“Well,” Byrnes said, “I hate to behave like a television cop, sir, I would really rather forget the entire thing, as you suggest, but the possibility exists that there is a plan to murder you, and in all good conscience I cannot ignore that possibility, not without discussing it first with you.”
“Well, you’ve discussed it with me,” the parks commissioner said, “and I say forget it.”
“Sir,” Byrnes said, “we would like to try to apprehend the man who picks up the lunch pail, and we would also like to supply you with police protection tomorrow night. Had you planned on leaving the house tomorrow night?”
The parks commissioner said that Byrnes could do whatever he thought fit in the matter of apprehending the man who picked up the lunch pail, but that he did indeed plan on going out tomorrow night, was in fact invited by the mayor to attend a performance of Beethoven’s Eroica given by the Philharmonic at the city’s recently opened music and theater complex near Remington Circle, and he did not want or need police protection.
Byrnes said, “Well, sir, let’s see what results we have with the lunch pail, we’ll get back to you.”
“Yes, get back to me,” the parks commissioner said, “but not in the middle of the night again, okay?” and hung up.
At five A.M. on Tuesday morning while it was still dark, Detectives Hal Willis and Arthur Brown drank two fortifying cups of coffee in the silence of the squadroom, donned foul-weather gear requisitioned from an Emergency Squad truck, clipped on their holsters, and went out onto the arctic tundra to begin a lonely surveillance of the third bench on the Clinton Street footpath into Grover Park. Since most of the park’s paths meandered from north to south and naturally had entrances on either end, they thought at first there might be some confusion concerning the Clinton Street footpath. But a look at the map on the precinct wall showed that there was only one entrance to this particular path, which began on Grover Avenue, adjacent to the park, and then wound through the park to end at the band shell near the lake. Willis and Brown planted themselves on a shelf of rock overlooking the suspect third bench, shielded from the path by a stand of naked elms. It was very cold. They did not expect action, of course, until Hawes dropped the lunch pail where specified, but they could hardly take up posts after the event, and so it had been Byrnes’ brilliant idea to send them out before anyone watching the bench might observe them. They did windmill exercises with their arms, they stamped their feet, they continuously pressed the palms of their hands against portions of their faces that seemed to be going, the telltale whiteness of frostbite appearing suddenly and frighteningly in the bleak early morning hours. Neither of the two men had ever been so cold in his life.
Cotton Hawes was almost, but not quite, as cold when he entered the park at nine A.M. that morning. He passed two people on his way to the bench. One of them was an old man in a black overcoat, walking swiftly toward the subway kiosk on Grover Avenue. The other was a girl wearing a mink coat over a long pink nylon nightgown that flapped dizzily about her ankles, walking a white poodle wearing a red wool vest. She smiled at Hawes as he went by with his lunch pail.
The third bench was deserted.
Hawes took a quick look around and then glanced up and out of the park to the row of apartment buildings on Grover Avenue. A thousand windows reflected the early morning sun. Behind any one of those windows, there might have been a man with a pair of binoculars and a clear unobstructed view of the bench. He put the lunch pail on one end of the bench, moved it to the other end, shrugged, and relocated it in the exact center of the bench. He took another look around, feeling really pretty stupid, and then walked out of the park and back to the office. Detective Bert Kling was sitting at his desk, monitoring the walkie-talkie operated by Hal Willis in the park.
“How you doing down there?” Kling asked.
“We’re freezing our asses off,” Willis replied.
“Any action yet?”
“You think anybody’s crazy enough to be out in this weather?” Willis said.
“Cheer up,” Kling said, “I hear the boss is sending you both to Jamaica when this is over.”
“Fat Chance Department,” Willis said. “Hold it!”
There was silence in the squadroom. Hawes and Kling waited. At last, Willis’ voice erupted from the speaker on Kling’s box.
“Just a kid,” Willis said. “Stopped at the bench, looked over the lunch pail, and then left it right where it was.”
“Stay with it,” Kling said.
“We have to stay with it,” Brown’s voice cut in. “We’re frozen solid to this goddamn rock.”
There were people in the park now.
They ventured into the bitch city tentatively, warned by radio and television forecasters, further cautioned by the visual evidence of thermometers outside apartment windows, and the sound of the wind whipping beneath the eaves of old buildings, and the touch of the frigid blast that attacked any exploratory hand thrust outdoors for just an instant before a window slammed quickly shut again. They dressed with no regard to the dictates of fashion, the men wearing ear muffs and bulky mufflers, the women bundled into layers of sweaters and fur-lined boots, wearing woolen scarves to protect their heads and ears, rushing at a quick trot through the park, barely glancing at the bench or the black lunch pail sitting in the center of it. In a city notorious for its indifference, the citizens were more obviously withdrawn now, hurrying past each other without so much as eyes meeting, insulating themselves, becoming tight private cocoons that defied the cold. Speech might have made them more vulnerable, opening the mouth might have released the heat they had been storing up inside, commiseration would never help to diminish the wind that tried to cut them down in the streets, the saberslash wind that blew in off the river and sent newspapers wildly soaring into the air, fedoras wheeling into the gutter. Speech was a precious commodity that cold March day.
In the park, Willis and Brown silently watched the bench.
The painters were in a garrulous mood.
“What have you got going, a stakeout?” the first painter asked.
“Is that what the walkie-talkie’s for?” the second painter asked.
“Is there gonna be a bank holdup?”
“Is that why you’re listening to that thing?”
“Shut up,” Kling said encouragingly.
The painters were on their ladders, slopping apple green paint over everything in sight.
“We painted the D.A.’s office once,” the first painter said.
“They were questioning this kid who stabbed his mother forty-seven times.”
“Forty-seven times.”
“In the belly, the head, the breasts, everyplace.”
“With an icepick.”
“He was guilty as sin.”
“He said he did it to save her from the Martians.”
“A regular bedbug.”
“Forty-seven times.”
“How could that save her from the Martians?” the second painter said.
“Maybe Martians don’t like ladies with icepick holes in them,” the first painter said, and burst out laughing. The second painter guffawed with him. Together, they perched on their ladders, helpless with laughter, limply holding brushes that dripped paint on the newspapers spread on the squadroom floor.
The man entered the park at ten A.M.
He was perhaps twenty-seven years old, with a narrow cold-pinched face, his lips drawn tight against the wind, his eyes watering. He wore a beige car coat, the collar pulled up against the back of his neck, buttoned tight around a green wool muffler at his throat. His hands were in the slash pockets of the coat. He wore brown corduroy trousers, the wale cut diagonally, and brown high-topped workman’s shoes. He came onto the Clinton Street footpath swiftly, without looking either to the right or the left, walked immediately and directly to the third bench on the path, picked up the lunch pail, tucked it under his arm, put his naked hand back into his coat pocket, wheeled abruptly, and was starting out of the park again, when a voice behind him said, “Hold it right there, Mac.”