“You really mean it, don’t you?” she said.
“Yeah, what can you do?” Carella said, and shrugged.
“Well, okay then,” Hillary said, “I guess.” She rose, shrugged out of the coat, laughed gently again, murmured, “The lingerie business,” shook her head, and said, “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Good night, Hillary,” he said.
“Good night, Steve,” she said, and sighed and went into the bathroom.
He stood looking at the closed bathroom door for a moment, and then he went into his own room and locked the door behind him.
He dreamed that night that the door between their rooms opened as mysteriously as the doors at the Loomis house had. He dreamed that Hillary stood in the doorway naked, the light from her own room limning the curves of her young body for an instant before she closed the door again behind her. She stood silently just inside the door, her eyes adjusting to the darkness, and then she came softly and silently to the bed and slipped under the covers beside him. Her hand found him. In the darkness she whispered, “I don’t care what you think,” and her mouth descended.
In the morning, when he awoke, the snow had stopped.
He went to the door between the rooms and tried the knob. The door was locked. But in the bathroom he smelled the lingering scent of her perfume and saw a long black hair curled like a question mark against the white tile of the sink.
He would not tell Teddy about this encounter either. Seven ghosts in one night was one more ghost than anybody needed or wanted.
11
The pawnshop stakeout went into effect on December 28, as the result of a squadroom brainstorming session that took place early that morning in Lieutenant Byrnes’s office. The lieutenant was sitting behind his desk wearing a blue cardigan sweater—a Christmas gift from his wife, Harriet—over a white dress shirt and a blue tie. His desk was piled with papers. He had told Carella and Hawes that he could give them fifteen minutes of his time, and he looked at the clock now as Carella started his pitch.
“It looks like the man we’re after is this Jack Rawles,” Carella said. “Came down here from Boston on the day before the murders, wasn’t back there yet when I called yesterday.”
“Why’d you call?” Byrnes asked.
“Because he rented the house Craig wrote about.”
“So?”
“So there’re supposed to be ghosts in that house,” Carella said, not daring to mention that he had actually seen the ghosts who were supposed to be there.
“What’s that got to do with the price of fish?” Byrnes said, a favorite expression he never tired of using when his detectives seemed to be making no sense at all.
“I think there’s a connection,” Carella said.
“What connection?” Byrnes said.
“The typist up there in Hampstead says she typed up a portion of Craig’s book from a tape that Rawles may have made.”
“How do you know Rawles made it?”
“I don’t for sure. But when I talked to his roommate’s girlfriend, she confirmed that he has a rasping voice. The voice on the tape was described to me as rasping.”
“Go ahead,” Byrnes said, and looked up at the clock again.
“Okay. Somebody fitting Rawles’s description made two attempts to hock two different pieces of jewelry stolen from Craig’s apartment on the day of the murder.”
“First pawnshop was on Ainsley and Third,” Hawes said. “Second one was on Culver and Eighth. We figure he’s holed up somewhere in the precinct and is trying to get rid of the stuff at local pawnshops.”
“How many are there in the precinct?” Byrnes asked.
“We get daily transaction reports from seventeen of them.”
“Out of the question,” Byrnes said at once.
“We wouldn’t want to cover all—”
“How many then?”
“Eight.”
“Where?”
“A ten-block square, north and east from Grover and First.”
“Eight shops. That’s sixteen men you’re asking for.”
“Right, sixteen,” Carella said.
“Have you checked the hotels and motels for a Jack Rawles?”
“All of them in the precinct. We came up negative.”
“How about outside the precinct?”
“Genero’s running them down now. It’s a long list, Pete. Anyway, we think he’s someplace up here. Otherwise, he’d be shopping pawnbrokers elsewhere in the city.”
“Where’s he staying then? A rooming house?”
“Could be. Or maybe with a friend.”
“Sixteen men,” Byrnes said again, and shook his head. “I can’t spare anybody on the squad. I’d have to ask Frick for uniformed officers.”
“Would you do that?”
“I’ll need fourteen,” Byrnes said.
“Sixteen,” Carella said.
“Fourteen plus you and Hawes makes sixteen.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I wish I could ask him for ten. He’s very tight-assed when it comes to assigning his people to special duty.”
“We can make do with ten,” Carella said, “if you think that’ll swing it.”
“I’ll ask for an even dozen,” Byrnes said. “He’ll bargain for eight, and we’ll settle for ten.”
“Good,” Carella said. “We’ll work up the list of shops we want covered.”
“He won’t be hitting the two he already tried,” Byrnes said. “I’ll call the captain. Get your list typed up. When did you want to start?”
“Immediately.”
“Okay, let me talk to him.”
The stakeout started at 10:00 that morning, shortly after it began raining. In this city there was a wintertime pattern to the weather. First it snowed. Then it rained. Then it grew bitterly cold, turning the streets and sidewalks to ice. Then it snowed again. And then, more often than not, it rained. And turned to ice again. It had something to do with fronts moving from yon to hither. It was a supreme pain in the ass. Snug in the back room of Silverstein’s Pawn Shop on the Stem and North Fifth, Carella and Hawes complained about the weather and sipped hot coffee from soggy cardboard containers. Elsewhere in the precinct, ten uniformed cops were similarly ensconced, waiting for someone fitting Jack Rawles’s description to appear, preferably bearing large hunks of jewelry stolen from Craig’s apartment.
“There’s something I ought to tell you,” Hawes said.
“What’s that?”
“I took Denise Scott to dinner last night.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Carella said.
“Well…Actually, she was in my apartment when I spoke to you.”
“Oh?” Carella said.
“In fact, she was in my bed.”
“Oh,” Carella said.
“I’m mentioning it only because she’ll be a material witness when we get this guy, and I hope that doesn’t complicate—”
“If we get him.”
“Oh, we’ll get him.”
“And if he’s our man.”
“He’ll be our man,” Hawes said.
“He’s got to be our man, don’t you think?”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” Carella said.
“Why do you figure he did it?” Hawes asked.
“I’m not sure. But I think…” Carella hesitated. Then he said, “I think it was because Craig stole his ghosts.”
“Huh?” Hawes said.
Adolf Hitler must have thought of himself as a hero; Richard Nixon probably still thinks of himself as one; every man and woman in the world is the hero or heroine of a personal scenario. It was therefore understandable that Carella considered himself the hero in the continuing drama that had started with the murder of Gregory Craig on December 21. He did not for a moment believe that Hawes might similarly consider himself the hero. Hawes was his partner. Heroes sometimes have partners, but they are only there to say, “Kemo sabe.” In Hawes’s scheme of things, he was the hero, and Carella was his partner. Neither of them could possibly have guessed that yet another hero might make the arrest that cracked the case.
Takashi Fujiwara was a twenty-three-year-old patrolman working out of the Eight-Seven. His fellow police officers called him “Tack.” Like all men, he considered himself a hero, even more so on this night of December 29, when the stakeout was two days old and the snow had turned again to rain. It was Fujiwara’s devout belief that no one in his right mind should be walking a beat in the rain. He wasn’t even sure that anyone should be walking a beat at all, rain or not. What was the matter with putting all the city’s patrolmen in cars? What was all this bullshit about foot patrols deterring crime? Fujiwara had been walking a beat for two years now, and he had not noticed a discernible decline in the city’s crime rate. He did not know that at two minutes past 5:00 on this shitty, miserable rainy Friday he would become a hero not only in his own mind but in the eyes of his peers. He did not know that before the new year was a week old, he would be promoted to detective/3rd and become an honored and honorable member of the team of men up there on the second floor of the station house. He knew only that he was soaked to the skin.