Back at the squadroom, Arthur Brown—who was an English literature freak—mentioned to Miscolo in the Clerical Office that the guy had been named absolutely perfectly for a burglar.
“What do you mean?” Miscolo said.
“Addison and Steal,” Brown said, and grinned.
“I don’t get it,” Miscolo said.
“Steal,” Brown said. “S-T-E-A-L.”
“I still don’t get it,” Miscolo said. “You want some coffee?”
This was before a team of six men stole an entire city street.
The call came in at ten minutes to 5:00. By then there had been the expected number of actual suicides or suicide attempts—in fact, a bit more than anyone could remember for previous Christmases. By then Lieutenant Byrnes had personally driven out to Meyer’s house to break the news to Sarah. Sarah was relieved to learn her husband had only been shot in the leg; the moment she saw Byrnes on her doorstep she’d assumed the worst of her fears had been realized. Byrnes drove her to the hospital after his brief visit, and she spent the rest of the afternoon with Meyer, who complained that when a man got shot, his wife should bring him a nize bowl tschicken soup. Along about then, as she was holding Meyer’s hand between both her own and telling him how glad she was that he was still alive, a truck pulled into Gedney Avenue, and six men got out of it to begin tearing up the cobblestone street.
Gedney was one of the few areas in the city that still boasted cobblestone streets—or at least until that Christmas Day it did. The cobblestones, some said, went back to when the Dutch still governed the city. Others maintained that the Dutch wouldn’t have known a cobblestone from a tulip, and it was the British who’d first paved Gedney. The name of the avenue was British, wasn’t it? So it had to be the British. Whoever had paved it, the six men who jumped out of the truck were now unpaving it. The plows had been through Gedney twice already, and the street was relatively clear of snow. The men set to work with great vigor—odd for civil service employees at any time, but especially peculiar on Christmas Day—using picks and crowbars, prying loose the precious cobblestones, lifting them into the truck, stacking them row on row there, working with the precision of a demolition squad. All up and down the street, people peered from their windows, watching the men at work, marveling at their dedicated industry. It took the men two hours to unpave the entire block from corner to corner. At the end of that time they piled back into the truck and drove off. No one noticed the license plate of the truck.
But one man was somewhat impressed by the fact that the Department of Public Works—for such it had seemed—was out there doing its bit for this much-maligned city even on Christmas Day. He called the mayor’s office to congratulate whoever was manning the phones and got through to someone on the mayor’s newly installed Citizens’ Hotline, to whom he poured out his effusive praise. The lady who’d answered the phone suspiciously called the Department of Public Works immediately afterward, got no answer there, and called the superintendent of the department at home. The superintendent told her there had been no work orders issued to tear up the cobblestones on Gedney Avenue. He suggested that she call the police.
So at 5:00 that evening, as the streetlamps came on and the shadows lengthened, Detectives Arthur Brown and Lou Moscowitz stood at one end of the block and looked at the same soil Indians must have trod in their moccasins centuries ago, when Columbus came to this hemisphere to start the whole she-bang. Shorn of its cobblestones from end to end, Gedney looked virginal and rustic. Brown and Moscowitz were grinning from ear to ear; even cops appreciated a daring rip-off every now and then.
Carella, at home, felt guilty as hell. Not because someone had carted off a block of cobblestones but because Meyer had been shot twice in the leg. Had Carella switched holidays with him, then maybe Meyer wouldn’t have got shot. Maybe Carella would have got shot instead. Thinking about this, he felt a little less guilty. He’d been shot enough times, thanks—once just a few days before Christmas, in fact. But Carella was of Italian descent, and the Italians and Jews in this city shared guilt the way they shared matriarchal families. Carella had a cousin who, if he accidentally drove through a red traffic light, would stop in atonement at the green light on the next corner.
So on Christmas night, at 8:00, Carella arrived at Mercy Hospital to tell Meyer how guilty he was feeling about not having got shot in Meyer’s place. Meyer was feeling guilty himself. It was Meyer’s contention that if he hadn’t been stupid enough to have got himself shot, then Bob O’Brien wouldn’t have been forced into the position of once again having to draw his gun and fire it. Meyer was worried about what this might do to O’Brien’s own feelings of guilt, even though O’Brien was Irish and consequently less prone.
Carella had brought a pint of whiskey with him. He took it out of his coat pocket, poured a pair of generous shots into two sterile hospital glasses, and together the men drank to the undeniable fact that Meyer was still alive albeit a bit punctured. Carella poured a second pair of drinks, and the men drank to another day dawning tomorrow.
7
The new Lineup Room, or Showup Room as it was alternately called, was in the basement of the station house, adjacent to the holding cells where booked prisoners were kept temporarily, awaiting transportation to the Criminal Courts Building downtown. This provided easy access to live bodies who—if they or their attorneys had no objections—could be paraded before a victim or a witness in the company of the true suspect the police hoped would be identified.
In days of yore, a lineup of all felony offenders arrested the previous day would be held downtown at Headquarters every morning. The purpose of that bygone lineup was to acquaint detectives from all over the city with the people who were committing crimes here. Detectives attended lineups as often as they attended court. But whereas court appearances were necessary if convictions were to be had, somebody upstairs decided that the daily lineups were a drain on manpower and resulted in a minimum amount of future arrests since the people on the stage were headed for confinement anyway, some of them for life. The lineup was now a strictly local affair and conducted solely for the purpose of identification.
The Lineup Room contained a narrow stage with height markers on the wall behind it and a hanging microphone above it. In front of the stage, and separating the stage from three rows of auditorium seats, was a floor-to-ceiling one-way mirror. The one-way mirror was sometimes called a two-way mirror by cops, but cops rarely agreed on anything except whose day off it was. One-way or two-way, it presented to the people lined up on the stage behind it only their own reflections. On the other side, the people sitting in the auditorium seats could look through what appeared to be a plate-glass window for an unobstructed, unobserved view of the men or women lined up beyond.
The lineup that Tuesday morning, December 26, was being held for the express purpose of eliciting from Jerry Mandel a positive identification of Daniel Corbett. Carella had called Mandel at home first thing in the morning and was delighted to learn that the Harborview security guard had returned from his skiing trip without any broken bones. He had set up a time for the lineup and then had called Corbett first at home and then at Harlow House to ask if he would cooperate with the police in this matter. Corbett said he had nothing to hide—he had definitely not been the man who’d announced himself at Harborview on the night Craig was killed.