“Where were you?”
“Between…between…what time did you say?”
“Five-thirty and six.”
“With a friend of mine,” Walsh said, and looked enormously relieved.
“What’s your friend’s name?”
“Alex Harrod. His phone number is Quinn 7-6430, call him. Go ahead, call him. He’ll tell you where I was.”
“Where was that?”
“What?”
“Where were you with your friend Alex Harrod?”
“At his apartment. 511 Jacaranda, third floor rear. Apartment 32. Go ahead, call him.”
“What time did you get there?”
“About twenty after five. He was just coming home from work.”
“How long did you stay there?”
“I left at about nine-thirty.”
“Did you leave the apartment at any time?”
“No, I did not.”
“Did Harrod?”
“No, we were there together.”
“How long have you known Harrod?”
“We met only recently.”
“When?”
“On Christmas Eve.”
“Where?”
“At a party.”
“Where was the party?”
“Here in the Quarter.”
“Where in the Quarter?”
“In Llewlyn Mews. A man named Daniel Corbett was giving a party, and a friend of mine asked me to go with him.”
“Had you known Corbett before then?”
“No, I met him that night.”
“And that’s when you met Harrod, too, is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Have you spoken to him since you left his apartment tonight?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“We can check with the phone company for any calls made from his number to yours.”
“Check,” Walsh said. “I left him at nine-thirty, and I haven’t spoken to him since. Who got murdered? It wasn’t Alex, was it?”
“No, it wasn’t Alex,” Carella said. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Walsh.”
8
The way they reconstructed it later, the killer had gone after the wrong person. The mistake was reasonable; even Carella had made the same mistake earlier. The killer must have been watching her for the past several days, and when he saw her—or the person he assumed was Hillary Scott—coming out of the Stewart City apartment building at 8:30 Wednesday morning, he followed her all the way to the subway kiosk and then attempted to stab her with what Denise Scott later described as “the biggest damn knife I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Minutes after Denise rushed into the apartment with the front of her black cloth coat and her white satin blouse slashed, Hillary called first the local precinct and then Carella at home. He and Hawes got there an hour later. The patrolmen from Midtown South were already there, wondering what they were supposed to do. They asked Carella whether they should report this to their precinct as a 10-24—an “Assault Past”—or would the Eight-Seven take care of it? Carella explained that the attack might have been linked to a homicide they were working, and the patrolmen should forget about it. The patrolmen seemed unconvinced.
“What about the paper?” one of them asked. “Who’ll take care of the paper?”
“I will,” Carella said.
“So then maybe we get in a jam,” the second patrolman said.
“If you want to file, go ahead and file,” Carella said.
“As what? A 10-24?”
“That’s what it was.”
“Where do we say it was?”
“What do you mean?”
“The guy tried to stab her outside the subway on Masters. But she didn’t call us till she got back here. So what do we put down as the scene?”
“Here,” Carella said. “This is where you responded, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but this ain’t where it happened.”
“So let me file, okay?” Carella said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“You ain’t got a sergeant like we got,” the first patrolman said.
“Look, I want to talk to the victim,” Carella said. “I told you this is a homicide we’re working, so how about letting me file, and then you won’t have to worry about it.”
“Get his name and shield number,” the second patrolman advised.
“Detective/Second Grade Stephen Louis Carella,” Carella said patiently, “87th Squad. My shield number is 714-5632.”
“You got that?” the second patrolman asked his partner.
“I got it,” the first patrolman said, and they both left the apartment, still concerned about what their sergeant might say.
Denise Scott was in a state of numbed shock. Her face was pale, her lips were trembling, she had not taken off her coat—as if somehow it still afforded her protection against the assailant’s knife. Hillary brought her a whopping snifter of brandy, and when she had taken several swallows of it and the color had returned to her cheeks, she seemed ready to talk about what had happened. What had happened was really quite simple. Someone had grabbed her from behind as she was starting down the steps to the subway station, pulled her over backward, and then slashed at the front of her coat with the biggest damn knife she’d ever seen in her life. She’d hit out at him with her bag, and she’d begun screaming, and the man had turned and begun running when someone started up the steps from below.
“It was a man, you’re sure of that?” Carella said.
“Positive.”
“What did he look like?” Hawes asked.
“Black hair and brown eyes. A very narrow face,” Denise said.
“How old?”
“Late twenties, I’d say.”
“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”
“In a minute.”
“Did he say anything to you?”
“Not a word. He just pulled me around and tried to stab me. Look what he did to my coat and blouse,” she said, and eased the torn blouse aside to study the sloping top of her left breast. Hawes seemed very interested in whether or not the knife had penetrated her flesh. He stared at the V opening of her blouse with all the scrutiny of an assistant medical examiner. “I was just lucky, that’s all,” Denise said, and let the blouse fall back into place.
“He was after me,” Hillary said.
Carella did not ask her why she thought so; he was thinking exactly the same thing.
“Let me have the coat,” she said.
“What?” her sister said.
“Your coat. Let me have it.”
Denise took off the coat. The knife thrust had torn the blouse over her left breast. Beneath the gaping satiny slash, Hawes could glimpse a promise of Denise’s flesh, a milkier white against the off-white of the satin. Hillary held the black coat against her own breasts like a phantom lover. Closing her eyes, she began to sway the way she had after she’d kissed Carella. Hawes looked at her and then looked at her sister and decided he would rather go to bed with Denise than with Hillary. Then he decided the exact opposite. Then he decided both of them wouldn’t be bad together, at the same time, in the king-sized bed in his apartment. Carella, not being psychic, didn’t know that everybody in the world had threesomes in mind this holiday season. Hillary, claiming to be what Carella knew he wasn’t, began intoning in a voice reminiscent of the one she’d used after she’d kissed him, “Tape, you stole, tape,” the same old routine.
Befuddled, Hawes watched her; he had never caught her act before. Denise, used to the ways of mediums, yawned. The brandy was reaching her. She seemed to have forgotten that less than an hour ago someone had tried to dispatch her to that great beyond her sister was now presumably tapping—Hillary had said it was a ghost who’d killed Gregory Craig, and now the same ghost had tried to kill her sister, and her black overcoat was giving off emanations that seemed to indicate either something or nothing at all.
“Hemp,” she said.
Carella wasn’t sure whether or not she was clearing her throat.
“Hemp,” she said again. “Stay.”
He hadn’t planned on leaving, so he didn’t know what the hell she meant.
“Hemp, stay,” she said. “Hempstead. Hampstead.”
Carella distinctively felt the hair on the back of his neck bristling. Hawes, watching Denise—who now crossed her legs recklessly and grinned at him in brandy-inspired abandon—felt only a bristling somewhere in the area of his groin.