è questa Carella?” his mother said.
“Mama, please.”
“Who is this Carella?”
“A detective on the squad.”
“Where you work, sì?”
“Sì. Please, Mama.”
“He is your boss?”
“No, he just works up there.”
“He was shot, too?”
“No, he was beat up.”
“By the same man who shot you?”
“No, not by the same man who shot me,” Genero said, which was also the truth.
“So what does he have to do with this?”
“Well, he’s got influence.”
“With the boss?”
“Well, no. You see, Captain Frick runs the entire precinct, he’s actually the boss. But Lieutenant Byrnes is in charge of the detective squad, and Carella is a detective/2nd, and him and the lieutenant are like this, so maybe if I talk to Carella he’ll see how I helped them grab that guy yesterday, and put in a good word for me.”
“Let her call the boss,” Genero’s father said.
“No, it’s better this way,” Genero said.
“How much does a detective make?” Genero’s mother asked.
“A fortune,” Genero said.
Gadgets fascinated Detective-Lieutenant Sam Grossman, even when they were bombs. Or perhaps especially when they were bombs. There was no question in anyone’s mind (how much question could there have been, considering the evidence of the demolished automobile and its five occupants?) that someone had put a bomb in the deputy mayor’s car. Moreover, it was mandatory to assume that someone had set the bomb to go off at a specific time, rather than using the ignition wiring of the car as an immediate triggering device. This aspect of the puzzle pleased Grossman enormously because he considered ignition-trigger bombs to be rather crude devices capable of being wired by any gangland ape. This bomb was a time bomb. But it was a very special time bomb. It was a time bomb that had not been wired to the automobile clock.
How did Grossman know this?
Ah-ha, the police laboratory never sleeps, not even on Sunday. And besides, his technicians had found two clock faces in the rubble of the automobile.
One of the faces had been part of the Cadillac’s dashboard clock. The other had come from a nationally advertised, popular-priced electric alarm clock. There was one other item of importance found in the rubble: a portion of the front panel of a DC-to-AC inverter, part of its brand name still showing where it was stamped into the metal.
These three parts lay on the counter in Grossman’s laboratory like three key pieces to a jigsaw puzzle. All he had to do was fit them together and come up with a brilliant solution. He was feeling particularly brilliant this Sunday morning because his son had brought home a 92 on a high-school chemistry exam only two days ago; it always made Grossman feel brilliant when his son achieved anything. Well, let’s see, he thought brilliantly. I’ve got three parts of a time bomb, or rather two parts because I think I can safely eliminate the car’s clock except as a reference point. Whoever wired the bomb undoubtedly refused to trust his own wrist watch since a difference of a minute or two in timing might have proved critical — in a minute, the deputy mayor could have been out of the car already and on his way into the synagogue. So he had set the electric clock with the time showing on the dashboard clock. Why an electric clock? Simple. He did not want a clock that ticked. Ticking might have attracted attention, especially if it came from under the hood of a purring Cadillac. Okay, so let’s see what we’ve got. We’ve got an electric alarm clock, and we’ve got a DC-to-AC inverter, which means someone wanted to translate direct current to alternating current. The battery in a Cadillac would have to be 12-volts DC, and the electric clock would doubtless be wired for alternating current. So perhaps we can reasonably assume that someone wanted to wire the clock to the battery and needed an inverter to make this feasible. Let’s see.
He’d have had to run a positive lead to the battery and a negative lead to any metal part of the automobile, since the car itself would have served as a ground, right? So now we’ve got a power source to the clock, and the clock is running. Okay, right, the rest is simple, he’d have had to use an electric balsting cap, sure, there’d have been enough power to set one off, most commercial electric detonators can be fired by passing a continuous current of 0.3 to 0.4 amperes through the bridge wire. Okay, let’s see, hold it it now, let’s look at it.
The battery provides our source of power.… which is in turn set for a specific time, about eight, wasn’t it? He’d have had to monkey around with the clock so that instead of the alarm ringing, a switch would close. That would complete the circuit, let’s see, he’d have needed a lead running back to the battery, another lead running to the blasting cap, and a lead from the blasting cap to any metal part of the car. So that would look like …
And that’s it.
He could have assembled the entire package at home, taken it with him in a tool box, and wired it to the car in a very short time — making certain, of course, that all his wires were properly insulated, to guard against a stray current touching off a premature explosion. The only remaining question is how he managed to get access to the car, but happily that’s not my problem.
Whistling brilliantly, Sam Grossman picked up the telephone and called Detective Meyer Meyer at the 87th.
The municipal garage was downtown on Dock Street, some seven blocks from City Hall. Meyer Meyer picked up Bert Kling at ten-thirty. The drive down along the River Dix took perhaps twenty minutes. They parked on a meter across the street from the big concrete and tile structure, and Meyer automatically threw the visor sign, even though this was Sunday and parking regulations were not in force.
The foreman of the garage was a man named Spencer Coyle.
He was reading Dick Tracy and seemed less impressed by the two detectives in his midst than by the fictional exploits of his favorite comic strip sleuth. It was only with a great effort of will that he managed to tear himself away from the newspaper at all. He did not rise from his chair, though. The chair was tilted back against the tiled wall of the garage. The tiles, a vomitous shade of yellow, decorated too many government buildings all over the city, and it was Meyer’s guess that a hefty hunk of graft had influenced some purchasing agent back in the Thirties, either that or the poor bastard had been color-blind. Spencer Coyle leaned back in his chair against the tiles, his face long and gray and grizzled, his long legs stretched out in front of him, the comic section still dangling from his right hand, as though he were reluctant to let go of it completely even though he had stopped lip-reading it. He was wearing the greenish-brown coveralls of a Transportation Division employee, his peaked hat sitting on his head with all the rakish authority of a major in the Air Force. His attitude clearly told the detectives that he did not wish to be disturbed at any time, but especially on Sunday.