“Yeah, about five.”
“Okay, were you the only one tending bar at five o’clock?”
“Sure.”
“So you were serving the redhead.”
“Right.”
“So between five and six there was no excitement. Nothing to distract you. So can you try to remember whether or not Warren Esposito came in at five-thirty?”
“Look at the picture again,” Carella said.
Brogan looked at the picture again. Carella found himself wondering how the man would behave in a four-alarm fire. What would happen if he hacked his way into a blazing bedroom and found a bare-breasted redhead in there? Would he forget his own name? Would he jump to the street six stories below without a net under him? Would he turn his hose on an open window?
“Yeah, that’s right,” Brogan said.
“What’s right?” Carella asked, wondering if he’d stumbled across another psychic.
“Rob Roys. He drinks Rob Roys. Right. I served the redhead a Manhattan, and then the old fart up the bar a gin on the rocks, and then he came in and ordered a Rob Roy.”
“Esposito?”
“Yeah, the guy in the picture here.”
“What time?”
“Well, if the redhead came in at five…Yeah, it musta been five-thirty or thereabouts. Like he said.”
“What time did he leave?” Carella asked.
“That’s hard to say,” Brogan said. “Because of all the excitement with the redhead.”
“Was he there when the redhead took off her blouse?”
“I’m pretty sure he was. Let me think a minute.”
Carella watched him while he thought a minute. Carella imagined he was reconstructing the entire exciting event in his mind. In all his years of police work he had never known an alibi to hinge on a redhead’s breasts. But the redhead had come in at 5:00 and taken off her blouse at 6:00, and they had just established that Esposito was there at about 5:30. If Carella had wanted to pull teeth for a living, he would’ve become a dentist. It seemed, though, that they would have to work Brogan’s mouth from bicuspid to molar to canine, tooth by tooth, till they got what they were after.
Brogan began counting off imaginary people lined up along the bar, using the forefinger of his left hand. “Abner at the end of the bar, near the juke, scotch and soda. The secretary from Halston, Inc., next to him, vodka tonic. Then your guy here, Rob Roy. Next to him a guy I never saw before, bourbon and water. Then the redhead, Manhattans. And next to her the guy who made the comment about her tits, also who I never saw before, Canadian and soda. So that’s who was there at six o’clock, just before she took off the blouse. So, yeah, your guy was still there at six.”
“How do you know it was six?” Hawes asked.
“The news was just coming on. On television. We have a television set over the bar. That’s what started the whole thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“This girl they got doing the six o’clock news. What’s her name? I forget her name.”
“I don’t know her name,” Hawes said.
“But you know who I mean, don’t you? Her and this guy do the news together. The six o’clock news.”
“Well, what about her?” Hawes said.
“Somebody said she had great tits—the girl on television—and the redhead said they were falsies, and the guy sitting next to the redhead said something about hers being falsies, too, and that was when she took off her blouse to prove they weren’t.” Brogan grinned appreciatively. “Believe me, they were definitely not falsies.”
“So Esposito was there at six o’clock when the news came on and the blouse came off,” Carella said.
“Right.”
“Was he still there at six-thirty?”
“Six-thirty, six-thirty,” Brogan said. “Let me think a minute.”
Carella looked at Hawes. Hawes let out his breath through his nose.
“The boss came in about ten minutes after six,” Brogan said. “He sees the redhead sitting there at the bar starkers from the waist up, he says, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ He thinks she’s a hooker or something, you know? He tells her to get the hell out of there, he don’t want hookers lining up at his bar, bringing heat down on the place. Just between us, he collects numbers on the side. So, naturally, he don’t want some cop coming in there to bust a hooker and accidentally tumbling to the numbers operation.” His voice lowered confidentially. “I’m telling you this because we’re all civil service employees,” he said. “I don’t want to cause the guy no trouble.”
“All right, so the boss came in at six-ten,” Hawes said. “Was Esposito there when the boss came in?”
“Yeah, he joined in the chorus.”
“What chorus?”
“Everybody told the boss to shut up and leave the redhead alone.”
“Then what?”
“The boss told her to put on her blouse and get out of there before he called the police. He wasn’t really going to call no police because then he might get the kind of trouble he wasn’t looking for; he was just kind of threatening her, you know?”
“Did she put on the blouse?” Carella asked.
“She put on the blouse.”
“At ten minutes after six?”
“At a quarter after six.”
“Then what?”
“She left. No, wait. First she called the boss a tight-assed son of a bitch. Then she left.”
“At six-fifteen?”
“Six-fifteen, right.”
“Was Esposito still there when she left?”
“He was still there.”
“How do you know?”
“He asked me for another Rob Roy, and he also commented that those were the biggest tits he ever saw in his life.”
“Good, so now it’s six-fifteen,” Carella said. “Was he still there at six-thirty?”
“I gave him his tab at six-thirty.”
“How do you know it was six-thirty?”
“Because the news was going off.”
“Did he leave when you gave him his tab?”
“He paid it first.”
“And then did he leave?” Hawes asked.
“He left,” Brogan said, and nodded.
“At six-thirty?”
“A few minutes after six-thirty, it musta been.”
“How do you know it was Esposito who left?”
“He gave me a five-dollar tip. He said the five bucks was for the floor show.”
“Why couldn’t you remember all this when we first asked you?” Hawes said.
“Because everything in life has a beginning, a middle, and an end,” Brogan said, and shrugged philosophically.
He had, at long last, established Warren Esposito’s alibi. The man had been at Elmer’s, drinking and watching an impromptu ecdysiastical performance, just about when his wife was being stabbed to death on the sidewalk outside their building.
They were back at the beginning again, and the middle and end seemed nowhere in sight.
At 6:00 that night, car Boy Seven of the 12th Precinct was dispatched to 1134 Llewlyn Mews to investigate what the caller had described as “screaming and hollering in the apartment.” It was a peculiar fact of police nomenclature in this city that precincts like the 87th and the 63rd were familiarly and respectively called the Eight-Seven and the Six-Three, whereas all precincts from the 1st to the 20th were called by their full and proper designations. There was no One-Six in this city; it was the 16th. Similarly, there was no One-Two; the men who responded to the call in the Quarter that day after Christmas were cops from the 12th.
They got out of the RMP car, stepped over the bank of snow at the curb, and gingerly made their way across the slippery sidewalk to a sculpted black wrought-iron fence surrounding a slate courtyard. They opened the gate in the fence and went through a small copse of Australian pines to the bright orange front door of the building. One of the patrolmen lifted the massive brass knocker on the door and let it fall. He repeated the act four times and then tried the knob. The door was locked. There was no sound from within the place now; they assumed at once that they’d be calling in with a 10-90—an “Unfounded.” But being conscientious law enforcement officers, they went around the side of the building and through a small garden banked high with snow, and rapped on the back door, and then peered through a window into a kitchen, and then rapped on the door again, and tried the knob. This door was open.