“Miss Smith?” Carella said into the phone.
“Yes. Who’s this, please?”
“Detective Carella of the 87th Detective Squad.”
“Oh, my goodness,” Taffy Smith said.
“Miss Smith, we’d like to talk to you about your missing roommate, Bubbles Caesar. Do you suppose we could stop by sometime today?”
“Oh. Well, gee, I don’t know. I’m supposed to go to rehearsal.”
“What time is your rehearsal, Miss Smith?”
“Eleven o’clock.”
“And when will you be through?”
“Gee, that’s awfully hard to say. Sometimes they last all day long. Although maybe this’ll be a short one. We got an awful lot done yesterday.”
“Can you give me an approximate time?”
“I’d say about three o’clock. But I can’t be sure. Look, let’s say three, and you can call here before you leave your office, okay? Then if I’m delayed or anything, my service can give you the message. Okay? Would that be okay?”
“That’d be fine.”
“Unless you want me to leave the key. Then you could go in and make yourself a cup of coffee. Would you rather do that?”
“No, that’s all right.”
“Okay, then, I’ll see you at three, okay?”
“Fine,” Carella said.
“But be sure to call first, okay? And if I can’t make it, I’ll leave a message. Okay?”
“Thank you, Miss Smith,” Carella said, and he hung up.
Andy Parker came through the slatted rail divider and threw his hat at his desk. “Man, what a day,” he said. “Supposed to hit seventy today. Can you imagine that? In March? I guess all that rain drove winter clear out of the city.”
“I guess so,” Carella said. He listed the appointment with Taffy on his pad and made a note to call her at 2:30 before leaving the squadroom.
“This is the kind of weather you got back home, hey, Chico?” Parker said to Hernandez.
Frankie Hernandez, who’d been typing, did not hear Parker. He stopped the machine, looked up, and said, “Huh? You talking to me, Andy?”
“Yeah. I said this is the kind of weather you got back home, ain’t it?”
“Back home?” Hernandez said. “You mean Puerto Rico?”
“Sure.”
“I was born here,” Hernandez said.
“Sure, I know,” Parker said. “Every Puerto Rican you meet in the streets, he was born here. To hear them tell it, none of them ever came from the island. You’d never know there was a place called Puerto Rico, to hear them tell it.”
“That’s not true, Andy,” Hernandez said gently. “Most Puerto Ricans are very proud to have come from the island.”
“But not you, huh? You deny it.”
“I don’t come from the island,” Hernandez said.
“No, that’s right. You were born here, right?”
“That’s right,” Hernandez said, and he began typing again.
Hernandez was not angry, and Parker didn’t seem to be angry, and Carella hadn’t even been paying any attention to the conversation. He was making out a tentative schedule of outside calls that he hoped he and Hawes could get to that day. He didn’t even look up when Parker began speaking again.
“So that makes you an American, right, Chico?” Parker said.
This time, Hernandez heard him over the noise of the typewriter. This time, he looked up quickly and said, “You talking to me?” But whereas the words were exactly the words he’d used the first time Parker had spoken, Hernandez delivered them differently this time, delivered them with a tightness, an intonation of unmistakable annoyance. His heart had begun to pound furiously. He knew that Parker was calling upon him to defend The Cause once more, and he did not particularly feel like defending anything on a beautiful morning like this one, but the gauntlet had been dropped, and there it lay, and so Hernandez hurled back his words.
“You talking to me?”
“Yes, I am talking to you, Chico,” Parker said. “It’s amazing how you damn people never hear anything when you don’t want to hear—”
“Knock it off, Andy,” Carella said suddenly.
Parker turned toward Carella’s desk. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” he said.
“Knock it off, that’s all. You’re disturbing my squadroom.”
“When the hell did this become your squadroom?”
“I’m catching today, and it looks like your name isn’t even listed on the duty chart. So why don’t you go outside and find some trouble in the streets, if trouble is what you want?”
“When did you become the champion of the people?”
“Right this minute,” Carella said, and he shoved back his chair and stood up to face Parker.
“Yeah?” Parker said.
“Yeah,” Carella answered.
“Well, you can just blow it out your—”
And Carella hit him.
He did not know he was going to throw the punch until after he had thrown it, until after it had collided with Parker’s jaw and sent him staggering backward against the railing. He knew then that he shouldn’t have hit Parker, but at the same time he told himself he didn’t feel like sitting around listening to Hernandez take a lot of garbage on a morning like this, and yet he knew he shouldn’t have thrown the punch.
Parker didn’t say a word. He shoved himself off the railing and lunged at Carella who chopped a short right to Parker’s gut, doubling him over. Parker grabbed for his midsection and Carella delivered a rabbit punch to the back of Parker’s neck, sending him sprawling over the desk.
Parker got up and faced Carella with new respect and with renewed malice. It was as if he’d forgotten for a moment that his opponent was as trained and as skilled as he himself was, forgotten that Carella could fight as clean or as dirty as the situation warranted, and that the situation generally warranted the dirtiest sort of fighting, and that this sort of fighting had become second nature.
“I’m gonna break you in half, Steve,” Parker said, and there was almost a chiding tone in his voice, the tone of warning a father uses to a child who is acting up.
He feinted with his left and as Carella moved to dodge the blow, he slammed a roundhouse right into his nose, bringing blood to it instantly. Carella touched his nose quickly, saw the blood, and then brought up his guard.
“Cut it out, you crazy bastards,” Hernandez said, stepping between them. “The skipper’s door is open. You want him to come out here?”
“Sure. Steve-oh doesn’t care, do you, Steve? You and the skipper are real buddies, aren’t you?”
Carella dropped his fists. Angrily, he said, “We’ll finish this another time, Andy.”
“You’re damn right we will,” Parker said, and he stormed out of the squadroom.
Carella took a handkerchief from his back pocket and began dabbing at his nose. Hernandez put a cold key at the back of his neck.
“Thanks, Steve,” he said.
“Don’t mention it,” Carella answered.
“You shouldn’t have bothered. I’m used to Andy.”
“Yeah, but I guess I’m not.”
“Anyway, thanks.”
Hawes walked into the squadroom, saw Carella’s bloody handkerchief, glanced hastily at the lieutenant’s door, and then whispered, “What happened?”
“I saw red,” Carella said.
Hawes glanced at the handkerchief again. “You’re still seeing red,” he said.
Taffy Smith was neither voluptuous, overblown, zoftik, nor even pretty. She was a tiny little girl with ash blonde hair trimmed very close to her head. She had the narrow bones of a sparrow, and a nose covered with freckles, and she wore harlequin glasses, which shielded the brightest blue eyes Carella or Hawes had ever seen.
There was, apparently, great Freudian meaning to this girl’s penchant for making coffee for strangers. Undoubtedly, as a child, she had witnessed her mother clobbering her father with a coffeepot. Or perhaps a pot of coffee had overturned, scalding her, and she now approached it as a threat to be conquered. Or perhaps she had been raised by a tyrannical aunt in Brazil where, so the song says, coffee beans grow by the millions. Whatever the case, she trotted into the kitchen and promptly got a pot going while the detectives sat down in the living room. The Siamese cat, remembering Hawes, sidled over to him and purred idiotically against his leg.