“But not on his jewelry?” Carella asked.
“Yes, his, too. But we had to get separate policies because we aren’t married. I was only familiar with what mine came to.”
“And what was that, offhand?” Hawes asked.
“Offhand, it was exactly eighty-three thousand four hundred and thirty dollars.”
“That’s a lot of stuff to have kept loose in a dresser drawer,” Carella said.
“Greg was planning on buying a wall safe,” Hillary said. “Anyway, it was all insured. And besides, the security here is very good. We wouldn’t have taken the apartment if we weren’t promised such tight security.”
“Anything else missing?” Hawes said.
“Was he wearing his college ring?” Hillary asked.
“There was no jewelry on the body.”
“Then that’s missing, too.”
“What college?” Carella asked.
“Holman University. Where he met his former wife.”
“What kind of ring?”
“Gold with an amethyst stone.”
“Where did he wear it?”
“On the ring finger of his right hand.”
Carella remembered the Wounds Chart: Slash wound on inside of ring finger of right hand. Had the killer used the knife to pry the ring loose from Craig’s finger? Had he come into the apartment armed, or had he used a knife he’d found on the premises? If he’d come here specifically to commit a burglary, then how had he got through the “tight” security downstairs? Would Craig have admitted a stranger to the apartment, someone who’d later stolen in excess of $83,000 worth of jewelry and killed him before leaving? But Hillary Scott insisted it was not a burglar.
“The flux is strongest in this room,” she said. She walked to the desk facing the windows and put her hands on its surface. “He was here at the desk.”
“He?”
“A male spirit,” she said, running her hands lightly over the desktop. “Young. Black hair and brown eyes.” Her own eyes were closed; her hands flitted lightly over the surface of the desk; she swayed as she spoke. “Searching for something. Seeking. Restless. A restless spirit.”
Carella looked at Hawes. Hawes returned the look. Carella was wondering how somebody who so closely resembled his wife could be so certifiably nuts. Hawes was wondering what she’d be like in the sack—would she go into a trance from all the flux? And then he felt immediately incestuous because the damn girl looked so much like Teddy Carella. He turned away from Carella’s gaze, as though fearful his mind had been read.
“Anything missing from the desk?” Carella asked.
“May I open it?” she said. “Are your people through with it?”
“Go ahead,” Carella said.
She opened the drawer over the kneehole. A tray full of paper clips, rubber bands, and pencils. A staple remover. A box of key tags. A box of loose-leaf reinforcers. She closed that drawer and opened the file drawer to the right of the kneehole. It contained a sheaf of index folders lettered with names.
“Is that Craig’s handwriting?” Carella asked.
“Yes, shhhhh.”
“What are those names?”
“Ghosts,” she said, “shhhhhh,” and passed her hands lightly over the folders.
“He was searching here.”
“If he was,” Hawes said, “the lab boys’ll have prints.”
“Spirits do not leave fingerprints,” she said, and Carella thought, Nutty as a fruitcake.
“Those names…”
“Yes, ghosts,” she said. “Cases he planned to investigate for authenticity. Ever since he wrote Shades, he’s received calls and letters from all over the world, people reporting ghosts.”
“Anything missing that you can tell?” Hawes asked.
“No, but he was in here. I know he was in here.”
She closed the file drawer and opened the drawer above it. A ream of yellow Manila paper, nothing else. “Here, too,” she said. “Searching, seeking.”
“Did Mr. Craig ever keep anything of value in this desk?” Carella asked.
“His files are extremely valuable,” Hillary said, and abruptly opened her eyes.
“Maybe he was looking for something,” Hawes said. “Everything thrown around the room the way it was.”
“Yes, positively,” Hillary said.
“And found it,” Carella said.
Hillary looked at him.
“More than eighty-three thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry.”
“No, it wasn’t that. It was something else. I don’t know what,” she said, and passed her hands over the air as though trying to touch something the detectives could not see.
“Let’s check the kitchen,” Carella said. “I want you to tell us if any knives are missing.”
They checked the kitchen. On a magnetic wall rack, over the countertop, there were seven knives of varying sizes, one of them a ten-inch-long chef’s knife. According to Hillary, all the knives were there. They opened the cabinet drawers. She counted the table cutlery and the assortment of slicing and paring knives in the tray and told them nothing was missing.
“Then he came here with it,” Carella said.
Hillary closed her eyes again, and again spread her fingers wide, and pressed her palms against the empty air. “Looking for something,” she said. “Something.”
It was Cotton Hawes who caught the flak from Warren Esposito. The flak was perhaps well deserved; Hawes might have encountered the same indignation in any major city of the world, Peking and Moscow not excluded. Whatever the politics of a nation, the fact remained that if you knocked off somebody in the public eye, that murder was going to get more attention from the police than the murder of a wino or a scaly-legs hooker. Marian Esposito was neither a drunk nor a prostitute; she was, in fact, the secretary for a firm that specialized in selling gift items via direct mail. But there was no doubting the fact that she was somewhat less important than Gregory Craig, the best-selling writer. As her husband, Warren, paced the squadroom floor and raged at him, Hawes wondered whether they’d have given her case the same attention they were giving Craig’s had she been the one found with nineteen knife wounds in her and he’d been the one lying outside the building with a single stab wound. He decided the priorities would have been the same. Craig was “important”; Marian Esposito was only another corpse in a city that grew corpses like mushrooms.
“So what the hell are you doing?” Esposito shouted. He was a tall, hulking man with thick black hair and penetrating brown eyes. He was dressed on this Friday afternoon in blue jeans and a turtleneck sweater, a fleece-lined car coat open and flapping as he paced the floor. “There hasn’t even been a single cop to see me, for Christ’s sake! I had to make six phone calls before I discovered where they’d taken her! Is that what happens in this city? A woman is stabbed to death in front of her own apartment building and the police sweep her under the rug as if she never existed?”
“There’s a companion case,” Hawes said lamely.
“I don’t give a damn about your companion case!” Esposito shouted. “I want to know what you’re doing to find my wife’s murderer.”
“It’s our guess—”
“Guess?” Esposito said. “Is that what you’re doing up here? Guessing?”
“It’s our opinion—”